He had a large collection of texts—every day there were new ones laid out for me. Some of it was engrossing work—astrology, divination, and herbology. Some of it was tedious—endless charm recipes and talismans that made no sense to me. Some of it was beyond what I imagined magic to be, let alone imagined anyone had put to paper—transfiguration, transformation, and a scroll purportedly written by an angel.
On the evenings he was in residence, Death would instruct me to put away my work and pour us both a good wine. A tray of food would appear, and he would spend a whole evening telling me stories. Of how he’d found one scroll on a man in the desert and traded it for five years of the man’s life and a goat. Or the time he met the Greek gods and bartered gossip for a spell from Apollo that made waters in which a dipped arrow would always hit its mark. Through his stories and his book, I found that this devotion to magic was how he kept the man he’d once been alive in Death’s eternity.
When he was in residence, I was focused and aware, fully present in my work but also on the way his long, lordly body filled the space. Sometimes it seemed so intimate—to simply work alongside him, breathe his same air—and my whole body would burn even to the tops of my ears from the pleasure of it. Those evenings he was in residence expanded beyond his stories into a pleasant, sometimes passionate, discussion of the day’s learning. We discussed the nature of magic, not the practice of it—its soaring concepts rather than thebloody guts. It inspired me and gave me motivation to try to grasp the concepts quickly and find little pieces of meaning so I could string together rudimentary ideas of my own.
I enjoyed those nights more than anything I had in my life. He would end the evening by walking me through the labyrinth of the château’s halls and leaving me safely enclosed inside my room with my mind buzzing from the stimulation. I often laid awake long after he’d gone, thoughts still circling and the buzz spreading through my whole body with an unreleased pressure. It made for long, restless nights alone.
I was not in love with him, but I was enamored with him. I ached to turn over in bed and find Dacia there, to tell her everything and listen to her thoughts. How with Death I was free to be the self I had always hidden. How I did not feel cursed. In his presence, I lived for his word, for the barest of his touches, and most of all, for his respect—a thing I had never experienced before. But she was not there, and thinking of her and him both made me feel as if I were betraying one of them, so I tried hard not to think of her at all.
But when Death was gone, it all felt much different. It was as if his firm grasp on the world kept me upright, and when he left, everything came tumbling down and in the quiet my mind began to unravel. Strange things happened. Once, I opened a kind of hole in the middle of the room that I was fairly sure led into that dark abyss where the gods roamed out past the stardust, and it was only luck that my instinct to recite the incantation backward and envision sewing the seam shut closed it.
On more than one occasion, I heard women’s screams—raw and desperate—waking me out of a dead sleep as if the house was bored and tantalizing me to come searching. But I stayed in my room, as I had promised, and I stayed safe.
Only occasionally did I see spirits. Only in the forest. Mostly lost travelers. Once, I saw a young woman who walked with her arms tiedabove her head, face lifted to the sky. She filled me with an unspeakable terror, like no other spirit I’d ever seen, and I ran from her until I couldn’t draw breath. Another time, I spotted the spirit of an old man with pleading, wild eyes, as if he were searching for someone among the trees. I kept my distance, backing away slowly. One day, while thinking too much about the spirits and the forest, I nearly stumbled back into the hollow where the bandits hid. I was able to escape without being spotted, but from then on I was more careful about my thoughts when passing under the boughs.
But with magic all around me, it became harder and harder to tell what thoughts to control. One afternoon, while Death was gone and I was working on the transcriptions, I found myself falling into that lulling focus from when Perchta had first taught me to make a poultice. I sat at my desk in Death’s chambers, in a dress of deepest midnight blue wool with red embroidery. I had the sleeves tied out of my way and the neck loosened from the warmth.
The strange silver smell of lightning made me lift my head, brow furrowed. I had only smelled that with Perchta. I put the quill down to investigate, but then saw.
My dress had changed. Not just the color but the fabric as well—from blue wool to a white silk, or something like it. It was so white it gave off a soft glow. I ran to the silver mirror hanging in Death’s chamber—a twin to mine. My skin glowed like an angel. Even my hair was white. I did not look like myself, but I could see myself in her somewhere.
What had I done? I imagined Death finding me in this state and I had no idea how to explain. I spun back to the desk, rifling through my papers to find out what I’d been writing. It wasn’t even a spell. It was the description of an archaic goddess. I didn’t know what to do with that, but when I tried reversing it by reading it backward, and easing a little power into the working, my black hair and dark dress reappeared.
From then on, when I even thought the incantation, I could transform to that being of light.
“WRITE ME AN INVOCATION TO TURN MY WATER TO WINE,” he said one evening.
I froze, confused, slightly horrified. “Like Jesus?”
He raised an eyebrow, as if daring me to mention blasphemy or miracles or show any fear.
“Like Jesus,” I said again, this time as if it were a matter of course.
And so I spent the next fortnight recreating Jesus’s first miracle. I calculated the movement of all the planets before realizing I only needed the moon. I wrote countless circles with complicated markings, using the new occulture alphabet he’d taught me, and Hebrew and Greek and Latin for good measure. I tried it at all hours. In different places—my room, my desk, the empty kitchens, the cold cellar.
“This could only work for Christ himself,” I cried after another failure.
Death watched me throw out the water in my frustration, his gaze as enigmatic as ever. “You have made no sacrifice,” he said. “That’s why it all fails.”
But none of itcalledfor a sacrifice. I had not sacrificed to make the poultice. Perchta did not sacrifice to mend my broken bowl. But I couldn’t say any of that without betraying my time with her, a fact that only irritated me more, and I stormed out of the room. When I came back hours later, there was no sign of my tantrum. My mess had simply been cleaned up, everything laid out for me to try again.
The longer it went on, the more I thought Death had set me to the task only for the pleasure of watching me struggle. Finally, unable to think of anything else, I listened to him. I trapped a mouse from the melting spring forest and sacrificed it. And as I finished the working, I knew it had been successful.
Triumphant, I handed over the cup of rather watery red wine.
Death took it with a smug grin, but when he tasted it, I saw a shock of surprise he could not hide cross his features.
It should have been a great success, and indeed, that brief expression of surprise felt euphoric. He had not expected me to succeed, and I had! But after the initial joy, I could not shake the feeling that his surprise had been tinged with a kind of horror, or something like it. I could not understand this. And I felt let down at the cost, the death of an innocent creature for such a pointless spell.
Afterward, the terrible drawn feeling returned and kept me bedridden for a few days. I recognized that once again I’d gone beyond my borders, but there was nothing I could do about it because spring had only just come.
When I had recovered and felt sure there would be no more hard frosts. I went out to circle the barren courtyard. The trees clacked their bare branches in the wind, but it was a warm, blustery wind and thunder sounded far off across the mountains. Perchta had helped me dig up tender shoots of vervain out of the forest so I could plant them nearby, and they were gently wrapped in a damp cloth in my skirt pocket. Some part of me didn’t want to plant them—what could grow here? I kicked the ground, and it coughed a puff of dust. With a heaviness I couldn’t explain, I kept walking.
On the side closest to the forest, I found a smaller stone gate that led into the dense trees. There were no hawthorns here—nothing at all. But when I turned, I saw a small door that led back into the château. It felt … made for me. Uncanny. I chewed on my lip and pulled the plants out of my skirt. They were so fragile. It felt wrong to put them here. But I set them down and went to find a rock to dig up the ground.
MY SUCCESS WITH THE WINE ENDED UP FEELING LIKE A FAILURE. Death never mentioned it again, and the next day he paused myother work and gave me sections to copy from a tome larger than the Bible. Boring work. I couldn’t tell if this was supposed to be a reward, because it felt punishing. But I held my tongue. After a few weeks, he allowed me to return to actual magic, this time asking for me to create a sapphire. I went right back to failing.
“Anyone can put out the ingredients and draw the shapes,” Death said sternly.
