Death was silent for a moment. Then reached for me. I froze, not knowing what was happening or what to do. But he just smoothed my wild hair down the back of my head and onto my back. An innocent gesture all on its own, but when I met his eyes, searching the dark gaze that seemed so far away and so fixed all at the same time, he seemed unable to hide his longing.For me?I had never loved a man, but this atmosphere around us felt like something bigger, something more powerful, something I could fall into and never recover from.
“Go,” he said, his voice dry and cold. He handed me the veil he’d pulled off. “Take care of yourself.” And with that he turned his back as if I had already gone.
I crept back to my room in the falling twilight, my mind racing but no thoughts emerging from the maelstrom. After bathing and eating, I crawled into bed, already feeling the drain on my body. I fell asleep easily and dreamed of nothing.
I woke with a gasp, my heart beating in my chest as if I’d been running. My fire had gone out completely—not even a glowing coal—and the room was plunged into the deepest part of night. I did not know what had pulled me out of my sleep, but as I laid there, his voice came, as clearly as if he stood by my bed.
“Salomé!” Death called, as if through tears or through pain or through some uncrossable mountain that echoed his cries. Right out of the air beside me, but my fumbling fingers proved there was no one there.
He sounded as if he needed help. He was calling for help. I scrambled for the door, almost forgetting the house was full of treachery in these hours. But then the memory of being burned alive, no matter if it was an illusion, assaulted me, and brought with it all my life’s griefs, like creatures clawing out of my own mind—Valerie, Rochelle, and a sudden vision of Dacia being taken away, screaming as she disappeared among the trees.
I stumbled away from the door toward the cold fire, trying to find the poker to stir it into life, my whole body tensed in anticipation.
His cry came again, desperate and pleading. As if he stood at my shoulder, though again, nothing and nobody was there. I could not ignore it. He needed my help! I flung the poker down and rushed for the door, before I could lose my courage.
In the hall, all the torches were out.
The passage yawned as a dark throat in either direction, empty. And down it, the cry came again. “Salomé,mon coeur!”
I rushed into the dark, my thin shift no protection against the frigid air. I could not imagine what he was facing, but I would be there for him. I ran blindly, expecting the house to arrange itself as it always did. I could see my breath but barely anything else.
“I’m coming!” I cried. “Where are you?”
But when I turned the next corner, I realized I had made a mistake.
“Salomé!” it called in the voice of Death.
But it was not Death.
The shape filled the entire hallway, the body of something massive and looming. Great tusks gleamed in the moonlight. I felt certain I was not dreaming, but everything slowed, as if I had been caught in a dream, like the time in the hot springs when that strange unseen presence had swept through the forest. The roof was gone and the stonehallway had crumbled, and we stood among charred and blackened ruins, half sunk into the earth.
“You called,” the presence said, but I am not sure it spoke any words.
And then I understood.
My spell.My spell.
But Death had told me it had not worked! This must be a trick of the house. What I was seeing could not be real. My mind could not make sense of it. My voice was in my throat, and I could not get it out, so I simply shook my head.
Whatever it was, it gave a snort. “Beware little witch,” and in an instant the moon, the being, and the charred ruins winked out.
XVIII.
Maiden, Mother, Crone
“What is theurgy?” I asked Perchta one day, as I sat in the spring-green grass and braided river rushes into baskets. It was not many days after my failed spell to call the god and the trick of the house, calling with Death’s voice. I could not shake his comments about some magic as the language of peddlers and the powerless. I could not help but wonder if Perchta was another charlatan that Death would disdain. I looked at the basket in my hands. It wasn’t even magic. It was basket weaving.
“What would I care of the business of priests?” Perchta asked. She was on her hands and knees, her gnarled fingers pushing into the dirt to set her plants in the cool spring wind.
“Not just priests,” I said, setting the basket down in the grass. “But sorcerers. The powerful ones.”
“Powerful in what way?”
I did not have a quick answer. “To do great work,” I finally said.
“What kind of great working do you imagine?”
To be free, I thought. I saw myself going back to Dacia and taking her away from Josef. I saw myself finding Rochelle. “To save someone,” I said.
