Fresh, red wounds were marked into my body. Carved into my body—one on each thigh—were symbols for a spell. But either the dream or the cloudiness in my brain wouldn’t let me see them clearly.
Incense burned in thick trails in the damp atmosphere of the chapel while Renaud worked over my body, reciting something. His tunic was removed, bare chest covered in sweat. When he finished the incantation, he climbed up onto the altar to straddle my legs. The symbols he’d cut on my legs were positioned directly beneath him. He pulled down his hose, and I watched with a strange detachment, as if I were watching a nightmare. Standing over my limp and senseless form, he began stroking his staff from limp to erect, increasing into a frenzy. His face twisted. I can only describe it as the opening of something deep inside, something that I felt, instinctively, should not be opened. Should not be surrendered. My entire body rejected whatever that magic was, and for one terrifying second, I thought my spirit was about to flee and my body would never be seen again, just left behind as a shell, limp as a doll. An intense revulsion came over me. A dread worse than death, worse than anything I had ever imagined or encountered.No.I screamed in my mind and reached for myself.No!
Below the altar, Schneid mewed incessantly. On the altar, my body twitched.
I heard or maybe just sensed Renaud somewhere forbidding me from coming back, telling me to keep going, to trust him. But I couldn’t. I only knew one true thing—I was in danger of something worse than death. I dove back into my body.
When I opened my eyes, I was not in the scene I’d just witnessed. I was in the chapel, yes, but Renaud leaned over me, fully dressed, hand smoothing my hair back as he murmured soothing words. I could have told myself it had all been a nightmare—but that first moment I came to consciousness, so clear and true, I knew it had not been. Even as he tried to shush me back into a magicked sleep, the candlelight flickered across the angles of his face, stretching them sharper and longer. It seemed I could see in his eyes, something in that darkness, lurking andstalking and greedy, so infinitely greedy, like a great dragon over his hoard. It filled me with so much dread, I convulsed and immediately pushed up off the altar, shaking off his hands and leaping to the floor. I nearly landed on Schneid. The hellcat hissed at me.
Rochelle’s figure in the mirror appeared in my mind, the whites of her eyes showing as she searched the frame, trying to get through.Run.
I bolted for the door.
Renaud shouted at me. He screamed my name. But I ran and did not look back.
I burst out of the chapel and into the labyrinth of halls, following the glow of Schneid’s back. The world seemed to flicker strangely, and I stumbled, dizzy. It must have been the draught. I could still feel its effect, the lifting sensation as if my spirit couldn’t help but want to tear away from my body. Rubbing my eyes, I ran, naked and nearly blind, for the doors.
Out in the courtyard, midnight had fallen over the forest and the wind was hot and heady. A rumble of thunder echoed through the sky, but to my heart it felt like the roar of Renaud’s rage.
I ran for the trees.
XXI.
A Bad Time
The forest had suddenly come alive. Creatures that I couldn’t see peered from the branches above me, their eyes glowing and strange and unlike any animal I’d ever seen. Dark pockets loomed between the trees, darker than the abyss outside Perchta’s hut. But I ran. I ran, stumbling through the twisted trees, mindless of the pain. Every root that leapt out, every branch that sliced at me, every rock I nearly stumbled into—I felt none of it and kept going. Schneid stayed out in front of me, and I focused only on the flicker of his light.
Whether it was my own altered state of fear, or the lingering effects of the draught, or the wounds on my legs, I struggled to hold the world together as one. My path kept splitting, the trees cracking into two, the leaves rushing upward as if blown from the ground and high above me. Lightning branched throughout the sky, making it seem to be both day and night to my fractured mind. In the brief flash, I’d see all manner ofbeingsgazing hungrily at me. With every push of my bare feet in the dirt, it felt like I was doing as much work to stay down as I was to move forward. The wind tore through the trees, and with it, the smell of coming rain, and finally I could go no farther.
Schneid looked back, mewing at me to follow. But I couldn’t. My legs were on fire. I felt like I might be sick. Spotting a fallen branch in a flash of lightning, I sank down, a puppet with cut strings.
I couldn’t wrap my head around what had happened. I ran becauseof instinct, but now I sat in the middle of the dark forest, with summer storms high and my way lost, and I could only think of Renaud. The look in his eyes. Him standing over me. Was it possible I’d been having a nightmare? But then why did he take me to the altar? What was he doing with my body? The questions were unbearable.
Schneid leapt up to the branch and sat beside me, restless, as if waiting for me to be ready to keep moving.
As I sat there, completely absorbed by my whirling thoughts and the effort to catch my breath, a strange lifting sensation pulled at me. I reached for the ground to steady myself and found, suddenly, that I couldn’t feel the ground.
A bolt of lightning flashed white hot. The earth moved below me. The branch I sat on was lifting in the dark. Screaming, I clutched the rough bark to keep from tipping off. I was too far up, rising still. I tried to send my body back down, but I had lost contact with the earth, and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t connect my mind back to the forest floor. Schneid still sat beside me, watching me with a distasteful stare as his tail hung off the branch, curling and uncurling, seemingly unaffected by anything that was happening. I couldn’t tell if I was suffering a delusion or if I had truly lost my mind. The branch kept moving as if possessed. I wrapped my arms and legs around it, clinging for dear life.
Cursethis forest. Perchta had told me that magic did not leap out from thin air, that when my power arced out from me, it was from not holding my own borders, from bleeding wounds I should have bandaged up. But I was so emotional and wrung out, just trying to hang on, that I could not even begin to feel the shape of myself, let alone regain control. It was easier to simply blame the forest, as if it were enacting some kind of vengeance.
The branch picked up speed and began to turn. I screamed and held as tight as I could, eyes screwed shut. Thunder rumbled through the forest. Passing branches lashed at me, cutting into my skin.
Without Death, without his protection, it felt as if the forest and all it contained was determined to kill me. The more I screamed, thefaster the wind tore, whipping me down the mountainside. I was in a nightmare that would not end.
I don’t know what I hit—but I must eventually have hit something and toppled from the branch. All I heard was the sound of my own screaming. And then nothing.
IWOKE TO WARM RAIN ON MY FACE.
I was on the old Roman road that traveled between Riquewihr and the next closest village, near to an old statue of Saint Hildegard, with her nose knocked off and hands turned upward to the sky. I’d fallen into the meadow at her wayside, naked and covered in scratches like I’d been fighting the trees. The spirit of a small child clung to the stone legs as if eternally begging to be picked up.
I’d forgotten what it was to live with these tragic remnants of life and longing and love everywhere I turned. If Valerie had not fished me out of the river where my father had flung me, I would have been the same as this child. A lost infant, eternally in the cold and damp. It made me so intensely sad I wanted to lie back down in the dirt.
I ducked my head to avoid seeing the spirit. But the statue seemed to taunt me in her holiness, reminding me of everything, missing nose and all, and I realized how much time I had spent with my head bowed low to avoid the sight of suffering.
Gingerly, I picked myself up.
Vivid images flashed behind my thoughts—of all that I’d dreamed or done—and I flinched, more uncertain than ever as to what, exactly, had happened. The wounds on the back of my thighs burned. I clutched my arms over my breasts and picked my way through the field up to the road. It was quiet and grassy, disappearing quickly into the thick forest and folded mountains. At the edge, I stopped and looked both ways.
