She didn’t say anything, but I heard her faint breath. I had never heard a sound so perfect. I didn’t know how to cut her free or bring her down. The only knife I’d seen in the château was the one from the carving spit, wielded by the Emperor, and it had vanished when I unraveled the room.
I set down the lantern and began to rub the cord against the hook. She moaned in pain as I worked, and my heart broke but I could not stop—I was desperate to free her. My arms trembled and the smell of flesh and burning rope mingled with the blood and decay. It was nearly too awful. I leaned my head against Dacia’s forehead and wept. “I’m here. I’m here,” I told her.
“Salomé,” she whispered.
The rope snapped, and she collapsed into my arms.
Despite my herbs, I was still weakened from the ritual the night before, and I did not know how I would carry her from that place. Dacia was nearly as tall as me, and though she had lost weight, her bones hung heavily. I tried to take a step and stumbled. Tears pricked my eyes.
But I had learned much in this home, this monstrous place that served the worst monster of all. Taking a deep breath, I ground my feet into the stone and thought the incantation.
My light filled the room, and even the spirits who could not look at me lifted their heads. I gathered Dacia against my stainless white dress and lifted the giant’s lantern again. As I walked us out of that airless room, I reached for each spirit to follow. Each lost girl. Each forsaken woman. Some of them tried to speak, but I could not hear their words. Some of them I recognized, and each time our eyes met I found more sorrow, more horror. There was no one left alive in that cursed place, other than Dacia, and I gathered them all to my light tenderly, as a mother would her children, and led them forward into the château.
I didn’t know where to take them. Where to go. I needed a horse. I stumbled through the halls. I needed to take Dacia to Perchta’s hut. But as I turned the corner of the hallway, a tall man all in black came toward me.
Renaud had returned.
There was no hiding it. No illusion or spell to cover my tracks. He could see me, clear as day—barefoot and shining, covered in blood. My eyes wild, my breath fast. And Dacia’s limp body slung over me.
But other than a strange glint in his eyes, there was nothing that betrayed anything was amiss. “Did you cut yourself?” he asked, his tone kind and benevolent.
For a moment I thought I must have lost my mind—fool that I was, I had gotten it all wrong somehow! His eyes, even now, looked on me with so much gentleness. He did not seem surprised by any of it—my white robes, the spirits hovering behind me, the woman on my shoulder, or the lantern at my side. Rather than me, it was Renaud who was filled with so much righteous confidence. No look of guilt or fear. He seemed to have no shame, not even with Dacia’s labored breathing filling the silence. This lack of shame made me hesitate. Had I missed something? His dark gaze was as fathomless and clear as always. Clearand endless into nothing. All this time I had mistaken nothing for great depths. A void.
My fear expunged everything, even my magic. Suddenly my spell light went out, and I buckled under Dacia’s weight.
He looked down and I followed his gaze.
I’d left bloody footprints up the steps, and the hem of my dress was soaked in blood.
“You …” I lifted my head, to accuse, to say something. But I was speechless. How had I not seen his true face. How had I been so fooled? “You are not Death,” I said. And then it clicked, the connection I should have made all along. “You are the Baron de Laval-Rais!”
He gave me that slow predator smile, teeth sharp and white, and stepped closer to me, his gloved finger coming to my chin.
My heart raced, raced like it used to race when he looked at me like this. Raced like when I thought he was someone special to me. But now I saw my feelings with clarity, separating them from myself, finding where I ended and he began. This was fear. How had I ever thought it anything else?
“Wrong, ma petite chou. I amyourDeath.”
XXXV.
The Curse of the Void
There was nowhere to go, especially not with Dacia in my arms. In a blink, Renaud grabbed me by my skirt and tore me down, the violence in shocking contrast to his previous gentleness. My face smacked against the stone, my scream dying to a moan. He dragged me in one hand, Dacia in the other, down the hall, without mercy. His cold ferocity told me in no uncertain terms—
We were going to die.
The moment I thought it, some thread of the spell so deeply embedded inside me broke—and when it broke, the château changed.
It was a ruin. The same ruin I had arrived in the day he’d plucked me out of the woods. The spell was unraveling, I could feel it, and in feeling it, I realized it was a spell I’d unwittingly cast, or, no …fed.
I remembered in a flash those symbols on the hourglass during my first test. The hourglass. They were a curse that tied me to this place. He used their spell to draw on my power, the forest’s magic, using us to make up for his lack of ability. And I … I had brought the spell alive with my adoration, my desperation, and my need for power.
But it was too late for understanding or revelation. I kicked and struggled but he dragged us on. The spirits followed us, a ghostly parade whispering to each other in words I could not hear.
It was as I had dreamed, so many times.
He brought us to the chapel, swinging the doors open so forcefully they thudded against the walls. I had gripped the lantern this entire time, and I used the moment to throw it at him as hard as I could, trying to rip myself from his grasp, but he dropped Dacia among the pews and dodged it. The lantern bounced onto the floor, but it did not break, and the flame did not go out.
Once again quick as a snake, he caught me by my hips with two hands, hauling me up on the altar in the same way as the night before.
