Even slaughtering is different. Not pleasant, but different. There is a purpose and an honor to it, killing for food. There was no honor to this. There was a lot of blood, viscous and syrupy and dark, spreading from the knife across her jeweled bodice and down the handle of the cleaver onto my hands.
That beautiful bodice! I felt a twinge of dismay at ruining the expensive fabric, slicing up that masterful bosom-swelling structure of whalebone and stiff cloth, because it was easier to feel dismay at that than it was to look into the beautiful, startled, dying face.
I don’t think she had expected me to fight back at all, despite what she had said about being unable to charm me. She had trusted in the power of her beauty and charisma to keep me frozen as she reached for my heart, and she looked surprised as she died, surprised and irritated, as if I had performed some indignity as mild as tripping and spilling something on her gown.
She stayed upright for a moment, staring at me, at the cleaver sunk into her up to the handle, then sagged to her knees, the complicated upholstery of her golden gown collapsing around her. Her skirts were so wide and billowing that it looked like her torso was reaching up out of a yellow sea as she drowned in it, hoping for someone to pull her out.
“Sylvester,” she ... Well, it is hard to describe exactly how she said it, through all the blood. Bubbled, or gurgled. Sounds that you would never imagine could come from that elegant, pale throat.
The words came out in gasps, and pink froth formed around her perfect lips. Her eyes looked almost human. She reached up one hand, impossibly, and grasped at my leg with improbable strength. “You must find him. The king will kill ...”
But she never finished, because I gave the cleaver a final tug, and freed it from the twin prisons of her ribcage and the stiff corset. With it came a gush of blood. I staggered backward and retched, still clutching the cleaver as tightly as I could.
I wasn’t sure if I could unbend my fingers from its handle, at that point. I thought I might have to spend the rest of my life brandishing a bloody cleaver at everyone I met.
Still holding it, I threw up a puddle of mostly bile on the black floor, then stood bent in half and panting until my head stopped feeling like it was about to detach and float away.
I leaned against a table to support my suddenly quivering legs, and, one by one, released my fingers from the cleaver until it fell to the black floor, ringing against it with an incongruously bright, appealing sound.
The blood. So much blood. On her, on me, and all over the floor. It had even landed on places that seemed impossible for it to reach, lumpy and viscous and bright as paint, thicker and stickier than anything that had come across Da’s butcher’s block.
My eyes stung with it. I wiped my arm across my face, and it came away red. Itstank, too, even though it was fresh. Meaty. Metallic. It began to seem deliberate, as if the sorceress’s malice had liquefied and conspired to stain and surround me, creeping into every crevice.
I felt filthy, besmirched. The blood was so thick on me that it cracked as it dried and began to fall off my skin like scabs. Lovely. And my clothes were beyond salvaging; I would have to burn them.
I thought about these things to avoid thinking beyond them.
Clarissa’s face was so beautiful, even in death. I had half expected her to turn into a hideous old woman when she died, or to crumble into dust, like a witch in a fairytale, but she looked the same as ever.
Well, not quite the same. Without light in those leaf green eyes, she no longer seemed frightening or full of menace. She looked very young, in fact. Like someone’s daughter. Like Sylvester’s beloved sister. Like the child she might have been before, all those years ago, when the king had taken a little girl and made her into something else, then spent however many years since then filling her with his poison as she reached adulthood and became one ofthem.
I passed my palm over her eyelids, closing them gently. Her eyes were already drying out, and the skin rasped over them unpleasantly, making me shiver. I swung away from the sorceress’s body—and saw the king.
I do not know how long he had been standing there. I wished I hadn’t let the cleaver fall. I wished I wasn’t clothed in blood-stained rags, panting and panicky and barefoot in the spreading, sticky puddle of red on the floor. He was smiling, just a little, as if he enjoyed the sight.
“I felt it,” he said. “Did you not think I would feel it when one of my children dies?”
“They are not yourchildren,” I spat at him. “They are your puppets.”
He shrugged. “I fail to see much difference.”
“Youlovechildren,” I snapped. “They are not just tools for your benefit. You had no right to take children and make them into your playthings.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said, still smiling. He walked past me, so close that I could smell his stale skin below the rich perfume, and bent beside his daughter’s body. He stood again, holding my heart in its little jar, letting it dangle from the silver chain.My heart.In my panic, I had forgotten to take it from her. I clutched at my chest.
“She performed her duty to the last,” he said. “My very best daughter.”
He straightened, and I took a step back. Here in this room, in the light of the faintly glowing jars, I saw him clearly.
He wasn’t human, not really, and not in the way that Sylvester wasn’t quite human. He was rotting from the inside, somehow, the soul of him, and it wasn’t from the creeping mold destroying the hearts in those thousands upon thousands of jars. He stank of corruption, seeping up from somewhere deep and secret inside.
“You saw the little girl, of course?” he said, with something like relish.
“Millie,” I said. “Her name is Millie.”
“Most inconvenient, of course, to have to make another right now, but twelve does seem to be the magic number when it comes to casting the most powerful spells.”
“Twelve?” I croaked through a dry throat. “With Sylvester, there are thirteen.”
