Page 7 of The Blight of Hollowmire

I pass a table decorated with autumn roses—Bronwyn’s doing, most certainly. The nearest rust-colored bloom curls inward as I go by, petals browning at the edges like a spot of old blood. I grit my teeth and draw my power tightly. I promised Sephy, after all. I should have drunk more leywort tea before I came.

Focus, Vireth. You are here to eat, not to commit horticultural crimes.

The nearest table groans beneath roasted capon glazed in honey and vinegar, trenchers soaked with gravy, and bowls of herb-crusted turnips and excellent boiled potatoes swimming in butter. Steam drifts upward, fragrant and tempting, and my stomach gives an audible growl. Fortunately, no one is close enough to me to hear it—the silver lining to my forced isolation.

Long since freed from the expectation of socialization, I’m able to focus on the food before me instead of the frustration and disappointment teasing my senses. I select carefully: a still-warm chunk of bread first, dense and dark, topped with a thick swipe of soft butter. A slice of roast ham, sticky with honey and dusted with flakes of crunchy salt. Pickled onions, black grapes, pomegranate seeds that glitter like tiny rubies in the candlelight. Hard cheese veined with blue that calls to the rot magic ever-festering beneath my skin. Apple tartlets topped with brown sugared sunflower seeds that I’d eat in fistfuls if I were alone here.

As I lift the bread to my mouth, a noblewoman two places down leans toward her companion and murmurs, not nearly quietly enough, “Seeing her eat ruins my appetite.”

“I hear it spoils in her mouth,” comes the reply, filled with disgust. “Turns to mold before she swallows.”

It would be nice to enjoy a meal—to enter a room—without attracting such disdain. The pain has dulled some with time, the splinters scabbed over. My lips twist in a sad frown with the realization that it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d worn the blue gown—though I like the gray one all the same.

I take a deliberate bite and chew slowly. The bread remains bread. The cheese remains cheese. I swallow and smile faintly into my cup of full-bodied, pleasingly tannic wine.

Technically, they’re not part of the Moontide retinue. Technically, they’re fair game.

It doesn’t take much from my little pool of power within to rot the food on their forks just as they clamp their vitriolic jaws around them. When they spit and curse and retch, I turn my back to them to better hide my vicious glee. I make good my escape before they can lob their accusations at me, though they will have little doubt who’s to blame. It’s truly a pity that no one would dare make a scene at Sephy’s bloomday.

A ripple of movement near the doors draws the room’s attention away from me like a tide pulled by the moon. Trumpets sound—brass, obnoxious, and blaring—and the Moontide delegation makes their entrance in a wash of deep blues and silvers, their cloaks embroidered with waves and scallop shells. Lifting my nose a fraction, I scent them from here. They smell of salt and clean wind and… money.

At their head walks a young prince with hair the color of wet sand and a smile polished bright as sea glass. He bows low to my parents, then turns and offers his hand to Sephia.

She steps forward and her radiance elicits a gasp of admiration from the court. Gold beads and jeweled flowers glint in her green hair, and her rose velvet gown shimmers in the low honeyed light of the torches. When the Moontide prince draws her into the dance, she doesn’t hesitate—there’s no trace of her earlier apprehension. He bows low over her outstretched hand, and she sinks into a fluid curtsy as though her bones were made of water.

They dance beautifully, of course—moving as one in sweeping arcs about the hall. Sephia moves in a way that one cannot help but admire, the very air conspiring to flare her gown just so. Grace comes to her as easily as breath—as easily as my biting remarks come to me.

A dark, bitter, twisting thing bites into my chest—a sharp-edged pride, a lingering fear, and shamefully, envy, sour as vinegar. The prince seems pleasant enough, though I’m more likely to think favorably on him after the insurance I gifted to Sephia. I can sense the small mushrooms pulsing toxically from here, growing slowly in the box tucked away in her skirts. Mayhap she won’t even need them.

Finishing my plate and settling the gnawing in my stomach, I retreat to the wall, back pressed to cool stone. From here, I watch the hall as one might watch a tide pool—curious, yet alert for sudden rogue waves that may sweep me off my feet. Couples dressed in finery spin in endless patterns. Laughter rises and falls, coming more easily as the wine and mead flow. Servants scramble at the edges of the fray, anticipating every possible need. My boredom grows legs and begins to pace. Nibblebones senses my growing fatigue and yawns.

I weave fantasies of leaving this hellish assemblage, but catch Mother’s stern gaze as I quietly try to shuffle toward the back door. Relenting, I give it another quarter hour out of politeness, obligation, and sisterly affection for Sephia. Then another ten minutes out of haughty stubbornness, lest anyone believe their sneering drove me off. But by the time Sephia is laughing at something the Moontide prince murmurs in her ear, I have reached my limit. My feet ache from standing in these thin dancing slippers that have not once danced, and my low back yearns for the soft support of my bed.

I edge toward a side door half-hidden by a tapestry depicting Hollowmire in a more flattering century, filled with dragons and goddesses and humans, even. The air near it is cooler, redolent with the freezing rain and stone and blessed emptiness. Freedom.

I am one step from slipping through when suddenly, a hand clamps around mine.

Distantly, I acknowledge a foolish hope that someone is about to ask me to dance, but the hand is cold. Too cold to be the sweaty palm of some lackwit lord wanting to test his bravery in the face of the rot-tainted one.

I whirl, already snarling, and find myself face-to-face with Sephia’s bloomday fortune teller.

She isn’t at all what I expected—a stooped crone wheezing beneath layers of veils and mystery. She looks scarcely older than Sephia, in fact. Her face has sharp features and the golden eyes of a fox, and her dark hair braided with bits of carved bone, silver beads, and threadbare ribbon. Her ears taper to delicate points like the rest of us. Fae, then. Obviously young enough that her gift still owns her, rather than the other way around. That, I suppose, is something we might have in common.

“Lady Vireth—I must speak with you. It’s rather urgent, and…”

Her onyx pupils dilate with fear and something ominous and knowing slithers through me. My pulse flutters like a moth stuck to spider silk, because I’m certain a fortune teller with urgency on her mind is about to deliver an ill omen just for me.

Before I can offer a wary assent or aristocratic dressing-down for grabbing me without permission, her eyes roll back, showing only white.

She screams, guttural and shrill at the same time. The sound tears through the music, through laughter and clinking cups, through the marrow of my bones. The hall freezes.

“Blight Mother,” she shrieks, fingers digging into my skin hard enough to bruise. “Rot-Born Queen!”

The silence that seizes the crowd has all the air of a teapot ready to whistle. From the back of the hall, a goblet clatters to the floor, clanging sharply against the stone. Still, no one moves.

Her grip tightens as though I mean to pull away—and I should—but I find myself rooted to this spot, staring into her milk-pool eyes. The next time she speaks, her voice isn’t the lilting tenor of a young woman—it’s older, weathered with age and deep as the sea, as if something vast and ancient is leaning close to whisper through her mouth.

“From the rot of mercy comes the mother of endings,” she intones. “Crowned in hunger. Swollen with what the world casts away.”