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Chapter 48
Serilda lay on her side, staring at her own face, watching herself die. The wisps of dark hair that curled around her ears. The eyelashes against pale cheeks—quite dark, quite pretty—but never noticed because all anyone ever saw were the wheels in her eyes. She had never thought of herself as pretty, because no one else had ever told her she was. Other than Papa, and that hardly counted. All she ever heard was that she was odd and untrustworthy.
But shewassort of pretty. By no means a breathless beauty, but lovely in her own way.
Even as the last bits of color drained from her cheeks.
Even when her lips began to turn blue.
Even when her limbs began to spasm, her fingers twitching against the branch at her side, before they finally stilled and sank into the grass and mud.
Unlike all those lost souls in Adalheid Castle, hers was a soft death. Peaceful and quiet.
She felt the moment the last breath left her. Serilda looked down, pressing a hand to her body’s chest. Her eyes widened as she noticed that the edges of her hand were wisping into the air like morning dew struck by the first ray of sunlight.
Then she started to fade. Her body was pulling apart. There was no pain. Just dissolving. Returning to the air and the earth, her spirit fading into everything and nothing.
Ahead of her, across the river, she spied a figure in emerald green robes, a lantern lifted high in one hand.
Beckoning her. Their presence was a comfort. A promise of rest.
Serilda took a step forward and felt something solid beneath her heel. She looked down. A stick. Nothing more.
But then—she remembered.
Hold tight.
Don’t let go.
She gasped and bent down, reaching for the branch that had been stolen from an ash tree at the edge of the Aschen Wood. At first, her fingers wouldn’t take hold. They slipped right through.
But she tried again, and this time, she felt the roughness of the bark.
On the third attempt, her hand wrapped around the limb, clutching it with the little bit of strength left to her.
Her spirit slowly came back together, tethered to the land of the living.
She looked up again and wondered if that was a smile worn by the god of death, before Velos and the lantern faded away.
This time, she did not let go.
In the hours that passed, Serilda found that she very much disliked being dead. She was gravely bored.
That’s precisely how she would describe it, she thought, when she told this story to the children.
Gravelybored.
They would find it funny.
Itwasfunny.
Except that it was also true. There were no people about, and even if there were, she doubted they would be able to see or communicate with her, not so long as there was daylight. She didn’t know for sure—she’d never been a spirit before—but she didn’t think she was the sort of traumatized, half-corporeal spirit like those that haunted the castle. She was just a wisp of a girl, all mist and rainbows and starlight, wandering along the riverbank and waiting. Even the frogs and the birds paid her no heed. She could scream and wave her arms at them, and they went right on chirping and croaking and ignoring her.
She had no jobs to complete. No one to talk to.
Nothing to do but wait.
She wished she had taken the potion at sundown. If only she’d known. The waiting was almost as tedious as spinning.
