WALES 2022
‘ I ’ M THE DEVIL ,’ I choked out, everything I thought I knew about my existence splintering and shattering to the ground.
Not a victim of a cruel curse – the maker of the curse.
‘I’m sorry,’ whispered Arden, and I could not look at him, this soul I had destroyed, this soul whose love for his sister I had turned into something monstrous, this soul I’d spent decades chastising for not caring enough about his family. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘I reaped your soul?’ Every word was a blight, a tumour, a sin, a whip-crack of self-loathing across my heart.
Propping his elbows on his knees, he clutched his temples and stared at the ground. ‘In exchange for my sister’s survival. But it turns out I wasn’t specific enough in my bargain. Her fever broke, only for her to die of choking the very next day.’
No.
‘Because of me?’ Everything was reeling, spinning, my thoughts and feelings kaleidoscope fragments I couldn’t quite grasp. ‘Surely I didn’t willingly let her die.’
‘I don’t think you did, either. We both messed up the bargain. But I still hated you for it.’
The knowledge was a pit in my heart, gaping and yawning in horror.
I was the devil .
I was everything evil in this world.
And I’d fucking forgotten . Like milk on a grocery list.
Yet as he’d described it, it had come back to me, every startling detail. As though it had always been there. Had my mind willingly buried it? Was it grotesque self-preservation? A refusal to look myself in the eye?
I lay flat on my back, the dizziness making it impossible to sit up for much longer. My hip twinged in pain, but it was distant, irrelevant. A mortal problem, and I was not mortal.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I did, the first few times, while I still hated you. But the last seven or eight hundred years … I couldn’t bear the idea of telling you what you really were.’ Arden sniffed. ‘You’re the furthest thing from a devil I can imagine. I didn’t want you to have to carry the burden of everything you’ve done. The fate you’ve cursed us to.’
I deserve to carry the burden , I wanted to scream at him. But he had only been trying to protect me.
‘Were there others?’ I asked, my throat both thick and dry. ‘Before you? Did I reap other souls?’
‘I think I was your first.’
A small solace, at least. I’d been such a terrible devil that my first mark was still hunting me down a thousand years later. If there was one thing in life it was good to be inept at, it was probably this.
I am not a monster. I am not a monster. I am not a monster.
I chanted it in my head in the hope it would feel true.
It was one thing to know your life – lives – defied some fundamental law of nature, but quite another to confirm the existence of something as arcane as devils . I supposed there was a reason the mythology of evil spirits and Faustian bargains transcended cultures and eras and faiths, a reason the idea had been sprinkled through the last thousand years like malignant confetti.
But it was a wholly ruinous thing, to grapple with the idea that you were one.
I tugged Arden’s scarf up to my face, so his scent covered my mouth and nose, and breathed into it like a comfort blanket. Fresh air and clean linen, with underpinnings of hay and woodsmoke.
Words muffled, I asked, ‘What happened after Lundenburg?’
He looked away, down to where the river babbled indifferently below. ‘I spent seven days and seven nights on hot coals.’ A bitter laugh. ‘Hence the nightmares.’
The horror in my chest billowed. The carnal screams every night, the way he clawed at his back in feral desperation, the existential terror in the alto yells. That unimaginable trauma was because of me.
I had subjected him to that – only to save myself.
No wonder I had spent a thousand years subconsciously atoning. Throwing my own body into the firing line again and again, a bone-deep need to right a historic wrong. A martyr, a lamb for sacrifice. A devil seeking redemption.
‘And then you had to work for me,’ I finally managed. ‘For the Mother.’
He nodded, now gazing up at the constellations sprayed across the night sky. ‘I was supposed to, but the moment I was back in Lundenburg, I realized my sister had died despite what I had sacrificed to save her. So I hunted you down and killed you instead. Partly out of hatred, but also because I thought it would free me from the futile bargain. But as soon as you took your final breath, I died too.’
A stronger breeze picked up, rustling through the cluster of trees behind us. ‘So what about the next life? Why did you keep killing me if you knew it wouldn’t free you?’
‘At first I thought it had worked. I was a warrior in Bavaria, holding back the constant tide of raging Hungarians. I had quite the reputation on the battlefield as someone who could sustain many wounds without dying. As time went on and our eighteenth birthday approached, I did remember what had happened in our last life, but it had a sort of filmic quality. I thought that I could not possibly be actually recalling a previous existence. It felt more like a recurring dream. Even if it had been real, I could not have imagined the bargain would follow me into another life.’
‘But it did.’
‘The second I turned eighteen, I was wrenched back into the Underrealm and brought before the Mother. You were there too, but it wasn’t …’ He searched for the right words. ‘We weren’t corporeal. I think our bodies were left behind in the mortal world, and our souls descended to the place they were forever tied to.
‘Anyway, you had no memory of anything. No clue why you were there. It was horrible to watch – you were absolutely terrified by what was happening to you.’ He shook his head fiercely, a lock of dark hair falling free of its tie. ‘I’ve never understood that element of all this. The fact that all knowledge of who and what you were simply escaped you from one life to the next.’
The magnitude of it all was impossible to process. It was so much bigger, and so much worse, than I had imagined. Not a trivial squabble with a forest witch, nor a petty grudge from long ago, but something deeper and darker, something that tied us to the very underbelly of the universe.
And I had just forgotten .
That’s what I kept hitching on. The absurdity of my own bad memory.
‘What happened when we were summoned back to the Underrealm?’ I asked, determined to mine every last horrific detail from the shared earth between us.
‘The Mother told us our souls had been marked as hers. And that now we were of age and at our full power, it was time for us to begin reaping souls. Those we made bargains with would then be under our own command – and would also be required to start reaping, after their week on the coals was over. It would all ultimately sustain her. The suffering … it’s her lifeblood. And she was growing stronger and stronger with every bargain made.’
‘It’s a fucking pyramid scheme.’ I shot a withering look up at the sky. ‘How was my soul marked in the first place? Was I just born a devil?’
‘That, I’ve never been able to figure out.’
I thought of that fated trip back to the Underrealm in our second lives. ‘Why didn’t we just refuse to reap?’
‘We did, at first, but we were put on the hot coals until we obliged.’ A shudder shot through him, and he looked instantly embarrassed, clearing his throat and looking away. ‘You lasted a lot longer than I did. A martyr, even back then.’
My toes curled inside my boots. ‘But I gave in, eventually.’
‘Don’t hate yourself for it. The pain is impossible to describe.’
Somewhere in the trees behind us, a twig snapped beneath the foot of a fox or a badger.
‘What happened after we finally agreed to reap for the Mother?’
‘We went back into the world – me to the battlefield and you to the monastery you’d lived in for years.’ His voice had taken on a soft, lilting cadence, like a storyteller by a campfire. ‘It would’ve been easy for me to find a desperate soul to bargain with, given where I was. So much death, and suffering, and loss. But instead I fled the battle and came to find you. Since we’d turned eighteen, my tether to you was a hundred times as powerful. Before, it had been a vague tug, but now it was a magnetic yank. I found you within days. You were utterly distraught, clawing at your back as though you still felt the flames licking up it. You were on the brink of reaping the almoner.’
Guilt twisted through me. Arden had not been the one-off I’d hoped. I had been prepared to do it again. ‘Why did you come and find me? Didn’t you still hate me for what I’d done to you?’
‘Because I wanted to tell you what I’d inadvertently discovered the first time I killed you. That if I killed you, we both died, and the clock would essentially reset. We would be born into new lives, and have another eighteen years before we were torn back to the Underrealm. And we could keep doing that forever. We wouldn’t have to reap anyone, nor would we ever go back to the hot coals, as long as we kept dying at the right time. No matter how much I resented you, it seemed a mutually beneficial solution.’
Digging my nails into my palms, I whispered. ‘And I agreed?’
‘You did. But then, when I came to find you in Northern Song …’
‘I didn’t remember.’
‘You didn’t remember.’ He shook his head, as though the memory still confused and troubled him. ‘You didn’t remember anything , in those early lives. Your memory seemed to be wiped entirely with every fresh incarnation. And yet, even without that tug of guilt, that need for redemption, you offered to take my punishment for me, my father ’s punishment. Even though you had no idea who I was. And god … I hated you for it. Because I hated you so much for the miserable existence you’d sentenced us to – I was beginning to understand, then, that I would never again be able to live or love the way others did – and you just did not remember . And in that moment, nothing could’ve felt worse than being in your debt. My pride wouldn’t allow it.’
Shadowy images drifted across my mind’s eye – a wooden stool beneath a dangling rope. ‘You threatened to kill yourself. I remember that much.’
As Arden puffed his breath out, it misted in the crisp night air. ‘Because it was becoming clear to me that I would not be able to kill us both. How could I have left that cell and got my hands on you? I was small and unarmed, and there were guards. My throwing stars had been taken from me upon my arrest. And because of your completely unfounded act of generosity and martyrdom, it was also clear that you were not likely to kill me. Even if I’d explained the situation to you, right there in front of the guard, I very much doubted you would have raised a blade to my throat. Your heart was too good, too pure. And I did not understand it one bit, given the way we began.’
‘So you thought if you killed yourself,’ I said slowly, ‘at least you would be saved from having to reap.’
He nodded. ‘I wasn’t sure whether my death would end your life too – suicide had not been the plan – but it was the only play I had left. And now, with a thousand years of hindsight, I know my attempt would not have been successful, anyway. The only way we can die is by the other’s hand.’
What an almighty, devastating mess. A Greek tragedy with no end.
Unless.
Opening my mouth into the silence of the night, I said, with far more conviction than I felt, ‘I think we should let ourselves be called back to the Underrealm.’
The valley practically trembled at the words. The distant gush of the river mirrored the roar of my own blood. Far above us, a falling star sailed across the dark canvas of the sky.
Arden turned to me as though I’d sprouted a thousand heads. ‘Why?’
I took a deep, steadying breath. ‘Because if your soul is marked to mine, and you are able to kill me, then …’
Understanding dawned in his eyes. ‘You should be able to kill the Mother. Because your soul is marked to hers.’
‘Exactly.’ A flurry of something bright and hopeful rose in my chest, like a snow globe turned upside down. ‘The flaw in the system, right? Maybe the very act of binding souls together makes them more vulnerable to each other. Maybe whatever dark magic tethers us – and protects us from all other types of death – also creates a kind of murderous back door.’
The realization was a potent one. And somewhere deep in my gut, I knew my theory was correct. No matter which life I’d been in, there had always been a push and pull to the universe; without light there was no shade. It was yin and yang. The karmic, cosmic balance of it all. The Mother could not be all-powerful. Nature didn’t work that way.
For once, Arden wore his emotions all over his face as he processed the idea. A kind of inward darting to his gaze that made me think he was picking his way through each conflicting feeling, trying to find solid ground.
He turned to face me, resting on his shins, like an animal poised for attack. ‘What if destroying the Mother destroys us too?’
Softly as I could, I replied, ‘You’ve known of my martyring ways for a millennium. Surely you must know I would sacrifice myself a thousand times over to rid the world of this evil.’
‘But you’re not just sacrificing yourself. You’re sacrificing me. Us.’
My eyes searched his. The light of the stars cast a silvery glow over his face, every beautiful line of it: the full lips, the thick brows, the kind eyes, the hard jaw and the high cheekbones, and the searing, burning Arden-ness of him. Flowers and ink.
‘What other option do we have?’ I asked, desperate now, because if there was another way, I would take it in a heartbeat.
‘This,’ he said urgently, and he grasped my hands in his. I jolted at the touch, so warm and immediate, and something in my chest danced under the heat. ‘Now that you understand everything, we can just live out our eighteen years in various lives and mutually die when the time comes. There’s no reason we can’t keep doing this forever.’
The thought was at once dark and alluring. It was like the urge to lie or steal or cheat – glittering and exciting, a sparkling imperial jewel ripe for the taking. It carried with it a thrill, but also an undercurrent of shame.
‘I don’t think it’s right,’ I whispered.
His posture was almost frantic now, coiled like a spring. ‘Why?’
Swallowing hard, I replied, ‘I think if we have the chance to destroy the Mother forever, we have to try. Think of all the other innocent souls we’ll be freeing from this hell. No more hot coals, no more sentencing victims to the same fate. No more devils.’
There was a long beat, and then, ‘Why do you have to be so good?’ he asked, pained. ‘Why can’t you be selfish, just this once?’
I smiled wryly. ‘Would you have loved me for so long if I wasn’t selfless?’
His silence was answer enough.
‘So what now?’ I asked.
‘I guess we wait to turn eighteen.’