24. Clara
CLARA
The garden dirt is cold through my socks, and I don’t care.
Okay, I care a little. My toes have opinions. But going back inside for my boots means walking past the kitchen, and walking past the kitchen means the possibility of seeing him, and I would rather grow moss on the soles of my feet.
“You know what the funniest part is?” I ask Shmoo, who trots beside me down the gravel path between the cabbages like this is our regular morning constitutional and I’m not having a breakdown in athletic socks.
“I defended him. To myself. Multiple times. He’s not like Marco, I said.
He apologized, I said. He keeps children’s drawings in Tolstoy, I said. ”
Shmoo says nothing, because he’s a cat, and also because he watched the whole thing from the cellar stairs and probably has opinions he’s saving for his memoir.
“And then he stands there with his stupid glowing chest and tells me I’m a woman who says yes when no isn’t on the menu.
” I yank a weed out of the strawberry bed for no reason except that it’s there and I need to destroy something.
“Like it’s a diagnosis. Like he ran the numbers.
Ah yes, subject exhibits classic escape behavior, deploy maximum cruelty. ”
The weed comes up with a satisfying rip. I throw it at the compost heap and miss.
“I saw her hair, Shmoo. Her ear. I was standing there holding the biggest clue either of us has found in seven hundred years, and he chose that exact moment to become a courtroom drama.”
Shmoo flops onto the path, rolls in the dust, and looks up at me upside down.
“Yeah,” I sigh. “That’s about how I feel too.”
I do another lap. Past the beans, past the well pump, past the lavender that smells like the bath he drew me, which—nope. Not thinking about the bath. Filed under Later, subfolder Never, cross-referenced with everything else that happened in that tub.
I’m rounding the tomato stakes when I hear boots on gravel.
I know his stride by now. The unhurried warlord stomp of a man who has never once had to rush for anything. I keep my eyes on the tomatoes. The tomatoes are fascinating. The tomatoes have never accused me of anything.
“Clara.”
I say nothing. A cherry tomato is developing a blush on its left side. Riveting stuff.
“Your boots.” Something soft lands on the path beside me. I glance down. My boots, laces tucked in, and… he stuffed dry socks inside them. Rolled. Like little bread loaves.
Damn him and his aggressively considerate acts of service.
“You have been walking on cold ground for two hours,” he says. His voice is missing the arrogance, the command, all of it scraped away like old paint. “You will make yourself ill.”
I sigh. “Seven hundred years and you never learned that ‘you’ll catch a cold’ isn’t an apology.”
“No.” He comes closer. “The apology is that I was cruel to you this morning. I took something you told me in confidence, and I wielded it like a weapon.” He stops and takes a deep breath. “I was an asshole.”
The modern word in his ancient mouth almost gets me. Almost. But I can still hear the words he said in that cellar, and the wound feels too fresh.
I pick up my boots and turn my back on him to sit on the edge of the raised bed and put them on. The dry socks are warm. He warmed them. By the kitchen fire, probably, while rehearsing his speech, because he rehearses, I’ve heard him do it through doors.
I lace my boots and say nothing.
The silence stretches long enough that Shmoo starts washing his face.
“I will make food,” Aldric says finally, quietly, to my back. “You have not eaten since yesterday. It will be waiting when you are ready. Or it will be waiting anyway.”
His steps retreat up the path. The garden door opens and closes with a gentleness that’s somehow worse than slamming.
“I’m still mad,” I tell Shmoo.
Shmoo looks pointedly toward the keep, where a thread of smoke is already rising from the kitchen chimney.
“I am.”
My stomach, that traitor, growls loud enough to startle a bee.
I hold out for another ninety minutes, which I count as a moral victory, and then my body stages a coup and marches me inside.
He’s waiting at the great table. The spread is ridiculous. Roasted chicken, bread still steaming, butter, honey, the fan of sliced apples he creates when he’s trying. Even candles.
I sit. I put my napkin in my lap. I look at him with all the warmth of a Swiss bank denying a loan.
Aldric isn’t smirking. He’s just watching me carefully, his undead eye seeming less vibrant than usual.
“When I touched the goblet,” I say, tearing bread with more force than bread requires, “I had a vision. The witch. I watched her pour the souldust into your wine, right here in this hall. Then I saw her younger, in a meadow, with two little girls. Her daughters. They all had my hair, Aldric. My eyes. She turned and looked at me, like she knew I was watching, and she was about to speak when someone bellowed my name and broke the connection.”
His knuckles whiten around his fork.
“So I’m going to touch it again,” I continue, buttering the bread with surgical precision. “Today. And this time nobody is going to interrupt, and I’m going to hear what she has to say. This isn’t a request for permission.”
His jaw flexes and I can almost see the arguments he’s lining up, a whole medieval army of objections mustering on the field.
He swallows them.
“All right,” he says.
I blink. “All right?”
“You will not go alone. That is my only term. If the dust takes you somewhere, I will be there when you return.” He pushes the chicken toward me. “Eat first. Visions on an empty stomach seem inadvisable.”
I eat. It’s delicious. I refuse to tell him so.
Aldric goes down the stairs first with the candle and the glow of his heart.
The goblet isn’t where it rolled this morning; it’s righted now and returned to its shelf behind the iron grate.
He must have replaced it after I stormed out.
I picture him standing alone in the dark with it, and I squash the sympathy like a mosquito before it can do anything stupid.
Shmoo takes up his post on a wine barrel like a fuzzy court reporter.
“You are certain,” Aldric says. It’s not a question, but his hand hovers near my elbow without landing. “The dust made me what I am.” He nods at Shmoo. “It made him what he is. We do not know what it will do with you, even if it seems you are somehow related to the witch who cursed me.”
“I’m certain.” I flex my fingers. “I want this curse broken. Even if you’re a terrible boyfriend.”
His jaw clenches so hard I hear his teeth creak. The word boyfriend visibly ricochets around his medieval skull looking for a definition, and he’s none too pleased with the adjective preceding it. He says nothing, but he does step back and gives me room.
I pick up the goblet.
Cold metal. Heavy. The crusted residue glitters faintly in the candlelight, and I wait, heart hammering, for the world to dissolve.
Nothing.
I turn it. Grip it with both hands. Hold it up like I’m toasting the barrels.
Nothing.
“Come on,” I mutter. “Don’t do this to me. I sat through the previews, show me the movie.”
“Clara—”
“Shush. Maybe it’s buffering.”
A full minute passes. My arms get tired. Shmoo yawns. The humiliation of demanding a magical vision in front of my undead ex-whatever starts to creep up my neck, and I’m lowering the goblet, opening my mouth to say something deflecting—
The cellar melts.
Sunlight. The meadow, the scent of elderberry so sweet I can taste it. The young witch stands ten feet away in the tall grass, her daughters chasing each other in circles behind her, silver hair flashing, and this time she’s already looking at me.
She speaks, and her voice is equal parts warm and weary. “If you are seeing this, then you are mine. My blood, come down through the long years.”
I try to speak. Nothing comes out.
“Listen well, daughter of my daughters, for I have poured all that remains of my craft into this vessel, and I may say this only once.” She folds her hands.
Behind her, the girls shriek with laughter, now chasing a white butterfly through the grass together.
“When I was young, I was given a premonition. I saw a warlord come out of the west with a crowned wolf on his banner. I saw him burn our village. I saw my sisters die.”
The meadow darkens at the edges.
“I had years to prepare. I could have gathered the covens. I could have poisoned his wells, turned his men, ended him a dozen ways before he ever reached our valley. Do not think I did not want to.” Her jaw sets, and I know that expression; I’ve made that expression, it’s in my mirror.
“But the sight showed me further. If I stopped him, my line ended with you. In only one thread did we continue. The thread where I let him come. Where I sent my girls away to the city, and stayed, and let the village burn.”
My chest caves. She watched it happen. She chose to watch it happen.
“So I could not kill him,” she says, wrinkling her nose in resentment.
“Instead, I had to preserve him. For you. I laced his wine and bound him to his castle. Undying, unchanging, held apart from time, until the day my line circled back to his gate. Until a daughter of my blood could enter where no other soul may pass. Until she looked upon the monster I made and he looked upon her, and… well, you know what you two have been doing.”
Oh no. Oh my god. My dead great-times-a-lot grandmother has seen me fucking the revenant in her dreams. I want to die. I want to die in this meadow.
“He took my line’s future,” she says, oblivious to my struggle and feeling no second-hand embarrassment. “So I bound him to restore it. His eternity for my lineage. His castle for a cradle.”
One of the little girls runs up and tugs her mother’s skirt, and the witch rests a hand on the small silver head without looking away from me.
“And now the question that brought you here.” She steps closer.
The scent of elderberry thickens, her eyes—my eyes—filling my entire vision.
“The curse on the castle is not yours to break, daughter. It is already broken. It was written to hold only until my descendant came, and saw him truly, and loved him… monster, curse, and all. That seal cracked the moment your heart did.”
The meadow starts to fade, sunlight giving way to candlelight.
“The gate has been open,” she says, her voice quieting to a whisper. “The only walls left standing are the ones you two built yourselves.”
The grass dissolves. The girls’ laughter dissolves. The last thing I see is her bittersweet smile.
Then I’m standing in the cellar with a goblet in my shaking hands, blue light washing over me, and Aldric’s ruined, beautiful, terrified face inches from mine.
“Clara. Clara. What did you see?”