Chapter 14 Now
Thomas gathers men to search for Will. They clamber through the streets, banging on doors and shouting among themselves, before finally stomping through the village walls into the wilderness beyond. A somber hush falls over the settlement in their absence, enveloping its buildings in melancholy and whisper.
I stand vigil in the kitchen with Margery, stalking back and forth across the room as I offer silent prayers to gods I know aren’t listening. Margery tries to busy herself with work, but her trembling fingers lose their grip on a large iron pot, and it crashes to the floor.
“God’s blood!” she curses, and my stomach sinks. I’ve barely heard Margery raise her voice, let alone curse.
A series of horrible, heavy booms punctuate the air, joined by frantic cawing as blackbirds undoubtedly flee from their perches in the surrounding trees. The sound is otherworldly, and my mind races to find an explanation for it—Titans? The gods?
Margery sucks in a breath. “They’re firing their muskets.”
“Their muskets?” I parrot, perplexed by the word. I recall the metal weapon that Thomas slung over his shoulder as he left this morning. “What for?”
“Maybe they found an animal. Or”—her face darkens—“maybe the Secotans.” After the first round of shots, the woods fall quiet once more. Somehow, this wretched silence is more agonizing than the volley of musket fire.
The men return under the banner of twilight. Like Margery suspected, Mauris Allen thought he saw a red wolf and tried to kill it. Apparently, the beast evaded not only his weapon, but Thomas’s, Charles’s, and Hugh’s as well.
But they bring no news of Will. There was no evidence of him, and that fact alone is suspicious. His disappearance is too clean, too illogical. There was no reason for him to leave the confines of the palisades at night, though even if he had stumbled drunk through the forest alone, surely there’d be proof of that. Some scrap of clothing snagged on a branch, wafting like a flag in the frigid air. If he’d walked straight into the sea, the waves would have returned his body to shore by now.
I confide my belief of the Bailies’ involvement to Emme, and she hushes me quickly, as if I’ve invited their Lucifer to break bread with us.
“Even if you’re right, nothing will come of it,” she cautions as she pulls me into an alley between two cottages, fearful that the others on the street might have read the accusation on my lips. “The Bailies are too powerful—such a statement will land you in the pillory if you’re lucky. If you’re not, you’ll find your neck kissed by a rope.”
I think of the pillory, the wooden contraption erected on a platform behind the meetinghouse. Intended for public humiliation, the device is little more than a wooden frame atop a post with holes for the punished to place their head and hands. No one has been forced into its clutches since I arrived.
Emme’s warning leaves me restless, disturbed by the knowledge that even if anyone else suspects the Bailies in Will’s disappearance, they won’t breathe a word of it. I must carry this suspicion alone, deep inside me at the base of my stomach, where it agitates to no end. The only way I can keep calm is by imagining my future revenge. After Agnes’s smug observation that Thomas is the next in line for my hand, I know she plans to join him on our trip to Scopuli. A scoutingparty is no place for a lady, but an exception can be made for the mother of Scopuli’s future king. So be it. I won’t stop her. Our vow not to harm women was never explicit, though we also never encountered one like Agnes, who so easily manipulates those around her into facilitating her own ascension.
A patrol of ten men, all Will’s compatriots, spends the following mornings marching up and down the frozen streets under Thomas’s orders, knocking on doors, asking questions. Watching them from my window brings the taste of vomit to the back of my throat. What a waste of time. By his own admission, Thomas was certainly the last to see Will alive, save for perhaps John Chapman, who was too drunk to remember. But this fact is never spoken aloud by anyone. Instead, his cronies perform the charade of grieving friends, forcing their way into people’s homes, demanding answers that only the Bailies have.
Throughout all this, the Waters home remains as silent as a grave.
I try their door three times each day. Once, I’m certain that I catch sight of Cora sneaking a peek from a side window, but, painfully, the door remains closed. I press my palm to the wood, willing her to speak to me through the barrier. She doesn’t come.
When I return home after today’s final attempt, I find Margery in the kitchen preparing a watery soup. She’s doing her best to flavor it with one of the few remaining bones from a long-dead sheep. Most of the town is eating much worse, if they’re lucky enough to have food gracing their bowls at all. Will I even survive long enough for the weather to turn, or will I starve before then? I take a seat at the table with an audible groan, and Margery looks at me sympathetically.
“She still refuses me,” I say, and Margery doesn’t need to ask me who I am talking about. She’s seen Cora and me grow closer; she’s seen how her absence has me on edge.
“Give her some time, Lady Thelia.” Her voice is kind, tinged with understanding. Every woman here is deeply intimate with catastrophe.
Tears well in my eyes. I know Cora is suffering, but I can’t help but wallow in my own losses as well. I think of our last true conversation, of her breath against my lips.
It seemed impossible that even then, I…
A mere few days ago, the world held more promise than I ever dared wish for, and now those dreams have burned into ash. Margery steps beside me, placing a hand on my shoulder.
“She’ll come around,” she whispers, but there’s an uncertainty in her voice that she can’t quite hide. Margery knows more than anyone how dogged Cora can be when she has her mind set on something. “She just needs more time.”
She’s right, but the sentiment doesn’t bring me any comfort.
“Do you think things would’ve been different if I had listened to you?” It’s a thought that I haven’t been able to shake.
“What do you mean?”
“Before the challenge. You told me to tell Thomas he couldn’t participate—” My voice cracks beneath the weight of my guilt.
Margery’s face crumples. “Oh, Thelia…Who can say? But whatever’s happened to Will, it’s not your fault…”
How many times have I heard those words before? How many times have I said them, more of a plea than a statement, desperate for them to be true?
Fault is a curious thing, too messy to trace. I can tell myself that I alone was not to blame for Proserpina’s abduction—Dis, certainly, bears the bulk of that honor. But does Ceres hold any responsibility for placing the care of her daughter in the hands of three young girls? Or perhaps it’s the fault of the oracle who visited us as girls for not warning Proserpina whose children she’d bear. Better yet, weren’t the Fates the ones to weave her abduction into her destiny, just as they wove my traitorous act into mine?
But all of that feels hollow in the memory of Proserpina’s screams. I was the one who was with her, and I was the one who gave her away. When determining true fault, all you can do is see who has the most blood on their hands, and I’m always covered in gore.
The Bailie home feels more like a prison than Scopuli ever did, with one notable distinction: No magic binds me inside its walls. Despite the cold, instinct draws me to the woods. Thomas will purposefully never find Will, or what’s left of him, and given how confidently he struts around the house when he returns from his patrols, he believes no one else will, either. But this is Thomas’s fatal error: He underestimates me.
And so, every day I leave the safety of the city walls to search for clues. Margery accompanies me as often as she’s able, waiting just outside the eastern gate. Cora has made it clear that she wants nothing to do with me, and our circle is too nervous to test her wrath. Margery’s the only one brave enough to defy her, but even she won’t walk beside me inside the palisades.
Which means I mostly explore the woods alone. Even the men don’t stray as far away from the settlement as I do, but there’s little reason for them to: Most have given up trying to catch anything in their traps, and the shadows that gather between the oaks and pines don’t feel like home to them. But they do to me, even though the oaks here have the curious trait of retaining their leaves. Winter has gilded them with hoarfrost, and overhead, branches of all kinds shimmer with delicate, sparkling icicles. When the sun hits them, they glitter just as brightly as Pisinoe’s jewels.
But there’s no sun today, and it makes an already cold day feel even more frigid. My fingers stiffen in the deep winter air until the ache sharpens into pain. I welcome it. This hurt is physical. Manageable, and within my control—at any moment, I can return to the warmth of Margery’s kitchen and end it.
The pain of Cora’s silence has no release.
I’m far enough into the trees now that the settlement’s sounds are lost to me. There’s only the crunch of my boots against hardened snow, and the occasional soft thud when a branch drops its powder collection to the ground.
A large, unfamiliar oak looms ahead of me on the path, signaling that I’ve reached an unexplored area of woods. In the dull afternoon light, the tree’s snarled branches look menacing, as if its arms are raised in warning. My gut tells me to heed it, but how can I? Frosted leaves shiver in the wind as I push forward into this unknown section of the forest.
Go back, they seem to whisper. Immediately, the trees feel wilder and the sky darker. This must be the section of woods that belongs to Sybil Browne. A shiver traces up my spine. Though I have no reason to fear her, when nature flashes its fangs, you should listen. I pull my cloak tighter to my frame to steel myself against the cold and defy every instinct that screams at me to turn back.
After a while, I ponder heeding the warnings, until I smell it. The scent is strange, a petrichor that has soured, a sweetness that masks something sinister. At first, it’s faint enough that I can pretend I’ve imagined it, but it intensifies the deeper I go into the labyrinth of trees.
What could cause such a foul smell? An animal?
It’s too cold for rot to touch an animal’s corpse, and my stomach growls at the idea. A haze of hunger descends, and inside its fog I let myself believe it’s a creature, perhaps even a buck, that the cold air has preserved enough to eat. Margery will be thrilled. For the first time in weeks, Jeremie will sleep with a full stomach.
Fallen branches claw at my wool cloak, as if the forest is begging me to stop. But the idea of fresh meat overpowers whatever internal warning mechanism the smell has activated. The scent is staggering now. It holds more decay inside its profile than before, and a warmth that’s reserved for rotting things. A wave of nausea rolls through my belly, and my hands move to cover my mouth. Then I hear it.
It’s the sound of beak tearing muscle, combined with a slow plip…plip…plip. The trees part to reveal a clearing. Directly before me, hanging from the limb of another ancient oak, is a body. A large, hideous turkey vulture sits on the corpse’s shoulder, and although the bird is obscuring his face, I don’t need to get any closer to know that it’s Will.
The vulture lifts its head to appraise me with large golden eyes. She’s already consumed Will’s, leaving behind two bloody voids that find me. But the worst part is his stomach. Someone has carved him open, leaving his intestines to spill out onto the snow. Pink ribbons, all tangled together in a heaping pile at the base of his feet, and although this scene should be familiar, it makes me want to retch. No one here practices haruspicy; only hate could drive someone to desecrate his body like this.
“Oh, Will,” I whisper. “What happened to you?”
Having decided I’m no threat, the vulture burrows her hideous, bloodstained beak back into Will’s neck. A primal growl rises in my throat as I rush forward. She raises her huge black wings, not unlike my own, and unleashes a hiss meant to ward me away, but she’s calculated wrong—I am a threat, and I grab a large stick from the ground to prove it. One violent swing through the air is all it takes for her to decide that Will’s body isn’t worth dying over. She’s a scavenger, after all. She takes to the sky, leaving Will and me alone.
A low wail rises from my gut and spills out from my lips. Will’s body swings gently from the force of the vulture’s ascent, his toes just barely caressing the red snow beneath him. The sight is so like the sailors I processed on Scopuli’s shores; the only difference is that this exact shade of gore now paints snow instead of sand.
My stomach growls. My mouth waters.
Once again, my hand is at my lips, although this time I’m not sure if it’s to prevent myself from retching or from drooling. Disgust and shame flood every part of me, and I turn away from Will. His shocked expression feels accusatory, as if he knows what my body, what my instinct, wants to do with him.
“This is Will!” The words come tumbling out in a desperate scream. But hearing them hang in the ice-chilled air isn’t what makes the salivating stop—it’s that violent open gash across his midsection, the source of the fetid smell. His bowels are torn; the meat is spoiled. Instinct sorts him into the pile for burning. Hot tears pool in my eyes, and I rub them away with the backs of my hands.
Gods, I really am a monster.
I move to the rope tied around the oak’s trunk that keeps Will suspended. It feels like hours before I’m finally able to undo its knot, and when I do, he crashes into the snow. Another horrid, wretched sound tears from my throat. I wish it had its magic—the sorrow it carries would bring down the sky.
I nestle down beside him. His face, the face that holds so much of Cora, is mottled blue and purple, and I blink back tears as images of sailors twisting on the end of my rope flash before me. Will suffered the same fate, a realization that makes my hands shake. Ice crystals cling to his dark hair, and to his eyelashes, which still ring those hollow eyes. A bloated, blackened tongue hangs limp between his lips. Everything about his appearance is an affront to how he looked in life.
My fingers move to brush a tendril of hair behind his ear, and I place my head to his stiff chest, hoping against reason to find what I know I will not. No heartbeat drums, and my tears break free at this final injustice. The cold turns them to ice against my face.
The sun has fallen below the tops of the trees, and the temperature with it. I should go back, but the thought of leaving Will like this makes the tears come harder. Even in my dreams, I never turn around to help Proserpina. I can’t abandon another person I care about to the darkness, and Cora needs to know—oh, gods. This will destroy her.
“Get out of here, girl.” An unfamiliar voice cuts through the glen, as gnarled as the oak that held Will.
My head jerks from his chest to search the ring of trees that encircles me, but I can’t find the source. It’s as if the woods themselves are speaking, ancient and all-seeing, though I know who the voice belongs to.
“Sybil?” I ask, pushing myself to my feet. “Sybil Browne?”
“If they find you with him, they’ll blame you for this savagery.”
“I could never—” The sentence dies in my throat, because of course I could.
I did.
Not Will specifically, no, but how many countless others? Did they have lovers they never returned to, who always wondered what fate they met, assuming the worst but never able to guess the true horror of it?
If Will had been on one of those boats, I would have killed him. Who knows how many Wills died at my hands. The thought is so disturbing that I let out another anguished wail as Sybil emerges from the trees. She’s tiny, her face hidden beneath the shadow of her cloak.
“No need for that. I know it wasn’t you.”
“So you saw who did it, then?” My eyes are frantic now. “Was it Thomas Bailie?”
“It was a man, that’s all I know. I heard him laughing.” She tips her head to Will. “But by the time I got here, he was gone.”
Grief sharpens into fury, an emotion I’m far more comfortable wearing. “He lured Will here on purpose. To do this.”
“No one ventures here unless they have good reason.”
“Because of you.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t leave him.”
“You must. How would it look, you dragging him back into town? Do you think they’ll believe you had nothing to do with his death?”
Of course they wouldn’t. It’s painfully clever, and equally devastating. Thomas hid his treachery in plain sight, knowing that I, with my frequent forest venturing, was the only one likely enough to find it. When he led the search parties, all he had to do was avoid an area of the woods that everyone already avoided. Either his secret would remain safe or I would dig my own grave by trying to return Will’s body to the City of Raleigh.
Such designs are far too thoughtful to be the work of Thomas alone. No, he’s too brash, too excitable. This level of planning belongs to someone calmer, more collected. Agnes. She set a snare for me, and without Sybil’s intervention, I would have walked straight into it. My fingers curl to fists, and if I had any reservations about her fate, they’re gone in an instant, a drop of water lost to the waves.
The other men will be for my sisters, for Proserpina. Agnes and her son will be mine.
Abandoning Will in the woods is excruciating, but Sybil’s right: I can’t allow myself to fall into Agnes’s trap. So I kiss his cheek gently and force myself to return home. The warmth of my bed provides no comfort, as two thoughts torment me: First, what Thomas must have said to bait Will that deep into the woods so late at night. Did Will mistake the moment as the time for his confession? Is that what made Thomas desecrate him so? And second, how can I possibly carry such a secret? Luckily, I don’t have to for long.
The next morning, Mauris Allen discovers Will’s mutilated corpse outside the southern gate. It’s torn to shreds, left in such a state of carnage that the official conclusion is an animal attack. If Agnes and Thomas are shocked by the news, they manage to keep a straight face when they tell me about it. I have to keep one as well—how did Sybil manage to move Will there, and how was she able to disguise the exact nature of his death? Perhaps the stories women whisper about her aren’t entirely fabricated.
What’s left of his body is placed in the charnel house outside the eastern gate: The frozen ground won’t easily accept the dead, but Master Waters can’t wait that long. He demands a funeral, frigid earth be damned. Perhaps he fears he won’t make it to warmer weather to see his son properly buried. Unable to refuse a dying man, the Council acquiesces. And so, three days later, on the morning of my fourth full moon, the town gathers to bury Will.
Sorrow and the strangeness of unknown customs work together to soften the edges of his funeral into no more than a series of discordant sights, sounds, and feelings: There’s the loud, hollow tolling of the bell that guides his procession past the charnel house to the colony’s cemetery. The forest that looms ahead, its trees twisted into a nearly impenetrable gate. The longing that fills me for the safety of their shadows, more home to me than the City of Raleigh could ever be.
The dark, exposed soil that will soon hold Will’s grave, the ground around it scorched an unseemly, malicious black from where they lit a fire to thaw it. The sour taste of bile in my throat at the sight of it, and the smell that lingers in the chilled air—the same hideous scent of burnt earth as when the ground opened to swallow Proserpina. The strange sense of knowing that one day, the forest will reclaim this cemetery, and the wooden crosses that mark its graves will be lost to time. Will, and everyone else this island devours, will simply vanish from history. How this makes me feel so profoundly lonely.
There’s Alis Chapman graciously offering me a handkerchief, and Cora standing before Will’s grave, refusing to meet my eyes. The jealousy that needles between my ribs when it’s Margery she leans into for support, and the shame that swirls in the pit of my stomach at the fact that even here, I yearn for her.
Me willing her to change her mind: Look at me. Look at me. Look at me. My fingers tapping against my sides as I think the words over and over, always three times in a row, counting on the magic that number holds to sway her: Three sisters banished. The Trinity. The Fates, who apparently didn’t spin this concession into my destiny, for my incantation goes unanswered.
Cora never looks.