Chapter V
V.
The Calm of the Tomb
Maxime arrived just as the rain clouds cleared, and a weak sun slid behind the ridge. He stomped into the brothel, mud caked to his shoes, already in a heated argument with one of the soldiers with him.
“That bandit should be gutted, along with all his men. I’ll do it with my bare hands,” Maxime roared.
The other women’s gazes darted like rabbits, and they melted closer to the men they were entertaining or quickly left the room on some pretense.
Even the merchant Kaufman, our richest and most powerful villager, ducked his head deferentially.
But I straightened my shoulders and leaned against the pillar, my face arranged into a seductive scold.
It was that look that had brought me Maxime.
My long black hair, my face sharp, to some men so frightening it was ugly, but to some representing all the mystery and darkness of the world.
Maxime was the captain of the Baron’s retinue.
An enormous and cleverly stupid man, he’d fought in the Holy Wars and made the twin passions of blood and lust the aim of his entire life.
He kept his head and beard shaved like a mercenary and stood a head taller than any man in the room.
I had immediately recognized the look upon his face the first time he’d visited the Blue Moon.
He’d worked himself up into a red-faced fervor with brutal tales of war and then shoved into a shaking girl until she buckled under his violence.
The other girls all feared him, but I, who had learned to fear other things, saw opportunity.
“Salomé, stop looking at me and take my boots off,” Maxime barked and sat in a chair by the fire.
I shot him a look, but without a word lowered gracefully to my knees to remove the mud-caked shoes.
I abhorred him. I detested him. But there was relief with him.
These evenings with Maxime were the only time in my life where I didn’t need to be quite so afraid of that darkness inside me striking out.
Where I did not have to work so hard to keep my ugliness contained.
I pulled off the second boot, my fingers deep into the icy mud.
I set the shoes by the fire to dry and stood.
“A drink,” Maxime said.
I bit my lips and then turned for the casks.
Honestly, this game was one of the easiest to play—to take Maxime’s money and spread my legs.
The first time I put my hands on his meaty shoulders, I felt the edge of violence all around him—a great sea of blood whose tides swept over his body.
I handed him the beer, and he took a drink and then spewed it all over me and the floor.
“You stupid cunt, you got mud on the mug.”
“My mistake,” I said coldly and upended the mug into his lap.
He jumped out of his chair, hand closing over my neck. As soon as he touched me, I felt the wave of that red sea and I went numb.
“Every night I come here looking for hospitality and what do I get?” he sneered, his face darkening.
He kept his meaty hand firm without pressing too hard. I struggled under his grip.
“A headache,” he answered. “Now pick up the mug and get me a new one.”
I lifted my chin over the web of his hand on my throat. “Make me.”
Delight flooded his face, lighting his eyes with an unearthly gleam. Taking my arm in his hand, he hauled my body up the stairs like one would drag a doll.
Would he kill me? I did not ask myself such things. I knew he could and that was enough. But for these nights, his violence was only a farce of the real thing. Any discomfort was soothed away by the fact that he paid well.
Of course, that night he refused to pay.
At first, I thought it was still part of the game, and I was tired of playing. I sighed and pushed back my loosened hair, still sweaty and tousled. “I’m not your wife, Maxime.”
“Of course not. I would never marry a woman as treacherous at you.” He smirked. His face was still red from my exertions.
“We are agreed, so pay me.”
He strapped on his belt, ignoring me as if I were a spirit screaming in the corner.
Maybe I had become one. A wild stab of fear cut through me, and I lifted my arm and looked at myself, suddenly uncertain whether I could ever know if I was awake or asleep or dead or alive or sane or mad.
I had thought I could live forever in this stupor, but maybe all the spirits lingering here had once been women like me, women who simply faded day by day until they disappeared.
Then, all the years of crushing silence and averting my gaze and suffocating my fears came pouring out of me, as if my body could no longer cage it within the confines of ribs and skin.
“Pay me!” I yelled, stomping on the floor. I’d shake the whole brothel if I had to. I was not a ghost. Not yet. “I don’t do this for free, Maxime.”
“You’re exhausting me,” he snarled.
“I know. Three times.”
I was breathing hard from my fury, but I did nothing to check my rage. Not even when Maxime turned, still and silent, staring at me as if he had never seen me before. This was not part of our game. He had fucked me into submission—so why was I yelling?
Josef came in then, wringing his hands, the flash of a few of the girls whispering behind him in the hall. Dacia wasn’t one of them. “Is Salomé causing trouble?” he asked Maxime.
“He won’t pay me,” I snapped.
“She’s lying. Trying to get me coming and going,” Maxime said to Josef, with that terrible tone of one man confiding in another as if they were the only two people in the room.
“He is lying!” I was in a thin tunic, and I pulled it up, exposing my naked body, still flushed from the work he hadn’t paid me for. “Search me. Where did the money go? Search the room.” I bored my gaze into Josef, certain he would care if money was on the line. “He didn’t pay.”
Josef looked out into the hall, as if expecting someone else to come in and handle me.
“You should select them better,” Maxime said to Josef. “This one is all wood up there.”
Wood, hah. “If he ever wants to put that little fiddle into me again, he’d better pay me now.”
Maxime was bred for war, lost in those backwoods without regular killing.
All the other women who shied away the moment he crossed the threshold knew they were prey.
And I, who had spent my life as something else, did not have the sense to see it.
But I was so angry. I felt my anger in my fingertips and between my teeth, like it would protect me if only I fed it more, nurtured it more.
I was not afraid, not even when he lifted his hand, threatening me with his ham of a fist.
No. Not afraid. I was reckless. I met his gaze and snarled. “Pay. Me.”
He swung. I blindly reached for his shoulder, thinking only to put distance between me and his brutality. But when I reached, something I had never felt before slipped in my mind and I touched that other surface, that uncanny red sea. It leapt to meet my fingers with a howl.
Maxime gave a short cry and pulled back.
Everything fell silent. So silent.
I pulled my hand to my stomach, barely daring to breathe.
Blood dripped onto the floor, wet and thick.
Standing there, I felt small and strange again, desperately wishing that the last second had not happened. That it had never become this. It had only been a split second. I had done nothing.
But I had done something.
The blood kept beading on his skin and streaming onto the floor. And then his eyes rolled into the back of his head, and he fell like a tree onto the floor with a great thud. The girls in the hallway pulled back. Josef went white.
Witch, the shadows of everyone at the corners of my eyes whispered.
And just like that, my curse was revealed in the dull firelight.
I wanted to protest, but there was nothing I could say.
I stood there, clutching my trembling hand to my thin shift, and no defense came to mind.
I stared at the floor and the viscous puddle still forming, crawling over the floorboards.
From underneath the shadows of the bed a tiny creature crawled.
It looked like a regular mouse, except for the claws and the set of tiny horns, and it began lapping up the edge of the wave of blood.
As I stood there, stupid and silent in shock, everything went dark.
MY SENSES CAME BACK TO ME IN A DARKNESS AS COMPLETE AS before creation.
My head throbbed and my legs were bent and stiff.
The quiet was too close, and it smelled of rotting earth.
Josef must have stuffed me in a corner of the cellar until the priest could arrive.
I had to escape. They would drag me off to my pyre as they once had Valerie. I forced my eyes open.
The darkness stayed so profound, so solid, I thought I still dreamed.
I blinked to rouse myself out of my sleep, but it didn’t help.
I tried to move, but my hands and feet and knees all bumped against rough wood.
I didn’t have much room, but I managed to slam my fists against the door, again and again, until my wrists felt close to snapping.
Then thumped my knees against it and cried out, hoping Dacia or one of the other girls would hear.
Maybe this was only a nightmare. Wake up.
Eventually, it dawned on me. I was beating upward.
The door over me. My back against the wall. My heart began to race.
I knew already where I was—I knew—but I could not accept it.
Of all the endings, I had not imagined this one.
I racked my mind, trying to recall a cellar in the village that would feel like this.
My fingers, hot and pulsing with the throbbing in my head, touched the wood and pushed.
A trickle of sifted earth fell upon my brow.
They had buried me alive.
Every moment of suffocation in the last five years rose up inside me as sheer panic.
I couldn’t be buried; I was still alive!
I screamed. Kicked. Beat my fists until they bled.
My voice rebounded on me, close and cramped.
Every slam of my fists, dulled by the profound weight of the earth, sent a heavy shower of dirt down, choking me.
Shutting my eyes made the darkness easier to bear, and I screwed them tight and willed myself to lay still. The silence closed in again. My mind roiled, wordless and frenzied. Cold passed over my feet and a shudder of nausea rolled through my body.
Even in my grave I couldn’t find peace! I couldn’t see them, but I knew from the feel that spirits were still there, curled at the bottom of the coffin.
One itched at my skull, as if it were eager to watch me become one of them.
I screamed and kicked again, but it got me nothing but another mouthful of dirt. Exhaustion washed over me.
One thought rose, sharp and striking.
Not like this.
I wanted to die on my own terms. I wanted the last look of the world to be of my own choosing, not Maxime’s pooling blood or the pitch black of my own coffin.
I wanted to own my body, my life, and my death.
I had to escape or die trying. Pulling my knees up until they hit the coffin lid, I pushed. The wood strained and creaked.
With each press of my legs, the wood heaved and sagged back into place. Pausing, I wiped the dirt off my face and pulled the edge of my shift over my mouth to make it easier to breathe. I kicked again. And again. The wood groaned but refused to break.
Help me, I begged the spirits, the watchers, my tormenters, though they were always silent.
Never my friends. Desperately, I dug deep in my body, scraping its corners with my prayers.
My power seemed to be a thing that happened to me, and not something I could control, but if there was ever a time to call upon it …
The wood creaked. Sweat dropped down my temples. I gave one great shove, a choked cry in my throat. And finally, finally, the wooden planks cracked. A heap of soil, damp and heavy, fell onto my chest.
If I didn’t sit up, I’d be crushed. I needed to clear a way through.
Wrapping my fingers around the splintered edge of the coffin, I yanked.
The seam opened wide. The dense, damp earth poured over me.
I pulled myself up as far as I could and dropped all my weight down to tear apart the wood.
The earth wrapped itself around me again, and I sputtered and coughed.
The panic flashed like lightning through the darkness of my body.
For a moment, it was too much. Too confining.
There was no way I could do this. And yet I screamed through my teeth and tore at the wood like something feral, until the smell of blood mixed in with the damp earth.
A hole cracked open. I dug upward, ignoring the scrape of the rough edges of the wood.
Half burrowing and half kicking, I swam through soil so thick and dark it threatened to swallow me. Still, I reached. At every point it felt like my death would be final. But at last, my hand broke to the wondrous cold bite of winter.
The crown of my head broke next—freed from the earth like a newborn out of the tight grip of the womb. I gasped a deep breath of air and choked on my caul of dirt. I was alive! My strength surged. I found the edge of the broken coffin lid and stood.
Coughing and sputtering, I wiggled out to my chest. My waist. The spirits stayed clustered at the edges of the grave, a sullen begrudging that I had not stayed with them.
I was so relieved to see their gruesome forms under the rising moonlight, I could have kissed their cold mouths.
Before this, I had not known there was a dark so profound it swallowed even souls.
My choking coughs echoed in the quiet night, puffs of silver breath and dirt-laced spittle obscuring the snow.
At my hips, I could reach the grave’s edge and solid ground.
I pulled onto my hands and knees and rolled, finally, gasping, onto my back on the mud-tracked snow.
Above me, the stars burned bright. In the distance, the village stood still and cold.
I was alive. And for the first time, it felt glorious.
No wonder the nuns went on and on about being reborn.
Using the spare wooden cross they’d placed at my grave; I managed to rise.
Grave soil was packed tight under my fingernails and covered my shift, my bare feet, my hair.
I sniffed, dirt still in my nose, the air raw and clear over the sleeping village.
The fires burnt low in their huts and homes.
The Blue Moon would be bright and warm, filled with the soldiers and farmers and merchants and priests.
I exhaled and turned my back on the village.