Chapter 21
XXI.
A Bad Time
The forest had suddenly come alive. Creatures that I couldn’t see peered from the branches above me, their eyes glowing and strange and unlike any animal I’d ever seen.
Dark pockets loomed between the trees, darker than the abyss outside Perchta’s hut.
But I ran. I ran, stumbling through the twisted trees, mindless of the pain.
Every root that leapt out, every branch that sliced at me, every rock I nearly stumbled into—I felt none of it and kept going.
Schneid stayed out in front of me, and I focused only on the flicker of his light.
Whether it was my own altered state of fear, or the lingering effects of the draught, or the wounds on my legs, I struggled to hold the world together as one.
My path kept splitting, the trees cracking into two, the leaves rushing upward as if blown from the ground and high above me.
Lightning branched throughout the sky, making it seem to be both day and night to my fractured mind.
In the brief flash, I’d see all manner of beings gazing hungrily at me.
With every push of my bare feet in the dirt, it felt like I was doing as much work to stay down as I was to move forward.
The wind tore through the trees, and with it, the smell of coming rain, and finally I could go no farther.
Schneid looked back, mewing at me to follow. But I couldn’t. My legs were on fire. I felt like I might be sick. Spotting a fallen branch in a flash of lightning, I sank down, a puppet with cut strings.
I couldn’t wrap my head around what had happened.
I ran because of instinct, but now I sat in the middle of the dark forest, with summer storms high and my way lost, and I could only think of Renaud.
The look in his eyes. Him standing over me.
Was it possible I’d been having a nightmare?
But then why did he take me to the altar?
What was he doing with my body? The questions were unbearable.
Schneid leapt up to the branch and sat beside me, restless, as if waiting for me to be ready to keep moving.
As I sat there, completely absorbed by my whirling thoughts and the effort to catch my breath, a strange lifting sensation pulled at me. I reached for the ground to steady myself and found, suddenly, that I couldn’t feel the ground.
A bolt of lightning flashed white hot. The earth moved below me.
The branch I sat on was lifting in the dark.
Screaming, I clutched the rough bark to keep from tipping off.
I was too far up, rising still. I tried to send my body back down, but I had lost contact with the earth, and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t connect my mind back to the forest floor.
Schneid still sat beside me, watching me with a distasteful stare as his tail hung off the branch, curling and uncurling, seemingly unaffected by anything that was happening.
I couldn’t tell if I was suffering a delusion or if I had truly lost my mind.
The branch kept moving as if possessed. I wrapped my arms and legs around it, clinging for dear life.
Curse this forest. Perchta had told me that magic did not leap out from thin air, that when my power arced out from me, it was from not holding my own borders, from bleeding wounds I should have bandaged up.
But I was so emotional and wrung out, just trying to hang on, that I could not even begin to feel the shape of myself, let alone regain control.
It was easier to simply blame the forest, as if it were enacting some kind of vengeance.
The branch picked up speed and began to turn. I screamed and held as tight as I could, eyes screwed shut. Thunder rumbled through the forest. Passing branches lashed at me, cutting into my skin.
Without Death, without his protection, it felt as if the forest and all it contained was determined to kill me. The more I screamed, the faster the wind tore, whipping me down the mountainside. I was in a nightmare that would not end.
I don’t know what I hit—but I must eventually have hit something and toppled from the branch. All I heard was the sound of my own screaming. And then nothing.
I WOKE TO WARM RAIN ON MY FACE.
I was on the old Roman road that traveled between Riquewihr and the next closest village, near to an old statue of Saint Hildegard, with her nose knocked off and hands turned upward to the sky.
I’d fallen into the meadow at her wayside, naked and covered in scratches like I’d been fighting the trees.
The spirit of a small child clung to the stone legs as if eternally begging to be picked up.
I’d forgotten what it was to live with these tragic remnants of life and longing and love everywhere I turned.
If Valerie had not fished me out of the river where my father had flung me, I would have been the same as this child.
A lost infant, eternally in the cold and damp.
It made me so intensely sad I wanted to lie back down in the dirt.
I ducked my head to avoid seeing the spirit. But the statue seemed to taunt me in her holiness, reminding me of everything, missing nose and all, and I realized how much time I had spent with my head bowed low to avoid the sight of suffering.
Gingerly, I picked myself up.
Vivid images flashed behind my thoughts—of all that I’d dreamed or done—and I flinched, more uncertain than ever as to what, exactly, had happened.
The wounds on the back of my thighs burned.
I clutched my arms over my breasts and picked my way through the field up to the road.
It was quiet and grassy, disappearing quickly into the thick forest and folded mountains.
At the edge, I stopped and looked both ways.
Outside the chateau, there were no real choices for me. I couldn’t go back to the village where I had already died. I couldn’t go back to Death, whom I’d fled. I couldn’t go on to the next town, the next drudgery, the next thing that would attempt to kill me.
But there was Perchta’s hut, and the relief of her help.
I heard voices drifting toward me from the direction of Riquewihr. This didn’t surprise me, but I scampered off the road, into the wet brush, and crouched down, folding my naked body tight like a rabbit in the grass and clutching my knees as I waited for the group to pass.
They emerged from the bower of deep green trees, women’s voices, and as they came closer, I saw they wore black cloaks edged with mud from the road.
Only prostitutes wore black cloaks. My heart leapt; before I even saw her, I heard her dear voice.
I did not stop to consider what I should have done. I’d been buried as a witch. They’d seen my grave. I’d seriously hurt or even killed one of their soldiers. But instead of hiding, I ran from the forest, naked, as if none of that had ever occurred. Because it was her.
“Dacia!” I cried.
At my appearance, the group gasped and huddled together. A soldier in red livery on horseback sprang to block me. But a figure pushed her way to the front of the group and started running toward me. “Salomé?” Dacia cried.
We fell into each other’s arms as if not a moment had gone by.
I buried my face in her curls, smelling her skin, the rain and lilies and musk that hadn’t changed even a bit, her warm hug holding me upright.
I was so overcome that I simply burst into tears.
In her arms, it felt as if I suddenly found myself utterly human in a way I had not known to miss, surrounded these last months by so much magic.
I had imagined I’d been fully myself with Death, but in her arms I realized how careful and restrained I had been all these months.
It felt like the first time I’d seen her all over again, sailing out of the cluster of people at Josef’s—a beacon of light, of love, of safety.
I loved her in this moment. I loved her in every moment. I’d love her forever.
But as it always did with me and Dacia, reality made itself known, and I became aware that the rest of the girls kept their distance, terror written across their faces. I pulled away.
I supposed I was terrifying—naked, bruised, and my wet hair wild and full of leaves and sticks.
I did not know what had happened to Maxime or what stories had been told about my disappearance.
I needed to explain it in some way, and I immediately began blabbering.
Dacia draped her cloak softly over my shoulders as I told her a story that barely made sense, even to me.
I did not tell the truth—how could I? I told a lie about Josef selling me, being in another village, and then accosted by bandits on the road.
As I spoke, I became aware of the girls passing worried looks to one another.
They thought me mad or possessed. No one believed me.
But Dacia, my sweetest friend, betrayed no such suspicion.
Her face was guileless and joyful, and she kept embracing me and picking litter out of my hair, murmuring sounds of shock as I explained.
“Josef said you were dead,” Christine finally said. “We saw your grave.”
“Josef sold me,” I lied again. I wondered if Josef had hidden that I’d escaped from said grave.
“You haven’t been arrested for Maxime’s death?” Odette asked.
I had not known he’d died, and it hit my stomach harder than I expected—I did not know who I should mourn more, me or him.
For all my latent hatred of him, I had not wanted him to die.
In a strange way, he’d been a solace. The first person with whom I had not had to fear myself—at least, not until the end.
“No,” I said. It was all I could say. “I … am on my way back to Comar,” I added, rather weakly.
“We will take you there. Or Louis will.” Dacia gestured to the man on horseback. “The Baron was so kind to give us a man for protection.”
“We are not going to Comar,” Christine corrected. “Louis must escort us to the altar and then home.”
“The altar?” I asked.