Bitterbloom

Chapter 1

one

Nine days before I enter the rowan wood, I wear fabric in shades of bruised slate, the woolen swathes reeking of death and my mother’s perfume.

Notes of citrus and asphodel assail my senses while the villagers gather around the grave site, each handful of earth tossed down a solemn prayer to the gods.

Lilith Corley lies in satin beneath the oaken lid of her casket, a face so pale she is like the first shock of winter.

Across the visage of freshly dug earth, her parents hold each other, their eyes dry.

Lilith’s death is only the latest in the long line our village has witnessed over many years, and there simply aren’t enough tears to go around anymore.

Three days past, from my bedchamber window, I watched when they dragged her from the banks of the river, limp and wilting…

A chill breeze brushes up from the River Thine down in the valley, catching Father’s black robes and throwing them about his towering frame like wisps of shadow. He holds fraying Blessed Scriptures in one hand, reciting the final rites. A church bell tolls—a lone, somber note.

In Rixton, villagers claim bells are for protection, rung to keep evil at bay, but I sometimes think it is the opposite. They welcome the darkness and death—open doors for it to slip in, curl its talons around our necks, and choke us.

The cold bites at my pallid cheeks, the color there long-since faded. Silver-white curls tumble down my back, and twists of lace cover the blackened bruises on my wrists. No need for the villagers to see what they already believe. That I am cursed. Touched by the Devil, by Erybrus himself.

They whisper he came to me one night, licked a silver-slitted tongue across my bones, and made me pale and sickly, like a corpse left to rot. The villagers don’t know the truth of it, though.

The way the pain creaks along my bones and chest. The way I press my finger against Mother’s old sewing needles and bleed black. They know nothing of the monsters that haunt my waking hours.

These visions are my most hidden, horrible secret.

I have kept them from everyone I know: Father, even the woman I used to call my most beloved friend, Clara.

And they despise me for it, this illness that quickens my veins.

Call it a curse. It is easier to blame the gods when the minds of men cannot make sense of the truth.

Or would rather turn a blind and hateful eye to the things they do not understand.

While the villagers raise their voices in a prayer of mourning, my pulse beats wildly in my throat, and I hurry a finger to the skin, if only to feel the beating.

A-live, a-live, a-live.

The strange wrongness to my heartbeat appeared in the months after my mother’s death, with the blush of girlhood still on my cheeks.

On a spring morning sometime after we buried her in the old churchyard, I ran along the riverbanks, picking forget-me-nots and daisies to twist into a knot for my mother’s headstone.

To my left, Clara stood ankle-deep in mud, weeds in her hair, trying her best to make me laugh.

But it did not work.

My little legs froze.

To my right, the rowan wood reached toward the heavens, casting darkness to the grass at my booted feet. I heard something that day—the brittle ringing of a bell.

My chest squeezed so tightly I thought I would die. Stars of brilliant white pain shot through my arms and legs, and my stomach clenched when I fell to my knees.

Clara called my name. Once, twice…My heart slipped, tugged like a fish on a string. My vision clouded with black, and I was lost to the world.

I rose the next morning, tied to a chair by my father’s hand. The ropes that held me there left my skin broken, shadowed blood like ink drops in water. The only explanation my father ever provided was that I was simply cursed by the gods.

Now, staring across the graveyard to where the trees bite away the landscape, the same pain I experienced that day by the river blossoms at the root of my skull. It takes my breath away, and I turn my gaze to Lilith’s burial plot. Blood pounds in my ears, hot with fear.

Lilith was a summer child, Mother always said.

My opposite, with her dark hair and a smile that brightened any room she walked into.

My heart is simply another thing that makes us different.

It might not work the way the gods designed, but at least it pumps.

At least it harbors the shadowed blood in my veins.

Lilith’s heart is as still as stone now.

I still remember the body found one peaceful morning before Mother died: pale lips crusted in flaxen vomit, limbs stiff as tree trunks, and violet stains ringing an open mouth, as though the woman had been freshly kissed.

My throat dries when I picture Lilith in a similar state, buried beneath my feet.

Even Mother’s death, with her twisted tongue and eyes as wholly black as midnight, was wrong. Unnatural.

And I wonder, sometimes, if she was cursed too.

Finally, the last handful of earth is tossed onto the mound, and the villagers make their way back up the hill toward the church. Their black skirts and coattails follow them like so many raven feathers. They will eat now—Lilith’s corpse still half-warm while they feast above her bones.

I wait until the churchyard is empty. Father foregoes the funeral feast and disappears into a black carriage, a banner embroidered with a silver rose hanging from the driver’s box.

Death does not wait long in Rixton. It is a hungry, vicious thing, and there is another deathbed to attend to.

Though, for once, it is not a woman with poison stained on her lips.

Beyond the village, past the wheat fields and meadows of Avery Manor, stands Blackbourne Castle. When the brother-gods still walked the earth, before the Rending, the structure was freshly birthed. Now, it rots and its lineage of men along with it.

For weeks, rumors have circled of the Lord Black’s condition.

Some in Rixton say he is simply too old for this world.

Others speak of evil rife in his castle, the corrupt worship of Erybrus.

His son, Ransom, will not say what it is his father is dying of.

He hardly comes into the village at all.

But my father has been visiting the castle every day for the last week.

Death is an unforgiving master. He comes for us all in the end.

I crouch in the dirt, running gritty crumbles of it between my fingers. This is the third Sunday in a row we have buried bodies in the churchyard. They are appearing on the riverbank faster than they used to. All of them women. All from Rixton, skin wan and lips bruised purple.

Villagers whisper to themselves of a curse enacted during the Rending—when the god Ithrandril, father of light and life, separated and cast his brother, Erybrus, father of lies and deceit, into shadow. But I do not think these deaths are the work of our brother-gods.

Mother used to tell me there were monsters in the rowan wood. I have seen them. Prowling at the edges of the graveyard, wisps of smoke that smell of rot. Who else could be killing the girls of Rixton? Better monsters than an ill woman with blood on her hands.

I wipe my palm along the wool of my skirt and turn on my heel, casting my gaze to the surrounding landscape.

This churchyard I know like my own bedchamber.

The faded grass my quilt, the stones my own grotesque playthings.

One headstone stands out from the rest, a mere slab, the carved words already licked with lichen.

Mother’s.

She was so afraid of death. I still hear her cries sometimes.

Please don’t let him take me, Addie. Please don’t let me die.

My knees go weak, as if someone has sliced the thin skin behind them.

Nausea widens in my gut, presses up my throat.

A thousand curses spring to my tongue, but I swallow them as the sickness sinks into every inch of me.

Sweat blooms on my skin, and the world goes spinning. I reach out for the nearest thing.

Another grave. Another tangle of bones and old cloth beneath me.

I do not want to see Mother’s, not today.

So instead, I focus my swirling vision on the stone in front of me.

Bram Avery, Aged 24. I swill the name in my mouth.

It tastes familiar. Another strange death.

Alive one day, gone the next. But before I can sink my teeth into it, there are footsteps swishing in the wet earth behind me. I do not look up.

“Adelaide?”

The voice tethers me to some semblance of reality, pulling me from my haze of sickness. I turn, finding Clara limned in the mist of the graveyard, her calfskin boots shushing in mud. Fear hooks in the corners of her eyes.

This is how all the villagers look at me. Like I am an old heirloom high atop a shelf, covered in dust and ready to fall. Her throat bobs, golden skin flushed with cold.

“Shouldn’t you be inside with the rest of them?” I try to sound strong and sure of myself, but the result is something hoarse and desperate.

Clara wilts. “I saw you out here all alone and thought—”

“I don’t need your pity.” My grip tightens on the headstone. “Whatever you have come here to preach, I have already heard it a thousand times.”

Clara hesitates, then reaches for something in the folds of her russet cloak. “I’m sorry,” she says and holds out a half-drunk wine bottle, sloshing red liquid. “A peace offering.”

I stare at the bottle, my tongue suddenly dry.

How long has it been since I drank of communion wine?

Father forbade me a long time ago, said my wickedness was too thick in my throat for a sip of forgiveness from Ithrandril.

But I take it from Clara’s outstretched hand and press my lips to the verdant glass.

The wine tastes like sin. Rotten berries and sweet mint from the hedges hemming the lanes through Rixton.