Chapter 7
seven
The next coach departs Rixton in less than a week, and already, I have worried my palms raw, flesh pink and peeling.
I cannot go to Idlewild, where I am sure to be strapped to a chair, my brain pricked and prodded until I am empty.
Men blessed of Ithrandril, my father said.
And what are men blessed by gods other than tools of destruction?
I tell myself Father will change his mind, that I will awake to find him waiting outside my door, tea in hand and an apology written on his face.
But the truth is, I have not seen my father since Bram appeared, scared of his own shadows and smelling of acrid citrus.
I have not met with anyone, and I think it is better this way.
So, I stand in front of my window, the edges of my body reflecting in the dim light of morning.
My face is drawn and tired, skin creased around my eyes like damp paper, lips bitten and dry.
The sky outside is a blanket of gray, the trees like candlelight against its darkening visage.
A murmuration of starlings kicks up from the fields beyond the silver river, reminding me of the way Bram wore the shadows, as if they were his very skin.
Faces beneath a hood. A deal to be made.
Two birds with one stone. Not one soul brought back, but two.
Yet death is not a power to be trifled with. Erybrus is a hungry god. I have seen death take too many, whisper across a soul and turn it into nothing more than a casing of flesh and coagulated blood. Young women left frozen along the riverbank.
Making a deal with a devil for one soul is a foolish mistake. But two souls? That would make me a thief.
Beyond the garden wall and down past the hill, the River Thine rushes beneath the bridge and through the village like a tongue of molten glass. I trace it until it disappears between the trees beyond the graveyard.
On the day of the Rending, when the world was torn in half between Ithrandril and Erybrus, it was said that rivers were the only openings back to the two gods.
That they left some of their magic in the waters, which is why the waves are always at war between the darkness and the light.
If Bram is right and his soul is held somewhere in the rowan wood, then there is some truth to the teaching.
I cross to the small table beside my bed and peel open the desk drawer. The bell lolls on its dome.
I should bring it back.
Grind it beneath my boot and send the pieces back to the river.
It can curse the next unfortunate soul who finds it, make them see visions of the dead.
For a moment, I wonder at how its original owner—a Reaper—lost it.
But does it matter? With my white hair and blackened blood, I am not too far from Erybrus myself.
I bite down on my bottom lip until a coppery taste floods my mouth, reminding me of the scent of the room when Bram appeared or the tang in the air that sweeps up from the wood when the monsters—or the souls, as I now have come to know—show themselves.
There are monsters in the wood. Maybe not the things I have seen. But Erybrus harbors many a monster, hellhounds, Reapers.
I trail a finger along the cool metal.
Perhaps, this bell is the making of another.
Before I can think, I gather it into my fist, grab my coat from its hook, and set my hand against the door.
I will not live in this in-between place.
This wishing and hoping for a life that was never meant to be mine, stolen from me while Mother took her last, ragged breath.
Closing my eyes, I rest my head on the rough-hewn wood.
I am more than this endless ache of something I will never have again. Whatever I am.
Father may wish to send me away. But if I go, if I let the healers in Idlewild attend me, will he love me again as he once did?
Perhaps that is the wish of a child.
I throw the door open and rush down the stairs. The kitchen is empty and cold. No fire in the hearth, no kettle on the stove. There is no warmth in this house. It is merely a cage of old bones.
My palm falls open, revealing the bell, and I watch the delicate brass catch the thin light.
“I’m so sorry, Mother,” I whisper, voice wet. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you. But now I’ve—I’ve—” My throat clogs, and it takes every bit of strength I have to stay on my feet, spine straight. “I have to save myself.”
Without another look back to the kitchen, I wrench open the small door and spill out into the frosty morning, the taste of copper and lemons on my tongue.
The wind is a cold bite at my back, a shriveled palm pulling at the folds of my cloak.
A shiver runs through me while my feet tramp down the long expanse of frosted grass, the lilt of snow on the air.
Down in the valley, the river runs like a mad beast, spitting up between chunks of hardened ice, red leaves gathered and stuck in the crevices between solid and liquid.
My stomach swills, boots squelching in the curdled muck, when I step down to the riverbank and pull the bell from my pocket, then hold it up against the dim sun.
A Reaper’s bell. Bram’s voice niggles at the back of my mind.
I almost laugh at the thought. A halting, messy sort of noise spilling from the back of my throat like sandpaper. I swallow, mouth the words over and over.
A Reaper. Death.
The very things hounding all the girls of Rixton.
It sinks into my bones and flesh, that word, and sees me for all I am.
Mother used to speak of death and the fear she carried finally catching her.
I often wondered if she would ever find a way to keep herself from dying.
She would stroke my hair by firelight, whispering things in my ear.
Chase Death, Addie, my darling. That way, he will never catch you.
Fine. Come and find me. Show your face. Tell me if it’s mine.
But it’s a fool’s errand to tell Death how and when to act.
And I am no fool. I am merely a broken-pieces woman who feels her own doom approaching with the grinding wheels of a rickety coach.
And though they are one and the same, the Reapers and Death, why would they own something as trivial as shards of brass washed up on the banks of the River Thine?
And I am not Death, am no minion of Ithrandril or his greedy brother.
I am just a woman.
My knuckles shift white when I tighten my grasp on the bell, every thought now bent on destroying it. Saying goodbye. If I am to be sent away to Idlewild, there is one thing I know for sure. The healers there can poke and prod me all they like, but they will not heal me like my father expects.
I must heal myself.
“Adelaide?”
I drop my hand and spin on my heel. Mud sprays my hem. Clara stands behind me, brown hair wisping about her face, a basket hung from the crook of her elbow. Her skin is pale, cheeks bitten with the cold, and her eyes look as though she hasn’t slept in days.
I swallow, my body hot with nerves, and nestle the bell deep into my pocket, hoping Clara didn’t see it. Won’t be able to tell a story about how she found the vicar’s daughter down on the banks of the River Thine, with a crazed look on her face and a Reaper’s bell clenched in her hand.
Clara smiles. A reanimated thing pulled from some distant form of life. I do not smile back.
“What are you doing out here?” she asks. “We aren’t safe anymore.”
Her eyes catch on the thin wool of my dress, the tangle of my white hair, the violet stains clutching high on my cheekbones, and I flinch. I find I cannot look at her while I answer, so instead, I throw my gaze to the village at her back.
“I could be saying the same to you. What business is it of yours what I do with my time?”
The sting of my words is a snapped band in the air. We say nothing, the rush of the water beyond the only thing making a sound. That and the ravens nesting in the creaking trees.
When I look at Clara, her eyes are clogged with tears, turning the whites bloodshot, rimmed in red. My stomach swims, tying itself into a knot that settles low and clings to me like a sickness.
“Clara, I’m—”
“No.” Clara holds up a hand. “No, you’re right. It is no business of mine. I’ll leave you to whatever it was you were doing.”
She goes to turn, the edges of her skirt making curls in the icy mud. A crack echoes from the forest, and I whip toward the line of trees on the far bank.
The monsters. No. The souls.
All the waiting dead things.
“Adelaide?”
I blink and turn back to Clara, her eyes sparking with curiosity. She’s hardly a breath away from me now, so close I smell her father’s bakery wafting from the folds of her rust-colored coat. Marble rye bread and apple scones.
“Adelaide, you look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”
The irony of her words curdles a bitter laugh at the base of my tongue. “What do you know of ghosts, Clara?”
Her brow crinkles, lips forming a crescent moon over her chin. “Adelaide, don’t.”
It is not what I was expecting her to say, and it leaves me standing there, breathless, any witty comebacks left dry and shriveled.
Clara’s eyes glaze with tears, her gaze darting from me to the river and back again.
“Don’t pretend as if I know nothing. As if I haven’t watched you waste away, get all tucked up inside yourself.
You were my best friend, Adelaide, and now…
now it’s like I don’t even recognize you. You’ve turned so sharp.”
I don’t reply. What is there to say when every word she speaks is a truth so hard it lands like a stone in my gut?
“This isn’t you,” she says. “The girl I saw hardened in the churchyard, the girl right now, words like needles…that’s not you.
” She steps closer, and there is pain in the lines between her brows, eddying there like a storm at sea.
“What happened to you, Adelaide? After your mother died, I was here. I have always been right here.”