Chapter 23
twenty-three
Mother cuts a sharp figure against the soft glow of the chamber. Her face pinches, and though she is a small thing, her anger swarms around us like oil. Bram rolls off the bed, hastening for his buttons and the slack buckle of his belt.
“I—gods below and above,” he sputters, cheeks more alive and burning than I have ever seen them. Bram brushes fingers through his hair.
“Get out.” Mother’s voice is as sharp as cut steel. “Now.”
Bram takes a step forward, mouth open, gathering courage. “Mistress Thorn, if I could just—”
“I don’t give a damn about what you could or could not do, Mr. Avery. I said get out.” She kicks the door open wider, and Rascal whines. “And take that mangy creature with you.”
I open my mouth to protest, collect myself just enough to ask her to stop, but when I sit up higher on the bed, my voice squeaks. “Mother, please—”
“I don’t enjoy being ignored,” she snaps. The edge in her voice frightens me more than the darkness seeping into the chamber. “Take that dog, Mr. Avery, and get out of my daughter’s room.”
Bram’s eyes dart to me, begging me to open my mouth, to tell her off, to beg for him to stay. But I can’t come up with anything. My body tenses like a freshly strung bow.
“I’ll see you at the party, Bram.”
There is betrayal in his face when he hurries across the room and past Mother, Rascal behind him.
My stomach folds, and once more, I am just a girl wilting in the presence of someone who thinks they know what is best for me.
But when do I get to make that decision?
When is it time for my voice to be loudest?
Tension swims thick as Bram leaves the room. My mother’s eyes trail him and then back, hard on me. I push myself up more, but her gaze is piercing.
“Do you hate him?” I ask.
She blinks. “Don’t be ridiculous, Morning Glory. You can’t hate someone you don’t know.”
Saliva sticks hot in my throat. “But you do know him. You said—”
“I know him merely as the young man who died back home, nothing more.”
Back home.
I scramble forward in the bed, sheets scratching my skin. “Mother, I was thinking, once we’ve attended this party and all, we could…” The words stop halfway up my throat. I swallow, force them past my teeth. “We could go home. Back to Father and the vicarage and Rixton.”
Her face lights up like candle-glow, only to be blown out by a shadow leaking from her steely irises. “Why would we do that?”
I wait, listening for more, hoping her lips will break out in a laugh and she will reassure me she is only teasing. That, of course, we can go home. But she doesn’t. Her face only twists into shapes I do not recognize. I do not answer her, too stunned for words.
Mother strides deeper into the room and throws a dress on the bed. “Istelle will be up shortly to help you dress.” She turns to leave but sets her eyes on me. “Be careful, Adelaide. You’ll be deciding where your allegiances lie before the end.”
The door slams, and I am left with my skin burning. Both from the pain of Mother’s words and from where Bram traced me with his lips. I try to blink away the thought of her not coming home, but it clings to me like houndstooth weed, sinking into my flesh.
She will come home. I will make sure of it. If not, what will there be to go home to? And what will remain here, tethering her to this place in between life and true death?
I push the edging dread away and reach for the dress, hold it out in front of me.
It glistens blue, like ice beneath the candlelight.
Beads like shards of glass trickle down the bodice, and the sleeves cut away to show off my shoulders.
Istelle comes to lace me into it, and I shiver beneath her touch.
Everything is so desperately cold here. Like an unlit hearth in winter, a hollowness where warmth should be.
The invitation lies crumpled on the bed, where it was lost between Bram and I.
Istelle ties a mask tight around the crown of my head and turns me back to the mirror.
Breath sticks in my throat. The upper half of my face is swathed in silver, spindles of ice shooting from delicate white lace. A crown of winter.
Istelle sniffs. “The Lady picked it out herself.”
My stomach boils at that. Lady.
My mother does not belong here. She needs to be at home.
With me and Father. This stupid mask and dress and party is a waste of bloody time.
But what do I know? The day before yesterday, I let Ransom almost have me in the confessional box, and mere moments ago, I found myself tangled up in Bram. Nothing makes any sense.
I close my eyes, fist my hands. One deep breath after another. I will do as Mother wants, attend this silly party of hers, and then we will all go home—even if I must force her. The bell will make her whole again.
We just have to find Ransom first. “Damn it.”
Istelle raises a brow. “What was that?”
“Nothing.” I shuffle toward my own homely dress and search its pockets for the bell.
When my fingers brush against the metal, Istelle’s eyes pierce the back of my neck. I freeze. My skin flares hot, heat crawling up the back of my throat. I release the bell, instead slipping my fingers in its wrappings.
When I spin, there is a saccharine smile on my face. “Just looking for a hair ribbon.” I hold it out to her, and her face pinches.
“You’re to follow me,” she grunts.
My boots skim the stones while I walk behind her through the door.
The lock snicks into place, and my heart goes hard against whatever waits below—mothers and ghost boys and things that should not exist. I wrap my fingers around the bell in my pocket and hope that, whatever awaits me below, it will not be the end of me.
There is a moment when the world freezes.
When autumn falls away into the white ether of winter and the breath fogs from your lips.
It is not a gentle slipping. It is a rugged crash to the ground.
A tangle of limbs and falling snow. This is how it feels when I enter the ballroom of Blackbourne Castle and see the dead dancing.
There are so many of them—men and women—skirts and coattails swirling in a storm of blues, golds, and purples, bits of bone showing between laced corsets and silk-lined waistcoats.
One woman wears a dress the gentle shade of shushing water, her dancing hand devoid of flesh.
Her bones dig into the shoulder of her partner, a woman with only one eye shining through her ebony mask. She catches my gaze.
I try on a smile, bob my head.
The room ghosts with cold. Ice crawls up the stones, slicks the floor.
And so, it is strange when I catch the scent of the place—all soil and the sour pinch of lemons.
It sends me reeling. Back to my mother’s skirts, back to the way her hair smelled after hours spent in the garden.
Scrubbing the ruby sap of bitterbloom off her fingertips.
My eyes burst with black, then white, and I am ten years old, standing in the rain outside the garden shed. I listen to Father’s frantic whispers, footfalls in something wet, the squelch and pop of meat and bone.
Here, in the dead castle, my lungs pump, and yet the air does not come fast enough. I reach for something—anything—to steady myself on and brush against something cold.
Cold and moving.
“Adelaide, what’s wrong? Tell me.” It is Mother’s voice, soft now at my ear.
My heart pulls in two directions, pain blooming at the center of my chest. One side wants nothing more than to turn around, sink against her softness, and cry.
Beg for answers in the shadows. But the other side is hard.
A locked chest. Terrified she might be angry at me for wanting to take her home, when she has so obviously made a place for herself here, amongst the dead.
Worried she might not be the same Esme Thorn I lost on that bed, covered in blood and vomit all those years ago.
But what is life if not the flip of a coin? A shot in the dark? So, I take mine and turn.
Mother is breathtaking. She wears a gown the color of spilled blood. It seems to drip off her very skin. In her hair, hundreds of little white flowers flutter like living things.
Bitterbloom.
I take a step away, hardly able to believe what I am seeing.
Esme Thorn, the vicar’s wife. Esme Thorn, up to her elbows in the earth or hidden behind the garden shed door, the bitter scent of lemons spilling out to greet my inquisitive nose.
Esme Thorn, like a queen in this underworld.
My throat turns sharp, and I try to smile, but all I seem to manage is a thing like weak tea.
“Are you all right?” she asks, one lithe hand coming to rest on my cheek.
My pulse quickens. No, no, I am not. I can feel the bones beneath her skin. Count them as if they are my own. They seem so brittle here, like a bird’s, and yet when I look up at her, brittle is the last word I would choose.
Here, she is something else. Transformed. A creature of red and white and gold. It is both haunting and beautiful, and I feel as though I am being tugged in by ropes on either wrist. I swallow, try on yet another smile.
“I’m fine. I just—I just want to go home.”
She curls her hand around my jaw, cups my cheek. Mother towers over me, her face so much like my own it’s like a shadow come to life.
“I’m sorry for how I responded earlier, my darling.
I understand your feeling,” she says, and hope kindles in my chest. “I understand the desire to go back home, feel the wet grass beneath your feet, the spring scent in the air.” Her eyes flash behind me to the dancing figures.
“But what if I told you there was something better?”
My breath drops to my stomach, my knees shaky. “Something better?”
Her smile glistens like glass. She takes me by the hand, leads me over to a darkened window, and draws aside the curtain. White glimmers outside. White and green and yellow alike. It takes me a moment to realize what I am seeing, but once I do, my mouth drops open.
Bitterbloom.
Hundreds of brilliant, bright white petals. They are a field, a moat, each bloom lifting a glossy head to the pale moon. My breath fogs up the glass.
“How are they growing here?”
She says nothing for a moment, as if sifting through words to try and find the right ones. “They grow where the ground tells them. Where there is a remembrance of life.”
A remembrance of life. The words stick at the back of my throat like a film. Before I can ask her to explain herself, she is whisking me away from the window, her elbow hooked through mine.
The music swells, a haunting melody of strings not quite tuned.
It grates on my ears and runs a single finger down my spine.
Mother leads me to the center of the dance floor, the scent of citrus in her wake.
She folds her fingers through mine, places a hand at my side, and begins to turn me through the melee of surrounding death.
It begins as a twist of her lips. Subtle, if not for the fact I have pictured her face every day since we laid her in the ground. Her teeth glint out—not a smile exactly, more like the face a fox makes before it pounces on prey.
Hot spikes pierce my belly, and I tear my gaze away, searching the room for Bram. But I do not see him. There are too many faces—dead ones—and none I know.
“You are afraid, Addie,” she says. “Look at me.”
I do not want to, do not want to peer upon the dead thing behind my mother’s eyes. But what choice is there? Mother’s lips have gathered into a sneer. Her skin is gray in this light, and each bone of her face is outlined against her flesh. Cracks in the skin like shadow. I swallow, throat tight.
“Should I be afraid, Mother?” I hope my voice sounds braver than I feel.
There is a shush of skirts when she spins me deeper into the crowd. My head feels light, my skin almost floating.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” she says. “Did you know that? Never thought you’d be the one to finally piece it all back together.”
My skin gooses with cold. “Piece what back together?”
“The bell, the rowan wood, the boy…”
A noise gathers at the back of my tongue. Something between a whimper and a growl. I can feel the heaviness of the brass in my pocket. “How do…”
Mother’s sneer curls upward, a half-moon slash in her graying face. “Oh, my Morning Glory. There is so much you don’t know.”
“Then tell me.” My fingers grasp her tightly.
She needs no encouragement.
Hand digging into my side, she whirls me to the opposite end of the ballroom, emptying us at the foot of a grand staircase, all crumbling stone hung with flowers.
They are everywhere, now that I notice them, the same ones she wears in her hair.
The bitterbloom. Trailing in the gardens, spilling from beneath the shed door, weeping across Bram’s grave.
Across all the graves of all the dead girls back home…Mother’s fingers come to my jaw, pull my eyes up to hers.
“He didn’t want me to have it, you know? The bell. Kept it from me all those years, even as I grew more and more sick. Told me it was an unnatural way to do things—use it to keep me alive, keep me safe. But now I have you.”
A sound like an earthquake, a roll of thunder cracking over my ribs, bleeding down to my wrist. Some vast shattering, a chasm deepening. And then I realize, it is my mother.
Or not my mother.
The woman who stands before me is hard as stone, eyes flashing like lightning in an autumn sky. Her fingers dig trenches in my skin.
My words die on my lips. “Mother, you’re hurting me.”
But she does not care; she holds faster. Stronger. A peal of danger rings out in my head, and Bram is nowhere in sight. What has she done with him? What has she done with herself?
“You must listen to me, Adelaide.” That unnatural strength pulls me tight against her chest. “Here, in this place, I live a half-life. I do not want to belong to Ithrandril or his brother. I want to remember what it was like to taste, to smell, to feel the ground alive beneath my feet. Don’t you understand?
I have fought so long and hard for this, and now it is in my grasp. I will not let you take it from me.”
I hold back tears. “Take what from you, Mother?”
“Eternal life.”