12. Vireth #2
My fingers curl unconsciously against the edge of the table.
Renard watches her steadily. “And what’s that?”
Ursula lifts her gaze toward me rather than him.
“They foretold a great change—that the world had fallen out of balance, and they would determine if the world had suffered enough yet.”
No one speaks for several moments afterward. Even Nibblebones is quieter overhead, and I’m sure she’s paused to listen, as well. Ursula exhales softly and continues.
“After that, the dreams worsened. Every night, it was more of the same—forests collapsing beneath waves of rot, rivers black with unnatural mold, bones stirring beneath the earth as if something—someone—deep below called them upward.” Her gaze flicks briefly toward the braids hiding my antlers.
“And always the same woman standing at the center of it.”
A thousand moths must have hatched in my stomach, for all the fluttering that begins.
“Me,” I whisper, the tone thick with dread.
“Yes.”
She smiles slightly, which should be unnerving, but there is no fear in her expression, only certainty.
“Well,” I force a brittle smile. “Shit.”
Ursula does not return the smile.
“The visions grew stronger the closer I got to Hollowmire. Eventually, I realized every path led toward Sephia’s bloomday feast. I needed to have a chance to speak with you without being turned away.”
The memory of the feast rises instantly behind my eyes: music, candlelight, the smell of wine and roasted meat, Sephia laughing somewhere nearby before Ursula found me just shy of sneaking out.
Blight Mother—the scene replays again and again in my mind.
I drag a hand slowly over my face. The exhaustion of the last several days settles heavily through my bones all at once.
“You called me the Blight Mother,” I say quietly, my hope turning desperate in the face of her explanation. “Is that what the gods said—what they told you? Do you believe that is what I am? What I’m becoming? Is there any way to stop it from happening?”
She doesn’t answer immediately, but rises from the table to fetch something from a high shelf—an apple. At first glance it appears ordinary enough—slightly too perfect with its glossy red skin absent of blemishes, but otherwise normal.
When she slices it open, the inside glistens with moisture, and yet no scent rises from it.
She slices a piece off and hands it to me, bidding me to eat it.
The moment my tongue touches it, I recoil—there is no sweetness or tartness where I expected, it is as if all sensations of taste and the satisfaction from eating such a beautiful piece of fruit have fled.
“The food still looks like it should,” Ursula says softly. “Better, even. Everything looks perfect, but it does not nourish. Nothing breaks down, nothing withers. It all simply… remains. I believe the land is blocked, somehow—life cannot complete its natural cycle.”
Renard’s eyes widen, blue and piercing. He tenses and leans forward slightly. “How long has it been this way?”
“We’ve had a difficult spring and summer with meager harvests, so merchants have been bringing food through Morsell from Valehar for months now.
Grain, fruit, glossy vegetables that smell off before they get unloaded from the carts.
Everything arrives wrong in the same way.
” She nudges the ruined apple with the knife tip.
“It fills the stomach for a little while, but nothing satisfies. The people of Morsell have begun to starve.”
Renard exhales, shaking his head.
“They’ve been trading the tainted crops,” he says, disgusted. “Selling them to others instead of trying to dispose of them… even though they know the food is inedible.”
I stare at the shining red fruit while fragments of memory drift uneasily through my thoughts. Suddenly, the weak harvests in Hollowmire seem more than just a coincidence, as does the cold arriving too early, and the way the forests grow quieter each season.
Ursula sets the knife aside and folds her hands loosely together.
“Decay is part of life,” she says, eyeing me meaningfully.
The words land strangely inside me. For years, I’ve listened to people describe my magic as corruption, disease—even punishment.
It’s always something to be ashamed of, or hidden away, not like Sephia’s fertility or Bronwyn’s merrymaking.
Gods, even my own family poured leywort tea down my throat with expressions pinched tight from revulsion and fear.
“I suspect you already know how vital it is, given your connection to the earth. New roots grow from soil that feeds on rot,” she continues.
“Gods, the earth itself feeds on death. Forests survive because fungi and worms and scavengers break down what came before so new life can grow in its place.” Her eyes settle steadily on mine.
“Without decay, life eventually starves beneath its own abundance. Without decay, there would be no life.”
Suddenly, I’m reminded of the rather useless diary buried with Hollowmire’s archives and now sitting in my pack back at the inn.
Humanity pushing the world toward imbalance, and the Blight Mother becoming the hand that tips the scales back toward equilibrium.
At the time it sounded like myth, but now I’m no longer certain.
Renard rubs thoughtfully at his beard. “You think someone interrupted that balance deliberately.”
“I think something prevented—is preventing—the world from completing its natural cycle.”
“And you think I have something to do with it,” I say, my voice a touch more shrill than I’d like it to be.
The look Ursula gives me is just short of pitying, and I bristle, standing abruptly.
“I think you are connected to it intimately,” she answers.
My antlers give a dull throb, my head aching with a persistence I’d otherwise believe was the result of a sore head from too much wine. Sighing, I cross toward the window that overlooks the village below.
Morsell glows softly below, sleepy and quaint.
Candlelight flickers through warped glass windows while smoke curls upward from clustered chimneys.
People move along the narrow streets below carrying firewood and baskets and ordinary concerns that have nothing to do with prophecy or ancient balance or antlers erupting from their skulls.
They simply go home to their families, to their loved ones, secure that they will not be ascending to some sort of destructive goddess-hood because the world simply needs fixing.
For one breathless moment, I am nearly suffocated by envy.
Behind me, Ursula speaks more gently than before.
“You are not the sickness, Vireth.”
I close my eyes briefly, feeling the pressure of tears behind my eyes. Gods, I don’t want to cry in front Ursula, and certainly not in front of Renard again. I think I’ve cried more in the last week than I have in the whole of my upbringing.
“You are what comes after,” she finishes.
What comes after.
She likely means the words as a balm—comfort against the weightiness of a prophecy I feel no closer to understanding.
“You act like this thing inside me is just a part of life. Like it’s natural,” I say finally.
“It is natural,” she insists
I turn away from the window sharply enough that my cloak sways around my boots. “Surely, you jest. Antlers growing from my skull is not natural.”
“In Hollowmire, perhaps not.”
“In anywhere,” I snap. “In any realm!”
Ursula lifts one shoulder. “The gods would disagree.”
Starving ravens, preserve me from cryptic women.
I cross back toward the table and sit more heavily this time, planting both elbows on the rough wood while pressing my fingertips against my temples.
The antlers ache something fierce, and I dig my fingers into my skull if only to have discomfort of another kind.
Renard moves to put a hand on my shoulder, but pulls back at the last moment.
Firelight catches in the silver beginning to thread through the dark hair at his temples, softening the hard lines of his face and making him more handsome.
Why is it that men age with elegance, strength, and wisdom, and women either become easy to ignore—or terrifying collections of horrors?
“I have a book,” I say, as though it might help, when I already suspect it’s not worth the parchment it’s written on.
“A diary from a young mage apprentice. It simply says that the Blight Mother is called down from the gods to restore balance, but it does not say how this happens, or what specifically triggers it. Or, importantly, what happens after the Blight Mother is… finished.”
“I suppose it has been a very long time since it happened last,” she says. “Longer than even a fae’s living memory. It’s likely that many of the books that would’ve been informative were destroyed in the last… rebalancing.”
“When was that? What more do you know?”
The seer carries three cups of steaming tea to the table before sitting once more. Though I’m in no mood to be soothed, she waves her hand at me.
“It’s but a willow bark tea, Vireth—it will ease the ache in your head. And in your healing injuries, Renard,” Ursula says.
Renard wraps both hands around his cup with obvious gratitude. The journey through the pass left him colder than he probably wants to admit aloud. Humans were never meant for mountain weather, particularly not aging soldiers stubborn enough to march directly into it.
Not aging, some traitorous part of my mind corrects immediately. Mature. Experienced. Broad shouldered and irritatingly competent.
I take a long drink of tea, nearly scalding myself in the process, before my thoughts can become any more lascivious.
“The famine in Valehar is not spreading naturally,” Ursula says quietly. “That much I know.”
Renard’s posture shifts at once, every trace of exhaustion vanishing beneath sharp attention.
“What do you mean?”
The seer turns the ruined apple slowly between her fingers.