17. Renard
Renard
When Vireth collapses, this time it’s not from pleasure—she doubles over, retching and screaming.
Panic banishes the remnants of my ardor and I bend over her to place a hand on her bare back, alarmed by the heat pouring off her body.
Something is horribly wrong. Dread surges, pulled up from my gut in a rising tide of nausea because there is a part of me deep inside that knows this is all to do with the Blight Mother.
She is crouched on the ground, clutching at her head, screaming in pain, and I don’t know how to help her—and it’s killing me.
“Vireth!”
I shout to be heard above her cries, but she does not respond to me. Suddenly she thrusts her fingers into the dirt, leans forward and vomits a stream of powdery mold spores that sink into the earth.
Fear seizes me as I take in the clearing around us—as far as the eye can see, decay and rot grip the forest. I refuse to feel shamed for finally taking what I’ve wanted—what we’ve wanted—and coming together, but seeing the devastation around us is terrifying.
It must’ve happened when we were focused solely on each other.
Was it our joining that wrought this? Did this somehow unlock, unleash, or summon the ancient goddess slumbering inside Vireth? How did this happen?
Vireth groans, snapping my attention back to her. Her voice is not hers, and a chill climbs up my spine because I recognize the sound at once.
“Vireth?” I try again.
She does not respond.
I swallow, gathering my courage.
“Blight Mother?”
A dark laugh splits the early morning air, coming from every direction at once. In the distance a lone wolf howls and the hair on the back of my neck stands on end.
“Silence, knight,” the Blight Mother hisses. The ground trembles again—harder this time—and I almost lose my footing.
Vireth stands jerkily, her movements awkward and lacking the grace with which she normally moves.
I watch in horror as her antlers grow upward, pressing through her hair that’s still tangled from our lovemaking.
Suddenly, I am acutely aware that we are both still naked, and I snatch my breeches and shirt from the ground.
The bones that have vibrated up through the soil begin to clatter together, bouncing upon the shaking ground as though they are being puppeted by a great unseen force.
They begin to wriggle across the ground into collections, or piles, until they begin to form the skeletons of the long-dead beasts they once belonged to.
I recognize skeletal bears, wolves, foxes, and hares, along with a number of birds hopping around—then there are the creatures that I know hail only from this realm, like the wyreboar.
An army of dead things gathers in the surrounding woods, the trees now covered in growths of mushrooms too thick to see the bark.
Vireth—no, she is not my Vireth now, she is the Blight Mother—turns in the direction of Valehar.
“It’s there,” she thunders, though I don’t think she’s speaking to me. “The imbalance. It hails from the humans.”
She takes a few halting steps forward.
“No!” I cry out, but am surprised when she whirls around.
The woman staring back at me is not my Vireth—owner of moonlight hair and oxblood eyes.
Her eyes are as white as pearls, rimmed in red as black tears streak down her cheeks.
Not only have her antlers grown to towering height, but small crops of mushrooms and moss now wreath her head in an odd sort of crown.
Vireth’s skin is covered in the dirt and grass stains from our intimacy, but some new, terrible thing slithers beneath her pale skin—threads of black running along her veins, leaking out into dripping black liquid that falls from her fingertips and hisses when it hits the ground.
For a heartbeat, I see her eyes shift back.
“Renard!” she wails.
My chest cracks open and I rush to her, grabbing her face between my hands.
“I am here,” I tell her. “You are not alone. I will do anything, Vireth—what can I do? Tell me what to do to stop this, to help you!”
Heaving sobs wrack her body as she clings to me.
“Please,” she begs. “Don’t let me destroy it all. I cannot bear it. Take my life if you must—I cannot be the end of all things.”
“No! I will find another way!”
Horror and desperation surge, and I press my lips to hers in a kiss that feels gut-wrenchingly like goodbye.
I feel the moment the Blight Mother takes control again, the kiss turning hard and the sobs quieting.
“You are a stubborn one,” she says. “Your fae will be the instrument of my will, knight, whether it is wanted or not. The balance must be corrected.”
“Please—”
The word sounds weak beneath the groaning of roots and the endless clatter of bones.
“Please,” I say again.
The Blight Mother tilts her head, studying me with Vireth's face, and then she laughs. The sound rolls through the forest, shaking loose clouds of spores from the mushrooms choking the trees, and the ground trembles beneath my boots as the gathered dead stir around us.
“You beg for the world now?”
I force myself to meet her gaze, trying to appeal to her, or to reach Vireth within.
“There are innocent people in Valehar.”
“There are innocent people everywhere.”
Her white eyes fix on mine, and I know them—I know them like the despair of my own failures. Fear bubbles in my gut, and it takes exhaustive effort to keep it down, to keep it from taking hold.
“Do you think I do not know that?”
Heat suffuses my face, but whether it’s from shame or embarrassment or anger or fear, I have no answer.
For a long moment, she simply watches me, and there is nothing—nothing—like standing in front of a god who looks through you, seeing every selfish choice I’ve ever made, every excuse I’ve ever told myself, every failure and mistake I have tried to leave buried behind me.
“I should kill you. You share in this responsibility, knight. You are one more man who inherited a broken world and left it broken.”
Black liquid slips from her fingertips and spatters against the earth—the earth where, only moments ago, Vireth and I were locked together in bliss.
“I should strip the flesh from your bones and feed what remains to the roots.”
My stomach twists, but I refuse to look away. Beneath this terrifying ancient being is Vireth—my Vireth. I don’t want to lose her now, when I feel as though I’ve just found her.
“But I will not.”
Hope rises in my chest before I can stop it. Then she smiles.
“For Vireth's sake.”
The smile grows colder.
“She is fond of you, despite your faults, and I would not rob her of the chance to learn the truth for herself.”
“What truth?” A chill runs through me.
“She will learn why you came to Hollowmire, of course. She will learn that you came here to spill her blood. She will learn why you have not yet slipped into Arden’s room and cut his throat.”
Shame crashes over me. The words land with brutal precision because they are true, at least in part, and no amount of silence can change that. The Blight Mother watches my expression and laughs softly.
“She will learn all of it,” she says. “And when she does, Vireth can kill you herself.”
I lower my eyes. Not for the first time since arriving in Hollowmire, I find myself afraid not of death, but of seeing disappointment in her face—of being yet another person in her life who has betrayed her.
“You thought you could come into this world and defeat a god.”
Her voice carries across the clearing.
“Why? Because you wore armor? Because you survived a few battles? Because you were born in a castle? Because you were the favorite bastard of a king?”
She takes a slow step toward me, and I clench my jaw—the words hitting harder than I expect, doubly so because they spill from Vireth’s lips.
“You had more opportunities than most men ever see. You were given training. Education. Influence. You were handed advantages others would have killed for.”
The dead stand silent around us, waiting.
“And still, you could not set your kingdom to rights. You could not mend what was broken. You could not stop the suffering around you. Is it that you could not? Or that you would not? So content in your exile with the mantle of responsibility being taken away from you without a fight. Be honest, knight—you were glad to fail in Hollowmire the first time. You came here with your company hoping for death, because your wife and sons were gone. And since then, you have been cowering on your farm, letting the rest of your kingdom suffer because you could not find a way to use all that education and training and privilege to pluck the thorn that has festered in your land.”
I think of Valehar—of hungry villages, corrupt lords, frightened people who looked to men like me for help and received too little of it. The shame sits heavy in my chest. No defense comes to mind, perhaps because there isn't one.
“And now the responsibility falls to this woman,” she says, pressing a hand against her chest. “To one who has suffered more than you can understand. Hated from the day of her birth. Ignored at the best of times, punished at the worst. Pushed to the side, bullied, teased, feared, reviled, pitied. Imprisoned by the ones who were supposed to love and protect her the most.”
In my mind’s eye, I see Vireth as the beautiful woman she truly is, sitting beside a campfire with her boots kicked off, laughing at some foolish remark of mine, and I think of how she has been failed and betrayed by everyone. Including me.
The Blight Mother's expression hardens.
“She has carried pain all her life, and she will carry more before this is done, because someone must correct the errors of men.”
The forest falls silent, even the dead seem to stop and listen. Her gaze pins me in place.
“For shame, knight.”
And finally, I cannot look at her. I can bear the face of the woman I love telling me these things no longer. Coward that I am, I sink to my knees.