19. Vireth
Vireth
Cloying gray mist swirls around me, sticking to my skin and trailing over me like the phantom fingers of a spurned lover.
Twice now I have managed to climb back up to my senses—to the place where I am myself. Once to cry for Renard’s help, and once again to fight with the Blight Mother who has seized control of my body.
I will not do it, I tell her. I will not bend to the destructive impulses that threaten to unhinge me from my humanity.
She laughs bitterly, and urges the wyreboar’s bones forward—marching determinedly toward Valehar. Through her, I can sense that it is close, but I know not what that means for us—for me.
The gray mist clings to me—sticky and cold, like seaweed upon the rocks at low tide.
It’s like a cursed fog, beading along my arms, seeping under my nails and gathering in the hollows of my throat until I can no longer tell whether I am standing, floating, or drowning.
There is no wind in this strange place—this realm of oblivion—yet the mist moves constantly, dragging itself over me in slow currents that smell of loam and mushrooms and wet stone.
This place is familiar, conjured up from my dreams and nightmares as an in-between place and I hate it. Gods, how I hate it.
It’s humiliating being so helpless—being trapped here without my consent, while my body carries on without me.
It’s infuriating, too, when my hands touch what I don’t wish to touch, when my eyes look where I don’t wish to look, when my mouth speaks words I don’t wish to say.
I’ve spent years—my whole life!—being told what I am, what I should be, and what I will ruin, and now it’s my body itself that joins the betrayal.
You think this is betrayal? the Blight Mother asks, her voice clear through the mist. Poor child. I am giving you divine purpose. See how they will react to your magic when this is all over.
“Purpose!” I snarl, my voice echoing through nothingness. “I have always had purpose—whether it is divine or not. In my life, I have been an ill omen, a burden, a weapon, and now, apparently, a throne that you intend to sit upon. You’re just as bad as the rest of them.”
The mist thickens and the ground trembles in answer.
A throne, she echoes. A weapon. A burden.
Listen to yourself, my child. I am not making you anything that you aren’t already.
I would never have you make yourself smaller.
I would never call your power ugly. They will see, Vireth.
You won’t have to smile when they whisper about you, or drink tea that alters you, or pretend your rot is a shameful thing.
My hands curl into fists, though I cannot feel my palms—it’s enough to drive any woman to madness, and I begin to wonder if I am already there.
“Cease your vitriol,” I warn.
They will fear you no matter what you do, Vireth, she says, her fathomless voice gentling.
If you spare them—if you save them, they will forget it at the first opportunity.
If you weep for them, they will mistrust your tears.
There is nothing you can offer that will make them love the rot in your blood. You already know this to be true.
Something thready and panicky catches in my chest when I consider what she says.
Visions of endless cups of leywort tea, of banquets ruined because I could not leash my mold-summoning sadness, of the near-constant sneers and frowns.
I think of everyone at court whispering rot-touched behind their hands as they turned their backs on me.
The anger that rises is old and hot, not sudden at all, and it is as comfortable as a pair of well-worn boots.
There you are, the Blight Mother murmurs, cat-like and far too satisfied.
I pull away, as if the thought is a flame I’m too close to. “No!”
Why not? Anger is honest. Anger does not beg a knife to explain itself before it cuts.
“Anger is destructive,” I argue.
So is hope.
For a moment, the mist clears enough that I see through her eyes, or through mine with her behind them, and physical sensations come back to me in waves—none of them pleasant.
I feel the hard bones of the wyreboar’s spine beneath my legs, rubbing blisters on my bare thighs.
I feel the aching weight of my now enormous antlers, the stinging black liquid that leaks from the beds of my nails and falls to the soil in fat, syrupy droplets.
Wind gusts through our skeletal army, whistling hollowly as it carves through hundreds—perhaps thousands—of empty skulls.
I try to wrench my fingers open, but they do not move.
Panic claws up my throat, and this time it is buoyed by anger.
I shove against the Blight Mother with everything I have—against the mist, against the weight of her will, against the deep thrum of her power entangling with mine.
Suddenly, for one glorious, painful heartbeat, my smallest finger twitches against the wyreboar’s spine.
The Blight Mother stills.
I laugh because I cannot help myself—nearly hysterical with my petty, useless triumph. “There. Did you feel that?”
Her silence is frightfully satisfying, until the mist turns bitterly cold, and the gray closes around my ribs until it’s difficult to draw breath.
You are stubborn, she says. Perhaps as stubborn as your failed knight.
“He has not failed me,” I snap. “And I have had excellent practice in being stubborn.”
You are also wasting strength you will need.
“For what? Destroying Valehar? Becoming some beautifully tragic end of days? Forgive me if I am reluctant to be promoted from family embarrassment to apocalypse rising.”
I would have expected amusement from her, or annoyance perhaps, but what comes instead is an ache so old it nearly bends me. It rolls through the mist and into my chest, not mine but definitely familiar—an old pain, a splinter that was never removed.
I am taking you to the wound.
“The wound beneath Valehar.”
Yes.
“And after that?”
After that, the world will learn what comes of kingdoms that believe they have mastery over the earth and her gods.
A pulse moves through the gray—similar to the sound of a great drum struck somewhere beneath the earth.
Renard will stop you, I think before I can decide whether saying it is wise.
The Blight Mother hears the thought anyway.
Renard, she says, and there is enough scorn in the name to make my teeth ache. I left him where men of honor so often end up when their quest becomes too much for them—in a clearing, on his knees. Shamed because he could do nothing—shamed because he gave up trying long ago.
The gray folds inward, and I see him.
He kneels in the clearing, naked and decked in dirt from our lovemaking, his face such a mask of shame and humiliation it threatens to slice my already-tender heart to ribbons. He remains as the Blight Mother rides away, looking more like a man defeated than anything.
“Don’t show me that,” I snarl.
Men will always do nothing if they can get away with it.
“No! Not him. Not Renard.”
It is the way things are—it is the way things have always been.
“Things only are what they are because no one has changed them yet,” I tell her, because it is a line I have whispered to myself a thousand times—every time I have felt othered in my own home.
Renard may have made mistakes, but he is not the sum of every cowardice he has ever known.
I have been made into a lesson too many times to do the same to him.
And if I let her turn every tiny hurt into proof, then I will have nothing left inside me but evidence that this angry, vengeful goddess was right all along, and there is no good worth preserving from a tide of unstoppable destruction.
“He will come,” I say.
The Blight Mother does not answer at once.
“He will,” I say again, and I allow myself a sip of hope—bittersweet though it is.
“And if he does not, then at least Sephia will still breathe somewhere. Nibblebones will still be a menace. Ulfrid will still curse my name when he finds half his tools rusted, but he will still spar with me every time I ask. The world is not only men failing, and it is not only fear, and I am not only what I can destroy.”
You believe that now because you are afraid.
“I believe it because I must. Perhaps it is my humanity,” I snarl. “And perhaps that is the biggest thing that you lack, goddess.”
The mist loosens a fraction, and at first I think I have managed some small victory, but my heart races as I realize the wyreboar’s gait has shortened.
The rattling behind us slows unevenly, and in the distance, a bell begins to sound, clear and resonant through my world of gray.
The cold air of the waking world pushes through carrying smoke, manure, horse sweat, and the stale sweetness of too much grain kept too long.
I press toward it and this time, the mist does not stop me quickly enough. My sight tears through—the bright afternoon sunlight almost painful after my wallowing in the realm of mist.
The forest has thinned considerably. Beyond the last black trunks of mold-covered trees, the land drops away into a wide valley bathed in sparkling sunlight, and Valehar lies below us with its pale walls, green banners, slate roofs, and fields upon fields of impossible abundance.
The crops stand high and golden despite the season, every row neat enough to look painted, and with dread, I notice there isn’t a bird trilling anywhere—there’s not a hare, not one living thing willing to trust what grows there.
The wyreboar takes one more step—then another, and then it stops. The dead behind us settle and a vast, uneven quiet filters through the trees. On the walls below, tiny figures begin to move. The bell stumbles, misses a beat, then rings harder.
Valehar.