21. Vireth
Vireth
I am retrieved just before dawn, when the sun should be scattering its pink and gold rays across the realm—but there are no windows in this wretched cell, and I suspect the sky is obscured by bland gray clouds, all the same.
The cell door groans open on rusty hinges, and three guards step inside with torches held aloft.
The light is blinding after hours of dark, painting the walls in a sickly yellow, catching on the thin fur of pale mushrooms growing through the cracks in the mortar.
One of the guards recoils, eyes wide with terror when he sees the mushrooms.
I bare my fangs at him, and he goes satisfyingly pale. It seems there are small joys yet in this wretched life.
“On your feet,” one of the other guards says.
His voice is far too young, which annoys me. If he were older—if he knew better, mayhap it would let me harden myself against him. Instead, he sounds like he should be whispering awful poetry to a tavern maid in an effort to lose his virginity.
“Lady Vireth,” I correct.
He shifts uncertainly, and I almost laugh when he appears to seek permission from the other guards before addressing me with my due honor.
“On your feet, Lady Vireth.”
The shackles around my wrists are cold enough to burn. They’ve wrapped the iron in some sort of spelled fabric, likely believing this can protect them from me—from us. Still, I don’t break them—not yet.
The Blight Mother is very quiet inside me, and I know she is pleased—smug, even.
To my surprise, she has been quiet since they dragged me down here.
I expected her to rage, to curse—to summon me back to the strange place of sticky, slithering gray mist. But so far, she’s simple settled down in the dark emptiness behind my ribs—a vast and patient hunger waiting for me to summon her.
When I finally turned my attention inward, I felt her sigh. The imbalance must be corrected, she told me in the long hours before morning.
There I sat—knees drawn to my chest, my ass numb from the cold stone floor, while I watched the pale mushrooms spread from the cracks in the wall.
I thought of Renard—of his rough hands and earnest words, of the way he looked at me as though I hadn’t been stitched together of every ill omen his people—and mine—ever feared.
I thought of his shame in the clearing—his naked, dirt-streaked humiliation when the Blight Mother showed me what she wanted me to see.
He will come, I told her. Yet dawn has all but arrived, and Renard has not.
Hope, as it turns out, is a foolish little creature because it doesn’t have the dignity to die quickly. It lingers—twitching on the ground in its pain, making pathetic sounds beneath whatever boot heel attempts to crush it.
The guards lead me from the cell, passing beneath a low archway and into the dungeon corridor.
The air down here smells of iron, mold, blood, vomit, piss, old straw, and fear—mine, theirs, everyone’s.
It’s remarkable how alike fear smells no matter who carries it.
Noble, peasant, guard, monster… all sour and salt and animal.
The Blight Mother finally stirs.
Why aren’t you rotting through the lot of them? she wonders.
“Because I am reserving it,” I say under my breath.
The guards tense, shifting nervously with a ridiculous clatter of ill-fitting armor.
“What?” the first one asks.
“Oh, nothing. Simply conversing with the ancient death goddess nesting in my bones. Do carry on,” I say with a feral grin.
The young guard whimpers, and if I weren’t being marched to my likely execution, I might laugh at that.
They take me up two flights of stairs, rising up through the bowels of the castle.
It’s impossible not to notice how dismal this castle looks—all the soldiers too thin, their armor dull, the foundations beneath the castle cracked and filthy.
A castle crumbling, weathering away just like this kingdom’s people.
One of the guards yanks sharply at my chains and I hiss at him through my fangs.
Each step drags another ache through my body.
I haven’t slept. I haven’t eaten. I haven’t had a bath.
Of all the ways I imagined facing the end, this might be the most pitiful.
My hair is tangled around the bases of my antlers, my skin is covered with dirt and gods-know-what from the floors of the cell, and dried blood cakes beneath one nostril from when one of Arden’s men struck me for laughing at him.
The door at the top of the stairs opens onto the lower courtyard, where cold air slaps me in the face and even the meager gray light stings my eyes.
Morning crouches gray and miserable over Valehar. The sky is the color of old, dirty pewter, low clouds sagging heavily above rooftops of the same hue. Everything about this place is gray—the sky, the depressing castle, the people themselves.
A scaffold has been built near the center of the yard—a simple chopping block rests on top, dark with stains someone did not scrub well enough.
Beside it stands a broad-shouldered executioner in a black hood, both hands resting on the handle of an axe whose blade has been polished to a vicious gleam.
Someone has gone to the trouble of sharpening it for me. Thoughtful, I suppose.
Beyond the scaffold, a small group of Valehar’s people wait in the cold.
There aren’t many—a few dozen at most, gathered in wary clusters near the courtyard walls.
They don’t chant or jeer or throw things like the other executions I’ve witnessed—they are simply wary.
Most keep their heads bowed, not out of reverence, I think, but fear—fear of me, fear of Arden, fear of being seen too clearly by either.
Despite my current circumstances, I pity them—I do. My suffering in this city pales in comparison to theirs. I’ve only been here for half a day and an evening while they’ve had to endure this place for years.
Their cheeks are sunken so deeply, I can see which of them are missing teeth even behind their closed lips.
Their eyes are reddened, their hands cracked, their clothes hanging loose from bodies that haven’t been fed something useful in recent memory.
It strikes me that this famine has emptied the places inside them where their anger ought to be.
And yet, my anger is never far away, and it rises in me like a reflex—a second heartbeat, or a breath.
Why haven’t you done anything? I want to scream at them. Can you not see him? Do you not understand who has betrayed you? Do you not sense that he is the one who should face the axe this morning? But of course they see him—that’s probably the worst of it.
They see him, and they bow their heads because people with empty bellies can’t be bothered to dream of rebellion—they are busy dreaming of soup. They dream of a crust their children can keep down… of surviving one more day under the hand that presses them into the mud.
Gods, what a clever, hideous thing power is.
Arden stands at the foot of the scaffold in a cloak of purple so deep it is almost black.
His face is pale in the morning gloom—practically another shade of gray for his gray kingdom—his split lip swollen from some injury I desperately hope has a satisfying story attached.
Two servants stand behind him with beaten copper bowls, stacks of linen cloths, and several glass jars.
My gaze snags on the copper bowls. Arden sees it and smiles.
“Lady Vireth of Hollowmire,” he says, loud enough for the courtyard to hear.
Ah. So now I’m Lady Vireth.
“Bring her up,” he says to the executioner, gesturing with one elegant pale hand.
I’m shoved roughly up the scaffold steps, and my bare feet slip on the frost-slick wood.
The courtyard murmurs in hushed whispers when I emerge fully onto the platform.
If I couldn’t hear their words, I might close my eyes and believe it was the sound of a soft breeze through a field of knee-high grass.
“There she is!” someone cries.
“It’s the Blight Mother,” someone else hisses.
“Fae witch! Hideous beast! Monster!”
The names are all too familiar, but they don’t hurt as much as they once did. Maybe because I have finally become more splinter than flesh. Or maybe because I can sense the Blight Mother listening, equal parts incensed and vengeful.
Arden climbs the steps after me, followed closely by the executioner with his too-shiny axe.
From below, one of the children begins to cry—poor thing—but her mother quickly hushes her with a hand pressed over her mouth.
Take your child from here, I want to say.
Leave this place and find a kinder kingdom to flourish in.
“People of Valehar,” Arden calls, his voice carrying beautifully over the pathetic assemblage.
“You have suffered beneath a curse not of your making. You have endured hunger, grief, weakness, and fear. Valehar has bent beneath the wrath of powers older than our laws and crueler than our understanding.”
The Blight Mother hums inside me.
Cruel? Nay, I would not call myself cruel, she murmurs. Not compared to fae, or to humans. Certainly not compared to the cruelty of men.
I snort a laugh, and the executioner throws me a glare. Arden pauses, too, annoyed by my derision.
“I, however,” he continues, lips twisting in a cruel smile, “bring forward the remedy. The source of our terrible blight stands before you. The gods are angry! The earth has recoiled from her unnaturalness. I, alone, can save our kingdom from what sickness she has brought upon us. But with blood—with her blood—balance may be restored.”
The servants behind him uncover the bowls with a dramatic flourish—the copper glinting even beneath the paltry morning light. I stare at them, then at Arden.
“You ridiculous little man,” I snarl.
His eyes cut toward me—is that a flicker of fear I see? Interesting. If it is, I wonder if it’s fear of the Blight Mother, or fear that this gamble will pay out.