21. Vireth #2
“Be sure to collect every single drop,” he instructs the servants, voice still smooth enough for his audience. “None of it must be wasted. Her blood will undo the curse, and it will satisfy the angry gods. Our suffering will come to an end!”
Your suffering is only just beginning, the Blight Mother whispers.
Oh, starving ravens. All my life, I have been a thing people merely endured—a family embarrassment dressed up in gowns that were always the wrong color, a daughter fed bitter tea so the flowers wouldn’t wilt, a woman whose magic spoke of death while others celebrated life.
Rot-tainted. Corpse-like. Ominous. Vireth—useful for the kitchen compost heap, perhaps, but not much else.
But then, Renard looked at me—not just looked but truly saw me—as though I was something else.
It made me feel… beloved, mayhap. Gods. That word hurts so much I almost look down to see if I’ve already been cut open.
I longed for a love that might prove the old stories wrong.
I thought that, maybe, if someone saw me clearly and wanted me anyway, then mayhap I wasn’t the monster everyone feared.
Maybe it would mean I was a woman with unfortunate powers, a dreadful temper, and a sweet little corpse weasel companion.
But love is a fragile argument against a lifetime of evidence, because Renard is not here. Sephia is not here. Ulfrid is far away in Hollowmire, perhaps not having thought of me a single day since I fled the castle. Nibblebones is gone, perhaps with Renard, who she might love better than me.
The people below look at me with sunken eyes and wait for my blood to save them, and I think… perhaps a monster like me was never worthy of love.
The thought should break me, but perhaps I am already too broken.
So instead, something inside me opens its eyes.
Strangely, it’s not the Blight Mother. It’s…
me. Anger and betrayal harden my resolve, and it’s impossible not to feel the Blight Mother thrilling beneath.
If they need a monster so badly, then perhaps I ought to stop disappointing them.
Arden steps closer, lowering his voice enough that only I can hear.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I do regret that Renard could not see reason.”
My heart lurches, the hope-creature twitching in its death throes.
“Renard,” I breathe. “What did you do to him?”
Arden’s expression does not change, which is answer enough to make panic rake claws through my ribs. Does he live? Is he here, after all?
Arden leans closer still. “Last words?”
For a moment, all I can hear is the wind moving through the courtyard. In the distance, there is a rumble of thunder, but I don’t smell the heavy petrichor that often precedes a satisfying, cleansing rain.
Suddenly, a memory of a different morning returns to me.
It feels like a lifetime ago, now. It was a morning drenched in rain, slick with mud, warm from the heat of the smithy and my exuberant sparring with Ulfrid.
It was a morning that ached with my ridiculous, silly hope that someone might sit beside me at a feast. In my mind, Ulfrid’s voice sounds, low and kind—it’s just the way things are.
I look at Arden.
“Things only are what they are because no one has changed them yet.”
His brow furrows, perhaps he is too dull to understand me.
“What a waste of breath,” he says.
Then he nods to the guard, who approaches cautiously to remove my shackles. Not that I really needed him to. The iron falls away from my wrists with a heavy clatter, and the marks beneath are red and raw. For a heartbeat, everyone waits for something terrible to happen.
I wait, too, but nothing does.
The executioner steps behind me. One guard grips my shoulder and forces me down to my knees before the block. I place my hands on either side of it, fingers curling against the damp wood, and lower my head.
The axe lifts—the courtyard holds its breath.
And the first spore drifts down—soft and white as a mote of ash. It lands on the chopping block in front of my face. And I cannot help it—a smile curves my lips upward.
More spores fall, tens, then hundreds, falling from above in a pale, silent snow.
Someone in the crowd gasps, followed by another voice crying out in shock, or surprise—and then in terror, or disgust. The executioner hesitates with his axe raised high, and I hear his breath rasping beneath the hood.
I look up.
Spores pour down from the low clouds, shimmering bone-white and silver-gray. They catch in Arden’s dark hair and dust the executioner’s shoulders. They cling to the eyelashes of starving children who stare upward in awe.
Inside my body, the Blight Mother exhales.
At the edges of the courtyard, the stones split open, wrenched apart by great wet seams of earth.
Thick, white stalks thrust upward, swelling faster than the eye can follow.
Massive mushroom caps unfurl overhead like a forest of parasols—red as blood, black as charcoal, and blue-violet with veins that pulse faintly beneath slick, oozing flesh.
Mushrooms taller than men erupt along the walls, tearing loose mortar, toppling barrels, throwing guards backward as roots and filaments lash beneath their feet.
The crowd screams—or perhaps it is the soldiers. In all the wet, liquid squelching, it’s hard to pinpoint where the screams are coming from.
A tower of lacy yellow fungus bursts through the scaffold steps, exploding in a cloud of bitter spores.
The executioner waves his free hand around as if the spores are a hive of angry bees, coughing and choking and bellowing.
In his panic, he drops his axe, and I wait for the pain of the blade biting into my shoulder.
Yet none arrives. The impact is jarring, and there’s the ugly crunch of bone that should follow. There is no pain, and there is no blood.
The axe sinks into my flesh and simply stops.
In an answering instant, black decay runs up the blade.
The executioner shrieks and releases the handle, stumbling back as rust blossoms over the steel in frantic red flowers.
The axe head crumbles at the edges, its sharp polish pitting, flaking, rotting into a pile of rusted iron filings that drift downward alongside the snowfall of spores.
Arden lunges forward to grab the weapon before it falls, and the moment his fingers close around the handle, the decay writhes hungrily up his sleeve.
A pulsing orange-black stain spreads across the velvet, tarnishing the delicate silver embroidery.
He shrieks in surprise, dropping the wooden haft and recoiling.
Arden’s horror is a rather satisfying sight to witness.
Truly, if I knew how to paint, I would capture the expression in layers of oil upon a canvas.
My gaze snags on the broken axe crumbling between us.
For the first time since I set foot in Valehar, I see hairline cracks in his hardened exposure.
His lip trembles, and he bares his teeth.
“You cannot kill me in any way that matters,” I say, unsurprised to hear that my voice is mine—and it is also not.
It is the sound of a thousand roots breaking through stone, and the scratching sound of mycelium devouring old, fallen trees.
It the slick, wet sound of carrion beetles burrowing beneath skin, and the soft sigh of every fallen leaf slowly turning into soil.
It is the sound of a death goddess singing, shouting, screaming.
Arden stumbles back while the Blight Mother surges through me, and this time, I don’t shove her away. I take a breath that reaches all the way down to my toes and let myself give way—feeling a heartbreaking sense of relief. Horrible, exquisite relief.
My antlers surge higher from my skull, branching upward in the smooth white growth of new bone.
My hair lifts in a phantom breeze around me, the white strands tangling with spores and the wreath of mushrooms crowning my head.
My fingernails lengthen, blackening to lethally curved points.
Beneath my feet, the scaffold groans until it finally explodes in a shower of splinters as roots punch through the planks and lovingly caress my feet, up my ankles, and finally, my legs.
As they grab hold of me, my senses open to a vast network of life underground, reaching deeper and deeper, until my awareness leaves this doomed courtyard and hollowed out kingdom of ruins behind. My mycelium thrust violently forward through the earth.
This isn’t like reaching into that private pool of rot that has always lived beneath my skin—this is vast and delicate, even beyond my fae comprehension.
Thousands—no, millions—of my fungal filaments slip through soil, around stones, beneath walls, under roads, under beds where starving people curl around empty bellies, under granaries full of pretty and useless grain, under the castle foundations themselves.
Gods, the taste of such unknowable power and connection. I feel everything.
I feel the roots of orchard trees—brittle with false life.
I feel the bones slowly breaking down beneath the old cemetery, turning back into the earth that once nourished these lives.
A buried ring. A lost tooth. A rusted nail.
The ash pits behind the kitchens. Worms. Beetles.
The damp, beautiful underside of the world.
And beneath all of it… Ah, there you are!
My threads are far beneath the castle now and there—there, there, there!
—it sits, the knot of something so unnatural, so wrong, it nearly makes me recoil.
It’s not rot, not death, and not life… it’s the spell that started this all.
It’s the spell that’s been hidden away in the soil, like a thorn driven deep beneath flesh.
Life everlasting.
I can sense it even without language—I can taste it in the blood used to bind the spell to the earth. Arden. The arrogant bastard—no wonder the land sickened and the food could not feed. Nothing can nourish when death is forbidden to do her work.