21. Vireth #4
With a triumphant chitter, Nibblebones leaps over to Renard’s shoulder and then races toward me.
Taking advantage of the distraction, Renard throws his bound hands upward, catching Arden under the chin with his forearms. The two men crash sideways into a spray of fungal spores and splintered wood.
The courtyard erupts into chaos again and the Blight Mother turns toward the struggle, but Nibblebones reaches us first.
She scrambles up the roots wrapped around my ankles, claws digging into fungus, tail lashing.
The Blight Mother tries to ignore her. I feel the impulse pass through our shared body—silly creature.
Nibblebones climbs higher, whistling and chittering like we’ve been apart for weeks and she means to tell me all of her thrilling gossip.
In her mouth is Sephia’s white-gold comb, the delicate filigree bent now, and one of the tiny mushrooms snapped from the edge.
It’s filthy with mud and lint and perhaps a bit of someone’s blood, but it’s here—it’s here when it should be lost.
She drops it against my foot. The gray mist flickers.
Sephia stands in my memory, timid and lovely, bowed beneath the weight of duty. Her fingers braid my hair. Her voice says, We share a bloomday, sister. Of course I remembered.
Fresh pain shears through me, and a sob wracks my body. I sink to my knees.
Nibblebones chitters and digs in the little pouch of odds and ends she must have stolen from gods-know-where.
She drags out Ulfrid’s dagger next, the carved bone handle wrapped tenderly with gravemaw hide.
The first gift from my fortieth bloomday.
The proof that someone saw me as more than a spoiled princess—as a student worth teaching.
A fighter. As a little toadstool. Ulfrid’s betrayal still stings, but I understand it, and if everything ends now, I won’t have the chance to tell him that I forgive him for a moment of weakness.
Happy bloomday, his memory murmurs.
Another sob heaves out of me, black tears streaking down my face like a torrent of angry rain. From all around me, the gray cracks. I reach for it, and the Blight Mother recoils.
No!
Nibblebones gives an indignant squeak and drops the last object into the tangle of roots—the rusted brooch pin she unearthed for Renard.
It might have been a bit of rusted nonsense, but Nibblebones gifted it to him with all the solemn pride of a queen bestowing honors, or a mother bestowing a birthday gift.
I remember him accepting it, and accepting her.
I remember the warmth in his tired face.
I remember thinking, perhaps foolishly, that there might be room in the world for all kinds of strange and broken things.
And finally, the last vestiges of my rage and grief seem to wither beneath the sudden, inescapable realization.
Ursula’s words come back to me in an instant.
You are not a monster. She’s right. I am not simply a tool for a goddess’s revenge.
I am not a taboo, or a prophecy. I’m not the Blight Mother, or a rot-tainted stain on this world.
I am fae. I am a woman. Vireth. Daughter of Hollowmire, sister to Sephia, and to Bronwyn, and the whole bloody brood. I’m a student of Ulfrid, a companion to the most wonderfully loyal corpse weasel ever to haunt the living world. And I am lover to Renard, the fool.
I do not want to destroy the world.
“I do not want this,” I tell the Blight Mother, who replies by bearing down with all her ancient grief and wounded pride.
You are alone, she sneers.
“No, I’m not.”
They feared you. They fear you still.
“Yes.” A sigh works its way out of me, because it is not easy to argue with an ancient death goddess who seems determined to pick at all your insecurities.
And they hated you then.
“Some did, yes,” I agree.
They will do so again.
“Almost certainly.”
Then why spare them?
My lips curl in a small smile, and I use my connection to her in this gray world to force a vision through to her—so that she can see that the world isn’t all betrayal, suffering, and men thwarting the gods.
“Because Sephia remembered,” I say, showing her the evening of our shared bloomday.
“Because Ulfrid gave me a bloomday present, too. Because my darling Nibblebones hoards trash and treasures both with equal devotion. Because Renard came, and because the world is not only cruelty, and I am not only what I can destroy.”
With the force of my will, I seize the comb, the dagger, the rusted cloak pin, and I use them to pull myself upward.
The sticky gray mist shivers and shudders, clinging to my skin, desperate for me to remain.
The Blight Mother fights me, and the struggle tears through the courtyard.
Mushrooms burst and collapse in rapid succession, their spores igniting in harmless blue flashes that disappear like melting snowflakes.
The roots tied to her power thrash beneath the stones, cracking them further.
I feel her grief and her rage—the long memory of kingdoms fighting against the old gods, cutting forests down and burning sacred groves. I feel her every wound.
I don’t deny them—she has a right to her pain. It’s just that I refuse to become only pain.
My body lurches as air slams into my lungs, and I surface with a ragged gasp.
The courtyard crashes into focus—too bright and too loud.
Nibblebones is clinging to my neck, chattering in high trills.
My hands are my hands again, thank the gods, though blackened to the wrists.
My antlers ache. Tears spill down my cheeks in hot black tracks.
“My darling,” I rasp, raw and sobbing. Nibblebones presses her cold nose to my cheek.
Across the broken courtyard, Renard has Arden on the ground.
For a wild heartbeat, hope blooms so fiercely I almost choke on it.
Renard’s hands are still bound, but he drives his elbow into Arden’s face with brutal, exhausted precision.
Arden’s head snaps back. The knife skitters away over the stones. Renard lunges for it.
I gasp, and the sound is enough for him to look up—just for a heartbeat, just long enough to see me. Just long enough for Arden to snatch a sharp, splintered plank from the wreckage of the executioner’s platform and drive it into Renard’s back.
The world goes white.
Renard’s mouth opens, but no sound comes out, and he falls.