22. Vireth #2
I cannot breathe, my lungs are refusing to draw air.
“You hear me?”
I press my face into his palm. “Renard, please…”
“You are life.” His voice is almost gone, a bare whisper beneath the wind. “You are my life.”
His eyes close, and his hand falls to the cobblestones below, his face slackens like it does in sleep. I could almost pretend that it is sleep, and in a moment, he will wake up and chuckle and bicker with me about the right way to organize my pack.
I feel as though my world has ceased to spin. The sun may have stopped in the sky, the wind may have ceased to blow. But here, outside, in these cruel, destroyed courtyard ruins of Valehar, there’s nothing else to mark the way my world, my hope, my life, has been ripped from me.
There is nothing else to it, I find. His breath simply doesn’t come again, though I wait for it. Gods, how I wait. I wait until the waiting starts to irritate my skin like an itch with no place to scratch.
“Renard?” My voice has never sounded so small.
He does not answer.
“Renard.”
Still nothing. I put my fingers beneath his jaw.
I press my ear to his chest. There should be a heartbeat there—why isn’t there?
There should be life under my cheek, stubborn as wheat and warm as fresh bread.
But there is only silence, and blood—all this blood that should still be inside of his body, flowing through his veins and giving me reason to draw breath.
I scream—the deep, guttural sound tearing through the courtyard until my ears ring in the silence that follows.
I gather Renard against me as much as I can without worsening the puddle of blood still seeping from his body.
I rock over him, keening into his bloodied shirt, black tears streaking down my face and dripping onto his beard.
Nibblebones creeps to his shoulder and presses her small nose to his ear, whining with such fragile confusion that it wounds me all over again.
“No,” I whisper. “No, little one. No.”
She looks up at me with her glossy black eyes, but I have no comfort for her, because I have none for myself.
And still, the Blight Mother doesn’t say anything.
She barely stirs, either out of petulance for me escaping her world of gray or because—mayhap—she is not without feeling.
I sense her waiting, observing my grief with something like astonishment, or curiosity.
The Blight Mother. A goddess—a goddess with power over life and death.
A goddess of endings, and of beginnings.
A goddess who’s been using me to help reset the balance of the world.
At last, I lift my head, my final thought coming to me with brutal, irrepressible clarity.
“Give him back to me,” I say, gritting my teeth so hard, they might crack.
Everything stills, both in the gray world where she lurks, and here in the ruined, rotting courtyard that’s slowly being carpeted with my love’s blood. The Blight Mother’s reply echoes from everywhere and nowhere—reverberating through my mind.
Death is not so easily returned.
I bare my fangs at the empty air. “Don’t you dare speak to me of what’s easy. Not after this—not after everything.”
The dead belong to me.
“Then bargain with me,” I snap.
A deep pressure—something of a warning—moves through me, and I can’t tell if it’s mists moving through the gray realm or from my own silenced intuition.
You play a dangerous game, child.
“Bargain!” I scream.
The other peasants in the courtyard cower at my outburst, trembling and weeping—the bitter scent of their fear and exhaustion lifting on a soft breeze. The ruined buildings and mushrooms shudder violently, sending another cloud of bone-white spores up into the air.
“Give him back to me,” I say again. “Give him to me, and I will give you whatever you want. I will give you the one you want most.”
I can sense when she twists in interest, and when my eyes cut to Arden, standing at the edge of the courtyard with a bloody plank of wood clutched in his fist, both the Blight Mother and I see him.
The one who saw fit to thwart me, she hums, her need for vengeance and justice overpowering her reluctance to do something I don’t imagine the gods agree to every day.
Arden stands near the broken scaffold, his hand, still slick with Renard’s blood, pressed to where Nibblebones bit him. He watches me with a calculating expression, as if even now his awful mind is already grinding away, searching for its next escape.
“Yes,” I say, feeling my rage stir beneath my numb grief. “Him.”
The Blight Mother is pleased by my rage, or mayhap the idea of something like a human sacrifice.
Agreed. I will return your human to you, provided you make an offering of mine.
Her acceptance settles through my bones, but this is not over yet.
I lower Renard gently onto the stones, and it takes great effort for me to let him go.
My fingers don’t want to uncurl from his shirt.
My body doesn’t seem to understand that his body is no longer a shelter.
I press my lips to his cold forehead once, tasting salt, blood, and the sun-warmed wheat scent of him.
“Do not wander far, Farmer Knight,” I whisper, and my heart seizes once in my chest.
Then I stand, furiously aware that Arden’s gaze flickers toward the nearest door.
“Run,” I say, softly, because I don’t need to be loud. The word carries through the courtyard on a soft cloud of blood-red spores.
He freezes, panic gathering at the edges of his usually calm face.
“Run,” I repeat, “and I will loose the Blight Mother upon your city again. Run and I will hunt you to the edges of this realm and the next. Run, and you won’t know another moment of peace in your entire life.
I will waste you away slowly, painfully, over the course of years—and my years are longer than yours, human—until your skin-covered skeleton can do nothing more than peer up through too-large eyes and beg me for death.
And even then, I will not give it to you. ”
His eyes flick back and forth—searching for a way out, no doubt.
“You have no authority here,” he says, his voice wavering.
I gaze up at the forest of mushrooms choking out the pewter sky—at the ruined city around us, at the too-hungry, too-fearful people still cowering at the edges of the city. I raise a brow even as Arden’s eyes narrow.
“I am Lady Vireth of Hollowmire,” I say, my voice carrying clear across the courtyard. “Daughter of Queen Celene and King Rhainor. Rot-born, ill-omened, and precious keeper of both a broken heart and a vengeful goddess. And I challenge you for the throne of Valehar.”
A murmur moves through the peasants huddled along the walls.
Arden scoffs. “You cannot challenge for a human throne.”
My lips twist in a feral grimace. “Then I challenge you for the blood of Renard. Don’t worry, little human—I won’t even use my magic.”
He looks at the towering mushrooms, the broken ground, the roots threaded across the courtyard. His gaze is calculating. “You swear to a fair fight—no magic, no god power? And what if you lose?”
I lift my free hand, and every filament stills—the mushrooms stop breathing their cloud of spores. The roots sink back enough to clear a wide circle around us.
“No magic,” I repeat. “No Blight Mother, no guards. Knives only. And if I lose, I will take the Blight Mother from here and leave you to your ruined kingdom.”
Arden’s gaze flickers to the surviving soldiers.
None of them step forward to offer defense or support.
Some, probably, because they’re afraid of me, but more, I think, because they’re afraid of the people watching—of what happens to rulers who fail their people so spectacularly.
There is something more in their hollow eyes now, and it is something more than simple hunger.
He sees it, too—that his kingdom has gone very quiet around him and there is simmering mistrust in their no-longer fearless regent. Arden picks up his dagger from the ground where it lay after his fight with Renard.
It is a fine little weapon, naturally, with a jeweled hilt and a narrow blade.
Idly, I wonder how many backs it has stabbed.
Nibblebones bounds over to retrieve the dagger Ulfrid made for me, then immediately runs back to curl atop Renard’s chest, protecting him from the clutches of the Death Goddess.
Arden and I circle each other over broken stone.
I’m not in the finest form for a fight. My entire body aches—my shoulder throbs from where the axe tried and failed to take my head.
My palms are slick with Renard’s blood, and my vision blurs every few breaths because grief keeps surging and making it difficult to breathe.
As ever, my antlers send pain radiating through my skull.
“You’ve already lost,” he says, gesturing to Renard’s still body.
I say nothing, focused on Ulfrid’s lessons—on my opponent, and how he moves, and what our surroundings might offer.
He moves first, and while I suspected he’d be a capable fighter, I’m almost taken aback by how fast he is. His dagger slices across my ribs before I can pull away, and pain flares hot along my side. A thin dribble of blood—mine this time—begins to trickle down my side.
“Ah,” he says softly, warming to the success of his strike. “So you can bleed.”
I lunge, already making note of my mistakes—the movement too wide, too slow, and too angry.
I need to regain my control. He sidesteps and slashes my upper arm, doling out another shallow cut that’s painful enough to make my fingers loosen around Ulfrid’s dagger.
I tighten my grip before the blade can fall.
Arden smiles—the bastard.
“You know, I think you were more interesting as the monster—now you’re just another woman who thinks she has a right to justice that she doesn’t have the stomach to earn.”