Chapter Eighteen
ANATOLE
The corridor was dark after the golden light.
Luc was there, at the top of the stairs.
The first mate took one look at Jeanne in Anatole's arms and his face went blank.
He cleared the way through the lower decks, while Anatole carried Jeanne up through the levels of the ship, past the hold, past the crew quarters, past the galley where Gris's banked fire still glowed, and up to the captain's quarters where the portholes showed the first gray light of dawn spreading across the Crimson Sea.
He laid her on the bed. She was conscious, her eyes tracking his face, but the focus was going in and out, the fever already stealing her concentration.
"Cold," she said, her teeth chattering while she was burning up.
He pulled the blankets over her. Stripped his shirt and pressed it against her chest because his scent had always calmed her. Maybe the same chemistry that soothed the door's call could slow whatever the curse was doing to her body.
"Stay with me," he said.
A ghost of a smile. "Can't exactly run at the moment."
"Don't joke."
"If I don't joke, I'll scream, and I don't want to scream. The the curse isn't finished with us yet."
"What do you mean?"
"The condition isn't that love survives the seeing.
It's that true love, freely given, survives the seeing.
We've seen the truth. Now we have to survive it.
And I don't think surviving means living through the fever.
I think it means something else." Her eyes were closing.
The fever was pulling her under, and he could feel it in the heat of her skin, the way her body was burning through whatever reserves it had.
"I think surviving means choosing each other after the truth. "
"I choose you. I have always chosen you."
"Not like this. Not with the mirror's truth between us.
Not with the purchase laid bare and the chains visible and every ugly thing that brought us here lit up and undeniable.
" Her voice was slipping, the edges dissolving into the fever.
"When the curse says freely given, it means given with full knowledge of the cost. Including the cost of how we started. "
Her eyes closed. Her breathing changed, the rhythm shifting from the measured control she'd maintained since the corridor to something shallower, faster, the breathing of a body beginning to fight an invader it couldn't see.
Anatole held her hand and felt the seventh platform waiting in the room below.
JEANNE
THE CABIN DISSOLVED into somewhere else, replaced by rooms she'd never been in and faces she'd never seen. She was lying in her nest, she knew this, she could feel the mattress beneath her and the blankets over her and his hand gripping hers, but her eyes showed her a different room entirely.
She was in a bedroom in a house on land with whitewashed walls, and a window looking out onto a garden. A dark-haired woman sat in a chair with her hands folded in her lap.
Marguerite.
Not the preserved body from the room below. The living woman. She wore an expression that held more grief than a young woman should have been capable of carrying.
"Can you hear me?" Marguerite asked.
"Yes." Jeanne's voice came out strange, doubled, as if she were speaking in two places at once, the cabin and this phantom room overlapping.
"Good. We don't have much time. The fever moves fast once the visions start." Marguerite stood. "I need to tell you what I couldn't tell the others."
"Why couldn't you tell them?"
"Because they were alone when the fever came, and by the time the visions connected us, the mirror had already done its work.
They were broken before I could reach them.
" Marguerite crossed to the phantom window and looked out at the garden.
"You're different. Whatever the mirror showed you, you're still coherent.
Still here." Marguerite turned back and sighed.
"I didn't know. None of us did. We all told ourselves stories about why we were there, and the mirror stripped those stories away, and without the stories, the love collapsed. "
"What was your story?"
"I told myself I loved him. And I did, in my way.
He was kind and fierce and nothing like the wolves my mother kept around her.
But the truth the mirror showed me — the truth that killed me — was that I chose Anatole to escape my mother.
Not purely because I loved him. Because he was the fastest route away from Morvenna's island and Morvenna's control.
" She held Jeanne's gaze without flinching.
"My love was real, but it wasn't free. It was fueled by desperation.
By rebellion. I married him in secret because secrecy was the only power I had against my mother, and the bond I formed was more defiance than devotion.
" A pause. "The mirror showed me that, and I couldn't survive seeing it, because I'd spent my whole brief marriage believing our love was something it wasn't."
"And the others?"
"Celeste told herself she was strong enough to conquer the curse. The mirror showed her that her strength was irrelevant because her love for Anatole was rooted in the challenge of the curse. Isabeau told herself she was clever enough to outwit it. The mirror showed her that cleverness and witty banter wasn’t love.
Our love wasn't strong enough to stand on its own.
" Marguerite shook her head sadly. "The curse's condition is true love, freely given and freely received. A love that exists for love only."
"Is that what Anatole and I have?"
"That's what I can't tell you. I can tell you what killed us.
I can't tell you whether your love is true enough to survive.
" The phantom room was beginning to dissolve, the edges going soft and transparent.
"But I can tell you this, the mirror has never shown Anatole anything before.
Whatever you did by bringing him into the room, you introduced a variable the curse wasn't built for. "
"I don't feel like I changed anything. I feel like I'm dying."
"You might be. The curse doesn't care about variables. It cares about love." The room was almost gone now, Marguerite's face the last thing visible, dark eyes and dark hair and an expression that was equal parts sorrow and jealousy.
"I hated him at first, but then I grew to love him. He called me his mate. I think he’s my destiny."
"Then hold onto that. Not as a feeling. As a decision.
The fever will try to take it from you. It will burn through every layer of what you've built until you die.
But if there's something genuinely real, then the fever can't burn it, because truth doesn't burn.
" The last thing Jeanne saw before the vision dissolved was Marguerite's mouth shaping words she couldn't quite hear, and then the phantom room was gone and the cabin was back, solid and real.
"Jeanne." His voice. Her mate. "You were talking. In the fever. You were talking to someone."
"Marguerite." Her throat was raw, her skin burning. The second wave was building, she could feel it gathering behind her sternum like a storm front. "She spoke to me."
"What did she say?"
The fever was cresting, and her vision was beginning to blur again.
The curse gripped her body and tightened around her like a vine.
The pain was in her blood and her bones and the place behind her sternum where the pull had lived for weeks.
Except the pull was gone now. In its place was a fire that burned from the inside out.
She heard herself cry out. Distantly, the way you heard sounds underwater. But she could feel Anatole lean over her, felt his mouth against her forehead, and heard the rumble of his voice.
"I'm here. I love you. I will always love you," he said.
She held onto his voice. Let it become the rope, the anchor, the thing she clung to while the fever tried to tear her loose from her own body.
The pain filled every space the love had occupied, as if the curse was burning out the neural pathways that connected her to him and replacing them with nothing.
“I love you too. I will always love you.”
ANATOLE
BY MIDNIGHT, THE FEVER had taken her speech.
Anatole sat beside the bed, Jeanne's hand in both of his, and he watched the woman he loved fight a war he couldn't join.
Her body burned. The blankets were soaked through with sweat that smelled wrong, the honeysuckle corrupted to something chemical and bitter that made his wolf pace in agonized circles.
Her breathing was shallow, rapid, the breathing of a body running out of reserves.
Gris came at first light. The old cook took one look at the cabin, at Jeanne's flushed face and Anatole's gray one, and he set down the tray he was carrying without a word.
Tea. Broth. The simple provisions of a man who had kept watch over dying brides before and knew that the living needed tending too.
"How long has she been like this?" Gris asked.
"The fever started within minutes and it’s gotten progressively worse."
"Faster than the others."
"The others went in alone. The mirror showed us both. Whatever it did to her, it did more of it. Or maybe it’s because she’s human."
He looked down at Jeanne's face. The flush had deepened, two spots of hectic color on her cheekbones, the rest of her skin paper-white.
Gris poured tea and set it beside Anatole's hand. "Drink."
"I'm not—"
"Drink. You'll be no good to her if you collapse from dehydration, and she's going to need you conscious for what's coming."
Anatole drank. The bitter tea cut through the fog of adrenaline and fear, anchoring him in his body, in the cabin, in the present moment. Jeanne's hand was hot in his. Her pulse was fast but steady, the rhythm of a heart working overtime to keep pace with a fever that wanted to outrun it.
When Gris left, Anatole sat in the silence and and watched the morning light strengthen across the cabin walls. The ship moved beneath them, the Barbe-Bleue sailing south on a wind that didn't care his omega was dying.
He should do something. He could sail back to Morvenna and beg for mercy. Or rush to the nearest port to search for a healer. But the logical part of him stopped him. Nothing would help, certainly not Morvenna.
The morning passed. Jeanne drifted in and out of consciousness, her eyes opening sometimes to fix on his face with a focus that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than the fever. In those moments she would squeeze his hand, and the pressure was a message he translated as I'm still fighting.
Luc came at noon. He stood in the doorway and reported the ship's status with clipped efficiency. “The wind is holding steady. The crew is restless, but functional. The wolves on the lower deck had been moved to the upper berths because Jeanne's changing scent was causing distress.”
Anatole just grunted.
"How is she?" Luc asked.
"Still alive."
"That's something."
"It's not enough."
Luc left. The afternoon wore on. The sun tracked across the cabin, throwing long shadows, and Jeanne's fever climbed, and her scent grew worse..
At dusk, she opened her eyes.
"Anatole."
He was on his feet, leaning over her, his hand on her face. "I'm here."
"How long?"
"A day."
"That’s all?" Her voice was a thread, thin and worn.
Before he could answer, she arched against the pillows, a sound escaping her that was closer to a keen than a scream, and her hand clenched around his with a strength the fever shouldn't have left her.
He held on. He held on and spoke her name into the dark cabin while the curse did its worst. The night stretched out ahead of them, long and terrible and full of the kind of darkness that broke everything it touched.
He kept his hope alive her, even in the darkest of hours.
He would keep hoping until there wasn’t a breath left in her body.
And then he would join her in death.