Chapter 53 #2
The slender stems that had coiled about her skirts climbed with dreadful deliberation.
One circled her waist. Another slipped higher, gliding over the line of her stays as though seeking a truer purchase.
A darker, thicker vine rose from the churned mud at her feet and passed, slow as a hand fastening a ribbon, across the hollow of her throat.
Her breath broke.
Darcy felt it. The instant of interruption. The small, helpless struggle of her lungs against a narrowing hold.
“Elizabeth!”
He dropped fully to his knees and seized the vine at her throat. The stem… yielded. It bent as living muscle bends, curling around his fingers. He yelped in surprise, and it slid from his grasp and wound higher, barbs catching in the curl of her hair, pressing against the pale column of her neck.
Around them, the murmur changed.
No longer accusation. No longer command. Someone muttered a prayer. Someone else fell silent halfway through one.
Harrowe caught a thicker strand about her ankle and braced his boot in the mud, hauling with both hands.
The vine stretched. It did not break. Blood sprang along his palm where thorns bit through skin.
He swore and pulled harder, broad shoulders straining, but the growth held as though anchored in stone.
A villager—young, white-faced, shamed by the pistol—darted forward and slashed at a coil with his knife. The blade skidded uselessly along the green surface, scraping bark that seemed too supple to be cut and too firm to be pierced. He stumbled back, crossing himself.
Elizabeth’s fingers, still clenched in Darcy’s coat, slackened. Her eyes met his.
Not in panic.
In apology.
The vine at her throat drew tighter. Closing out the world, taking her to itself.
He felt the constriction as if it were upon his own neck. The depletion that had plagued him flared sharper now, not merely draining but answering something in the earth beneath them.
He changed his grip.
No longer tearing. No longer fighting.
He slid his hand lower, to where one of the stems wound about her wrist, and pressed his palm fully against it.
The response was immediate.
The vine shifted beneath his touch. Not recoiling. Turning.
Elizabeth drew a shallow breath—no more than a thread of air—but it was breath.
Darcy stilled.
He did not look at Harrowe. He did not look at the crowd. He did not look at his aunt, though he felt her stare burn like frost upon his back.
He pressed harder.
The thorn rose along his wrist as though following a path it had long marked but not yet claimed.
It climbed the span of his forearm, barbs pricking through cloth and skin alike.
Pain shot through him—bright, precise—but beneath it ran something else.
Recognition. The same answering he had felt in the hollow.
The same terrible attention that had darkened the fields.
The vine at Elizabeth’s throat loosened another fraction. She sagged forward, coughing against his shoulder.
Behind them, Lady Catherine made a sound that was neither outrage nor triumph but something nearer to disbelief.
“No,” she said, and this time the word faltered. “No—this is not—”
Darcy gathered Elizabeth closer with one arm while the other remained fixed against the living coil. He could feel the root of it beneath the soil, a pull downward and inward, as though the land itself had fastened its grasp and waited.
He understood then—not by reason, not by Harrowe’s arguments, not by his aunt’s threats—but by the simple alteration of breath beneath his hand.
The thorn did not yield to strength. It yielded to inheritance.
He released her completely and shifted his hold from her wrist to the base of the rising stem and drew it toward himself. The movement was small. Deliberate.
The vine followed.
It unwound completely from Elizabeth’s throat as silk unwinds from a spool, sliding upward and outward and onto him. It circled his arm. His chest. His shoulder. Each coil tightened with quiet inevitability, barbs sinking through wool, through linen, into skin.
Elizabeth fell completely free of its highest hold and gasped, drawing air in a broken rush.
“Darcy—no!”
The thorn climbed his collar. Wrapped once about his throat.
And held.
Darcy fell rigid before her, his eyes still locked on her face, though the rest of his body was no longer wholly his own.
Vines coiled across his chest, across his shoulders, binding him with a dreadful sort of power.
A longer spear of hawthorn had driven clean through the fabric at his side and pinned him to the ground as surely as if the earth itself had claimed him.
“Darcy!” Her voice broke upon his name.
Blood traced dark lines down his wrist and pooled on the ground where the barbs had pierced him. Another thorn pressed cruelly beneath his jaw, drawing a thin red thread that slid toward his collar.
She tore at the vines with bare hands. The barbs bit her palms; silk and skin gave alike. “Release him! Take me—take me back! Do not—do not touch him!”
The thorns only tightened.
His breath shortened. She leaned in to caress his brow and felt it against her cheek—shallow, strangled.
She reached for his hand, but could not pull it free.
There was only the crook of one finger, catching hers.
Then it trembled once and then stilled in a way that frightened her more than any convulsion could have done.
“Elizabeth.” He spoke with effort. The sound was low, scarcely carried beyond her ear.
She lifted her face to his. His eyes were clear. There was pain in them, yes, and effort, but not terror. Not regret.
“I chose this,” he said. He coughed, and blood dribbled at the edge of his lips. “This is the answer.”
“No,” she whispered, shaking her head violently. “No, you do not know that—Darcy, please—”
“I do.” His fingers pressed once against hers, deliberate, though the thorns had nearly encased his arms. “Do not grieve it.”
The vine at his throat tightened again.
She saw the exact instant the struggle in his body ceased to be resistance and became surrender. His gaze did not leave hers. Not even as the breath failed in him. Not even as the strength left his hand.
His eyes went vacant.
“No!” she cried.
The world continued in dreadful fragments. Lady Catherine’s voice, sharp and breaking, cried out behind them. “You see what she has wrought! That false woman, that pretender has killed him! You see—”
Harrowe’s answering roar drowned her out. “Stand back from her!”
Somewhere, a horse shrieked again. A groom sobbed. The carriage creaked.
Elizabeth heard none of it in any coherent sense. She felt only the slowing beneath her palm.
She had pressed her hand to his neck, to the place where the thorn had cut him and where his pulse had beaten so fiercely moments before.
It faltered.
It shallowed.
It ceased.
The silence that followed was not quiet. It was absence.
Her own breath tore from her in a sound she did not recognise as her own. She fell to her knees in the mud, heedless of the rips in her gown, heedless of the blood upon her hands.
“No!” she cried, though there was no one left to bargain with. “No—no—”
And at once, without flourish, without spectacle, the thorn withdrew.
It did not recoil in violence. It did not lash or scatter.
It slackened. The coils loosened from his arms. The spear that had pinned him dissolved as though it had never been more than a shadow cast upon the earth.
The barbs that had pierced flesh shrank to green threads, and then there was nothing left of them at all but a faint ashen circle on the earth.
The soil stilled.
The fissure ceased its creeping.
Behind her, the carriage settled back upon level ground with a dull, final thud. The horses, still trembling, lowered their heads and looked nervously to their handlers.
Elizabeth scarcely marked it. She reached for him, for now she could.
She gathered his head into her lap, cradling him as though he were already borne to burial. His skin was pale beneath the streaks of blood. The wound at his throat was real—terribly real—though no thorn remained to explain it.
“Darcy,” she whispered, bending over him. “Darcy, do not leave me!”
Her tears fell freely now, ungoverned, striking his face and the earth beneath him alike. She pressed her mouth to his brow, to the already cooling skin at his temple, heedless of who watched.
“I did not wish you to choose it,” she sobbed. “I did not wish you to die for me!”
Around them, chaos struggled to resume its shape. Lady Catherine’s voice rose again in horrified denunciation. Harrowe’s broad frame barred her approach. Villagers muttered in tones that had lost their certainty.
Elizabeth felt only a hand, cool and trembling, come to rest upon her shoulder.
She lifted her head to find Anne de Bourgh standing beside her.
The girl’s pale composure had been stripped away. Tears tracked unheeded down her cheeks. She did not look at her mother. She did not look at the crowd.
She looked at Darcy.
Then at Elizabeth.
Without a word, she sank down beside her and wrapped her arms about her in a gesture so simple and so human that Elizabeth nearly broke anew beneath it.
Behind them, Lady Catherine protested furiously as Harrowe and two shaken grooms drew her back from the road, toward the carriage that had nearly sunk into the black river only moments ago.
Anne held her tightly. “I am sorry,” she said at last, her voice low and steady despite the tremor in her frame. “My cousin was a good man. He did not fail for lack of duty or will.”
Elizabeth shook her head, choking on her own grief. “He did not act from duty,” she managed. “Not from lineage. Not from—” Her voice failed.
Anne’s brow knit faintly. “From what, then?”
Elizabeth bent again over the still face in her lap. She pressed her lips to his cheek, to the place just below his ear where his pulse had once beaten warm and certain.