43. Chapter 43
In the morning, I found myself pillowed on both sides by Livvy’s parents, the twins attached to my legs, their voices crowding all around me in the tiny parlor.
It made me start crying all over again. I’d thought surely they must have believed what the rest of the town thought, that I was evil, a murderer—
“Well of course we didn’t think that.” Margaret pulled back to look at me, my chin caught in her hand.
“All these years you’ve lived with us. We would have known if you were evil.
” She said evil as if it were a silly fairytale word.
“Livvy told us what happened. I wish you would have told us. We could have helped.”
They couldn’t have, but I apologized anyway, dividing a look between all of their faces. “How harshly were you questioned? I half-thought I’d return to find the lot of you locked up.”
The cottage, in its grim, drafty, poorly-lit state, had never looked so inviting.
I blessed every crack and chip, every damn gray stone.
My heart floundered over the most innocuous details; the ragged run in the curtains covering the kitchen window, the table that always rocked precariously when we stacked even a meager dinner upon it.
Years of privation and poverty, no meat, lucky to even have bread, tucking children with ill-satisfied bellies into chilly beds, but it was home and it was mine, ours, all of us here—or almost all of us here.
Livvy had stepped out a few minutes earlier.
“We played dumb.” Robert tucked my hair behind my ears. “Easy enough to do, we didn’t know anything. Livvy only told us afterward.”
Livvy had slipped out the back door of the cottage at dawn to check the church for Serich. If he’d returned last night, the news hadn’t made its rounds through Monde’s End by the time darkness had fallen and the villagers had barred their doors, sealed their ears.
And when the back door burst open, I expected to find Serich right behind her, but only Livvy stood there, stamping off her feet, curls aquiver about her face.
I felt all the blood slither out of me. She was alone. Serich wasn’t home yet, he hadn’t made it back—
“He’s there.” She shut the door behind herself, catching sight of my face. “He’s there, he got in as the sun was setting. He’s fine, he’s coming to see you as soon as he can.”
The knot in my stomach loosened. I knelt to kiss the foreheads of both children, their grasping, sleep-warmed little fingers clutching at me. They smelled like bedsheets and hair oil and joy and I nearly knocked their heads together as I hugged them against my chest.
I was still holding them close when three smart raps pounded against the front door. They did not sound like friendly raps, and the weight of the eyes of Livvy and her family were so heavy I felt pressed against the floor.
Loud voices, muffled behind the door. Now urgent knocking that soon swelled into pounding. My name being spat like a curse.
A part of me wished I could run. I suppose I could have, though Riquin’s blood had long since drained away and I had no more Remy to lend strength to my legs. I couldn’t have made it far, couldn’t have outrun the noose they were probably about to loop around my neck.
So I stood, my heart zinging around my ribcage. “Say I threatened you,” I told my best friend and her family. “If they ask why you let me in, say I forced myself inside, you were frightened, you couldn’t think what to do.”
I allowed myself a moment to gather my wits, take a breath.
And then I opened the front door to a brand-new gray day and a rapidly-growing mob.
Serich and a collared, berobed Father Hull, along with what looked like the entire village watch.
People out in the lane gaped at me, slack-jawed and glazed with early morning stupors.
“Des.” Serich tried to take a step toward me, but Father Hull held him back. I hardly noticed.
A trunk sat before the front door, blocking me from taking a step outside to meet the mob. There was a portentous shiver haunting it. I stared dumbly for a moment—why was it there? what even was it?—before I knelt to pop the clasps.
The hinges squealed as I eased open the lid. A quick hiss of breath clotted at the back of my throat. Time didn’t move onto the next moment like it was meant to, at least until someone started shouting about having a warrant for my arrest.
“Nobody’s arresting me.” I looked up at the crowd, a piece of parchment clutched in my clammy palm. “I want to see Lord Fletcher.”
“Aye, you will,” another voice piped up.
“Des, just come quietly.” Serich’s amber eyes were imploring.
I supposed I shouldn’t have been angry at him for telling the villagers—for he had told them, I knew it in my gut; he’d ratted me out the moment Livvy had left him, hadn’t even thought me worth five minutes of private conversation—yet I was anyway. “We can sort this out, I know we can.”
“I want to see Lord Fletcher,” I repeated, and, with a massive effort, pushed over the trunk.
A cascade of coins spilled out, washing over the feet of Father Hull and Serich and the closest of the village watch crowding the front door.
Coins collected from the floor of Hell’s antechamber, I was willing to stake my life on it.
I could feel the moans of the damned in my body, thrumming my bones like the strings of a fiddle, even as I stood there three hundred miles and an earthly plane away.
The boundary between both worlds had never felt so flimsy.
Was this Remy’s handwriting? It didn’t look like it had in the logs he’d kept on his desk, but I could only read the words because of him.
Des, was all it read on one side; A bargain is a bargain on the other.
Did this mean he wasn’t dead, that he would come find me when he could? He’d been right here when I was just inside. Why hadn’t he tried to see me?
Father Hull backed away from the coins as if they were contagious. “Lord Fletcher will see you when he’s able,” he said, in a conciliatory sort of voice I supposed was meant to pacify me. “For now, I need you to come with me.”
I mustered the calmest tone I could, the most angelic smile of which I was capable. “You’re not arresting me. Not when I’ve come home bearing such a massive gift for the village.” Not when I had so much leverage with which to bargain my freedom. “Bring him to me. I’ll wait.”