Tales from the Hinterland

by Melissa Albert

  “There,” she breathed, squeezing her mother’s hand. “Right there. Do you see him?”

  Her mother was silent a moment, peering where her daughter pointed. Then she turned away.

  “There’s nothing there. Come, you’ll make yourself snowblind.”

  Ilsa did not follow her mother inside. Pulling her cloak more tightly around herself, she walked out to meet the figure in the snow.

  He did not move as she approached. When she was still many yards distant, he held up a hand that stayed her where she stood.

  “You killed my brother,” she said. And though he was far away, she heard Death’s voice as if he were right beside her.

  “It is my nature to do so.”

  She’d hoped he might deny it. “He is dead then,” she whispered. “How did it happen?”

  His reply held no remorse, no pity. “Your brother was beguiled. After many hours wandering lost, the snow became alive to him. It broke apart into bright colors before him, and he became convinced he’d been delivered into a summer country. He took his clothes off and he froze.”

  Though Ilsa could not move to approach him, she could tighten her hand around her knife. “Come closer,” she said. “I wish to say more to you.”

  “Do you think I can be killed? Do you think yourself the match of me?” There was curiosity in his voice, and a rough kind of wonder. It filled Ilsa’s head like the buzz of honeybees. She closed her eyes.

  “Do not court me,” Death murmured from right beside her. She kept her eyes closed, knowing his nearness was an illusion. “Even I might yet be tempted. Do not court me before your time.”

  When she opened her eyes he was gone. She stood in the snow until her tears froze on her cheeks and she could no longer feel the cold, and still she did not turn toward home. What could she have to fear, when Death himself had left her alone in the storm?

  * * *

  Once Ilsa’s mother had a husband and seven children. Now she was a widow with four. It was not so unusual in their village, where every family lived in Death’s shadow.

  Then one of her sons took his own life. Ilsa went to bed and he was living, she woke up and he was dead. She shook with rage at the cravenness of Death, who’d crept in and out when she was sleeping.

  Three children left, and now the villagers shook their heads.

  On a stinging autumn day one of Ilsa’s brothers put his work aside and walked into the woods, where he scaled a tree to sit in its very crown, swaying with the breezes and laughing at Ilsa when she called to him. The wind kicked up and shook him to earth, and he died when he hit the ground. It happened so fast Death might almost have taken him in midair.

  Two children now, and it hardened from rumor to understanding that the family was cursed. After that even the poor society of the other villagers was denied to them. Ilsa did not care—not yet. She was intent on meeting him again, that coward Death.

  Her last brother began to weaken. Not ill but grieving, staring for hours at the wall. He was afflicted with no sickness they could see; it must be his heart that had broken. When it became clear he’d die of it, Ilsa set her traps. Death was drawn to heartwood, it was said, so she whittled a piece of it into a hilt. Copper coins were used to weigh down the eyes of the dead; she smelted an old copper lamp into a new blade. She thought to draw Death toward her, and away from her brother.

  What she would do when she caught him, she did not know. Sometimes the memory of his slow and ancient voice arrested her, and she fell into shameful daydreams. Sometimes rage at all he’d taken made her tongue and fingertips feel as sharp as her knife, and she believed herself capable of doing the impossible: of killing Death himself.

  Ilsa’s last brother slipped from her fingers and into Death’s one very early morning. She’d left the room to fetch water. When she returned, she knew by the softness of his mouth that he was gone. The hearth was swept and the bedclothes straightened, as if Death had stayed a moment to tend to her work when his was done.

  Ilsa prepared the body for burial, but without brothers to help her, the ground was too cold to dig. She laid her mother’s last son over a pyre, and gathered bone pieces from the ashes to bury in spring. For days afterward, the scent of his burning clung to her hair.

  * * *

  Ilsa thought Death would come for her next, but he didn’t. In a village whose houses broke their backs around growing families, too many mouths to feed behind every door, Ilsa was an only child, she and her mother two women alone. For that, they were punished.

  The girl made a deal with Death to spare her, the villagers said. She is his lover, his handmaiden, his helpmeet. Even if she wasn’t, the more pragmatic among them decided, she was at the very least a girl made for bad luck. Anyone could see it. And the village turned its backs.

  Now Ilsa knew true loneliness. She felt too hollow to long for anything; revenge seemed as far from her grip as gladness. But she was not dead yet, and her heart not quite so hard as she wished it. The time came when longings returned to her. For company, for love. To speak to someone who wasn’t her mother, whose mind now dwelled with the dead.

  The village had as good as exiled Ilsa, but beauty speaks louder than banishment. She was seventeen when a young man came upon her daydreaming beneath a tree. She’d known him once, they’d played together as children. He hesitated a moment, then sat beside her.

  Though they didn’t speak much at first, he came back. By wordless agreement they met beneath the tree day after day. Soon Ilsa found herself taking joy in talking again, to someone whose own joy was mirrored back. The young man’s name was Thom, and while she did not love him yet, she grew to love herself through his eyes.

  Ilsa might have been content to keep Thom a secret, but after a year of clandestine meetings he asked her to marry him. He held her hand and looked at her tenderly, without seeing the battle within her. She did not wish to lose him; she did not wish to expose them both to judgment. She sensed, too, that she would always hold herself back from him, even if they were wed. There was a piece of her, buried deep as heartwood, that had already been claimed.

  But she was so weary of being lonesome, so finished with silence. Beneath the tree that had shaded all their happy hours, she said yes.

  * * *

  That night Ilsa lay sleepless, her mind conjuring visions of married life from the dark. A big bed, a crackling hearth, a wooden cradle. The image of the cradle kept slipping away, warping into the shape of a coffin.

  She sat up, sensing someone else with her in the dark. Not her mother, who slept in the next room, dreams weighed down with feverfew. The window was a gray mouth, the shadows beside it deeper than they’d been. A figure lingered inside them, the sight of whom made Ilsa’s body melt like wax and spark like flame.

  Are you here for me? She almost said it. Then the figure gave a sigh, soft as fur and touched with regret. The shadows shifted and lightened. She was alone again.

  And Ilsa knew who Death had come for.

  She ran to Thom’s house in bare feet. She’d dusted her soles with her brother’s ashes to remind Death of what he’d already taken. In her hand she held the fresh-killed body of a songbird Thom had given her. She wanted Death to scent her coming on the air. In her other hand she held her copper knife.

  Thom’s mother stood in their doorway holding a hatchet. She spat when she saw Ilsa.

  “Get away from here,” she said.

  “A hatchet won’t stop Death,” Ilsa told her. “But I will. Let me in.”

  The woman looked her over, tangled hair and dirty feet and bird’s blood dripping from her fingers. “It’s true, then. You made a deal with Death.”

  “Death makes no deals, but he’s made an enemy of me. Let me in.”

  Thom’s mother let the hatchet fall from her shoulder. She stepped aside to let Ilsa pass.

  The house was quiet. Death had already come for Thom’s father, and marriage for his sisters. Thom lay in the center of the house’s one room, hands full of earth to bi
nd him. Bowls of moonlight on water lay at his head and feet to confuse Death. Ilsa knew he would melt through these snares like wet sugar.

  She brushed the earth from Thom’s hands with the hem of her skirt. She drank the moon-washed water. She dropped the songbird to the ground and crushed its bones with her ash-dusted foot.

  When Death slipped in, he was smiling.

  Ilsa thought she’d remembered his face, but she was wrong.

  There were the pale eyes, the dark skin, the hair that wasn’t any color she could place. The smile slow-growing and teeth hooked on lip and the broad hands almost lost in the unlit spaces of the cottage. But she’d forgotten the quickness in him, the sense of distance and open skies and hot sun and wide water, places she could only fathom the edges of. She forgot all the words she meant to say. Others took their place.

  “Are you taking him because I love him?”

  Death considered her. “You do not love him.”

  Ilsa’s heart hadn’t worked properly before. It learned only in that moment to beat. “Are you taking him because you love me?”

  “I’m taking him because it is his time.”

  Her fingers squeezed and she remembered the knife in her hand. “I wish to kill you,” she whispered. “For what you’ve done to me.”

  “Dying is the one journey I cannot take.” Death held out a hand. “Now, girl who sees too much. Do you wish to know what it is I do, what it is I am? Take my hand, Ilsa, and stay a night with me.”

  She dropped her knife. Death’s palm was hot and dry as dust, and when she touched him she could see a blood-bright door in the wall of Thom’s cottage, where before there had been nothing.

  “Open it,” Death told her, and she did.

  On the other side was a hallway of cool white stone. Ilsa forgot all she left behind the moment her cracked feet crossed over. She followed Death through passages filled with the sound of rushing water, up pillared stairs, to a room where a man lay on a black-draped bed, a crown in his wasted fingers. He was young, his eyes were bloodshot, and he was alone.

  “Kings cannot escape me,” Death said, and finally Ilsa saw what he did when he came to the dying. With long fingers he sieved the life from the king’s mouth. It took the form of a steady blue flame, which Death tucked into the canteen that hung around his neck. He took Ilsa’s hand again, and together they leapt through the window behind the king’s bed.

  They landed light as leaves in a night garden that smelled of lavender. An old woman lay among the flowers, an arm curled over her chest. The life Death pulled through her teeth was like a lock of bronze hair.

  “The innocent cannot hide from me.” There was a dark joy in his voice.

  At the end of the garden was a pond. Ilsa followed Death into its waters. It swallowed them both, then spat them out onto the shore of a green island, lapped at by the Hinterland Sea.

  A blue-eyed woman in traveling clothes stood at their arrival, drawing her sword. Death twitched his fingers like he was coaxing a cat, and the woman’s life fled her throat. He seemed to marvel at it—a red wisp, like a twist of blown glass—before tucking it into his canteen.

  “Those who hide cannot evade me,” Death whispered, his breath crackling like cremation fire.

  All night he led Ilsa from place to place, stealing the life from men who cowered and women who wept, children who watched him through sickness’s fog, and babies whose life-lights looked like glints of sun on water. Ilsa saw cobbled roads and the blood-dark sea. She saw valleys and clifftops. She saw palaces of ice and brick and marble and villages like her own, penned in by the trees. She walked with Death into a seaside cottage where a laboring woman grew pale, and through a throne room slick with the blood of a princess’s fallen suitors. The hours passed and his head hung ever lower with the weight of his canteen.

  When the sun threw its first light over Death’s hands, he drew them back. He stood beside Ilsa in a cottage kitchen, where a man whose life was the color of a wren’s feather lay dead over a soup pot. There was a door in the wall, a bloodred door Ilsa remembered walking through a lifetime ago.

  She threw herself in front of it. “You cannot send me back.”

  Her night with Death had changed her, breath by breath. She couldn’t go back to what she’d been. But the door turned to red smoke and he pushed her through it, back into the close air of Thom’s cottage.

  “I must,” Death said. “But I’ll give you a gift. For being my companion for a night, and in penance for all I’ve taken from you, you may keep this man’s life. Do not fear, Ilsa. I will seek neither you nor him for many years.”

  Then he was gone, taking with him the scent of salt and wind, and Ilsa was alone.

  Not quite alone. Behind her, Thom stirred. Around her, the village breathed, full of bodies that held a secret just behind the lips: a twist of colored light, faded or radiant as starshine, ready to be plucked by Death’s fingers and tucked into his canteen.

  Thom called her name, his voice warm with love. The room stank of broken fever. Ilsa turned until he could see her face outlined in the early light. When he spoke her name again it was a question, one she answered by walking from the cottage on dirty feet, caked with the mud, salt, and sand of the whole of the Hinterland.

  * * *

  After that night, the villagers changed their minds about Ilsa. Miracle worker, they called her. Weeks passed, then months, and Death did not return to the village. While Thom stayed away, the rest drew nearer. Death’s destroyer, they said, and held her in reverence.

  They could not know the new secret she held close: that she could see what curled behind their teeth when they spoke or laughed or whispered. Her night with Death had taught her how to spy the little lights the living carried in their mouths, and she could not unlearn the trick. She could read in the dull green flame that lapped between a woman’s molars how she would live and how she would die. She could fathom a lifetime of lies and secrets in the snowy wisp circling a child’s tongue. Between her own mother’s lips she saw a life that had shriveled like a tree’s last leaf, and must be taken soon. The only life she could not make out was her own.

  This was Death’s true gift. Not Thom’s life, but Ilsa’s new vision, which carried with it a promise of madness. The little flames of the villagers’ lives shimmered and coaxed, they showed themselves like red fruit. She understood Death better now. How could he deny himself such baubles?

  But Ilsa would deny herself. She would not look, she would not see. Death couldn’t stay clear of her forever. And while awaiting his return, and the reckoning that must come between them, she would pretend her life had not changed.

  And so she did, until the day she looked up from trading whittled buttons for butter and found a baby watching her over its mother’s shoulder. Its life was a tendril of soft metal singing over its gums. Ilsa knew exactly how it would feel on her fingertips if she took it, how it would rest in her palm.

  In a cold haze she reached for it, fingers primed to pluck it free.

  The child screamed and the mother turned, a knife already in her hand. She slashed at Ilsa’s fingers, and Ilsa ran.

  Her fury mounted as she went. Death had remade her. Did he truly think he would not answer for what she had become? She packed a blanket, her knife, and a waterskin, and left the village that had been her prison and her home. The whole wide world lay ahead of her, and Death hid somewhere in it. If he refused to return to her, she would go to him.

  When darkness fell, Ilsa slept in her cloak by the side of the road. She would’ve died before morning if a twig hadn’t cracked beneath the boot of the man leaning over her, his intentions clear in the jaundiced throb of his life-light. She opened her eyes and went for it without thought. It was a dull yellow over his tongue and came away easily in her fingers. The man’s eyes went wide and stayed that way as he slumped over her in the leaves.

  The light was heavy. She rolled it from hand to hand, remembering how Death had carried all the Hinterland’s lost lives in h
is canteen. Into her drained waterskin she tipped the little light. Then she sat awake through the long night, knowing Death must come to claim it.

  He never did. Was there no end to his cowardice? When the sun rose, she rolled up her blanket and kept walking. As she walked, she planned. Once she sought to make herself a lure for Death, and though he came, he did not stay. Now she would make herself something he could not ignore: a rival.

  At first Ilsa tried to make sure they deserved it. She found low men who waited behind taverns with knives. Women who whipped their dogs and their children, merchants fat on coins who stepped on the backs of the lean to get more of them. The skin she carried around her neck grew heavy with lives, but never heavy enough to tempt Death.

  She started to slip. She killed a man for speaking an unkind word to his wife, waiting until he slept to coax free the little light, then failing to resist the faint blue beat of his wife’s. She wouldn’t take the lives of children, she told herself, until she saw one with a dirty face that made her think of her youngest brother. The sight filled her with a hot, hard pain; in anger she peeled his light away.

  If they’d lived, her brothers wouldn’t have recognized her in her long black coat, her knuckles scabbed and her hair streaked with clay-white strands. Her own life was still the only one she couldn’t see. If she could’ve she’d know it had been the color of sun through alder leaves once. Now it was the color of dirt dried hard on a dead man’s boots.

  Ilsa couldn’t sleep the night she killed the boy who looked like her brother. Finally she drifted off with her back against the wall of a tavern. When she woke a man stood above her.

  “No, no, no,” he said, when she tensed to rise. “I’ve been watching you. I know what you can do, and I know why you do it. There’s more I can give you than another bit of bait for your trap.”

  Ilsa looked him over, searching for his life-light, but his face was a scooped-out shell. She saw nothing in it. Ilsa hadn’t been frightened in a long time. Not since she’d made herself the thing that was feared.