by Jane M. R.
They help me sit up as if I no longer have a back bone. Maybe I don’t. I’ve never seen it. My limbs are stiff, sluggish.
They half carry me down the stairs to my bath. Maybe I do need the help to walk. I don’t feel the water’s chill. I barely notice the new scent of patchouli.
I’m helped out of the tub. Dried. Helped up the stairs. Sat at my vanity. I am a mannequin, like the ones in Corrana’s dress shop. Frozen. Lifeless. Dead.
My hair is pulled and wrapped and heated and curled all around my head.
“Dearie, no amount of makeup will put a smile on your face. That you have to do yourself.” Like yesterday didn’t happen. Like my mother got over the fact I might be spelled in favor of wedding off her only daughter. Didn’t even take the time to understand my hurt, to even try to believe what happened to me. I am a puppet with everyone else pulling the strings. The smile is too heavy. I can’t see what tomorrow will be like. Or the next day. I can’t see into the next ten years.
He told me the Faewraith would come. I was going to escape into his castle for safety. And then what? Wander the hills alone, hunting my food, checking in on this side of the mountain every once in a while to see if the Faewraith had left, that the Fae had housed dragons here instead?
What to do now? I don’t know. I’ll have to figure it out as I go, how to fill this aching hole. I insisted I visit him one last time. Didn’t even care to notice if people were hiding in the canyon to spy my entry and exit so they could know the way to enter the Fae Gate. I killed him. Because I didn’t want the hurt of never being able to see him again.
I’m dressed. I don’t look at my reflection though my mother awes and gushes at me.
“See you downstairs!” she sings, and then leaves.
Varseena left the morning paper she had been reading while my mother layered me in petticoats. Of course the front page was blazed with the excitement of two nights ago. Someone had penned their rendition of the wizard in his long blue coat, standing with his shoulder turned away.
FIRST SEEN AT THE WHAERIN ANNIVERSARY BALL said a snippet below the drawing. SEEN AGAIN AT CHURCH… BRINELLA FRONDAREN SPELLED…
I tear the picture out, stuffing it in the pocket of my heavy dress. Only time will tell if it will eventually bring relief or more pain.
I look at my room. One last time. I’m going to my new home now. It’s already outside. Waiting for me in a coach.
I open drawers for anything to take with me right now. Everything else will come later. But I had packed yesterday night for essentially the same purpose and everything is still in Durain’s bag by the door.
I open the bag. Gathering things to live in a castle is different than taking them because I’m married and moving away. I dump the contents on the vanity, everything I had kept secret in my box. The hair brush. I will keep it. It is the key to a time I once knew. The white container, too.
I hold the white metal, aching that I will never know what it holds inside because I never asked Zadicayn. Some hopeful part of me said I’d have him around forever. I stare at it, trying to pull its secrets out with my eyes. Durain gave it to me because it has the map marked on it that started me on my path of emotional destruction. But what is it? Why this? Why not a piece of paper with X’s and triangles and random lines?
I turn it in my hands soft from patchouli oil, eyeing the map which started this mess, trying to place myself back to that day. I can’t even hate Aklen for Zadicayn’s death. Really, that is what kept the wizard alive after all the others had been killed. I can’t even hate the priest for killing Zadicayn but he was only acting out of compassion for his congregation to keep them free from evil. He was trying to kill the source of evil. Not the human.
So I can’t hate anything. And that makes the hurt worse when there is no one to blame.
I turn the white cube around. With the black script along the long side it reminds me of the Fae Arch and the pads we stood on to relocate throughout the Fae Realm.
“Fae Language,” became Zadicayn’s answer to my question about the black script.
I stare harder at it, summoning every will in me to force me to read the spiraling black lace as if I could just know what was inside this container if I could only decipher it.
It’s going to bother me until I figure it out.
I stare hard at it for a long time. It came from the Fae Realm, clearly. Why was it in Durain’s possession? How did he get it?
A knock on my door. “Brinella?”
“One more minute!” I snap. I don’t care. I need to know this. I don’t have anything else in my life figured out right now, but I’m going to figure out this.
Is this even metal? I slid it across my cheek, over the soft skin under my nose. It’s cold like metal, but enough spongy kind of feel forces me to accept that maybe it’s not metal. But it’s not wood, either.
I shake it. That gentle ticking noise declares there is something inside.
I turn it around in my hands. I stop when I spy a black fingerprint on the face of one of the two square sides. That was not there before. I know. I had inspected this thing so thoroughly before that I found the near-discernable map on the long side.
Something is off with the fingerprint. There appears to be some marring, like a scar.
Zadicayn had a scar on his finger. Now I’m trying to remember the conversation to show me how I know this.
“What happened to your finger?” The first night we visited Corden at his camp. I saw it when Zadicayn put fire and ice one both ends of his stick.
“The Fae Wood box I telleth ye about?” Fae Wood? Is that what this strange white material is? Would make sense, since there is no doubt it came from the Fae Realm. So is this his fingerprint? Is this his container somehow, like the book Durain also had in his possession?
“The Fae cuteth my finger, so this fingerprint shall appear upon the box at my death. Tis how the box opens –”
Hell and all its demons.
It’s Zadicayn’s Life Blood.
CHAPTER SIXTY
BRINELLA
Brick Face at the door does not stop me. He likely thinks his job concluded at sunrise.
My wedding dress whirls like an ocean wave around the corner and I start down the stairs. My father, mother, and unfamiliar people are gathered in the foyer. My father smiles at me like yesterday never happened. Everyone else is oohing and aweing and I catch snippets of how beautiful I am, how elegant my dress is. My mother begins clapping which starts everyone else going.
I run right through them.
I kick off my high heels, running barefoot to the stables.
“Brine!” my father shouts but my name is loaded with more exhaustion and less of the vehemence of which he used last night.
I tuck the white rectangle under my corset, nestling it against my skin. I fling open the first stall door I come too. The horse jumps in alarm but exits when beckoned. I climb the stall wall to mount it bareback. Pressing heels into his flanks, the horse starts forward.
My father is halfway to the stables. He stops with a hopeless shrug as I exit. Jaicom is with him, both watching silently on as I gallop down the road.
I could be crazy. Thinking I can bring him back to life. After all, he lied about the Faewraith. Maybe he was wrong about this, too.
I keep the horse at a hard sprint, sunlight glaring, the horse heaving as its muscles sway beneath me. I dare not let myself hope. It would ruin me completely, like lifting me just high enough to kill me when I drop again.
We reach the church yard. I yank back on the mane. The horse slows with hesitation, not accustomed to being ridden without reins. I slide off, landing barefoot, my voluminous dress padding most of my fall. I run inside the parish, holding the dress scandalously above my knees.
There is no one praying today at this hour. My strained anxiety echoes freely in the open space where the priest tries to keep his people righteous. I open the undercroft door, my billowing dress nearly touching both sides of the narrow
stairwell descending down. I open the door at the bottom and go inside.
I’m not prepared to see his body so still and empty on the altar before me, his blue coat with the tall collar belted closed at the waist, black boots shined to reflect the light shed from the doorway I stand in.
I stop abruptly, trying not to drown in the cold wave of anguish splashing on my feet, beckoning me to just fall into it. If this doesn’t work, I won’t have the strength to leave again.
I creep forward, arms wrapped around me as if to hold my broken pieces together. I stop beside the altar. His fingers are laced together on his still chest, his broken amulet, drained of blood looks like clear glass now, resting just below his hands.
I’ll fall apart if I look at his face. I’ll fall apart now if I move. I feel like I’m the dead one with rigor mortis in my limbs.
I can’t do this. I can’t come down here, witness him dead, and see this fail. Seeing him is hard enough. Seeing my stupid idea fail will slay me.
I have to do this.
I dig the white box out of my dress and hold it in sweaty hands detached from me.
The Fae cuteth my finger, so this fingerprint shall appear upon the box at my death. Tis how the box opens.
His finger. The one with the scar. It’s on his right hand.
Ice shoots under my skin, like needles. I can’t do this. I can’t touch him, feel the lifelessness, the quiet heat beat like my own anguish.
I have to do this.
Shaky breath does not sustain me, so I have to inhale again and hold it while hot flesh brushes over cold life. I grit my teeth against the tears, sliding my fingers under his. I press his scarred fingertip against the black fingerprint on the white rectangle.
A tiny snick heralds a change to the container. I flinch at my empowering hope. I rest his hand back on his chest, dumping the tube on its side. A glass vial tips into my hand. Filled with blood.
Frantic, heart racing hard enough to choke me, I pop the small cork but stop. How do I use it?
I recall back to our conversation. He said that the blood would be applied to the wound that killed the wizard. But the amulet killed him. Put it on the amulet?
Sending a prayer with it, I watch the drops splatter one by one into the broken gem until the vial is empty.
I’m shaking so badly when I’m done I have to sit on the floor or collapse, resting my back against the altar. I’ll wait. Wait forever to see if it works. Will wait until someone comes and gets me, kicking and screaming out of here.
Nothing happens. I can’t be certain if it is seconds or minutes or an hour. But with this nothingness creeps in a black wave, colder and harder than before. It is going to consume me, steal my voice, steal my eye sight, and eventually steal my life.
It eats into my bones, an acid liquefying the marrow of my strength –
“Ye smell better with rosemary.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
ZADICAYN
Patchouli floods my waking senses. And though I am certain it is because my stomach is filled with the stagnant acid of my last meal, I still roll over and vomit on the floor.
Frantic hands touch me, pressing needles of sensation into skin still warming up but I can’t tell the hands to stop hurting me because I’m dry heaving. Shouting, too, but my ears are numb and a filmy haze won’t let me see clearly yet.
“Hold on,” I manage to gag out with my cough, trying to push her away so she won’t see the awful mess I made on the floor. “Hold on…”
Like a numb limb fed with blood again, the sensation begins at the crown of my head, and like a wave sears down my body in a million pin-pricks of fire; blood vessels firing back to life, every single nerve ending sparking into action.
I’m on fire. I thrash and kick with stiff legs but I can’t get the fire put out. I’m going to pass out. And scream. I do neither because I bit my arm to keep me awake and muffle any sound that fights out of a heart ramming against my rib cage as if I’m being kicked from the inside by a horse.
Flames of pain fork up both arms and legs, filling my center with a liquid pool of hot agony.
I bit my arm harder but the words still escape me. “I just want to die!”
“You can do this!” I hear Brine shout. “You are strong. Listen to my voice. Keep breathing!”
Amid my agony which is starting to ebb my whole body into a throbbing in time and beat with my bucking heart, I laugh.
“That tis… that tis the same thing ye said to me… when I almost went mad… after I left the vault.” I can feel her hands now. Not as two plates of pain but as anchors to hold me together through the blaze firing me back to life. Like they were when I almost went mad moments upon me leaving the vault. Saved both from a mental and physical death. By her. I will find a spell to live forever as long as I can keep her the entire time. My short glimpse of heaven while dead was agony compared to this single moment right now with her.
“You okay now?”
I take my first, real breath. Her perfume, my sweat, vomit, and musty church undercroft would have made me retch again except my stomach is empty.
My brain is spinning. “Rigor Mortis tis still in my legs.” And in other body parts I’m not going to mention. I’m breathing needles, both in and out. The pin pricks of fire have ebbed to finger-prods of chilling sweat. Now I’m shivering. “Ye found my life blood?”
“I had it all along. I just didn’t know it. I don’t want to talk about it right now.” She speaks so quietly I almost don’t hear her. She has backed away from my altar, holding herself tightly, looking like she’s going to combust any moment.
I rest back on my elbows, wondering how I must look to her laying on this altar like a sacrificial lamb. “Cometh here.”
She takes small steps. Barely looking at me. A moment ago she was holding onto me as if I was going to fly away. Now she looks hesitant to be in the same room. I can only imagine what she went through after I died, though I can take a guess by what I see on her face.
I spread my arm out. She comes close enough to where I can touch her, gathering her sweet folds into me. Once I’ve locked us into an embrace, she starts to cry, holding me with a tighter hold than what I’ve got on her. She finally relaxes, rolling her cheek against mine. I feel her face sliding over and I turn my head.
“Nay, Brine. If ye wert concerned over bad breath between two living people, just take a guess at what mine mighten be.”
She changes her mind to clinching me harder. Touch. And now I can finally decide that waiting in a vault for three hundred forty-two years for this girl was worth it, every moment of near insanity and all.
She keeps crying against my shirt. I let her.
“How long wast I dead?”
“Two days.”
She hasn’t reported on any destruction by the Faewraith yet so I believe she caught it just in time.
“I nary think one tis supposed to be dead that long before being brought back to life. That hurt.” It still does, as other odd corners of my body continue to bark in protest, having thought their job in life was done.
“I’m sorry.” This makes her whimper. I pat the back of her head.
“Nary be,” I whisper in her ear. “Twas worth it for thee.” I pause. Take a deep breath of her neck. “I loveth thee, Brinella Eldenshod.”
Well, now she’s really crying. It’s a good thing I’m still laying down because she would have tackled me to the floor had I not been. I have not failed to notice she is already in a wedding dress and I’m smart enough to realize it isn’t for me.
She starts to hiccup. I suppress a chuckle but I’m not successful. She hiccups again and this time she laughs.
“Help me sit.”
She does so, just as I hear a tremendous crash of glass through the doorway out of the undercroft left open. Fear rises in me as I listen. More shattering. And a distinct tinkling of glass.
She hears it to, pressing fingers to her mouth and looking at me.
I’ve been back for
ten minutes and I’m already tired of life’s troubles. “Ye wast close. The Faewraith beat ye to it.”
“You said they’d come in two days. It’s been more than that –”
“Thank the Fae they wert nary on time.” I stare at her lips, wanting to kiss them again because I had been brought back to life just to jump off a building to call a dragon to the Human Realm, and there is a very real chance the Fae would not respond to my request, given our last two discussions on the matter.
I won’t kiss her. I can taste my own breath. I need water. Badly.
I swing my legs off the altar, hopping to the floor. My knees are so stiff I think they have turned into willow branches. Brine comes around to help me, pulling my arm across her shoulders. I step forward, and then another, reminding the muscles how they are supposed to move.
Once I get the hang of it I let go of her. “Stay here. Ye be safe if ye close the door. I shall cometh back for ye.”
“You’re not going to jump off something high to call a dragon here, are you?” The terror and sadness in her eyes makes me almost decline leaving this room. But of course I know what will happen if I don’t.
“I shalt come back, safe and sound.” I hope. If I don’t, I won’t have to wait long for her to join me in death. A morbid thought that comforts me. I shuffle to the door and close it behind me, thinking for one horrid minute that a Faewraith will kill Brine while I’m away. I don’t know how badly she reacted to me dying, but I can guarantee mine will be double the agony if it’s the other way around.
I better hurry.
My knees and ankles protest going up the stairs, though they are warming up so by the top I’m able to accomplish a stiff jog across the chapel. Glass sprinkles the floor. I look up. The windows are busted. Likely the Faewraith relocated into the parish where they then made their escape. Screams outside erase any denial I might have still had.