Crimson Bound

by Rosamund Hodge

  In one flash, she saw Armand’s gray eyes, wide with panic. She couldn’t see Amélie, but she knew that she was somewhere in the room. There was still a chance that both of them could live, and she thought to the darkness inside her, Yes, yes, yes.

  Then nothing mattered, nothing besides the raw fury that she had been tricked, that this was the wrong vessel. This one still stank of human foolishness, but it was not human, and her lips drew back in a snarl of helpless rage.

  “Rachelle? Rachelle!” Someone was shaking her shoulders and screaming.

  She blinked open her eyes at the worthless traitor sacrifice—

  “In the name of Tyr and Zisa, let her go!”

  Her body shuddered. “Armand,” she gasped. She could feel his fingers digging into her shoulders, but the feeling wasn’t quite connected to her.

  She remembered sitting with Amélie in the darkness and talking about peace. Just a few brushstrokes, Amélie had said.

  “What did you do?” Armand demanded.

  Two steps. One word. A certain idiot abnegation, Erec had said, and it was easier than he had ever guessed.

  “Joyeuse,” she said. “The Bishop has it.”

  She saw Armand understand, saw him shatter with the knowledge.

  “Please,” she whispered, because the dark tide of the Devourer was pouring over her again, into her eyes, her nose, her mouth, drowning her and refashioning her, and she knew that he was trying to burn through her and absorb her so he could take another vessel. So he could rule.

  Armand looked like a broken window, desolate and razor-sharp. He stood—he shouted useless human words—and then he had the abomination, the blasphemous sword created to defy her. He was going to kill her when he should worship her, he was vile faithless ungrateful—

  She blinked, and she loved him again. Joyeuse was clinging to his hand, and his face was set in the trembling, absolute resolution that had held the Devourer back for six months.

  He had never been so beautiful. She had never loved him so much.

  There was fire and blood and battle all around them, but they were the only two people in the world.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and then the blade was between her ribs, and it didn’t hurt, but it burned like fire and ice, like the sun and the moon and the host of stars.

  And then there was night.

  She was in a forest.

  But it was not the Great Forest. That forest, as dark and terrible as it could be, was riotously alive. This was the forest of her dreams, and it was dead. Leafless trees stretched writhing, naked branches toward the sky. Dark red blood oozed from the cracks in their rough black bark, the only color in the bleak world. For the ground was covered in powdery white dust, while the sky was gray. Not the mottled, damp gray of overcast clouds, but a flat, featureless gray that no sun would ever burn away. The air itself was dry and dead; her breath rasped in her throat, and every breath stole away a little more of her strength.

  But she didn’t need to be strong now. Rachelle dropped to her knees. Black speckled her vision and it didn’t matter. She had been eaten by the Devourer and she had been killed with Joyeuse. She had, she hoped, killed him along with her. Was this lifeless world a last flickering dream before she fully died, or was it the beginning of her eternity?

  She started to fall forward and caught herself on her hands, sending up a wave of dust that made her cough and gag. It didn’t matter. She had done what she could, made what amends she could, and all the rest was beyond her.

  Almost all the amends she could. She’d never said the rosary that was to be her penance. She tried to form the words, but her mouth was too dry, her breath too short. Besides, penance was for those who had a hope of heaven, and she wasn’t at all sure that God could hear or find her in this place.

  But that was all right, wasn’t it? She had first talked to the forestborn—to Erec—because she wanted to save the world. She had known she was risking her soul, but she had gone ahead anyway, and she had gotten her wish. She might have repented, but she couldn’t quite regret.

  This was her home. This, her inheritance.

  She hardly felt it when she crumpled to the ground. Her vision was swiftly going dark. She thought of Armand and Amélie; she could take those memories, at least, into the darkness.

  There were worse endings.

  BUT IT IS NOT THE END.

  It is not the end because even death is not the end of fighting. I am dead, and I know.

  But even beyond death, there are endings, and mine is almost here. Now it lies to you, my daughter, my sister, my pride. Wake up. Finish my story.

  Wake.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  “Wake.”

  It was the voice that had spoken to her just now, telling her the story of Tyr and Zisa. She had been dreaming then, as she listened—she had thought she was dreaming—but now she heard the voice’s final words with her own ears.

  And Rachelle opened her eyes. Beside her knelt a girl her own age. Tangled dark hair fell about her round, bony face; in the center of her forehead was an eight-pointed red star. Her dress was made from fold after fold of black silk; it took Rachelle a moment to realize that her chest was slick with blood.

  Rachelle’s mouth was dry and stiff; when she tried to speak, she started coughing. Finally she managed to swallow, and said, “You’re Zisa.”

  “Yes,” said the girl.

  Her voice was soft but clear, sad yet resolute. It was exactly the way she had sounded when telling the story of how she and Tyr had fought the Devourer and both failed and won.

  Rachelle sat up. They were still in the bleeding forest, though perhaps the gray sky was a shade darker.

  “If I’m dead,” she said, “where are all the others the Devourer has eaten?”

  “Did you not hear? Even after death, there are endings. They all faded from this place long ago.”

  Rachelle’s hand went to her chest. She felt cold, sticky blood, but no pain.

  “Stand up.” Zisa got to her feet. “We do not have much time.”

  Her body felt heavy and foreign, but Rachelle still clambered to her feet in a few moments. She was surprised to find Zisa a head shorter than her.

  “Time for what?” she asked.

  “To kill the Devourer for all time,” said Zisa. Despite her height, she seemed to look down at Rachelle. “Did you not give your heart for that?”

  “I tried. I did.”

  “You did as I did,” said Zisa. “You accepted the Devourer into your body and died with him. Now he is bound to you in your death, as he was to me, and as long as your ghost can linger, he will be trapped here with you between life and death. But you cannot linger forever. Nobody can. And when you fade away, as soon I will, another must die in your place, or else yield the world to darkness. And in the meantime, the Forest will grow at the edges of the world, and the woodspawn will infect your cities, and the forestborn will harry you.”

  It was not a bad bargain, Rachelle thought. But it was not a victory.

  “Only the leavings of the wolf can kill the wolf,” said Zisa. “That is the ancient truth. Only a child of the Devourer can strike him down. That is why I failed: I did not have the sword when I needed it, so the duty fell to Tyr. And he was much too innocent.”

  “But what else can I do?” asked Rachelle. “I did the same thing. I left the sword behind.”

  “Have you forgotten what you carry in your right hand?”

  Rachelle stared at her.

  Zisa tilted her head. “Or have you never known?”

  Her hand throbbed. Rachelle looked down at the tiny white scar on her palm. For years she had hardly thought of it because it was so painful, but she had confessed it already to Armand, so she let herself remember again: Aunt Léonie, choking on her own blood. When Rachelle had bent over her, crying, Aunt Léonie had suddenly struggle
d against her, arms flailing. She must have been surprised while she was sewing, for she was still clutching a needle, and she stabbed it into Rachelle’s hand all the way down to the bone.

  Rachelle had choked on a scream. Choked on her tears. And then she had lowered the knife.

  “I told you what Durendal and Joyeuse were made from,” said Zisa. “Did you think they could not take that form again?”

  Two slivers of bone.

  In a sudden frenzy, she clawed at the palm of her hand. The needle twitched in answer; then with a sudden, sharp pain, its tip burst through her skin.

  With shaking fingers, Rachelle pulled it free: a tiny bone needle, covered in blood. Durendal.

  As she thought the name, the needle grew and lengthened in her hand, until it became a sword entirely made out of bone, a perfect twin to Joyeuse.

  “Do you know what its name means?” asked Zisa.

  “No,” said Rachelle, cautiously hefting the sword. It had once been a bone in the body of a sacrifice to the Devourer’s hunger: a boy who had forgotten self and name, but not the sister he loved.

  “Endurance. It is the sword that hopes all things, bears all things, believes all things, endures all things.” Zisa sighed. “In the end, I could not use it.” Her voice grew softer. “I believe you can.”

  She looked up just in time to see Zisa fading away. Her last words were less than a whisper: My time is over now. Good luck.

  And Rachelle was alone in the forest of bleeding trees.

  Slowly she walked forward, her feet whispering in the soft white dust; little clouds puffed up where she stepped. Many of the trees, in the crooks where their branches split and twisted, were growing teeth.

  Her skin crawled. The forest was feeling less dead by the moment, and she walked faster.

  Suddenly a shape loomed between the trees. It was the cottage from her dreams—the house of Old Mother Hunger, just as Zisa had described it. The eaves and lintels were carved with a profusion of figures who at first seemed to be dancing, but on second glance were devouring each other. The walls oozed blood between their planks. The roof was thatched with bones.

  The door yawned open.

  Rachelle walked quietly to it, her heart beating in her throat, and peered inside. She saw only a single room paneled in wood. There were no carved decorations, but the walls and floor alike were covered in doors, large and small, with barely an inch between them.

  She stepped in. The air was cold and still, spiced with the tang of wood smoke and blood.

  She turned to her right. The nearest door was tall enough for her to walk through. She flung it open.

  Pure, absolute darkness looked back at her, so stark that her eyes watered. No breath of air came through the doorway. But she realized there was a very, very faint murmuring sound, like the wind in very distant trees. Was it coming through the doorway? Or had it been here all along, and she’d only just noticed?

  Next was a row of four little cupboard-sized doors, one atop the other from floor to ceiling. She opened them all: the same darkness. Faster and faster, she started opening doors. They all revealed absolute darkness.

  The rushing noise was getting louder. It almost sounded like breathing. Rachelle’s body was wound tight and all her limbs jangled with the need to flee, but there was nowhere to run. The nightmare was her world now; there was no way out but fighting it.

  The doors in the walls were all open now; she no longer stood in a room with four walls, but in a latticework cage of door frames, with darkness everywhere looking in. That was what it felt like: not an absence, but a ponderous shadow pressing in upon the walls of the room, ready to crush it at any moment.

  She knelt and opened one of the doors set in the floor. More darkness.

  “My dear little traitor.”

  Her head snapped up. Erec stood in the doorway, so unexpected that for a moment he seemed more like one of the wood carvings come to life than the person she had known and trusted and hated.

  “Whatever shall I do with you?” he asked, stepping inside.

  She raised Durendal. “Stay back.”

  The shock on his face sent a little curl of satisfaction through her stomach.

  “How did you get that toy?” he asked.

  “How did you get in here after me?”

  He raised his hand where the crimson thread shone. “We are bound in every world, my lady.”

  “You are desperate to believe that, aren’t you?” she said, looking around the room. If it came to another fight, she would probably win, but she didn’t have the time to waste.

  There were still at least ten doors left unopened in the floor, but she was starting to think that there wasn’t a right door. Something else was the answer.

  “As you are desperate to deny it.” He lounged against the door frame, but she could tell he was readying himself to spring at her.

  In the very center of the floor, between the corners of three other doors, there was painted a little red star. Nothing else in the house seemed to lead anywhere; maybe this did. As Erec lunged forward, she lifted Durendal and plunged it down into the star.

  Cracks ran through all the wood. The whole house shuddered. And then it shattered into a thousand pieces.

  Erec grabbed her arm as they plunged into darkness. They only fell a few moments, but the darkness was so heavy that it choked her. Then they both hit the ground and rolled, ending in a tangle of limbs, dust flying up around them.

  Rachelle drew a breath full of dust and choked. It was not really dust: it was salt and ashes. As she gagged, Erec rolled on top of her and pinned her arms to the ground.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “It’s not too late. We can still escape. Believe me, I know, for I once explored this far. We can go back, and give your burden to Vareilles as he deserves. I will make you my queen. We will rule together.”

  His words were breathless, desperate. She realized that he was afraid. He was afraid of losing her, afraid of this place, and yet he was being brave. For her.

  “I’m dead,” she told him.

  “Your blood is still steaming,” he said. “The power of the Forest could still draw you back.”

  She didn’t struggle against his grip. She looked up at him and said quietly, “Even if I could, do you really think I would go with you?”

  “Where else? To your precious Armand?” A little of his old arrogance returned to his voice. “Do you think he would dare half as much for your love as I have?”

  “No,” she said. “He never could. That’s why I love him.”

  “You were desperate for me.”

  “Desperate. Not happy.” For the first time in all the years she had known him, she truly pitied him. “You can never, ever make me happy. My heart will never rest in you.”

  His mouth twisted into something that was half a smile, half a snarl. “And Vareilles, is he your rest?”

  She remembered Armand saying, You are never content. She remembered the jagged lines of the Dayspring’s body in the painting, remembered whispering her sins into a listening silence.

  “No,” she said. “I really don’t think he is.” Then she pulled her legs in and kicked viciously upward, throwing Erec off her body. She rolled to her feet, seized Durendal, and looked around.

  They stood on a field of the white ash-and-salt powder that had covered the ground in the forest. It stretched out, flat and featureless, all the way to the horizon, beneath a dome of pure black sky in which floated fragments of the forest: a broken tree, a ragged circle of ground, a triangular shard of iron-gray sky.

  “Don’t look back,” Erec rasped, sitting up. “That’s the rule in this place, don’t ever look over your shoulder. It sees you if you turn around.”

  So of course she turned and looked.

  And it saw her.

  It was the only appropriate word; no human pronouns could encompass the vast swirl of destruction that filled her vision. The dust spiraled around and around as it sank into the center, down and down toward
. . . nothing. That was what made her heart hammer, her chest feel like it was paper wrapped over a despairing void. She knew this thing—the Devourer—had forsaken itself to plunge into deeper and deeper nothing, seeking the final abnegation where it would be utterly alone and therefore omnipotent. All its bloodbound and forestborn and vessels, all its mastery and devouring, the power at the heart of the Great Forest, the stomach that swallowed the sun and moon—they all were no more than foam in the wake of its hurtling ruin.

  She saw a human figure floating upside down in the center of the whirlpool. She knew that was an illusion, something her feeble human mind had created to shield her from the nub of this vast destruction.

  And as soon as she saw it, she could hear it: a great howling wind—no, a voice, screaming and singing at once. It sang pain-hate-loss-fear, but most of all it sang hunger, the vast and devouring emptiness of a creature who once tasted bliss beyond what any mortal mind could comprehend, and now must keen unbearable loss forever after.

  It sang, and she sang with it. Her throat ached and burned from the sounds that ripped out, but she couldn’t stop. She felt that this sight had unlocked every secret of her life and made sense of them all. Surely she had always been singing this song in her heart. Surely this was her home. This, her inheritance.

  Erec slammed her to the ground. “You belong to me, lady,” he snarled, “not that thing.” And he kissed her ferociously, biting her lip.

  Rachelle bucked against him. “What—”

  “You are made of that creature. That’s why you can’t fight it.”

  She realized there were a thousand red strings running through the white dust all around them, down into the maw of the Devourer. As she watched, the strings slowly slid forward. She felt a tug on her own hand.

  “Yes,” said Erec. “Inch by inch, he eats us all.”

  There was no escape. Rachelle was no longer looking at the vast swirl of the Devourer, but she could feel the icy despair starting to rise again in her heart. She was eaten. Finished. Done. There was no way she could turn and face that creature with Durendal. She doubted that it would matter even if she could. Swords were made for killing, and having seen the Devourer, she did not think that death was a concept that even applied to it.