Painted devils, p.42
Painted Devils, page 42
“And if I choose the blood?” I demand. “You’d kill your own children?”
(I’m stalling. I think, by now, we have sufficiently established that Marthe would in fact feed us all to the hellhound for a single pretzel.)
I see it, then: the head of the waterfall beginning to roil and foam.
Marthe’s laugh is like stepping on broken glass; after all, I just told her which choice I’d make. “You have to pay for what you did to me. It’s what you deserve.” She hoists Emeric, grinning horribly; after all, she will punish me by taking him instead. Even this far above the Kronenkessel, I see the twin lights of the hellhound’s eyes circling in the water. “And I deserve to be the god of Hagendorn.”
A cool, resonant voice splits the air: “Hagendorn already has a god.”
A figure swells above the waterfall.
She’s robed in the shimmering rainbow of sunlight striking mist, translucent curtains of river-grass hair spilling like a torrent. She stands taller than the Scarlet Maiden, taller even than Brunne, born of the waters that feed the Haarzlands, beautiful as a drought ending, terrible as a flood.
My crown of yellow roses blooms on her brow above a face shining with divine wrath.
“I am Ilsza of the Rivers,” she declares, voice shaking the gorge itself as the congregation on the bluff gasps and murmurs. “And you are not welcome in my home.”
Ilsza lifts an arm. A startling quiet falls as the waterfall flexes and shudders. The cascade arcs away from the cliff, rising into the air, leaving the Kronenkessel as it curves up, up, up. In seconds the river is running in midair, just below the rope bridge.
Raucous cheers roll from upriver—cheers and a rising cacophony of hooves.
Ilsza has made the road.
Brunne charges over the crest of the waterfall, whooping, the rest of the Wild Hunt churning in her wake. Marthe gawks at them, even more aghast. While she’s distracted, I set the lantern down on the rope bridge’s planks, then brace myself.
And for the second time today, I take the leap.
(Thankfully, this time with a better plan.)
For a moment I’m airborne, the expanse of the gorge tilting beneath me, the abyss as vast as the sky above.
But the river flows under us, and I am not afraid to fall.
I know—I believe—I can be the person Emeric sees in me, the beauty and the terror, sister, God Daughter, more. And I can save us both.
I crash into him, wrap my arms around his chest as tightly as I can. We topple toward the river—
Brunne’s hand seizes my satchel’s straps, swinging me onto the saddled back of a silvery elk. She helps Emeric up behind me as the red haze sloughs off him. “We ride with you!” she bellows, and presses reins into my hand.
I wind them over my knuckles as Emeric wheezes, goes perfectly stiff, and then reaches to grab the saddle horn. “WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING,” he yells above the thunder of hooves and the river.
“No, look, it’s a ghost elk, not a flying horse this time!” I shout in return. My eyes are tearing. It could be the wind in my face, but in my heart, I know it’s relief—relief to hear his prickly voice, relief to feel his arms around me, relief that he’s out of Marthe’s grasp.
“The horse,” he grinds out, “is not the issue here!”
“Yeah, about that.” The river-road arcs around, wheeling us back to ScarMarthe (Scarthe?). The Wild Hunt is keeping her busy for us, jabbing her with spears, yanking her hair, firing arrows that pass right through her. “Emeric, meet my mother.”
“Your—oh gods, your mother?”
“The lantern’s her material anchor, there on the bridge.” I dig in my satchel and surface with the cambric and awl. “She’s haunted it for thirteen years. And she’s been drawing power from our blood ties, including mine to you—remember when I licked your hand in Minkja?”
“One in a series of unfortunate awakenings,” he mumbles into my shoulder. “So—she had an indirect link to me. That’s how she was able to fake the claim of a god to a sacrifice.”
“And how she’s been able to possess us, move things, send visions—all that. She started as a ghost. She’s been reserving her strength for the big things and using everything else to look more powerful than she really is.” I swallow and pull the witch-ash oil from his satchel. “Like cutting me off from Death and Fortune. She used our blood connection to push them out first. So—I think I have to push back.”
Emeric’s hand lifts from the saddle horn to grip mine. Then he reaches for the reins. “As long as we’re in this,” he tells me. I know the rest: We’re in it together.
I pull the cork out with my teeth, then swig a full mouthful of the vial. “Help me,” I gasp as magic explodes down every vein, burnishing my breath in juniper and lightning. Emeric takes the vial and drinks the rest, and when I sway into him, I feel a thousand threads singing between us. It’s too much—no, I won’t let them down, I won’t fail them again, I can fix this, I can be not a ruin but a mending—
His hands steady mine, guide me. I prick my finger on the bone awl and press it to the cambric—
And become the thirteenth star.
In Kerzenthal, Katrin Little goes still where she’s standing in Jörgi’s forge. Jörgi, too, lets their hammer sink slowly to the anvil, wordless. Luisa stops in the middle of drying her daughter’s face. Udo, Jakob, Dieter, and Helga are sitting in a dining room at a roadhouse near Prince Ludwig’s blockade; they fall silent. Ozkar fumbles a tool, the curse dying on his lips as he stares blankly at his workbench. Eida drops the chalk she’s using to mark a bolt of linen. Erwin goes quiet at the bar in the Green Sleeve. Sånnik sinks onto the edge of his bed in his new home. Henrik, sitting by a window in an inn on his way back to Welkenrode, lets his quill fall into his notebook midverse.
The blood drops ignite—not just mine, nor just those of our seven brothers, but drops from all thirteen of us. Scattered across the Haarzlands, we are cardinal points, dozens of ties connecting each of us to the others. We are a web, a briar, spokes on a wheel, segments of a rose unfurling, our own constellation. We are thirteen red stars, and I carry them with me.
And raying out over hill and dale, river and gorge, are threads binding us to our mother. If we are a wheel, she is the axle.
“Do you see them?” Emeric’s voice half whispers, half rings in my ear. Ilsza’s stream bends our path, carving a ring around the Scarlet Maiden, who’s still surrounded by the Wild Hunt.
In answer, I let the bone awl drop away. He presses the hilt of the silver knife into my empty hand.
“Don’t sever yours yet,” he says, “and hold on.”
I feel his heels jab the elk’s sides, far from me and pressing close all at once. The elk tosses its antlers and picks up its run. A scintillating red thread draws near—
And as I slash the knife through it, Eida gasps.
I don’t have time to think before another of Marthe’s ties rotates into sight. This time Jörgi puts a hand to their chest, blinking.
Henrik, Udo, Helga, Jakob—one by one I cut them free of our mother. I hear her shrieking with rage, clawing wildly at the Hunt, but we’re halfway down the circle already. Ilsza watches us ride past from her waterfall throne, the silver knife slicing again and again. Dieter lets out a breath. A single tear rolls down Katrin’s face. Luisa shivers. Erwin knocks over a sjoppen, swearing. Sånnik rocks back. Ozkar, when I break his tie, simply mutters, “Finally,” and goes back to work.
When we’ve come nearly full circle, I see Emeric, too, has been busy. The ties between us siblings are deftly weaving into something like a reed cage that’s closing in on Marthe.
“Brunne!” I call.
She lets out an ululating cry, and the Hunt bolts in every direction, darting through gaps in the cage’s bars. One last vila slips through just as the threads contract around Marthe’s thrashing form. She’s reeled in toward the old lantern resting on its side on the planks of the rope bridge, the ties tightening, shrinking, shredding the pretense.
Her long red locks shrivel and dull to hanks of carrot-colored hair. Her unearthly beauty fades to something more bitter, more weary, more human: the face I saw through the Augur’s Tears, uncannily like my own. The crown of burning roses becomes a thick woolen cap, the silken robes an old wadmal dress and cloak.
Marthe becomes as I remember her on that winter night, the one who has haunted us for thirteen years.
But it’s time for us both to move on.
“Ready?” I ask Emeric, reaching for Marthe’s final link to the siblings Ros.
“This won’t change a thing!” Marthe screams at me. Her voice is no longer resonant with the charade of divinity. “You can’t get rid of me, I’m already dead, I’ll just keep finding you! You’re cursed, you always were, you’re always going to ruin—”
“That’s enough of that,” Emeric confirms.
With a swing of the silver knife, I cut my mother loose.
Gold and shadow explode on either side of me: Godmothers Death and Fortune in all their glory, radiating the coldest of wrath.
“Your luck,” Death tells Marthe, “just ran out.”
Emeric makes a wrenching motion. The blood ties converge on the lantern with a squalling snap, like metal twisting against glass, dragging Marthe into the old iron frame. It jumps and jolts, skittering over the planks, straining to keep her contained, but the ties hold—
And Fortune smiles.
With a gust of bad-luck coal dust, the lantern rolls off the bridge.
I watch it plummet, heart in my throat, head pounding with the agony of the witch-ash oil. With the waterfall flowing into the sky, the Kronenkessel’s surface is smooth and clear, a perfect window into the deep.
And I’m not the only one watching the lantern fall.
The pool explodes, the great gray muzzle surging skyward. Water slings off fur matted and stained with years, centuries, of algae and muck and blood. The jaws open—
And slam shut on the lantern with a final burst of scarlet.
Far, far, far below, I see the tiny golden gleam of Brunne’s crown in the half-empty Kronenkessel. Now—while the waterfall is still airborne, while the hellhound is retreating with its meal—now might be the time—
I look to Ilsza as our elk slows to a halt on the rope bridge. She’s staring into the deep, transfixed on the sublime gold, the ghost of a dream that’s always been just out of reach.
Then she looks to me, gives the softest of nods.
And she lets the waterfall go.
The Kronenkessel fills in as the hellhound sinks beneath the roaring froth once more. Within heartbeats, there’s no sign of Boderad, the crown, or the lantern anymore.
It’s over.
She’s gone.
My mother is gone.
“Huh,” I hiccup. Something hot streaks down my cheeks. I’m crying. I—I didn’t think I would cry.
Maybe it was the final crumb of hope I had that she’d regret it, every way she hurt me. Maybe it’s knowing that will always be out of reach. Maybe it’s knowing I have to be the one to let go.
The night almost seems darker for it.
No—not seems. My sight is dimming, my heartbeat rising. The witch-ash is catching up to me. It’s time to pay the price.
I feel myself falling one more time, but there are arms to catch me, the voice of the boy I love saying my name. It’s the last thing I hear before I slip away, into the stars.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
PENNY GHOST
The first of May comes bittersweet in Hagendorn.
Less than a week earlier, the square was crowded with strangers calling themselves the Red Blessed, swearing fealty to an invading god, building colonies in longhouses, and swarming the older homes on the command of their queen.
It’s a lot harder, it turns out, to stay trespassing without a god on your side. The longhouses are mostly empty, the square mostly locals. A few sheepish congregants have stuck around to help clean up the mess. Everyone else, drawn here by the promise that they are chosen and special, has either slunk away of their own volition … or found themselves encouraged to leave by a god less willing to feed their ego.
The town is recovering the best it can. Plenty of people have come from Glockenberg to lighten the workload. Ilsza, too, first visited with a river of trout to help renew their larders, and she’s been happy to help pull up statues and tear down extra longhouses. Those remaining are being converted into a permanent lodge for travelers, a storehouse for harder times, and more.
Among the architectural survivors is the stave chapel. There’s only one occupant, and now that I’m up and walking again, she’s who I want to see.
Udo is standing by the chapel’s double doors, arms crossed. He’s on guard duty solely because he’s been working around the clock to put Hagendorn to rights, and this is the closest thing to rest that we can trick him into. “You sure you’re well enough?” he asks gruffly as I approach. The nearby innkeeper shoots me a side-eye, and Udo scowls until he moves on.
I’m getting used to it, those looks. And I can hardly blame them.
I just nod. “A bit of the wobbles, but breakfast helped.”
Witch-ash hangovers are no joke. I’ve spent the past three days alternately delirious and unconscious. I’m told Helga and Emeric took turns nursing me through fevers, chills, and what was probably a very glamorous bout of half-awake vomiting.
But when I woke this morning and found Emeric asleep at my side, not a single trace of the red handprint left on his chest, it was more than worth it.
(As was the bath I took shortly after. Saints and martyrs, the bath.)
Udo pushes a door open. “Shout if you need help.”
“I will.” I step inside the chapel and take a moment to let my eyes adjust to the dim. They pick out a heap sitting on the dais, head bent, shackled hands clasped in prayer. She’s still wearing her red robes, though the brass halo is nowhere to be seen.
Leni looks up at me and mutters, “The fraud.”
I don’t like standing over her like this. Instead I sit on one of the benches, close enough that I don’t have to yell, far enough away that if she gets jumpy, I can get a decent head start. “I want to talk to you.”
“About?”
About what happened after I left. About the choices she made.
About anything my mother said, any trace of her that’s left, because, even in my delirium, I watched over and over as her lantern fell into oblivion and I did nothing to stop it.
I guess it’s harder to let go than I thought.
I come at it from an angle. “Jakob says … you still believe the Scarlet Maiden’s real.”
“She saved my daughter,” Leni snaps.
I try not to sound condescending. After all, I laid these foundations. “It was a ghost, Leni. My mother’s ghost.”
“She worked miracles through me,” Leni insists. “I saw visions, heard voices.”
“She wanted you to believe she was a god because it gave her power. She wanted that power to hurt me.”
“You’re the Defiler, of course you’d say that.”
I grimace. “I bet she told you that right before she had you send those people after me in Rammelbeck.”
Leni hesitates. Then she says, “This is a test. The Scarlet Maiden said we would be tested. Only the worthy may rise in the age of plenty, and I am among them. I am strong in my faith, I am Her chosen prophet and the shepherd of Her flock.”
I have a lot of thoughts about shepherds who demand death of all the lambs. (For starters: terrible way to run a business.) But I’m not here to preach. I’m here for answers. “The Scarlet Maiden gave you power over the cult—”
“Congregation.”
“—and you used it to hurt people,” I continue. “Why?”
Leni’s face darkens. “I wasn’t hurting them. I was guiding them, teaching them. They needed to follow Her truth.”
I lean down so my eyes are level with Leni’s. “I don’t think,” I say tonelessly, “you believe that.”
For a moment, the look in her eye makes me glad she’s in shackles and that Udo is at the door. “They wouldn’t listen,” she seethes with the same bile as Marthe, “I told them the truth, I told them what we—what the Scarlet Maiden wanted, and they wouldn’t just do as they were told. They needed to be tested.”
She says tested. What I hear is punished.
My Scarlet Maiden was a benevolent god in a hard land; she was a fleeting superstitious hope and little more, until Marthe made her real. Maybe it was different because I knew she was a lie.
Maybe my mother just gave Leni what she’d wanted all along.
I stand. “Well, you can keep waiting for the Scarlet Maiden, but Hagendorn’s going to decide what to do with you in the meantime. I’d think of something better to tell them than ‘I was just testing you.’”
I’m nearly at the door when Leni’s voice catches me: “Who’s taking care of my daughter?”
My heart gives a squeeze at that. At least she has one point up on Marthe. “Sonja,” I say. “Your daughter will be going to your sister in Glockenberg.”
Leni begins a prayer as I leave.
It’s close to noon. I make my way around the square, where people are setting up modest decorations for the May-Saint Feast. There’s been an abundance of flowers, and with Marthe gone, they’re even blooming in colors other than red now, so garlands are in high supply and demand. The smell of roasting fires tells me the feast is going to be very trout-forward, but I don’t think anyone minds.
I lend a hand where I can, where I’m allowed. Some distrust still lingers in my wake. Others saw me on the bridge; they may not have the full story, but they know enough.
Jakob eventually calls me in for lunch. He’s already eaten, and he and Kirkling are on their way out as I walk in. I wish I could say Kirkling has thawed entirely, warming up to me as the daughter she never had, but for now she’s settled for a slight improvement of casual indifference over outright antagonism. It’s been enough that Jakob and Udo allowed her a sleeping pallet in the corner of their main room, instead of making her sleep with a handful of strangers in a slapdash longhouse. (They still aren’t sure what to make of Lady Ambroszia, but I think they’re coming around.)
