Cobweb Bride (26 page)

Percy sipped the heavenly warmth when it was her turn, then took her mug to the cart, and offered it to Emilie who pulled off the blanket from her miserable face just so that she could drink.

“How are you, child?” Percy held the back of her hand to the other’s burning forehead.

Emilie muttered something incoherent, then wrapped herself back in the blanket.

Percy returned to the fire to refill the mug, and this time she approached Vlau and his sister.

He took the mug without protest. “Thank you . . . I—I will give it to her myself.”

Percy watched as he drank a few eager gulps, then leaned forward, barely pulled back Claere’s hood, and made a show of trying to pour the hot tea past the sick girl’s lips.

For some reason, Percy’s gaze lingered on the two of them, lingered closely. And she noted the way most of the liquid seemed to miss the mouth and dribble on her chin. . . . And how the color of the girl’s face was so ashen white, so incredibly unreal, and the lips were bluish, with not a hint of blood underneath the skin. . . .

And then Percy blinked, and she saw it, a shadow lying alongside the sick girl in the cart. The shadow was like smoke and dark soot, and it looked exactly like the smoky shape at her grandmother’s bedside back at home in Oarclaven.

Percy recognized it, and she suddenly
knew
.

“Vlau,” she said in a soft voice. “You don’t need to give her any more tea. You know
what
she is, don’t you? If you do not—I am very sorry to have to tell you this, but—your sister is no longer alive. She—she is not going to need tea or rolls ever again. . . .”

He looked up at her, with his dark intense, stricken gaze.

“How did you know?”

Percy shrugged, then sighed. “I just know. I can
see
 . . . some things, I suppose.”

“What things?”

“There’s a
shadow
,” said Percy, speaking very quietly, so that the girls giggling around the fire and sharing chunks of bread would have no chance of hearing. “The shadow is next to her. I think—it is her
true death
. But because all death has stopped, the shadow has nowhere to go, nothing to do. So it just waits there, at her side. At each person’s side. I know, because I have seen it before.”

“Please
 . . .” he said, “I beg—I ask you not to tell anyone.”

“I won’t.”

He nodded, with some relief.

In that moment, the hood over Claere’s face moved back, swept by a thin, show-white hand, delicate as a swan’s neck.

Clare’s great hollowed eyes, frozen into eternal stillness in their sockets, were watching Percy.

It seemed, all her soul was contained in that silent gaze.

And then the dead lips parted, and there was an inhalation of breath. “Thank . . . you . . .” whispered the dead girl, as her breath gently faded. And then she was again silent, disappearing into herself.

Percy gave a small nod, then left them be, and returned to the warmth of the fire.

In a quarter of an hour they were done with eating and tea and restoring some warmth into their bodies. Flor put out the fire with the same care she used to create it, and she sprinkled delicate handfuls of snow gradually on the dying embers, so that the resulting smoke was absorbed and dispersed low on the earth. In the end, they piled more snow to create a drift in place where the fire pit had been, so that no one would know. And then Catrine and Niosta used branches to dust and smooth the snow all around their campsite.

“They will still see our footprints, will they not?” asked Jenna.

“They might. But then, they’ll also see Betsy’s hoof prints and the wheel tracks. Nothing can be done about it. Let’s go!”

“Let me just sweep this bit, just a little more—”

“No, Jen! No need, the best we can do now is be on our way. Now, climb in the cart! Hurry!” Percy spoke firmly, and Jenna scurried to obey her.

“Percy, you know how, back home, the older women all get together and talk?” Flor suddenly said in a low voice, while getting in the cart and settling down directly behind Percy.

“Yeah, I know.” Percy wondered what this was leading up to.

“Well,” said Flor. “Supposedly your Ma always complains that you are slow-witted and can’t do anything right. But what
I
think, is—you’re just pretending. You pretend you cannot do anything when in fact you can do all kinds of things . . . really
well
. Like what you’re doing now.”

Percy said nothing.

“I mean,” Flor continued, “it’s not just you. My Ma talks about me, too. She says these things about me, calls me an idiot and a slowpoke, when all I do is work and work around the oven, and she just complains and gives me more and more to do—”

Percy still said nothing, and picked up the reins.

“—so what I’m trying to say is, Percy—you don’t need to pretend any more. Not with me, or any of us. And—” here, Flor finished in a whisper—“thank you for taking care of us so well.”

I’ve stopped pretending a while ago.
 . . . Ever since I walked out of my father’s house, knowing it will be for the last time.

Percy silently drove the cart.

C
laere Liguon, daughter of the Emperor, lay huddled against coarse wooden planks, on a thin layer of hay covering the floor of the jostling peasant cart.

She had never been near hay in her life—nor would she ever be, now—but in death, she now experienced its simple brittle softness.

Hay and snow. . . .

On one side of her corpse, right underneath her stiff ivory elbow, were baskets and satchels of unknown stuff underneath canvas and burlap. A large lumpy sack butted up against her waist from the back, and she—her cold lifeless body—felt the strange sensory distance of its touch, as though perceiving the world through thick molasses. And on the other side of Claere was a very sick peasant girl, cuddled in a thin blanket, coughing and sneezing every few moments, and blissfully unaware of who or what reposed right next to her.

There were more female shapes and voices all around, some girls seated in the cart, others walking right next to it.

All sound was surreal—slightly distorted, elongated, as if coming from a distance of thick atmospheric layers, or as though heard through water.

She listened to the strangeness, or listened
despite it
—to the soft whisper-level litany of their conversation, occasional gentle banter, bursts of giggles, and then long bouts of weary silence . . . at which point the resounding silence of the forest was revealed, woods oppressed by the weight of snow, and the crackle of timber, the slithering of the ice wind. . . .

A large pale draft-horse pulled their cart. And the driver was another peasant girl, her solid back covered with a length of woolen shawl, which was all that Claere could see directly from her vantage point. That girl, Percy, was far quieter than the others, introspective. And this one
knew
somehow, had known Claere’s true condition with an uncanny sixth sense.

Claere recalled a sympathetic steady gaze of intelligent eyes of an indeterminate swamp color, somewhere between blue and grey and green, and more like slate ashes. The girl’s round peasant face with its cold-reddened features was bland, but the strange depth of the expression gave her away somehow as something more complex.
 . . .

She sees me, sees my death. Who is she? And why can she see this when no one else can?

Claere’s stray random thoughts were like winged things beating against the shutters of her body, her broken human shell. She lay back and watched the grey pallor of the winter sky through glass eyes, while the cloak hood had shifted from her face, giving her a wide panoramic view. Clouds of varied whiteness and vapor and darkness sailed across the sphere of heaven, streaking past each other in infinite layers of cotton and torn smoke. The depth of heaven overhead was infinite.

Clare—the
conscious thing
that was Clare—felt a pull, a reeling vertigo, until she imagined herself lifting like a bird and then falling inversely into the distance of sky, a soul taken at last. . . . If she could breathe, she would be breathless with the infinity, if she could cry, there would be a river pouring out of her. . . .

But she had been drained of all her waters already, days ago. And her river that had run red and abundant like wine was now all gone—for what is blood but the wine of life?—while she, what remained of herself, was but a flopping, convulsing fish in its final gritty dregs.

And he—the man who had done this to her, the murderer and the victim in one—now walked at her side. There he paced, with only wooden planks of the side-rail wall of the cart between them. And she
felt
his overwhelming presence somehow, felt
him
with more clarity than anything else in her world.

Marquis Vlau Fiomarre.

She had taken to repeating his name in her mind upon occasion, she noticed this recently. And she was doing it now, again, repeating the name like a litany, a strange prayer. It had started when she first learned it, the name of her murderer. And at first she savored its knife-edge sound in order to fathom him, his motives. But in the forest, earlier today, when they had been on the run, she realized that she had been repeating his name as an anchor, holding on to the shape of it in her mind as he carried her through the forest, as she felt the wall of his body around her, through the veils of thickness—of her death—felt him lifting her, bearing her aloft. . . .

Vlau Fiomarre.

She sensed him now, walking at her side, for he was ever nearby. He had remained with her strangely, maybe out of guilt, or maybe driven by remnants of the need for vengeance. A wave of cold distant fear inundated her, as she imagined for a moment what kind of new exquisite revenge he could possibly have in mind, what other thing of occult dread and evil he might attempt to do to her, the “accursed Liguon.”

But then just as easily the fear and suspicion drained from her. And she knew with a sudden surety that it was no longer what bound them.

She remembered his face, every moment of him seared into her mind, from that first fateful instant he stood before her in the Silver Hall, to the moments of his dark raging passion as he stood in chains and told his mad story of injustice.

And now, all she had from him was a dark fathomless intensity. It encompassed him, this intensity, this darkness, this infinite focused presence.

She was drowning in it, in its abysmal virile strength. And somehow, just at the edges, there was a new thing. . . .

A craving was born.

Vlau Fiomarre.

She could never admit it, nor would she divulge it, not even to herself much less to him—the murderer, madman, her anchor, and her destruction.

In truth, she did not even have the words for it, for this desire—whether for constancy, for unwavering strength, or merely for a fixed point in her storm. He was her death—and yet, her blade of life, of clarity, to cut through the thick roiling swamp of personal darkness.

She needed him.

Vlau.

A
nother half hour, and the snow started to really come down, while the shadow of the weakling sun disappeared completely through the thick afternoon clouds. The wind increased—enough to cause small spinning flurries, and to make it feel bitterly cold—as Betsy, the cart, and its occupants slowly advanced along the path.

Despite the frequent meandering, they and the path were moving directly north.

And now, their entire world had become a lace veil of falling whiteness.

Betsy plodded forward through the snow, her hooves leaving deeper prints in the fresh power with every minute, as the newly fallen flakes accumulated.

The girls whose turn it was to walk next to the cart had their meager cloaks and shawls and winter coverings pulled tightly over their faces, so that in most cases only the eyes were showing. They walked, leaning into the wind, taking each step forward with effort.

Those in the cart huddled together and used whatever spare blankets they had to cover themselves.

Vlau, the only man among them, paced onward relentlessly, holding on to the cart next to where lay Claere. The dead girl moved her lily-white hands occasionally to pull the cloak over her face whenever the wind revealed too much of it.

Percy drew her nice wool shawl as much over her nose as possible and periodically tucked each mittened hand under the shawl for extra warmth, holding the reins with the other. She wrapped her skirts as closely as she could over her knees and legs. Still, whenever the wind gusts blew hard in her direction, she could feel the cold’s fiery bite through the insufficient fabric and along her upper thighs. Underneath, her old, well-worn cotton stockings were inadequate for such long winter exposure. At least her wrapped feet were still dry.
 . . .

We are going to die, all of us, tonight.

And then, as soon as she thought it, reality immediately intruded, cheerfully reminding her that there was no longer the option to die—not for any of them, no matter what. Death had ceased, and they were all being given a bizarre reprieve.