It shallowed.
It ceased.
The silence that followed was not quiet. It was absence.
Her own breath tore from her in a sound she did not recognise as her own. She fell to her knees in the mud, heedless of the rips in her gown, heedless of the blood upon her hands.
“No!” she cried, though there was no one left to bargain with. “No—no—”
And at once, without flourish, without spectacle, the thorn withdrew.
It did not recoil in violence. It did not lash or scatter. It slackened. The coils loosened from his arms. The spear that had pinned him dissolved as though it had never beenmore than a shadow cast upon the earth. The barbs that had pierced flesh shrank to green threads, and then there was nothing left of them at all but a faint ashen circle on the earth.
The soil stilled.
The fissure ceased its creeping.
Behind her, the carriage settled back upon level ground with a dull, final thud. The horses, still trembling, lowered their heads and looked nervously to their handlers.
Elizabeth scarcely marked it. She reached for him, for now she could.
She gathered his head into her lap, cradling him as though he were already borne to burial. His skin was pale beneath the streaks of blood. The wound at his throat was real—terribly real—though no thorn remained to explain it.
“Darcy,” she whispered, bending over him. “Darcy, do not leave me!”
Her tears fell freely now, ungoverned, striking his face and the earth beneath him alike. She pressed her mouth to his brow, to the already cooling skin at his temple, heedless of who watched.
“I did not wish you to choose it,” she sobbed. “I did not wish you to die for me!”
Around them, chaos struggled to resume its shape. Lady Catherine’s voice rose again in horrified denunciation. Harrowe’s broad frame barred her approach. Villagers muttered in tones that had lost their certainty.
Elizabeth felt only a hand, cool and trembling, come to rest upon her shoulder.
She lifted her head to find Anne de Bourgh standing beside her.
The girl’s pale composure had been stripped away. Tears tracked unheeded down her cheeks. She did not look at her mother. She did not look at the crowd.
She looked at Darcy.
Then at Elizabeth.
Without a word, she sank down beside her and wrapped her arms about her in a gesture so simple and so human that Elizabeth nearly broke anew beneath it.
Behind them, Lady Catherine protested furiously as Harrowe and two shaken grooms drew her back from the road, toward the carriage that had nearly sunk into the black river only moments ago.
Anne held her tightly. “I am sorry,” she said at last, her voice low and steady despite the tremor in her frame. “My cousin was a good man. He did not fail for lack of duty or will.”
Elizabeth shook her head, choking on her own grief. “He did not act from duty,” she managed. “Not from lineage. Not from—” Her voice failed.
Anne’s brow knit faintly. “From what, then?”
Elizabethbent again over the still face in her lap. She pressed her lips to his cheek, to the place just below his ear where his pulse had once beaten warm and certain.
“From love,” she whispered. “And I—” Her breath broke entirely. “Oh, I loved him!”
Anne blinked. “What has love to do with any of this?”
Elizabeth’s shoulders crumpled, and she choked on a sob so powerful that it stole her breath. She clasped a hand to her mouth, squeezing out the tears before she could master herself. “Love… love is the whole of it. Love…” She fisted her hands to push enough tears from her eyes to see, and words—older words than theBallads, truer words than any myth—found their way to her tongue. “Love protects. It trusts. It hopes when there is nothing left to hope for. It endures past mortal strength.”
