“Mother!” My feet are bare on the dusk-dew grass.
Father drops to a knee, chest heaving with effort. The light from the kitchen catches the shadows on his face. Something is wrong. Tears stream wetly down his cheeks and into the grizzled salt and pepper of his unkempt beard.
“What happened?” My voice is small.
I glance down at Mother. Her skin is paler than snow, eyes closed, lids limned in shades of indigo and mulberry.
He does not answer at first, labored breathing, his chest a rugged cadence against the slow rise and fall of my mother’s lungs. She is still alive.
“Father. Tell me.”
He glances at me then, eyes haunted, rimmed red. When his lips part, saliva strings between them, like the veins of a gutted rabbit. “Your motheris sick, Adelaide. She has been for a long time. You should prepare yourself for the worst.”
He says nothing more, simply stands and sweeps Mother up to their bedchamber.
Over the next few days, I see hardly a thing of them, abandoned to my own devices. When Father finally does appear in the doorway of the kitchen, dressed in funeral blacks to lay Rosalyn Eckers in the ground, he takes one look at the crown of herbs in my hand and tears it from my grasp, throwing the braid in the fire.
My chest cracks with an unnamed emotion. Something I have never felt before. It aches, burns up the back of my throat. Tears well in my eyes when the ribbon catches flame, then the hyssop, the lavender I picked with my own fingers.
“Save your prayers and weeds, Adelaide. The gods do not listen to our supplications.”
He leaves me there, tears budding at the corners of my eyes, my mother gasping for breath in her bed while he goes to bury more bodies.
I suppose I lost my father even before Mother took her final breath.
The feel of Mother’s glove centers me back to the present. I peel it off and drop it beside the other. I don’t need any more reminders of what I have lost or what I have become. My eyes drop to my own hands, now stained with dirt.
Wind buffets the garden shed, rattling the broken window. My gaze snags on a collection of stiff pages, scribbles in ink. I reach for them, and a plume of dust rises to greet me. On the other side of it, a leather-bound journal.Mother’sjournal. My chest caves with heartache as my fingers brush the soft cover. I open the pages, wipe the grime and the dark stains, like blots of ink. Sketches, diagrams, lists. Names I know and names I do not. Larkspur, foxglove, belladonna, oleander, bitterbloom.
I trail a finger over the looping script.
A bell rings, low and somber, from the church. A death knell. I tuck the journal into my waistband. Just another dead girl to bury. And this time, I know the face all too well.
Closing my eyes, I picture Hester. When we were children, she used to bring me herbs from her own mother’s garden to braid into crowns.
Part of me knows I should pray, repent of my wickedness and beg forgiveness from Ithrandril above. And another fragment of me, the one that sees the monsters, recognizes the wrongness of my own heart, wonders if Hester Samuels suffered when she died.
If she cried and begged the monsters to stop while they peeled her flesh from her bones.
Father lets me out the next morning, my skirts stained from sweat, stomach rumbling. He leads me back into the vicarage and up to my room, where he points at my darkest frock and then at my boots, a jerk of his chin toward the door. I know these movements well, what they mean. Time to stare death in the face once more, see what awaits those who stray from the path of light.
Because that is what Father truly thinks, isn’t it? That the girls of Rixton are dying of their own accord? Perhaps not by their own hands, but surely—to his twisted mind—their sins play a part of it. Their own wickedness.
I fight the burn to smash my fist against his jaw. Instead, I do nothing. Instead, I will stare into the face of death today, and I will ask why it hasn’t yet taken me.
We make our way to the churchyard, and I ignore the sideways glances from villagers, the words I pretend not to hear.
Cursed, she is. Didn’t you hear? She was caught out at the river, summoning Erybrus, calling for the death of Hester.
My heart freezes in my chest, skips a beat, rumbles back to life. The breath whooshes from my lungs while I hurry past the gossipers, quick on Father’s heels. Perhaps they are right to fear me—Ifear me—but I am not a murderer. I look down at my trembling hands.
At least, I don’t think I am.
Father bows his head. “We call to Ithrandril. We ask him to greet us with holy warmth, to expel the shadow that our sin welcomes in and thesins of his brother, Erybrus. We ask that he shine his face on our departed, welcoming her into the brilliance of life eternal.”
Those attending lower their gazes against the drizzle streaming from the gray sky, fingers tracing the shape of flame over their chests. I keep my eyes open, study the trees veiled in mist. The wood is still. Too still. As if even the trees are holding their breath, waiting. For what, I do not know, but the thought chills me to the bone.
Hester’s father—the mayor—tosses dirt to her casket, his pouched face clotted with tears. Her mother goes next, and then we all take a turn. When it comes time for mine, I stoop under the weight of a hundred thousand eyes. My throat runs raw, heart thudding—a mad thing in my chest.
