I crouch in the dirt, running gritty crumbles of it between my fingers. This is the third Sunday in a row we have buried bodies in the churchyard. They are appearing on the riverbank faster than they used to. All of them women. All from Rixton, skin wan and lips bruised purple.
Villagers whisper to themselves of a curse enacted during the Rending—when the god Ithrandril, father of light and life, separated and cast his brother, Erybrus, father of lies and deceit, into shadow. But I do not think these deaths are the work of our brother-gods.
Mother used to tell me there were monsters in the rowan wood. I have seen them. Prowling at the edges of the graveyard, wisps of smoke that smell of rot. Who else could be killing the girls of Rixton? Better monsters than an ill woman with blood on her hands.
I wipe my palm along the wool of my skirt and turn on my heel, casting my gaze to the surrounding landscape. This churchyard I know like my own bedchamber. The faded grass my quilt, the stones my own grotesque playthings. One headstone stands out from the rest, a mere slab, the carved words already licked with lichen.
Mother’s.
She was so afraid of death. I still hear her cries sometimes.
Please don’t let him take me, Addie. Please don’t let me die.
My knees go weak, as if someone has sliced the thin skin behind them. Nausea widens in my gut, presses up my throat. A thousand curses spring to my tongue, but I swallow them as the sickness sinks into every inch of me. Sweat blooms on my skin, and the world goes spinning. I reach out for the nearest thing.
Another grave. Another tangle of bones and old cloth beneath me.
I do not want to see Mother’s, not today. So instead, I focus my swirling vision on the stone in front of me.Bram Avery, Aged 24. I swill the name in my mouth. It tastes familiar. Another strange death. Alive one day, gone the next. But before I can sink my teeth into it, there are footsteps swishing in the wet earth behind me. I do not look up.
“Adelaide?”
The voice tethers me to some semblance of reality, pulling me from my haze of sickness. I turn, finding Clara limned in the mist of the graveyard, her calfskin boots shushing in mud. Fear hooks in the corners of her eyes.
This is how all the villagers look at me. Like I am an old heirloom high atop a shelf, covered in dust and ready to fall. Her throat bobs, golden skin flushed with cold.
“Shouldn’t you be inside with the rest of them?” I try to sound strong and sure of myself, but the result is something hoarse and desperate.
Clara wilts. “I saw you out here all alone and thought—”
“I don’t need your pity.” My grip tightens on the headstone. “Whatever you have come here to preach, I have already heard it a thousand times.”
Clara hesitates, then reaches for something in the folds of her russet cloak. “I’m sorry,” she says and holds out a half-drunk wine bottle, sloshing red liquid. “A peace offering.”
I stare at the bottle, my tongue suddenly dry. How long has it been since I drank of communion wine? Father forbade me a long time ago, said my wickedness was too thick in my throat for a sip of forgiveness from Ithrandril. But I take it from Clara’s outstretched hand and press my lips to the verdant glass.
The wine tastes like sin. Rotten berries and sweet mint from the hedges hemming the lanes through Rixton.
I give the bottle back and wipe my mouth on my hand, black blood streaking from where the skin is chapped. If Clara notices, she says nothing. Only tucks the bottle into her cloak.
Behind her, through the mist and up the hill, the stained-glass windows of the church wink in hues of vermillion and goldenrod. Bloody swords and jewel-rich crowns of two brothers who forgot what it meant to love one another. Who allowed their differences to morph into bitterness.
My eyes comb over Clara. Her chestnut curls flutter loose from their ribbons, frayed with rain and wind. Her eyes are sunken, and there are shadows in the hollows of her cheeks that were not there the last time I saw her. The previous funeral, only days ago.
I should say something, a politethank you. Prove I am not the wicked thing the village has come to loathe—the woman whose father keeps her under lock and key, so sick she is only allowed out for death.
Just to stare it closer in the face.
“I’m sorry you’ve been so ill.” The claggy morning softens Clara’s features, but worry still etches lines above her dark eyes.
Ill. The word is bitter, lemons and wormwood. I twist a finger through the foliage growing on Bram Avery’s grave.Ill. As if I were laid up in bed with a fever, a cough rattling my lungs, or angry pustules bursting a meaty pink on my skin. But it is something more than that, isn’t it? The thing that keeps me inside…
I pull the lace cuffs of Mother’s dress closer around my wrists so Clara cannot see the marks made by a father ashamed of his own child.
I wish Iwasill.
Emptying my guts into a pot instead of having the ashen welts on my body from where my father ties me down, the aching bones of my chest when my heart beats like an untethered beast. A natural illness instead of the darkness swallowing me whole. Then, at least, I would have an explanation. A reason why I am this way, why I see the things I do.
I turn away from Clara, returning my attention to the tiny plants trailing Bram Avery’s headstone.
