Bram’s smile widens, stretches like a snake bathing in the sun. “Their own deals. Their own decisions. The Rending made us this way, Adelaide. We must choose, and it is a terrible choice to make.”
He ducks low when something invisible swoops overhead, and my heart crashes into my breastbone. I drop beside him, fingers groping at the shadow. At once, nothing and everything makes sense.
In the Rending, we were torn from Ithrandril. Tossed so near Erybrus, we spend every minute of our waking hours scrambling back toward the god of life’s warmth. And when we die? Father preaches that with each good deed, our souls are brought back into the glow of Ithrandril. But what if we die while we are still deciding?
Choosing between the god we will serve for eternity hereafter. A place where light and darkness are still at war. A place where we must make one final deal just to find the rest we have so long hoped for.
My heart thrums in my ears. “How do I bring my mother back?”
Bram’s eyes are untamed fire while they dart about my bedroom. My hands sink into the cold mist swirling around him like a maelstrom. It kicks up, bringing with it the scent of frozen leaves, ground licked by frost. I try to scream his name, to calm him as the shadows spin, but the rush of the wind swallows my voice, and I am blinking up from the floor, knees aching from where I have fallen.
Bram’s hair whips violently around his face. His skin begins to stretch, peel back. My chest constricts.
“The bell, Adelaide!” he cries above the tumult. “You must use the bell!”
Between the rips of wind and tendrils of my own hair, my gaze snags on my table. So far, so very far. And now the wind smells of blood, growing hotter while it spills through my room.
“Bram!” The word dies as soon as it leaves my mouth, and I am up on my knees, tearing aimlessly through the empty air.
Bram is swallowed up by the coppery wind, the eking shadow, and I am left all alone.
I fall forward, palms slapping the cold floorboards. My breath comes in short gasps between sobs. I drag myself up, heaving toward the window, the little table beside my bed. My shaking fingers fumble the drawer, and the bell rolls to greet me. I reach toward it and then pull back as if bitten.
No.
If I do this, I will have to face the truth. That what the village, what myfather, believes of me is true. That I am touched by shadow. Abandoned by Ithrandril.
Bram Avery is a ghost. A devil wanting to drag my soul to eternal damnation. I slam the drawer shut and look out into the night. My father’ssilhouette creeps down the garden wall, his shadow licking up the side of the church. I stare into the darkness, copper still coating my tongue, and whisper all that comes to mind.
“I’m sorry, Mother. I’m so sorry.”
seven
The next coach departs Rixton in less than a week, and already, I have worried my palms raw, flesh pink and peeling. I cannot go to Idlewild, where I am sure to be strapped to a chair, my brain pricked and prodded until I am empty. Men blessed of Ithrandril, my father said. And what are men blessed by gods other than tools of destruction?
I tell myself Father will change his mind, that I will awake to find him waiting outside my door, tea in hand and an apology written on his face. But the truth is, I have not seen my father since Bram appeared, scared of his own shadows and smelling of acrid citrus. I have not met withanyone, and I think it is better this way.
So, I stand in front of my window, the edges of my body reflecting in the dim light of morning. My face is drawn and tired, skin creased around my eyes like damp paper, lips bitten and dry. The sky outside is a blanket of gray, the trees like candlelight against its darkening visage. A murmuration of starlings kicks up from the fields beyond the silver river, reminding me of the way Bram wore the shadows, as if they were his very skin.
Faces beneath a hood. A deal to be made.
Two birds with one stone. Not one soul brought back, but two.
Yet death is not a power to be trifled with. Erybrus is a hungry god. I have seen death take too many, whisper across a soul and turn it intonothing more than a casing of flesh and coagulated blood. Young women left frozen along the riverbank.
Making a deal with a devil for one soul is a foolish mistake. But two souls? That would make me a thief.
Beyond the garden wall and down past the hill, the River Thine rushes beneath the bridge and through the village like a tongue of molten glass. I trace it until it disappears between the trees beyond the graveyard.
On the day of the Rending, when the world was torn in half between Ithrandril and Erybrus, it was said that rivers were the only openings back to the two gods. That they left some of their magic in the waters, which is why the waves are always at war between the darkness and the light. If Bram is right and his soul is held somewhere in the rowan wood, then there is some truth to the teaching.
I cross to the small table beside my bed and peel open the desk drawer. The bell lolls on its dome.
I should bring it back.
Grind it beneath my boot and send the pieces back to the river. It can curse the next unfortunate soul who finds it, makethemsee visions of the dead. For a moment, I wonder at how its original owner—a Reaper—lost it. But does it matter? With my white hair and blackened blood, I am not too far from Erybrus myself.
I bite down on my bottom lip until a coppery taste floods my mouth, reminding me of the scent of the room when Bram appeared or the tang in the air that sweeps up from the wood when the monsters—or the souls, as I now have come to know—show themselves.
