But I am not that woman.
I am the woman bound to a chair, fighting.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “That you died.”
Bram leans on the maul. “It wasn’t all so bad, you know. It almost felt like peace in the end, knowing that nothing could be worse than what the sickness was doing to my body.” He gives a self-deprecating smirk and swings another log up to the block. “Little did I know, eh?”
My eyes watch the skies, and with each wisp of shadow, I feel the empty space inside me. The space the wood tried to fill.
“You were sick?”
Bram smiles, a bitter thing, and lifts another log to the block. “Mother noticed it first, blamed my father. Thought he’d been—” He cracks the maul down, shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter what she thought in the end. I died anyway. The nausea was the worst of it, puking my guts up into a crock and watching helplessly as Matilda washed it out, only to replace it moments later.”
Matilda. The eldest of his three younger sisters. I remember seeing her in the market, all copper curls and blue eyes. What it must have been like to watch her brother waste away before her.
A familiar sort of sadness settles in my gut before it turns ashen with fear and memory. Reaper’s blood.
“Do you remember the face of the Reaper who took you?”
Bram blinks, like it is a strange question, and then his gaze darts to where my injured leg lies behind woolen skirts. “It wasn’t you, if that’s what you’re wondering. I never saw his face.”
Hisface. A man, then. A breath of relief shudders through me.
“Have you found peace here?”
Bram plants a cut of oak to the block. I want him to say yes, to reassure me that wherever Mother is, she is okay. She is safe. But his face tells me otherwise. He lifts the maul and sends it cracking down again.
“Nobody can prepare you for the rowan wood, Adelaide. It’s like smashing through a wall, only to find a cliff on the other side, and you’re just falling.” He lifts another log. “And when you finally hit the bottom and realize you’re dead, it’s too late. You can’t scramble back up, no matter how hard you try.”Crack. The log splits open and tumbles down, splinters raining.
“That…that sounds awful.”
Bram throws the kindling on the growing pile. “It is. But it’s not the worst of it. The worst part is what comes next.” He throws another log to the chopping block. “Shadows and a voice and three choices. Ascension to Ithrandril, a true hell with Erybrus in the place he resides, or here, staying put and futilely trying to climb your way back up the cliff.”
I blink at him, dazed. “Who would choose Erybrus?”
“Many people choose darkness, Adelaide. Sometimes, pain tastes sweeter.”
I march toward him, my feet moving without heed. My blood pressure rockets when he looks at me, the light catching his green and gold eyes. With Bram before me and Ransom behind, I feel vulnerable. Like my heart could choose either way and it will be my undoing.
I am doomed.
But this is not why I am here.
When he stoops to pick up the rest of the kindling, his dark hair sweeps from his face, and I notice a thin scar on his neck.
I am a thousand miles away, breath whooshing out of me.
“What is that?” I ask, pointing to his throat.
He tosses the wood. “What?”
“That mark on your skin.”
His fingers brush the pale line. “It’s nothing. Just a cut I got when I was little.”
I glower, fist my hands. “I don’t like being lied to, Bram.”
“That’s rich, coming from you.”
