Her smile glistens like glass. She takes me by the hand, leads me over to a darkened window, and draws aside the curtain. White glimmers outside. White and green and yellow alike. It takes me a moment to realize what I am seeing, but once I do, my mouth drops open.
Bitterbloom.
Hundreds of brilliant, bright white petals. They are a field, a moat, each bloom lifting a glossy head to the pale moon. My breath fogs up the glass.
“How are they growing here?”
She says nothing for a moment, as if sifting through words to try and find the right ones. “They grow where the ground tells them. Where there is a remembrance of life.”
A remembrance of life. The words stick at the back of my throat like a film. Before I can ask her to explain herself, she is whisking me away from the window, her elbow hooked through mine.
The music swells, a haunting melody of strings not quite tuned. It grates on my ears and runs a single finger down my spine. Mother leads me to the center of the dance floor, the scent of citrus in her wake. She folds her fingers through mine, places a hand at my side, and begins to turn me through the melee of surrounding death.
It begins as a twist of her lips. Subtle, if not for the fact I have pictured her face every day since we laid her in the ground. Her teeth glint out—not a smile exactly, more like the face a fox makes before it pounces on prey.
Hot spikes pierce my belly, and I tear my gaze away, searching the room for Bram. But I do not see him. There are too many faces—dead ones—and none I know.
“You are afraid, Addie,” she says. “Look at me.”
I do not want to, do not want to peer upon the dead thing behind my mother’s eyes. But what choice is there? Mother’s lips have gathered into a sneer. Her skin is gray in this light, and each bone of her face is outlined against her flesh. Cracks in the skin like shadow. I swallow, throat tight.
“ShouldI be afraid, Mother?” I hope my voice sounds braver than I feel.
There is a shush of skirts when she spins me deeper into the crowd. My head feels light, my skin almost floating.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” she says. “Did you know that? Never thought you’d be the one to finally piece it all back together.”
My skin gooses with cold. “Piece what back together?”
“The bell, the rowan wood, the boy…”
A noise gathers at the back of my tongue. Something between a whimper and a growl. I can feel the heaviness of the brass in my pocket. “How do…”
Mother’s sneer curls upward, a half-moon slash in her graying face. “Oh, my Morning Glory. There is so much you don’t know.”
“Then tell me.” My fingers grasp her tightly.
She needs no encouragement.
Hand digging into my side, she whirls me to the opposite end of the ballroom, emptying us at the foot of a grand staircase, all crumbling stone hung with flowers. They are everywhere, now that I notice them, the same ones she wears in her hair. The bitterbloom. Trailing in the gardens, spilling from beneath the shed door, weeping across Bram’s grave.
Across all the graves of all the dead girls back home…Mother’s fingers come to my jaw, pull my eyes up to hers.
“He didn’t want me to have it, you know? The bell. Kept it from me all those years, even as I grew more and more sick. Told me it was an unnatural way to do things—use it to keep me alive, keep me safe. But now I have you.”
A sound like an earthquake, a roll of thunder cracking over my ribs, bleeding down to my wrist. Some vast shattering, a chasm deepening. And then I realize, it is my mother.
Or not my mother.
The woman who stands before me is hard as stone, eyes flashing like lightning in an autumn sky. Her fingers dig trenches in my skin.
My words die on my lips. “Mother, you’re hurting me.”
But she does not care; she holds faster. Stronger. A peal of danger rings out in my head, and Bram is nowhere in sight. What has she done with him? What has she done with herself?
“You must listen to me, Adelaide.” That unnatural strength pulls me tight against her chest. “Here, in this place, I live a half-life. I do not want to belong to Ithrandrilorhis brother. I want to remember what it was like to taste, to smell, to feel the groundalivebeneath my feet. Don’t you understand? I have fought so long and hard for this, and now it is in my grasp. I will not let you take it from me.”
I hold back tears. “Takewhatfrom you, Mother?”
