Through the cross of night, through blood and seed, through water we return.
The King lifts one hand, and I understand. I step in. There’s no other choice.
The river is ice, the cold biting my ankles, calves, and knees. I wade until it laps at my waist, my ribs, my nipples shrieking at the cold.
I sink.
Let it take me.
The current scrubs.
Semen, blood, ash, betrayal, sin–everything–swirls away in cloudy ribbons. My braids float like ink. I open my mouth and the river fills it. This time, the river isn’t trying to take my life. It’s giving it back.
I stay under until my lungs burn.
Until I’m dragged back to the surface, strong hands pulling me back from the abyss.
I break the surface gasping and look into the masks of my Barons, to the bank where the King hasn’t moved.
“Go,” Hunter says quietly.
Obedience, that’s what emerged from this night, that’s who they want. That’s who they’ll get. Water streams off me, gooseflesh rising in violent waves. My teeth chatter so hard I taste blood.
My husband steps forward.
A robe–black, heavy, and drenched in his scent–is draped over my shoulders. His fingers brush my collarbone for half a second.
I open my mouth.
Please,I want to beg.Say it. Say I’m yours.
He leans in.
His mask fills my vision–hollow eye sockets, bone grin.
His whisper is low, terrible, final, “There will be no third chance, wife.”
His words dig into my heart like I’ve been stabbed, but I know it’s a test. It’s all a test, one I’ve failed over and over again. Now, I stand on the bank, dripping, reborn, and terrified. The silence that follows is heavier than any scream.
Then I hear the scrape of boots on wet stone, and someone steps out of the darkness as though the night itself has shaped him into being.
He’s robed in black velvet that drinks the moonlight, the hem dragging across the sandy river’s edge. A hollowed crow skull, bone bleached white, beak wired into a silent scream. Black flight feathers fan from the crown; thin silver wire stitches everything together. Deep, empty eye sockets are rimmed in tarnished silver. It’s chilling, and I instantly know who it is: Graves.
The Barons, river water dripping from their robes, flank the King. Graves stops three paces away.
“Kneel, Baroness,” he commands.
My legs fold before I decide they will. The dirt sucks at my bare knees; the robe slips from my shoulders and pools behind me like shed skin.
The King steps forward.
In his right hand, he holds the blade from the ritual, the three orbs clenched in his palm. Without ceremony, he drags the edge across the pad of his thumb. Blood wells, black in the ember torch light, and drips once, twice, onto the ground between us. My King kneels so that we are eye to eye. Graves speaks behind him, Latin rolling off his tongue.
“Memento mori, Baroness. Remember that you must die, so that you may truly live.”
He dips his bleeding thumb into the small hollow at the center of my forehead first, painting the lines of a star and circle. Then lower, between my breasts, over the frantic hammering of my heart.
Last, he slips his hand lower and presses the blood-wet paddirectly over my womb, marking the place where life begins and ends. Each touch burns colder than ice.
