My gaze lifts again. Past the priest. Past the grave. Back to the fog where the oak tree stands stiff and lonely.
But Death is gone.
Chapter
Sixteen
Elara
Death stayed gone for days.
Not in the literal sense, of course. After all, the business of collecting souls is ceaseless. By all accounts of my ministers, my husband has been a diligent god, sweeping through the realm of Issoria with an efficiency that doesn’t pause for grief or ceremony.
I spent just as many days out in the biting cold, sitting beside the mound of Daron’s grave. For hours, I sat in face-numbing stillness, trying to conjure him just so I could ask why. Why didhe wipe my tear with his bloodied hand before he said he was sorry? Why did he stay with Daron? Why is he avoiding me now? Why, why, why for so many things.
But where his wife is concerned, Death remains absent…
A heavy, wet flake sticks to my eyelashes before it melts against the numb skin of my cheek. I don’t brush it away. I sit unmoving on the frozen ground, my woolen skirt fanning out like spilled wine across the white blanket that covers the graveyard.
Snow makes the world quiet in a way that isn’t peace.
More like the arrest of time, muffling the rot-stink rising from the soil. It softens the sharp edges of broken headstones. It covers the mud where too many feet walked too recently. It hides the fresh dirt, and the brother who lies frozen beneath.
My fingers tremble in my lap, pink-tipped and numb, holding down the priest’s new translation, where ink blurs under the moisture of melted snowflakes. I read the words again, their true, unadulterated meaning letting a darkness settle inside me so profound that it feels like I’m trapped at the bottom of a deep, deep well.
To break the crown, love must rise,
Death binding his queen
in lover’s guise.
In the bed of the night,
his wife shall yield,
Receiving Death
on the corpse’s field.
For the string restores
not by the blade’s cruel art,
But snaps only
within his shattered heart.
His shattered heart.
Notmyheart.His.
Kael was mostly right, yet wrong on one part as crucial as it is hopeless. Whatever this warmth is at my core—be it gratitude, growing affection, or even inklings of devastating love—it’s useless. It’s not my heartache, not my love that the gold wants.
It’shis.
Death didn’t lie when he said hecannotbreak the curse. Trying to draw love from him is about as reasonable an attempt as drawing blood from a stone.
Whatever grudge against Vale or Death sustained me for weeks finally fizzles out, leaving me with nothing but the cold hard truth: I can’t blame a stone for not bleeding…and I can’t hate a shattered heart for failing to love.
