But the faerie doesn’t need her permission.
The pinpricks turn to knives, stabbing through her. She collapses on the forest floor, her voice lost. The earth under her cheek smells like rotting leaves and moss, but the cool damp offers no comfort. She is burning alive. It’s like Barnbow. Worse than Barnbow. There is no one here to help her now.
A shadow falls over Beatrix. The faerie leans close and hisses in her ear, her breath a cool, cruel breeze on her cheek. “You will live to regret this moment. And then you will keep on living.”
Until she didn’t regret it anymore.
The pain burns itself out in a blaze that leaves her breathless, her curse consumed by flame. The deep night is unsettled around her, charged against her skin. Changed. Or maybe that is her.
She pulls herself off the ground. She feels hollow, an empty shell of the person who used to be Beatrix. Maybe she is. She has lived so long with Oliver’s love and the faerie’s curse, maybe she is nothing without them.
The faerie kneels at the edge of the Wye, staring into the dark water. Beatrix approaches her, but the faerie either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. She glances at the faerie’s moonlit reflection. Her eyes don’t look like hers when she looks into the river, either.
“Am I free?” Beatrix asks.
“You’remortal.” The faerie spits the word, as if it tastes foul on her tongue.
Her heart leaps.Mortal. Human. Real.
The faerie draws her mismatched gaze from the water to meetBeatrix’s own. A gasp escapes her. The glow has dimmed, the triumph gone, and she can see every one of the faerie’s years there.Too many.
The faerie sighs. “Are you ready to return to your human life, Beatrix?”
But her heart sinks. It isn’t a return to her human life. It can’t be. That life was stolen from her. That life is gone.
She’ll have to start over.
“No.”
The faerie’s gaze flares brighter. “No?”
Beatrix has known intimate love, soaring joy, and profound sorrow. She has grieved for the state of the world and has been awestruck by its beauty. Stood in wonder of its people. Stood in fear of them. Has made too many memories to count. There can be no life more human than the ones she has already lived. Her heart skips. “I want to strike a new bargain.”
The faerie sneers at her. “I thought you would have learned your lesson by now.”
Beatrix has learned her lesson. Has played the night she died over and over in her mind, wondering where she went wrong—what she could have done, could have said, differently. What turn of phrase would have brought her back to her husband and her daughter and her life, instead of damning her to an eternity alone. It has taken her nearly seven hundred years to understand: There was never a way back. The faerie was never going to return her to that life—not when it stood in the way of what she so desperately wanted.
Now, the only thing standing in her way is Beatrix.
“Bring Oliver back.”
The faerie scoffs at her. “I’m not in the business of mercy.”
“I know,” Beatrix says. “But you want my soul, and this is how you get it. Save Oliver, and it’s yours.”
The faerie tilts her head. Her face is like a porcelain mask, pale and unreadable, beautiful yet terrifying, human but not. “Your soul for his life?”
“No tricks? No curse?” Beatrix warns.
The faerie shrugs. “He could drop dead tomorrow, but it wouldn’t be my doing.”
“Then yes.” Her soul for his soul, her heart for his heart, her life for his life. All her love to save him.
Like his love saved her.
“That wasn’t so hard now, was it?” the faerie asks. Smug. Satisfied.
Beatrix peers into the black waters of the Wye, and her fear—everything—falls away. A quiet, heavy peace settles over her, chases that cold and aching loneliness from her bones.
