Painted Devils, page 40
The Scarlet Maiden bends so her terrible, lovely face is burning inches from mine. “You will choose, Prophet, NOW.”
We need time. We need an opening. Maybe—maybe if I can weaken the cult’s faith, I can put a dent in the Scarlet Maiden’s power.
“I choose you,” I say as loudly as I can, hoping that if any original Hagendorn villagers hear me, they can forgive me someday, “because I am a false prophet. In January, I got drunk, fell on the bridge, and spilled rubies I was carrying. I made up a lie about having a vision so I’d get help fishing them out of the brook, and then that lie kept growing. You’re not the Red Maid of the River. You’re not even a god. You’re just a lie I tricked people into believing.”
The Scarlet Maiden rears back. Wrath fouls her face—
Emeric says suddenly, “There—I’ve got it, I know—”
I play my final card: “Brunne, come to my aid!”
Only silence answers.
We’re too deep into the Scarlet Maiden’s domain.
The Scarlet Maiden laughs, a dissonant, musical sound. “Oh, my foolish little prophet! Did you think I was not with you even then? Who do you think doused the fire before it swallowed the Ros brothers’ house? Who do you think saved Leni’s daughter from the waldskrot? My protection has been upon Hagendorn for months.” Miasmatic tendrils coil toward us, bristling. “And now it’s time to pay the price.”
The dirt shudders beneath our feet once again, this time writhing like great worms through dry silt. Roots squirm to the surface—no, not roots.
Briars.
They phase right through the intangible Scarlet Maiden, cutting a deep green road into the mob. “GO,” the Briar Hag thunders.
I don’t need to be told twice.
I grab Emeric’s hand and run.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
THE WAY OUT
“Felsengruft,” Emeric pants behind me as we dash down the briar road. “The anchor’s in Felsengruft, under the Broken Peak.”
Sure enough, the thorn walls are steering us onto the footpath to Boderad’s Gorge. There’s no time to wonder why the anchor isn’t in Hagendorn. I hear shouting and fury behind us but don’t dare look back. “Did you see what it is?”
“No, only that it’s in the rite hall.” Emeric draws even with me. “She’s—she’s even stronger than I expected if she can move us like that. It takes an enormous amount of power to shift reality.”
The briars wane around us as we reach the woods once more. Green eyes blossom in the trees, and this time, mouths split in the bark.
The Briar Hag’s rasp comes from every side. “I’ll keep the mortals locked down as long as I can. Make haste.”
“It took us, what—two hours to hike there last time?” Emeric asks as the eyes shrink away. “If we hurry … maybe an hour.”
The sunset is dyeing the already-russet forest an even deeper red, making rubies of the falling raindrops. I check my satchel to make sure the bloody cambric is still there. “How are you holding up, magic-wise?”
Emeric is rummaging through his own satchel, consternation on his face until he surfaces with an intact vial of witch-ash oil. I recognize the black cork: It’s the highest concentration made by the Order of Prefects. “Phew. Survived the fall. And I’m fine, the tracking spell is very lightweight. The binding was always going to call for witch-ash anyway.” He grimaces. “Not that we have a surplus of options. Did I hear right? We have until midnight before…?”
Choking apprehension clogs my throat. “That’s what ScarMad said, that she’d have a sacrifice by then, no matter what.”
“If it comes to it”—Emeric’s voice hitches—“destroy the blood drops and save your family. My life isn’t worth—”
“It won’t come to it, then,” I say, furious he would even suggest such a thing. “All right? I’m not letting it happen.”
He squeezes my hand but doesn’t answer.
Neither of us can speak of the other way out for him. A scant handful of hours remains, enough that, if we’re truly desperate—
No. We want to take our time, we want it to matter. I won’t let her take that from us too.
The choice dangles between us, a razor pendulum, nonetheless.
I remember climbing past the beeches and hawthorns of this path just a month ago, yet—maybe it’s the rain, maybe it’s the dwindling sunset—something’s different. We scramble along the trail until I see the striped hornfels walls of the gorge through the trees.
My stomach twists. That can’t be right. We’ve been walking for barely half an hour.
When we break through, it’s to a deafening roar.
I expected the long rope bridge that spanned the gorge, but it’s nowhere in sight. Instead, great plumes of spray blow into our faces from where the Ilsza plummets into the rocky teeth of the Kronenkessel. We’re at the waterfall’s foot, not its head.
Emeric stops short. “It’s the sacrificial bridge.” His voice sounds numb.
I follow his gaze to a spindly bridge of ancient stone. It’s the one we saw far below us when we first crossed the rope bridge. And, I realize, the one in every mural, mosaic, and memory I’ve seen of the Kronenkessel.
The one the sacrifice jumps from.
“We must have missed a turn,” I insist, knowing full well I’m in denial. I turn to go up the trail—
The world judders. Suddenly it’s not dirt beneath my feet but wet stone. In the final dregs of sundown, the water pooling on the surface looks like blood. We’ve been moved again, now to the middle of the ancient bridge. The Kronenkessel tosses and froths just beyond the edge, horrific, inevitable.
We’re still in the Scarlet Maiden’s trap. And she’s hell-bent on forcing us into an end.
I sway in place, trying to think, clinging to Emeric’s hand too tight. “We can—we can cross to the other side and find a way up to Felsengruft from there.”
“She’s just going to keep shifting us,” he says, almost disbelieving. “She’s not going to let us reach Broken Peak.”
If we can’t reach Felsengruft, can’t reach the material anchor, then we have no way to destroy her.
“I’ll call Brunne again,” I say desperately, Don’t panic beating in my mind like a drum.
Yet we both know how well that summons will work. The gorge is flooded in red haze, one not even Brunne the Huntress can pierce.
But the Briar Hag told me about Brunne for a reason, told me about the Red Maid for a reason, there has to be a way—
A faint golden gleam twinkles from the mad, foaming waters of the Kronenkessel.
A wild idea seizes me. I let go of Emeric’s hand. Before he can even react, I’ve whipped my satchel over my head and dropped it on the bridge.
Then I hurl myself off the edge.
I hear Emeric scream my name just before I hit the water. If I can get the crown, maybe I can rouse the real Red Maid, maybe she can save us. Maybe that will be enough.
It’s cold, bitterly cold, and the rush is dulled to a distant churn. I let myself be dragged down, then force my eyes open. The water stings, but I can make out great granite thorns, the inverted spume where the waterfall hits.
I cannot make out the bottom of the pool.
This is where the giant Boderad fell, where his fury turned him into a hellhound, and the wound is greater, darker, than I could have fathomed.
Still, a tiny ring of gold glitters against a spur of stone: Brunne’s bridal crown.
I know instantly that it is too deep for me to reach. I’ll never be able to dive that far, let alone make it back up. But I have to try, I have to fix this, somehow—
Something shifts in the depths. One milky glowing eye blinks at me from a deep beyond even the crown—then another.
My breath bubbles out. I thrash and kick, pushing toward the surface. I can feel the current change with the hellhound’s rise, the current of the waterfall reversing, pulling me deeper as water rushes to fill the void Boderad leaves in his wake. The water even tastes different, like stale brine ice—no matter how I fight, I’m being dragged down—jaws open beneath me, each tooth as long as I am tall—
A body knifes into the pool and to my side. Arms wrap around me, and there’s a flash of silver. It’s as if the water itself repels us, shoving us to the rocky rim of the Kronenkessel.
I’m hauled halfway onto muddy stone just as an algae-stained snout breaks the surface. The crack of teeth is so loud, all sound buzzes out for a moment. I collapse, sputtering.
“… you thinking?” Emeric’s voice fades in.
The hellhound sinks below the water, and a wave surges in its wake, lifting us both all the way onto the bank before draining away. Emeric sinks to the ground beside me, winded and stricken. “You didn’t—that thing would have torn you apart—”
“The crown,” I cough out, my teeth chattering as I look around. We’ve washed up on the same side of the Kronenkessel that we came from, the Broken Peak looming impossibly high above the opposite shore. There’s a meager crescent of pebble and dirt here, and a thin track leading to the sacrificial bridge. “Brunne’s crown. I thought if I got it for the Red Maid…” I hang my head. “It’s too far down.”
“Never mind that, you could have died,” Emeric says wretchedly.
I just give a hunched little shrug, because what is there to say? He’s running out of time, and I don’t know how to fix it. “Haven’t you figured it out yet?” I ask, half laughing, half broken. “I’d do it again if it’d work. You absolute bastard, I’d do anything to save you.”
He pulls me to him, shaking as he buries his face in my bedraggled wet hair. “Not for me, Vanja, please. Not for me.”
For a long, sweet, awful moment, we stay this way: on the bank of the pool, wound together in the cold, holding on like the only warmth in the world is between us. But night is falling, the shadows creeping in.
We both know there’s only one final way out.
It was always going to come to this, in the end.
I lean back and draw a breath, steeling myself. “We need more time,” I start. “We can leave here, keep the blood drops away from the Scarlet Maiden, and regroup … but not if she’ll take you in a few hours anyway. We have to break—”
“No,” Emeric says swiftly.
“—the claim,” I finish. There’s a tortuous pause.
“Is that what you want?” he asks me, in a way that says we both know the answer is no.
My fists ball up in his sodden shirt. It’s a testament to our mutual misery that we’re clinging to each other, soaked to the bone, and it’s doing nothing for either of us. “It doesn’t matter.” We both flinch at the lie. I try again. “We can take our time later, we can … make it special. But we need to get out of here first.”
“This isn’t right,” he whispers. “I don’t want to do this to you.”
I shake my head. “If you’re not ready either, I won’t force you. I just … don’t know what we’ll do.”
Emeric finally looks me in the eye. “I … I’ve been ready. But you deserve more than the least terrible of your choices.” His shoulders slump as he confesses, “But I don’t know what else we can do either.”
“You said you would choose me every time, Emeric.” I take his face in my hands, touch my forehead to his. “So please, this once—let me choose you.”
A shuddering breath passes between us, crackling like lightning. Then a soft, almost feral noise breaks from his throat as I bring his lips to mine.
Ever since the Scarlet Maiden possessed him, each kiss has been short, sweet but fleeting for fear of interruption. For the first time in two weeks, I let myself—make myself—linger.
I can do this. Despite the knot in my stomach, I can do this for him.
He’s clearly missed this, too, every stolen breath ragged, every touch of his hands, his mouth, almost reverent. When I move to plant a knee on either side of his hips, he sucks in a breath like he’s witnessed a miracle, kisses me with a ferocity that should draw an answering wildness from me.
It does, and it does not.
Part of me is here, savoring the taste of his skin, reveling in his shiver when I peel his shirt away. Part of me would martyr myself to sanctify his hands ghosting under my shift, to bathe in the holy fire they leave in their wake. Part of me burns to wreck myself on him utterly.
But the rest …
The rest of me is ready to run.
Braced for the worst.
Fixated on the red handprint between us, throbbing on his bare chest like it’s pushing me away, all but screaming, Stop, wrong, mine, mine, mine.
I can’t let go, can’t lose myself in him the way I want. I should be swept away, not annoyed with the jab of a pebble in my knee, not distracted by my wreath of roses bobbing against a rock in the water nearby. This should be about us.
It is, and it is not.
It didn’t have to be sonnets and choreography and flower petals. It didn’t even have to be planned. I just wanted more than a quick, performative rut in the mud. I wanted it to mean more than just—getting it out of the way.
But this has to be enough.
I want this to be right, I want it to be right so badly, I will do anything, even if it feels terribly wrong. I make my hands skim down his chest, working myself up to reach for the waistband of his breeches. I can do this, and it will be enough to save him.
Won’t it?
This is how I’m supposed to claim him, right? But my mind will not be quiet.
What if—what if it doesn’t count because I won’t get with child? Or what if we’re both supposed to finish and I can’t? No, if it were that, we’d have claimed each other in Rammelbeck—but what makes this so different?
Is it really just letting him into me this way? His hands, his mouth, they didn’t count?
Is this really the only way that’s good enough?
And then—
The threads knot.
I go still, hands frozen on Emeric’s stomach.
“Vanja?” he asks unevenly.
“It’s not enough,” I breathe, staring at the handprint as it pulsates on his chest. “We don’t … we don’t have to do this. It’s not going to work.”
“What?” Emeric stares at me, dazed and bewildered.
I don’t blame him. “It doesn’t matter what we do, none of it’s going to be good enough, because it never can be,” I say in a rush, thread after thread finally cinching into something like comprehension. “We’re trying to—to do this right, but there is no right way, because she’s always going to change the rules and say it doesn’t count. We were never going to break her claim. She just wants us to feel like nothing we did was good enough. We were never good enough.”
Emeric sits up, running a hand over his mouth. “Like how the Red Maid asked for the crown. We weren’t supposed to—”
He cuts off, chin falling to his chest. Red light dances across his cheeks.
But I expected this, from the moment I saw this game for what it is. I’m ready.
I push myself off him, rolling to my knees, and bark out, “Villanelle.”
Emeric drops to the ground.
Then—his whole body jerks.
His eyes are forced open, blazing red, the handprint too bright to look at directly.
“Thank you,” the Scarlet Maiden warbles through him, slurring a bit as she works his jaw like a ventriloquist’s dummy. He staggers to his feet, movements stilted and unnatural, a marionette with no strings. “It’s less elegant to puppet him myself, but so much easier when he doesn’t fight.”
It didn’t work. The sedative didn’t stop her this time.
Horror washes through me. “Let him go,” I whisper, insensible.
That red glow spreads through Emeric until he’s a lantern lit from within. She has him. She has him, she’s going to take him, she can march him into the jaws of the hellhound herself—
I lunge in a blind panic, hoping to seize any part of him I can. Emeric’s yanked backward, limbs dangling.
The Scarlet Maiden appears behind him in her full glory, a cutthroat smile bleeding triumph onto her face. She lifts Emeric into the air with a simple gesture. “You have made your choice.”
“I didn’t choose shit!” I yell, stumbling toward her like I’m an infant again, full of fury I can express only in a senseless howl. “Give him back!”
But the Scarlet Maiden just drifts lazily higher, taking Emeric with her, out of reach. “Time to pay, Vanja.”
Bloody light convulses around them both, and then—
They’re gone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
A CROWN OF GOLD
“Come back!” I scream into the night sky. “damn you, give him back!”
Of course, there is no answer.
I stand there on the muddy edge of the Kronenkessel, trembling, terrified of what is sure to follow: The Scarlet Maiden will sacrifice Emeric now, and there is nothing, nothing, I can do to stop it.
I stay that way, frozen for a minute that feels like an eternity. Then another. Still there is no sign of them. The rain hammers down, the waterfall howls in my ears, the mist rolls on, and beyond that—silence.
For a moment I’m back in Minkja, bruised and defeated in Emeric’s room, knowing one wrong move and I’d lose him.
But I didn’t. I found a way out—
I had Ragne and Joniza and Gisele and Barthl then, I have none of them now, there’s nothing I can do and I led him here—
My breath gums in my lungs, making a sickly sobbing sound. Oddly enough, that gives me just enough to lock onto. This is panic, this is raw, open fear, just like I felt at that moment in Minkja. Just like then, I need to give it room to pass.
I had the tolls of a clock to guide me in midwinter. There’s nothing of the sort in Boderad’s Gorge, so instead I squeeze out a guttural “One.” Breathe. “Two.” Breathing. “Three.”
I did this, I ruined it, his blood is on my hands—
“Four,” I force out.
I count to thirteen, for luck. Then I open my eyes and make myself pull at the threads of this web.
Sunset has gone, purpling night seeping across the sky. The Scarlet Maiden is nowhere to be seen, nor Emeric. Maybe she’s waiting for midnight.
