The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, page 4
Estele said nothing, because she knew it wasn’t fair. Knew this was the risk of being a woman, of giving yourself to a place, instead of a person.
Adeline was going to be a tree, and instead, people have come brandishing an ax.
They have given her away.
She lies awake the night before the wedding, and thinks of freedom. Of fleeing. Of stealing away on her father’s horse, even as she knows the thought is madness.
She feels mad enough to do it.
Instead, she prays.
She has been praying, of course, since the day of her betrothal, given half her possessions to the river and buried the other half in the field or at the slope of dirt and brush where the village meets the woods, and now she is almost out of time, and out of tokens.
She lies there in the dark, twists the old wooden ring on its leather cord, and considers going out and praying again now, in the dead of night, but Adeline remembers Estele’s fearsome warning about the ones who might answer. So instead, she clenches her hands together and prays to her mother’s God instead. Prays for help, for a miracle, for a way out. And then in the darkest part of night, she prays for Roger’s death—anything for her escape.
She feels guilty at once, sucks it back into her chest like an expelled breath, and waits.
* * *
Day breaks like an egg yolk, spilling yellow light across the field.
Adeline slips out of the house before dawn, having never slept at all. Now she winds her way through the wild grass beyond the vegetable garden, skirts wicking up the dew. She lets herself sink with the weight of them, her favorite drawing pencil clutched in one hand. Adeline does not want to give it up, but she is running out of time and out of tokens.
She presses the pencil point down into the damp soil of the field.
“Help me,” she whispers to the grass, its edges limned with light. “I know you are there. I know you are listening. Please. Please.”
But the grass is only grass, and the wind is only wind, and neither answers, even when she presses her forehead to the ground and sobs.
There is nothing wrong with Roger.
But there is nothing right, either. His skin is waxy, his blond hair thinning, his voice like a wisp of wind. When his hand lays itself upon her arm, the grip is weak, and when he inclines his head toward hers, his breath is stale.
And Adeline? She is a vegetable left too long in the garden, its skin gone stiff, its insides woody, gone to ground by choice, only to be dug up and made into a meal.
“I do not want to marry him,” she says, fingers tangled in the weedy earth.
“Adeline!” calls her mother, as if she is one of the livestock, gone astray.
She drags herself up, empty with anger and grief, and when she goes inside her mother sees only the dirt caking her hands, and orders her daughter to the basin. Adeline scrubs the soil from beneath her nails, bristles biting her fingers as her mother scolds.
“What will your husband think?”
Husband.
A word like a millstone, all weight and no warmth.
Her mother tuts. “You will not be so restless once you have children to tend.”
Adeline thinks again of Isabelle, two small boys clinging to her skirts, a third in a basket by the hearth. They used to dream together, but she has aged ten years in two, it seems. She is always tired, and there are hollows in her face where once her cheeks were red from laughter.
“It will be good for you,” says her mother, “to be somebody’s wife.”
* * *
The day passes like a sentence.
The sun falls like a scythe.
Adeline can almost hear the whistle of the blade as her mother braids her hair into a crown, weaves flowers in the place of jewels. Her dress is simple and light, but it might as well be made of mail for how it weighs on her.
She wants to scream.
Instead, she reaches up and grips the wooden ring around her neck, as if for balance.
“You must take that off before the ceremony,” instructs her mother, and Adeline nods, even as her fingers tighten around it.
Her father comes in from the barn, dusted with wood shavings and smelling of sap. He coughs, a faint rattle, like loose seeds, inside his chest. It has been there for a year, that cough, but he will not let them talk of it.
“You are almost ready?” he asks.
What a foolish question.
Her mother talks about the wedding dinner as if it has already come and gone. Adeline looks out the window at the sinking sun, and doesn’t listen to the words, but she can hear the light in her mother’s voice, the vindication in it. Even in her father’s eyes, there is a measure of relief. Their daughter tried to carve her own road, but now things are being set right, a wayward life dragged back on course, propelled down its proper path.
The house is too warm, the air heavy and still, and Adeline cannot breathe.
Finally the church bell tolls, the same low tone it calls at funerals, and she forces herself to her feet.
Her father touches her arm.
His face is sorry, but his grip is firm.
“You will come to love your husband,” he says, but the words are clearly more wish than promise.
“You will be a good wife,” says her mother, and hers are more command than wish.
And then Estele appears in the doorway, dressed as if she is in mourning. And why shouldn’t she be? This woman who taught her of wild dreams and willful gods, who filled Adeline’s head with thoughts of freedom, blew on the embers of hope and let her believe a life could be her own.
The light has gone watery and thin behind Estele’s gray head. There is still time, Adeline tells herself, but it is fleeting, faster now with every breath.
Time—how often has she heard it described as sand within a glass, steady, constant. But that is a lie, because she can feel it quicken, crashing toward her.
Panic beats a drum inside her chest, and outside, the path is a single dark line, stretched straight and narrow toward the village square. On the other side, the church stands waiting, pale and stiff as a tombstone, and she knows that if she walks in, she will not come out.
Her future will rush by the same as her past, only worse, because there will be no freedom, only a marriage bed and a deathbed and perhaps a childbed between, and when she dies it will be as though she never lived.
There will be no Paris.
No green-eyed lover.
No trips on boats to faraway lands.
No foreign skies.
No life beyond this village.
No life at all, unless—
Adeline pulls free of her father’s grip, drags to a stop on the path.
Her mother turns to look at her, as if she might run, which is exactly what she wants to do, but knows she can’t.
“I made a gift for my husband,” says Adeline, mind spinning. “I’ve left it in the house.”
Her mother softens, approving.
Her father stiffens, suspicious.
Estele’s eyes narrow, knowing.
“I’ll just fetch it,” she continues, already turning back.
“I’ll go with you,” says her father, and her heart lurches and her fingers twitch, but it is Estele who reaches out to stop him.
“Jean,” she says in that sly way, “Adeline cannot be your daughter and his wife. She is a woman grown, not a child to be minded.”
He finds his daughter’s eyes, and says, “Be quick.”
Adeline has already taken flight.
Back up the path, and past the door, into the house, and through, to the other side, to the open window, and the field, and the distant line of trees. The woods standing sentinel at the eastern edge of the village, opposite the sun. The woods, already cloaked in shadow, though she knows there is still light, still time.
“Adeline?” calls her father, but she doesn’t look back.
Instead, she climbs through the window, wood snagging on the wedding dress as she stumbles out, and runs.
“Adeline? Adeline!”
The voices call out after her, but they stretch thinner with every step, and soon she is across the field, and into the woods, breaking the line of trees as she sinks to her knees in the dense summer dirt.
She clutches the wooden ring, feels the loss of it even before she tugs the leather cord over her head. Adeline does not want to sacrifice it, but she has used up all her tokens, given every gift she could spare back to the earth, and none of the gods have answered. Now this is all she has left, and the light is thin, and the village is calling, and she is desperate to escape.
“Please,” she whispers, her voice breaking over the word as she plunges the band down into the mossy earth. “I will do anything.”
The trees murmur overhead, and then go still, as if they too are waiting, and Adeline prays, to every god in the Villon woods, to anyone and anything who will listen. This cannot be her life. This cannot be all there is.
“Answer me,” she pleads as the damp seeps into her wedding dress.
She squeezes her eyes shut, and strains to hear, but the only sound is her own voice on the wind and her name, echoing in her ears like a heartbeat.
“Adeline…”
“Adeline…”
“Adeline…”
She bows her head against the soil and grips the dark earth and screams, “Answer me!”
The silence is mocking.
She has lived here all her life and never heard the woods this quiet. Cold settles over her, and she doesn’t know if it’s coming from the forest or from her own bones, giving up the last of their fight. Her eyes are still shut tight, and perhaps that is why she doesn’t notice that the sun has slipped behind the village at her back, that dusk has given way to dark.
Adeline keeps praying, and doesn’t notice at all.
Villon-sur-Sarthe, France
July 29, 1714
IX
The sound, when it comes, is a low rumble, deep and distant as thunder.
Laughter, Adeline thinks, opening her eyes and noticing, finally, how the light has faded.
She looks up, but sees nothing. “Hello?”
The laughter draws itself into a voice, somewhere behind her.
“You need not kneel,” it says. “Let us see you on your feet.”
She scrambles up, and turns, but she is met only by darkness, surrounded by it, a moonless night after the summer sun has fled. And Adeline knows, then, that she has made a mistake. That this is one of the gods she was warned against.
“Adeline? Adeline?” call the voices from the town, as faint and faraway as the wind.
She squints into the shadows between the trees, but there is no shape, no god to be found—only that voice, close as a breath against her cheek.
“Adeline, Adeline,” it says, mocking, “… they are calling for you.”
She turns again, finding nothing but deep shadow. “Show yourself,” she orders, her own voice sharp and brittle as a stick.
Something brushes her shoulder, grazes her wrist, drapes itself around her like a lover. Adeline swallows. “What are you?”
The shadow’s touch withdraws. “What am I?” it asks, an edge of humor in that velvet tone. “That depends on what you believe.”
The voice splits, doubles, rattling through tree limbs and snaking over moss, folding over on itself until it is everywhere.
“So tell me—tell me—tell me,” it echoes. “Am I the devil—the devil—or the dark—dark—dark? Am I a monster—monster—or a god—god—god—or…”
The shadows in the woods begin to pull together, drawn like storm clouds. But when they settle, the edges are no longer wisps of smoke, but hard lines, the shape of a man, made firm by the light of the village lanterns at his back.
“Or am I this?”
The voice spills from a perfect pair of lips, a shadow revealing emerald eyes that dance below black brows, black hair that curls across his forehead, framing a face Adeline knows too well. One that she has conjured up a thousand times, in pencil and charcoal and dream.
It is the stranger.
Her stranger.
She knows it is a trick, a shadow parading as a man, but the sight of him still robs her breath. The darkness looks down at his shape, seeing himself as if for the first time, and seems to approve. “Ah, so the girl believes in something after all.” Those green eyes lift. “Well now,” he says, “you have called, and I have come.”
Never pray to the gods that answer after dark.
Adeline knows—she knows—but this is the only one who answered. The only one who would help.
“Are you prepared to pay?”
Pay.
The price.
The ring.
Adeline drops to her knees, scours the ground until she finds the leather cord, and frees her father’s ring from the soil.
She holds it out to the god, its pale wood now stained with dirt, and he draws closer. He may look like flesh and blood, but he still moves like shadow. A single step, and he is there, filling her vision, folding one hand around the ring, and resting the other on Adeline’s cheek. His thumb brushes the freckle beneath her eye, the edge of her stars.
“My dear,” says the darkness, taking the ring, “I do not deal in trinkets.”
The wooden band crumbles in his hand, and falls away, nothing more than smoke. A strangled sound escapes her lips—it hurt enough to lose the ring, hurts more to see it wiped from the world like a smudge on skin. But if the ring is not enough, then what?
“Please,” she says, “I will give anything.”
The shadow’s other hand still rests against her cheek. “You assume I want anything,” he says, lifting her chin. “But I take only one coin.” He leans closer still, green eyes impossibly bright, his voice soft as silk. “The deals I make, I make for souls.”
Adeline’s heart lurches in her chest.
In her mind, she sees her mother on her knees in church, speaking of God and Heaven, hears her father talking, telling stories of wishes and riddles. She thinks of Estele, who believes in nothing but a tree over her bones. Who would say that a soul is nothing more than a seed returned to soil—though she’s the one who warned against the dark.
“Adeline,” says the darkness, her name sliding like moss between his teeth. “I am here. Now tell me why.”
She has waited so long to be met—to be answered, to be asked—that at first the words all fail her.
“I do not want to marry.”
She feels so small when she says it. Her whole life feels small, and she sees that judgment reflected in the god’s gaze, as if to say, Is that all?
And no, it is more than that. Of course it is more.
“I do not want to belong to someone else,” she says with sudden vehemence. The words are a door flung wide, and now the rest pour out of her. “I do not want to belong to anyone but myself. I want to be free. Free to live, and to find my own way, to love, or to be alone, but at least it is my choice, and I am so tired of not having choices, so scared of the years rushing past beneath my feet. I do not want to die as I’ve lived, which is no life at all. I—”
The shadow cuts her off, impatient. “What use is it, to tell me what you do not want?” His hand slides through her hair, comes to rest against the back of her neck, drawing her close. “Tell me instead what you want most.”
She looks up. “I want a chance to live. I want to be free.” She thinks of the years slipping by.
Blink, and half your life is gone.
“I want more time.”
He considers her, those green eyes changing shade, now spring grass, now summer leaf. “How long?”
Her mind spins. Fifty years. One hundred. Every number feels too small.
“Ah,” says the darkness, reading her silence. “You do not know.” Again, the green eyes shift, darken. “You ask for time without limit. You want freedom without rule. You want to be untethered. You want to live exactly as you please.”
“Yes,” says Adeline, breathless with want, but the shadow’s expression sours. His hand drops from her skin, and then he is no longer there, but leaning against a tree several strides away.
“I decline,” he says.
Adeline draws back as if struck. “What?” She has come this far, has given everything she has—she made her choice. She cannot go back to that world, that life, that present and past without a future. “You cannot decline.”
One dark brow lifts, but there is no amusement in that face.
“I am not some genie, bound to your whim.” He pushes off the tree. “Nor am I some petty forest spirit, content with granting favors for mortal trinkets. I am stronger than your god and older than your devil. I am the darkness between stars, and the roots beneath the earth. I am promise, and potential, and when it comes to playing games, I divine the rules, I set the pieces, and I choose when to play. And tonight, I say no.”
Adeline? Adeline? Adeline?
Beyond the edge of the woods, the village lights are closer now. There are torches in the field. They are coming for her.
The shadow looks over his shoulder. “Go home, Adeline. Back to your small life.”
“Why?” she pleads, grabbing his arm. “Why do you refuse me?”
He brushes his hand along her cheek, the gesture soft and warm as hearthsmoke. “I am not in the business of charity. You ask for too much. How many years until you’re sated? How many, until I get my due? No, I make deals with endings, and yours has none.”
She will come back to this moment a thousand times.
In frustration, and regret, in sorrow, and self-pity, and unbridled rage.
She will come to face the fact that she cursed herself before he ever did.
But here, and now, all she can see is the flickering torchlight of Villon, and the green eyes of the stranger she once dreamed of loving, and the chance to escape slipping away with his touch.
“You want an ending,” she says. “Then take my life when I am done with it. You can have my soul when I don’t want it anymore.”
The shadow tips his head, suddenly intrigued.
A smile—just like the smile in her drawings, askance, and full of secrets—crosses his mouth. And then he pulls her to him. A lover’s embrace. He is smoke and skin, air and bone, and when his mouth presses against hers, the first thing she tastes is the turning of the seasons, the moment when dusk gives way to night. And then his kiss deepens. His teeth skim her bottom lip, and there is pain in the pleasure, followed by the copper taste of blood on her tongue.
