Chapter 8

CHAPTER EIGHT

MAEVYTH

T he sensation of sharp needles piercing my arm roused me from sleep, and I lifted it into the dappled rays of moonlight streaming through the window beside me. Noticing a strange blackness bleeding through the bandage where I’d cut myself, a sickening cold filled my chest.

I hissed a shaky breath and unwound the sticky bandage to find an oozing wound on my arm beneath.

Oh, no.

Angry red flesh surrounded the gash, and the veins branching out pulsed a distressing silver with each beat of my heart. Silver? A cold panic crawled over my chest, as I stared down at the abnormal color beneath my skin. Deep red drainage leaked from crusty edges, and when I lifted it to my nose, the stench of it tugged a gag from my throat. I pressed on the corner of the wound, and a thick, black substance, swirled through with what looked like whorls of molten silver, oozed out of it. Gurgling in my stomach had me breathing hard through my nose to stifle the urge to retch.

As a child, I’d had the silly notion that I’d one day become a physician. Ridiculous, seeing as women weren’t permitted to study medicine, but I hadn’t known any better. It turned out to be a futile ambition on my part when I’d discovered I had a weak stomach for blood and death.

And what grave misfortune that, of all places, I’d end up living in a mortuary.

“ Help! ” A frantic scream broke me from my thoughts, sounding like it echoed from the vent.

I turned to see my sister’s bed stood empty.

“ Please, someone help me! ” The voice arrived again, the intensity heightening to panic.

Aleysia .

I shot out of bed, wrapping my wound as I crossed the room toward the door, which I cracked open to find a dark and empty corridor. The pictures of grandfather’s relatives added an eerie feel, like eyes watching me, as I made my way down the hallway toward the staircase.

“ Please! Someone! Oh, god! ” The voice cried out again, though I didn’t entirely recognize it as my sister’s.

“Aleysia?” I whispered, as I stepped lightly down the staircase to the lower level.

“ I’m begging you! Please! Stop! ” The voice goaded me through the kitchen, washroom, and pantry, only to find nothing but stillness in each room.

From the front of the house, a thumping sound drew my feet closer to the viewing parlor. Tiptoeing toward the entryway, I followed the sound and rounded the wall. On the other side, stood Uncle Riftyn pressed against my sister, her head thrown back, bottom lip caught between her teeth. A twinge of alarm spiraled down my neck, and he turned toward me, his lips stretched to a grin, just before he captured my sister’s bare breast between his lips, never bothering to turn his gaze away from me.

Violent ripples of mortification pulsed through me, and I shuffled back around the wall before my sister could notice, wanting to scrub my eyeballs with soap and salt.

“Oh, gods be damned,” I muttered as I made my way back up to my room. It was then I noticed the cries I’d heard before had stopped. Certainly not my sister’s cries, with the risk of Agatha finding the two of them.

If not Aleysia, then who had called out for help?

Once back in my room, I paused by the vent, listening again.

Nothing.

Had I imagined it? Had my mind somehow conjured that sound?

Once settled in bed again, I turned toward the window, willing myself to erase the visual of Uncle Riftyn cornering Aleysia’s body against the wall, his pants pooled at his ankles, their naked limbs tangled around each other. The jarring shock of it still had my heart pounding in my chest.

I’d never been with a boy that way before, not fully penetrated, at least, though I did have a crush on one of the boys from my parish. Slightly older. The son of a miner, strong and handsome. The day before he left to fight for the Vonkovyan Army, he’d walked me home from the village square, where I’d gone to feed Mrs. Chalmsley some stale bread and dried fruits. Along a wooded stretch of road, he’d asked if I’d ever been touched by a boy before. When I’d told him I hadn’t, he said he’d never touched a girl, either. He asked if I’d allow him one small touch before he left for war, and I’d said yes. Right there on a deserted road, I lifted my skirt and let him touch me in that forbidden place. Had anyone caught us, we’d have been beaten for it, or worse.

Still, I savored the feel of his strong hands on my most delicate flesh. No rumors between us. No scorn or crooked faces judging us. Just a curious boy and girl.

I distinctly remembered his eyes, heavy with lust as he slid his fingers inside of me.

Eyes that had dulled, vacant and lifeless, when he’d returned from Lyveria, laid out on the concrete slab in Uncle Felix’s examination room, with his throat cut open. While a feeling of sorrow had filled my chest, I couldn’t help the envy he’d stirred. What freedom he must’ve felt when he’d closed his eyes and drifted out of that mangled body.

I never once spoke of our encounter–not even to Aleysia, who would’ve taken that secret to the grave.

As much as I loathed the nature of her relationship with our uncle, I’d do the same for her.

At the click of the door, I dared not look to see what I was certain was Aleysia making her way back to her bed.

Ungraceful footsteps clunked across the room, and I frowned at her blatant disregard. Cla-clunk. Cla-clunk. Cla-clunk.

Frustrated with her, I turned over in bed. “Do you have to be so–”

A cold, wet hand pressed to my mouth, and a scream ripped from my throat as I stared up at the horrid creature standing over my bed, whose pale, gaunt face carried a shadow of terror. The man from The Banishing, earlier. He released my mouth, leaving behind a sticky wetness that clung to my lips, prodding me to wipe it away, but my muscles wouldn’t move. Not even my lungs, which held my last drawn breath. He lifted a shiny, skinless finger to his lips, quieting me. Half of his face had been torn away to raw flesh and bits of bone. Hysterics gripped my chest, allowing only small panting breaths, as I lay staring up at him, studying his ghastly features.

The door clicked again.

Behind the man, I watched Aleysia pad toward her bed, not sparing him a single glance. On passing, she smiled at me. “Oh. I thought you were asleep.” Trembling, I turned only slightly, to see the man still standing there, while my sister approached him from behind.

Not an ounce of hesitation in her step. As if she couldn’t see him, at all, she practically waltzed right up alongside him. The sight of the two standing side by side left me paralyzed in disbelief. What was this madness?

Do you not see him? I wanted to say, but I couldn’t summon a single word.

“Are you all right? You look … pale.” Aleysia reached down to draw her thumb over my mouth and frowned down at her finger. Wiping whatever it was away on her skirt, she rounded the bed, walking right through the man, who wavered in a cloud of black smoke.

An illusion. It had to be an awful, terrifying illusion.

An intense burn at my arm flared again, and without thinking, I lifted it, unwittingly drawing Aleysia’s attention there.

“Dear god, Maeve, what happened?” She held my arm in her hands, the same hands I’d seen pinned to the wall by Uncle Riftyn only moments before. As she did so, the figure of The Banishing Man faded out of view, offering a small bit of relief to the turmoil churning in my gut.

I finally spoke. “I cut it.”

“On what?”

I didn’t answer at first, my head still searching for reason, answers for what had just happened.

“Maeve? How did you cut your arm?”

I couldn’t tell her how it had happened. While Aleysia certainly didn’t buy into the religious nonsense and superstition, she still feared that forest as much as anyone else. “I don’t …” I lifted the back of my free hand to my lips that were still sticky and wet.

“You don’t what?”

“Please leave me alone about it!” I wrenched my arm from her grasp, immediately regretting my tone, but, for god’s sake, if she requested a physician on my behalf, there was a good chance I’d lose my arm on precaution alone.

“You do look pale. Is it possible that it might be infected?”

“I don’t know. I washed it. I just …” Lifting my head, I scanned the room, making sure the man from before was gone. Truly gone. “I’m just tired.”

“Will you let me look at it?”

Absolutely not. One look would surely make her worry. It’d made me worry. “You’re not a physician. What good would having you look at it do me?”

“I’m your sister. I want to make sure you’re all right.”

“I’m fine.” I turned over in my bed, wanting nothing more than to wipe my head of the terrifying visual that still plagued me. “Please. I just need some sleep.”

“You’ll tell me if it gets worse, won’t you, Maeve? It’s like you said earlier, we need to stick together.”

“If only that were true,” I muttered under my breath.

“What does that mean?”

“You know exactly what it means. I saw you and Uncle Riftyn. And be grateful it was me and not Agatha, because you’d surely find yourself standing before that forest with the Vonkovyan soldiers prodding your back.”

An unnerving quiet settled between us, one that lasted too long, and I wondered if I should’ve kept my observations to myself. When she finally spoke, she said. “I’m sorry you saw us.”

Despite the emotion I could hear in her voice, I still couldn’t bring myself to look at her. “What are you thinking Aleysia?”

“I’m thinking that …. Well, that I love him.”

I turned over in hopes I’d see instant regret on her face for having admitted such a thing. “Are you mad? Are you so glutton for Agatha’s wrath that you can’t help yourself?”

“We’re careful.”

I didn’t have to respond to that, the way she instantly lowered her gaze from mine.

“Most of the time.”

“You can never marry him, nor have children, unless you run to the farthest reaches of this godforsaken continent, and what life would that be, beyond the reach of civilization?”

“Better than here. But we’d take you with us.” She rested a hand on my shoulder, and I wanted to grab and squeeze it into a mess as mangled as my heart. Damn her for always making complications so unbearably complex. “I’ve already spoken to Uncle Riftyn about it. He’ll take us both.”

Both? Had she lost her senses? “No. I won’t.”

“You’d stay here? And marry a man three times your age? One who undoubtedly longs for an heir, like every other man in this parish?”

The thought of that twisted my guts, but no worse than the vision of us three roaming the barren lands beyond Vonkovya and Lyveria, to the arctic reaches beyond Grimvale, or the scorching deserts of Romisir–the only place the Vonkovyan soldiers wouldn’t bother to hunt us down, because every other creature that dwelled there surely would.

“What do you want me to do? You think I asked to fall in love with him?”

“You’re the eldest, Aleysia. You’re the one who’s supposed to have the level head.”

She spat a mirthless chuckle. “So, I come live with you and Mr. Moros in your elaborate manor, staring the man in the eye every day as he rapes you for an heir? Or worse, stay and let Agatha find a man to break me?”

I agreed with her. Every option was unappealing. “I don’t have a solution. I only know that I don’t trust Uncle Riftyn to follow through.”

“You don’t know him like I do.”

“I’m certain of that.” I rolled back over, facing the window again. “Your love blinds you.”

“I suppose you’d have to know the love of a man to understand.”

As stinging as her words might’ve been, she was right. Behind my ribs stood a graveyard of empty caskets. A chest full of nameless tombstones. An emptiness which afforded me a small measure of clarity that she refused to acknowledge. “And I think you’re the greatest fool I’ve ever known.”

Another long bout of silence lingered between us, and I glanced over my shoulder in time to see her wipe a tear from her cheek. It was rare that Aleysia or I ever shed tears. Our lives, so entwined with pain and sadness, made crying seem pointless. She lifted the blanket and, despite my protesting stiffness and refusal to move, urged me over, just as when we were little, before sliding her hand over my hip and curling herself into my back. “Sing for me, Maeve. Just like you used to.”

“I’m not in a singing mood.” The stench of forbidden sex clung to her skin, clogging my throat.

“Please? Your voice always settled my mind.”

If only my voice had the power to make her realize how foolish she was for falling in love with our uncle. “I don’t want to sing.”

“ Vayr mu dahlj? ?” It was a song written in the old language, roughly translated to ‘ Go, my Darling .’

The first time I’d ever heard the song was the night I’d stumbled upon my father tucked away in grandfather’s cellar, sobbing. I’d come to realize, after everyone had gone to bed, he’d sometimes retired there, in the depths of the cottage, singing the song as he drank morumberry wine. Mourning his dead wife.

I’d learned the words to the song in the common tongue, in hopes that I’d work up the courage to sing with him some night, but I never had the opportunity between his deployments to Lyveria and his eventual disappearance.

With reluctance, I sang the song she loved. For her. Fingers gripping my shoulders, she nuzzled close, as I reached the chorus and stared out the window beside me, up toward the stars.

“Go, my Darling, unto that place

Where magic still exists

Beyond the confines of this cruel world

As you will not be missed

Instead, I’ll find you in a dream

Or a wistful plea on stars

Hours of suffering no more redeemed

For eternity is ours.”

At the end of the mournful dirge, Aleysia kissed my cheek, then padded back to her bed. I tucked my burning arm beneath the blankets, mentally willing myself to ignore the pain. In the silence of my thoughts, I drifted deeper and deeper into the abyss.