A hand reached through the bushes and drew me out so quickly that I was still gasping when I came face to face with Grosbeak. His eyes glittered as he pulled just a little harder than he needed to and I stumbled.
“We’re stopping for a moment while the mounts are tended. And I doubt the Arrow will notice you gone for a few more moments. So. Let’s see how well you play games, mortal.”
I tried to find my voice, but it came out a little too high. His pupils – narrow slashes rather than the round of human eyes – were expanding and I felt like I was caught in the gaze of a snake.
“What kind of games?”
“My favorite kind of all,” he said with a nasty grin. “The kind that leaves scars.”
“I’m not interested,” I said curtly. I tried to rip myself from his grip, but he held me fast.
I opened my mouth to scream and his hand slammed around it, cutting off all sound. He had my back to a tree before I knew it and I squeezed my eyes shut knowing that whatever happened next, I would be powerless to stop him. I was defenseless in his grasp, tiny as that bird in Bluebeard’s hand and just as easily crushed.
I knew my eyes were welling up with tears, but to my shame, I couldn’t stop them any more than I could stop my panicked breathing. He was tugging my skirts up and I tried to shift to the side, but he had me pressed too hard against the tree. All my struggles were not enough to move even a bare finger-width.
I opened my eyes, frantic to find a way out – any way at all. And then his blade was out, copper bright in the light and my heart was hammering in my ears. Pain blossomed in my upper thigh as the blade cut into the tender flesh. Stars shot across my vision and I gasped in agony.
He was knocked away. One moment his face was hardly a breath away from mine, the next he was gone. My hand felt for my thigh, clamping tightly over the welling wound. Tears flowed and my breath came out as a shudder. My blood was thick and hot, pouring through my fingers. I fell to the ground as if my very life was seeping out of me.
And there he was – my new husband – kneeling with one knee on Grosbeak’s chest as he removed his head from his body with a single slice of the slightly curved, silver-inlaid sword the king had given him. Horror flashed across his face. He sprinted to me, and for the barest moment, I thought he was coming for my head, too. Instead, he dropped his blade on the mossy ground and ripped my hand from my leg, cursing violently.
I heard voices as the others arrived, but my eyes were caught on Bluebeard’s. He gritted his teeth like he was dying to say something and then with a hiss of frustration he put a hand on my head, and everything went black.
Chapter Eleven
I blinked awake to find myself lying on a soft cloak with another one wrapped around me. With my face pressed to the ground, the scene in front of me looked odd until I realized the Wittenbrand were digging a grave for the headless corpse of Grosbeak who had tried – perhaps – to kill me. That’s what it meant to try to cut the femoral artery in the leg, right? I’d heard of men on the plains who were gored by wild boars and bled out in minutes when that artery was sliced by a tusk. That could have been me. So, why wasn’t it? I felt for my leg and hissed when I found the flesh completely smooth.
My hiss drew Bluebeard’s attention. He threw down his shovel and strode across the cold ground to sink into a crouch beside me. He examined my face with what looked like concern and then offered a hand up. I realized, belatedly, that it was his cloak I was wrapped in on top of my own.
“Let’s speak these rites and get out of here,” Sparrow said as she threw the body into the pit they’d dug. They seemed horrifyingly unaffected by the death of their comrade and a new chill tore through me. Was life of so little value in the Wittenhame?
Bluebeard took my hand gently and placed it on his arm, guiding me to stand beside the grave. The gentleness tore something loose in my mind and made me want to laugh hysterically. That one, ridiculous contrast made everything else seem that much more insane in comparison.
“You were taller than me by almost a hand,” Sparrow said and then drew a finger down forehead, nose, and chin in some kind of sign.
“You were the lord over the Mudhills and you owned a herd of Clay Horses,” Vireo said soberly, making the same sign.
What sort of memorial was this? I felt my eyes widening.
“You were husband to Derlia, now deceased, son of Gorath, also deceased,” said the only one whose name I still didn’t know. His eyes were dark, and he shot a poison glance at Bluebeard. Maybe not everyone was as calm about this brutal murder as the rest. He made his sign grimly.
“You were a traitor and likely a spy, but you played cards as well as any I’ve known. And you died with me owing you two silver,” Bluebeard said grudgingly, making his sign. He threw two silver coins into the grave.
All eyes turned to me. I supposed I was supposed to say something. But there was very little I knew. Seeing as Sparrow had only mentioned his height, I could say anything, really. Height. I again felt the hysterical urge to laugh. He was shorter now, wasn’t he? What was wrong with me? I was losing my mind. And they were all still staring at me.
“You were very quick with a knife,” I said acidly, and there were nods of agreement around the circle as I made the sign the others had made.
“Cover him up while I settle my wife on our mount,” Bluebeard ordered in a low, furious tone. “When I find out who has betrayed me, it will be more than their head that I take from them.”
The man whose name I still didn’t know looked up at that. “Maybe no one has betrayed you. Maybe he just acted on what we were all thinking. You shouldn’t have married her in our way. You never have before. How are you supposed to spend her if she is your Wittenbrand wife?”
“In the same way that I spend them all,” Bluebeard said, and his hand on mine was suddenly cold as death. “I was married to them all or none of this would work.”
“You weren’t married to them our way. You didn’t give a vow. You didn’t put them in your room for a night. We took them from this world, you kept them sleeping the pink sleep until we crossed, then we brought them to your home, and you put them in their rooms and that was it. They lived out their brief days like birds in a cage. But this one you keep awake. And you ride her in front of you. You act as if she is your wife in fact as well as name!” The look of pure hate on the other man’s face made me shy away. “Put her in the hole with him. Go back and get another. One like the others. The Bramble King will approve. We all will.”
“I’m collecting heads today, Ibis,” Bluebeard said, looking away into the distance as if none of this meant anything to him. He drew my bell from his pocket and bounced it on his palm, rolling it over his knuckles like a man at the fair might do with a coin. “Would you like one of them to be yours?”
The other Wittenbrand looked away and spat and Bluebeard moved with inhuman speed. The bell fell into a sleeve and disappeared, and he scooped me up into his arms and strode through the mist to where the elks huffed in the cold under a sprawling clump of cedars. His elk bore two wounds from arrows in his haunch but seemed unconcerned as it tore up frosty grass.
Bluebeard set me delicately on the elk’s back, arranging me in the saddle in a way that seemed fussier than I thought my situation warranted. I was very light-headed. So light-headed that little sparks danced across my vision, but I was not in immediate danger. He turned to retrieve something, and I gasped. There was an arrow stuck in his shoulder.
This would be shocking in any circumstance, but this man had killed and buried another, healed my wound by some sorcery, and carried me through the woods – all with an arrow shaft stuck in his flesh.
“Your shoulder,” I gasped out. “Let me help you.”
He grunted impatiently, reached up to where it stuck out of his shoulder and broke the shaft close to the skin with no more than a single grunt of pain.
My hands flew up to cover my mouth. If he had been my father or my brothers, he would be sweaty and white-
faced, laid out on a table while someone cut the barbed head from his skin.
Bluebeard winked at me, looking for all the world like the beautiful devil the monks spoke of – the one who thought so highly of himself that he fell from heaven into the underworld. And then he was gone, striding through the woods.
He returned with a grisly trophy, the head of Grosbeak, hanging from his hand by its long, blood-drenched hair. I gagged into my hands but fortunately for me, I had nothing in my stomach to vomit up. I had the most terrible precognition that I might need to stay light on the meals for the days and weeks to come.
He leapt into the saddle behind me, still clutching the head, shifted until we were pressed against each other again, and then made a satisfied sound and flicked the reins. Our elk leapt back into the mist as if it carried riders holding heads in their fists every day of its life. Maybe it did.
A wave of nausea rolled over me at the same time that my hysterical laugh bubbled up. I couldn’t hold it back this time. And why should I? If I was going mad, then what was the point of hiding it?
“Is it always like this with you?” I asked as my teeth chattered together.
He tilted my face around to see his – oh so gently, as if he were a lover and not a monster. I felt his palm reach up and cup my face and then everything went dark again.
“This little one here is the key to the closet at the end of the great hall on the ground floor. Open them all; go into each and every one of them, except that little closet, which I forbid you and forbid you in such a manner that, if you happen to open it, you may expect my just anger and resentment.”
- Charles Perrault, Bluebeard,
1697 as translated by Andrew Lang in The Blue Fairy Book 1889.
Chapter Twelve
When I awoke, it was dark. I opened my mouth, but a hand clamped around it.
“Remember, you must not speak to me.”
I thought about biting his hand, but then what? Would he chop off my head, too? I certainly was no match for him with the sword he’d given me.
“We are about to land at the Evergreen Inn. I will take a room there for us. I stole a few of your hours to heal you, but that is not real rest, and you will still need sleep to refuel yourself. Do not speak to the denizens of the inn. Do not speak to the Wittenbrand who ride with me. I will tell you what you need to know when we are in private again.”
I would have been more resentful of those orders if I hadn’t still been in shock over watching a man beheaded after he tried to kill me. My head swam at the memory of his bronze knife cold on my thigh and then the hot pain that followed. Little stars still danced across my vision. I’d lost a lot of blood.
I was very, very careful not to glance to my left. I caught occasional glimpses of Grosbeak’s severed head out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t want a better look. Every glimpse made me feel ill all over again with a kind of gripping queasiness that made all the illness I’d felt so far pale in comparison.
The elk touched down in a flurry of snow, landing in front of a well-lit inn with a jolly green sign and snow frosting the roof and the edges of the diamond-paned windows. Music poured out from the common room – a tin whistle and a snare, a woman’s lilting voice, and the sound of clapping and foot-stomping. I realized, with a start, that it was a human inn.
Had we not been traveling to the Wittenhame?
And yet, here we were in what was obviously a human town. Rooftops with curling smoke spiraling white against the black sky made a sloping curve down the hill from the inn. In the distance, the wide moon shone on the glare ice of a lake. Through the diamond-paned glass of the inn, regular people were dancing and laughing, red-cheeked, smiling, and whole. They wore bright reds and yellows – both men and women – and the women wore bonnets embroidered heavily around the brims in bright colors. Their pale braids hung down from these bonnets, like spun gold against the scarlet and marigold of their clothing.
Rouranmoore. I’d heard of this nation. But it was many days’ ride from my home and then one must take a boat across the wide channel. My breath froze in my lungs. That misty world we’d traveled through – had it somehow been outside our world? And now we were dipping back in to rest at a common inn?
I made a strangled sound in my throat.
“Don’t fret, pretty wife,” Bluebeard whispered in my ear. “No harm will come to you while you are with me and I will be with you until the end of your days. You are far too precious to leave without protection.”
I gave him a long, dry look. I wanted to say that the only protection I needed was from him. But that wasn’t entirely true, as evidenced by the head he still carried in one hand.
I looked at him and then glanced at the head and then back to him again.
“Oh no, bell of my heart, the head I keep. It is my due.” He winked one of his terrible cat’s eyes and I shuddered.
He was going to bring the head into the inn.
My cheeks flamed with the horror of it, but he snatched up my spare hand, kissed the back of it, hopped down from the elk, and drew me into the inn as if nothing was wrong at all.
And what could I do? Could I steal the elk and run? I looked over my shoulder at the exact instant that it winked out of sight. One moment it stood, stamping in the snow, the next minute it was gone. No, I could not steal our mount. Could I run out into the snow? In these clothes, I would freeze to death before morning, but even if I did not, he was inhumanly fast, and the snow was deep. I would leave tracks and he would find me so quickly that all I’d get for my trouble was my new husband’s distrust. I would simply have to bear all this.
Bluebeard strode straight to the bar where a man a head taller than him and twice as wide was polishing glasses and watching the dancing with an indulgent smile.
“A room I’ll have and a dram of your wine,” Bluebeard said.
“There are none to be had,” the man said without looking at us.
Bluebeard set the severed head on the counter and looked the man full in the face while around us the dancers slowed to a stop and the tin whistle squealed a wrong note.
“Three decades and four years ago there was a man who operated this inn by the name of Rubken. And that man asked me for a barrel of wine that never runs dry. And in exchange, I asked him for a room always kept free for me. Now ... I ask you ... is there a room? Or is there an empty barrel?”
The man went pale as a ghost. “There’s a room, of course, noble Wittenbrand. And food to go with it. My daughter Sarcha will take you there immediately.”
He must not have cared much for the poor girl to offer her up like that. It seemed a lot of men were willing to offer up their girls rather than bear the risk of the Wittenbrand themselves. I raised an eyebrow.
The innkeeper snapped his fingers and a girl with eyes round as those of a fresh-caught fish hurried over, wiping her hands on her tidy white apron. She bobbed a curtsy and practically ran up the stairs with Bluebeard striding behind her. I had to speed up to almost a trot to keep up with them.
Bluebeard had kept the head. The thought of sleeping in the same room as it made something inside me start to whimper.
The room the girl showed us was on the highest floor and took up the entirety of it. It was long and low, with an exposed beam ceiling and the thatch right there sitting on the rafters. It had its own separate bathing chamber with a door that locked. Someone had white-washed the walls nicely and even put a braided rug on the floor beside the bed. A fire burned hot at one end of the room and a wide hearth surrounded it.
Sarcha bobbed another curtsey and then she was gone, running down the stairs as if her life depended on it. My legs itched to follow.
Bluebeard set the head down by the door and stalked to where I stood by the fire.
“I can understand being upset over the misunderstanding with your betrothed.” He paused as if thinking. Oh yes, it was night now. He could say his piece. I straightened, lifting my chin to show I was not afraid. It was a lie but I would need to get v
ery good at lying to be around this man. “Well, I really can’t, but I can try to understand. What I cannot at all fathom is why you would be upset about Grosbeak over there.”
He flicked a finger at the head. It rolled slightly to the side, looked up, and scowled at him.
“You’ll have to wait on vocal cords, Grosbeak. I’ve about used up my reservoir of magic.”
I gasped, my hands flying over my mouth. The head was still alive? And now it turned its furious gaze on me. I backed up until my shoulders hit the wall. Bluebeard scowled.
“Don’t be such a fainting violet. He has no limbs. He cannot harm you or betray you now.”
I was in hell. I was being punished for sins uncommitted and crimes unrealized. That must be what this was. My breath sawed through my lungs, leaving them ragged.
Bluebeard pulled the bell out of his pocket as if it was significant, and bounced it on his palm a few times, biting his lip before looking over at me with what could almost be a soft expression.
They’d been right about the bell. It really did attract the Wittenbrand. A laugh swelled in my throat, threatening to escape. It took all my presence of mind to force it back down.
He strode over until the tip of his nose nearly touched mine. He placed his hands either side of my face, palms flat against the wall, eyes looking deeply into mine.
It was impossibly unfair that he smelled of lavender and his breath – which ought to be rank from travel – smelled of mint. It was also impossibly unfair that his blue stubble had not grown at all and was just the right length to make him look more rakish than anything else.
My breath hitched in my throat.
His eyes twinkled as if we were about to share a delicious secret. It was all I could do not to tremble slightly at his decided beauty and the uncommon way his ears came to a very faint, barely-there point. He reached into his shirt with a sudden motion and pulled out a small golden key on a chain around his neck. Drawing it off, he placed the chain over my head instead.
Fly with the Arrow: A Bluebeard Inspired Fantasy (Bluebeard's Secret Book 1) Page 8
