Adeline shivers.
She looks down, and sees that she is sitting on a bed of wet leaves.
A second ago, she was falling—for only a second, barely the length it takes to draw a breath—but time, it seems, has skipped ahead. The stranger is gone, and so are the last dregs of light. The summer sky, where it shows through the canopied trees, is smoothed to a velvet black, marked only by a low-hanging moon.
Adeline rises, studying her hands, looking past the dirt for some sign of transformation.
But she feels … unchanged. A little dizzy, perhaps, as if she’s stood too quickly, or drunk too much wine on an empty stomach, but after a moment even that unsteadiness has passed, and she’s left feeling as if the world has tipped, but not fallen, leaned, and then rebalanced, settled back into the same old groove.
She licks her lips, expecting to taste blood, but the mark left by the stranger’s teeth is gone, swept away with every other trace of him.
How does one know if a spell has worked? She asked for time, for life— will she have to wait a year, or three, or five, to see if age leaves any mark? Or take up a knife and cut into her skin, to see if and how it heals? But no, she had asked for life, not a life unscathed, and if Adeline is being honest, she is afraid to test it, afraid to find her skin still too yielding, afraid to learn that the shadow’s promise was a dream, or worse, a lie.
But she knows one thing—whether or not the deal was real, she will not heed the ringing church bells, will not marry Roger. She will defy her family. She will leave Villon, if she must. She knows she will do whatever
it takes now, because she was willing in the dark, and one way or another, from this moment forward, her life will be her own.
The thought is thrilling. Terrifying, but thrilling, as she leaves the forest. She is halfway across the field before she realizes how quiet the village
is.
How dark.
The festive lanterns have been put out, the bells have stopped ringing,
there are no voices calling her name.
Adeline makes her way home, the dull dread growing a little sharper with every step. By the time she gets there, her mind is buzzing with worry. The front door hangs open, spilling light onto the path, and she can hear her mother humming in the kitchen, her father chopping wood around the side of the house. A normal night, made wrong by the fact it was not meant to be a normal night.
“Maman!” she says, stepping inside.
A plate shatters to the floor, and her mother yelps, not in pain, but surprise, her face contorted.
“What are you doing here?” she demands, and here is the anger Addie expected. Here is the dismay.
“I’m sorry,” she starts. “I know you must be mad, but I couldn’t—” “Who are you?”
The words are a hiss, and she realizes then, that fearsome look on her mother’s face is not the anger of a mother scorned, but that of a woman scared.
“Maman—”
Her mother cringes away from the very word. “Get out of my house.”
But Adeline crosses the room, grabs her by the shoulders. “Don’t be absurd. It’s me, A—”
She is about to say Adeline.
Indeed, she tries. Three syllables should not be such a mountain to climb, but she is breathless by the end of the first, unable to manage the second. The air turns to stone inside her throat, and she is left stifled, silent. She tries again, this time attempting Addie, then at last their family name, LaRue, but it is no use. The words meet an impasse between her mind and tongue. And yet, the second she draws breath to say another word, any other word, it is there, lungs filled and throat loose.
“Let go,” pleads her mother.
“What’s this?” demands a voice, low and deep. The voice that soothed Adeline on sick nights, that told her stories as she sat on the floor of his shop.
Her father stands in the doorway, his arms full of wood. “Papa,” she says, and he draws back, as if the word were sharp. “The woman is mad,” sobs her mother. “Or cursed.”
“I am your daughter,” she says again. Her father grimaces. “We have no child.”
Those words, a duller knife. A deeper cut.
“No,” says Adeline, shaking her head at the absurdity. She is three and twenty, has lived every day and every night beneath this roof. “You know me.”
How can they not? The resemblance between them has always been so keen, her father’s eyes, her mother’s chin, one’s brow and the other’s lips, each piece clearly copied from its source.
They see it, too, they must.
But to them, it is only proof of devilry.
Her mother crosses herself, and her father’s hands close around her, and she wants to sink into the strength of his embrace, but there is not warmth in it as he drags her to the door.
“No,” she begs.
Her mother is crying now, one hand to her mouth and the other clutching the wooden cross around her neck, as she calls her own daughter a demon, a monster, a demented thing, and her father says nothing, only grips her arm tighter as he pulls her from the house.
“Be gone,” he says, the words half-pleading.
Sadness sweeps across his face, but not the kind that comes with knowing. No, it is the sadness reserved for lost things, a storm-torn tree, a horse made lame, a carving split one stroke before it’s done.
“Please,” she begs. “Papa—”
His face hardens as he forces her out into the dark and slams the door. The bolt scrapes home. Adeline stumbles back, shaking with shock and horror. And then she turns and runs.
 |
“Estele.”
The name begins as a prayer, soft and private, and grows to a shout as Adeline nears the woman’s cottage.
“Estele!”
A lamp is lit within, and by the time she reaches the edge of the light, the old woman stands in the open doorway, waiting for her caller.
“Are you a stranger or a spirit?” Estele asks warily.
“I am neither,” says Adeline, though she knows how she must look. Her dress tattered, her hair wild, streaming words like witchcraft on the step. “I am flesh and blood and human, and I have known you all my life. You make charms in the shape of children to keep them well in winter. You think peaches are the sweetest fruit, and that church walls are too thick for prayers to get through, and you want to be buried not beneath a stone, but in a patch of shade under a large tree.”
Something flashes across the old woman’s face, and Adeline holds her breath, hoping it is recognition. But it is too brief.
“You are a clever spirit,” says Estele, “but you will not cross this hearth.”
“I am not a spirit!” shouts Adeline, storming into the light of the old woman’s door. “You taught me about the old gods, and all the ways to summon them, but I made a mistake. They wouldn’t answer, and the sun was going down so fast.” She wraps her arms tight around her ribs, unable to stop shaking. “I prayed too late, and something answered, and now everything is wrong.”
“Foolish girl,” chides Estele, sounding like herself. Sounding as if she knows her.
“What do I do? How do I fix it?”
But the old woman only shakes her head. “The darkness plays its own game,” she says. “It makes its own rules,” she says. “And you have lost.”
And with that, Estele draws back into her house. “Wait!” calls Adeline as the old woman shuts the door. The bolt drives home.
Adeline hurls herself against the wood, sobbing until her legs give way, and she sinks to her knees on the cold stone step, one fist still pounding against the wood.
And then, suddenly, the bolt draws back.
The door swings open, and Estele stands over her.
“What is this?” she asks, surveying the girl folded on her steps.
The old woman looks at her as if they’ve never met. The moments before erased by an instant and a closed door.
Her wrinkled gaze flicks over the stained wedding dress, the wild hair, the dirt under her nails, but there’s no knowing in her face, only a guarded curiosity.
“Are you a spirit? Or a stranger?”
Adeline squeezes her eyes shut. What is happening? Her name is still a rock lodged deep, and when she was a spirit, she was banished, so she swallows hard and answers, “A stranger.” Tears begin to slide down Adeline’s face. “Please,” she manages. “I have nowhere to go.”
The old woman looks at her for a long moment, and then nods.
“Wait here,” she says, slipping back into the house, and Adeline will never know what Estele was going to do then, because the door swings shut, and stays shut, and she is left kneeling on the ground, trembling more from shock than cold.
She doesn’t know how long she sits there, but her legs are stiff when she forces them to bear her weight. She rises, and walks past the old woman’s house to the line of trees beyond, past their sentinels’ edge into the crowded dark.
“Show yourself!” she calls out.
But there is only the ruffle of feathers, the crackle of leaves, the ripple of a forest disturbed in sleep. She conjures his face, those green eyes, those black curls, tries to will the darkness into shape again, but moments pass, and she is still alone.
I do not want to belong to anyone.
Adeline walks deeper into the forest. This is a wilder stretch of wood, the floor a nest of bramble and brush. It claws at her bare legs, but she doesn’t stop, not until the trees have closed around her, their branches blotting out the moon overhead.
“I call on you!” she screams.
I am not some genie, bound to your whim.
A low limb, half buried by the forest floor, rises just enough to catch her feet, and she goes down hard, knees hitting ragged earth and hands tearing through weedy soil.
Please, I will give anything.
The tears come, then, sudden and heaving. Fool. Fool. Fool. She pounds her fists against the ground.
This is a vile trick, she thinks, a horrid dream, but it will pass. That is the nature of dreams. They do not last.
“Wake up,” she whispers into the dark.
Wake up.
Adeline curls into the forest floor, closes her eyes, and sees her mother’s tearstained cheeks, her father’s hollow sadness, Estele’s weary gaze. She sees the darkness, smiling. Hears his voice as he whispers that single, binding word.
Done.
