Page 90 of The Blight of Hollowmire

The gray folds inward, and I see him.

He kneels in the clearing, naked and decked in dirt from our lovemaking, his face such a mask of shame and humiliation it threatens to slice my already-tender heart to ribbons. He remains as the Blight Mother rides away, looking more like a man defeated than anything.

“Don’t show me that,” I snarl.

Men will always do nothing if they can get away with it.

“No! Not him. Not Renard.”

It is the way things are—it is the way things have always been.

“Things only are what they are because no one has changed them yet,” I tell her, because it is a line I have whispered to myself a thousand times—every time I have felt othered in my own home.

Renard may have made mistakes, but he is not the sum of every cowardice he has ever known. I have been made into a lesson too many times to do the same to him. And if I let her turn every tiny hurt into proof, then I will have nothing left inside me but evidence that this angry, vengeful goddess was right all along, and there is no good worth preserving from a tide of unstoppable destruction.

“He will come,” I say.

The Blight Mother does not answer at once.

“He will,” I say again, and I allow myself a sip of hope—bittersweet though it is. “And if he does not, then at least Sephia will still breathe somewhere. Nibblebones will still be a menace. Ulfrid will still curse my name when he finds half his tools rusted, but he will still spar with me every time I ask. The world is not only men failing, and it is not only fear, and I am not only what I can destroy.”

You believe that now because you are afraid.

“I believe it because I must. Perhaps it is my humanity,” I snarl. “And perhaps that is the biggest thing that you lack, goddess.”

The mist loosens a fraction, and at first I think I have managed some small victory, but my heart races as I realize the wyreboar’s gait has shortened. The rattling behind us slows unevenly, and in the distance, a bell begins to sound, clear and resonant through my world of gray. The cold air of the waking world pushes through carrying smoke, manure, horse sweat, and the stale sweetness of too much grain kept too long.

I press toward it and this time, the mist does not stop me quickly enough. My sight tears through—the bright afternoon sunlight almost painful after my wallowing in the realm of mist.

The forest has thinned considerably. Beyond the last black trunks of mold-covered trees, the land drops away into a wide valley bathed in sparkling sunlight, and Valehar lies below us with its pale walls, green banners, slate roofs, and fields upon fields of impossible abundance. The crops stand high and golden despite the season, every row neat enough to look painted, and with dread, I notice there isn’t a bird trilling anywhere—there’s not a hare, not one living thing willing to trust what grows there.

The wyreboar takes one more step—then another, and then it stops. The dead behind us settle and a vast, uneven quiet filters through the trees. On the walls below, tiny figures begin to move. The bell stumbles, misses a beat, then rings harder.

Valehar.

The name passes through me in the Blight Mother’s voice and mine together, and I feel her satisfaction. My lips curve—I didn’t wish for them to. Fighting to pull the feral grin from my face is a losing battle, however. I dig down into the only thing still wholly mine, past fear, past rage, past the tempting ease of letting her hatred carry me, and I hold fast to my damp, wilted, stubborn root of hope.

Do you truly think you can solve this problem? The Blight Mother says, her tone mocking. That you can find the root of the corruption and correct the imbalance without my interference? Without any bloodshed? Without these foolish humans reaping what they sow?

“I think it is worth trying,” I say, daring to hope that there might be a way through this without turning into the monster of bedtime stories.

Her answering laugh is boisterous and disbelieving.

Very well, Rot-Tainted One, she drawls, reaching for the detested moniker that haunted me throughout my life in Hollowmire. Go ahead and try. I look forward to your failure all the more—your despair and hopelessness will only add to the fruits of my wrath.

Before I can fully understand what’s happening, the gray mist parts like curtains drawing back with the first light of day—warm and light, and I find myself in control of my body once again. The wyreboar skeleton collapses beneath me and I tumble to the ground, followed by an ear-splitting clattering of the bones of my skeletal army of supporters. Turning back, I see them littering the field, glinting in the sun like the remains of an ancient battlefield.

Buoyed by hope and a fledgling sense of triumph, I march toward the city gates. My first thought was to keep the Blight Mother at bay, somehow, but I never believed I would truly be able to reason with a goddess bent on vengeance. As such, the panic begins to simmer at the realization that I have no true plan for rooting out the source of the corruption, as both Ursula and the Blight Mother referred to it.

If it’s hidden somewhere below the castle, that’s where I’ll need to start. But after listening to Renard’s accounting of the regent, I have a hard time believing that Arden will welcome me into the great hall with open arms and a willingness to let me explore.

Certainly there are other ways to sneak into a castle. With a pang of sadness, I think of Renard—hopefully following in our footsteps, and miss his company with a fierceness that helps steel my spine.

Renard would know what to do, I think—then huff a laugh at myself. Renard would probably walk straight up the castle steps and demand to see the regent, and expect to be obeyed. Failing that, I suppose he might try to fight his way through the guards.

The city gate looms large ahead of me, and I see the guards atop the wall running back and forth. The bell rings insistently, and I realize with a sudden start that my sleeping shift is back at the camp where Renard first divested me of it and I am as naked as the day I was born.

Panicked shouts erupt above me and I hear the measured marching of armored feet just inside the iron-studded wooden gate. The massive doors lift with a bone-jarring clanking noise and the inner city of Valehar is revealed in slow measures, from its mud-caked cobblestone paths to its tumbledown market stalls, to its bedraggled, carved out people—most as skeletal as the bone army I’ve just left behind. I seem to remember Valehar being referred to as a jewel of a kingdom—the best that the humans could conceive of, full of generous people and wondrous things. The vision before me is as tarnished as a buried cloak pin—the grandeur long since worn away, thinned out from too many years of hunger and despair.