Page 45 of Ravished By the Revenant

Nothing.

I turn it. Grip it with both hands. Hold it up like I’m toasting the barrels.

Nothing.

“Come on,” I mutter. “Don’t do this to me. I sat through the previews, show me the movie.”

“Clara—”

“Shush. Maybe it’s buffering.”

A full minute passes. My arms get tired. Shmoo yawns. The humiliation of demanding a magical vision in front of my undead ex-whatever starts to creep up my neck, and I’m lowering the goblet, opening my mouth to say something deflecting⁠—

The cellar melts.

Sunlight. The meadow, the scent of elderberry so sweet I can taste it. The young witch stands ten feet away in the tall grass, her daughters chasing each other in circles behind her, silver hair flashing, and this time she’s already looking at me.

She speaks, and her voice is equal parts warm and weary. “If you are seeing this, then you are mine. My blood, come down through the long years.”

I try to speak. Nothing comes out.

“Listen well, daughter of my daughters, for I have poured all that remains of my craft into this vessel, and I may say this only once.” She folds her hands. Behind her, the girls shriek with laughter, now chasing a white butterfly through the grass together. “When I was young, I was given a premonition. I saw a warlord come out of the west with a crowned wolf on his banner. I saw him burn our village. I saw my sisters die.”

The meadow darkens at the edges.

“I had years to prepare. I could have gathered the covens. I could have poisoned his wells, turned his men, ended him a dozen ways before he ever reached our valley. Do not think I did not want to.” Her jaw sets, and I know that expression; I’ve made that expression, it’s in my mirror. “But the sight showed me further. If I stopped him, my line ended with you. In only one thread did we continue. The thread where I let him come. Where I sent my girls away to the city, and stayed, and let the village burn.”

My chest caves. She watched it happen. She chose to watch it happen.

“So I could not kill him,” she says, wrinkling her nose in resentment. “Instead, I had to preserve him. For you. I laced his wine and bound him to his castle. Undying, unchanging, held apart from time, until the day my line circled back to his gate. Until a daughter of my blood could enter where no other soul may pass. Until she looked upon the monster I made and he looked upon her, and… well, you know what you two have been doing.”

Oh no. Oh my god. My dead great-times-a-lot grandmother has seen me fucking the revenant in her dreams. I want to die. I want to die in this meadow.

“He took my line’s future,” she says, oblivious to my struggle and feeling no second-hand embarrassment. “So I bound him to restore it. His eternity for my lineage. His castle for a cradle.”

One of the little girls runs up and tugs her mother’s skirt, and the witch rests a hand on the small silver head without looking away from me.

“And now the question that brought you here.” She steps closer. The scent of elderberry thickens, her eyes—my eyes—filling my entire vision. “The curse on the castle is not yours to break, daughter. It is already broken. It was written to hold only until my descendant came, and saw him truly, and loved him… monster, curse, and all. That seal cracked the moment your heart did.”

The meadow starts to fade, sunlight giving way to candlelight.

“The gate has been open,” she says, her voice quieting to a whisper. “The only walls left standing are the ones you two built yourselves.”

The grass dissolves. The girls’ laughter dissolves. The last thing I see is her bittersweet smile.

Then I’m standing in the cellar with a goblet in my shaking hands, blue light washing over me, and Aldric’s ruined, beautiful, terrified face inches from mine.

“Clara. Clara. What did you see?”

25

ALDRIC

The goblet trembles in Clara’s hands. Her eyes are enormous, glassy, fixed on some point beyond my shoulder, beyond the cellar, beyond the century.

“Clara. What did you see?”

She sets the goblet on the shelf with care, then she looks at me, and there is something in her face I cannot read.