Page 108 of The Blight of Hollowmire

“Vireth—”

“Don’t leave me,” I beg.

I beg. I don’t care about the indignity of it. I would suffer ten thousand fresh new indignities if it would save him.

“Please,” I sob. “Please, Renard. I love you. I love you, and I need you, and I’m only getting around to saying it now when the world is falling apart around us. You must stay—I need you to stay. I need you to forgive yourself because I cannot bear the thought of you carrying all that grief into whatever comes after. I need—I need—I need you to help me start again from somewhere other than death.”

His eyes glisten, and that half-smile quirks his lips up… lips that I am dangerously close to never kissing again.

“I need your broad shoulders,” I say, half-laughing, half-choking. “And your graying beard. And your terrible knee that predicts rain. I need your strength and your aches and pains and the little line between your brows when you think too hard. And, oh gods, I need you here, to help me remember how to be something—anything—other than death.”

His hand lifts, trembling violently before finding my cheek. He strokes one black tear away with his thumb.

“You are not death,” he says.

I cannot breathe, my lungs are refusing to draw air.

“You hear me?”

I press my face into his palm. “Renard, please…”

“You are life.” His voice is almost gone, a bare whisper beneath the wind. “You are my life.”

His eyes close, and his hand falls to the cobblestones below, his face slackens like it does in sleep. I could almost pretend that it is sleep, and in a moment, he will wake up and chuckle and bicker with me about the right way to organize my pack.

I feel as though my world has ceased to spin. The sun may have stopped in the sky, the wind may have ceased to blow. But here, outside, in these cruel, destroyed courtyard ruins of Valehar, there’s nothing else to mark the way my world, my hope, my life, has been ripped from me.

There is nothing else to it, I find. His breath simply doesn’t come again, though I wait for it. Gods, how I wait. I wait until the waiting starts to irritate my skin like an itch with no place to scratch.

“Renard?” My voice has never sounded so small.

He does not answer.

“Renard.”

Still nothing. I put my fingers beneath his jaw. I press my ear to his chest. There should be a heartbeat there—why isn’t there? There should be life under my cheek, stubborn as wheat and warm as fresh bread. But there is only silence, and blood—all this blood that should still be inside of his body, flowing through his veins and giving me reason to draw breath.

I scream—the deep, guttural sound tearing through the courtyard until my ears ring in the silence that follows. I gather Renard against me as much as I can without worsening the puddle of blood still seeping from his body. I rock over him, keening into his bloodied shirt, black tears streaking down my face and dripping onto his beard. Nibblebones creeps to his shoulder and presses her small nose to his ear, whining with such fragile confusion that it wounds me all over again.

“No,” I whisper. “No, little one. No.”

She looks up at me with her glossy black eyes, but I have no comfort for her, because I have none for myself.

And still, the Blight Mother doesn’t say anything. She barely stirs, either out of petulance for me escaping her world of gray or because—mayhap—she is not without feeling. I sense her waiting, observing my grief with something like astonishment, or curiosity. The Blight Mother. A goddess—a goddess with power over life and death. A goddess of endings, and of beginnings. A goddess who’s been using me to help reset the balance of the world.

At last, I lift my head, my final thought coming to me with brutal, irrepressible clarity.

“Give him back to me,” I say, gritting my teeth so hard, they might crack.

Everything stills, both in the gray world where she lurks, and here in the ruined, rotting courtyard that’s slowly being carpeted with my love’s blood. The Blight Mother’s reply echoes from everywhere and nowhere—reverberating through my mind.

Death is not so easily returned.

I bare my fangs at the empty air. “Don’t you dare speak to me of what’s easy. Not after this—not after everything.”

The dead belong to me.

“Then bargain with me,” I snap.