Cruel Beauty(39)

Seventeen years of waiting for marriage had left me bitter and cruel. Nine hundred years of slavery had left him gentle, still trying to help every one of Ignifex’s victims, even when he knew that he would fail. Even when the victim was me.

My breath dwindled away. I didn’t realize I was leaning closer to him until he closed the final distance and kissed me. It was slow and gentle but vast, like a rising tide. It felt like forgiveness. Like peace.

When he pulled back, his gaze flickered to my face only a moment before he looked down.

“You—” I started breathlessly, and then he dropped his forehead to my shoulder.

It felt like he was seeking comfort from me, though I couldn’t imagine why. But it was the least I could do for him, so I laid a hand on his shoulder, amazed all over again that I could feel the solid lines of his shoulder blade.

Amazed, too, that he wanted me. He wanted me.

“Shade?” I said softly.

He spoke slowly, and though I couldn’t see his face, I knew he was struggling against the seal on his lips. “I wish . . . we could have met . . . somewhere else.”

The air stilled in my lungs. If that was not a confession of love, it was near enough.

“I do too,” I said.

If I asked, he would probably kiss me again. For one moment I imagined staying. I could crawl into his arms and kiss him until I forgot everything, the dead girls and my monstrous husband, the doom upon my country and my duty to fix it.

Then I thought, I do not have time for such things.

I stood. “I need to go. I—I still have to find the other hearts.”

Shade caught my hand, slid his fingers through mine. The touch felt like lightning up my arm.

“He’s right about one thing,” he said. “This house has many dangers. I cannot save you from most of them.”

I clenched my hand until I felt the bones of his fingers.

Then I let go and forced a smile. “I wasn’t born to be saved.”


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11


At night, the hallways seemed longer and stranger, subtly out of proportion. It was seldom pitch-dark, for light glimmered from unexpected corners; but it was hard to tell exactly where the light came from, and I had to force back the suspicion that the shadows were falling toward the light, hungry for warmth and being.

Demons are made of shadow.

But the shadows had never attacked me before, no matter how late into the night I wandered the house. Ignifex must have ordered them to leave me alone. I had to believe that, or I would go mad with terror. I did believe it, mostly, but the nagging fear still itched down my spine.

I went on anyway. Soon I turned into a hallway decorated with elaborate gold molding and murals—I thought they showed the gods, but in the shadows, I couldn’t see more than a tangle of limbs. At the very end of the passage was a simple wooden door. Did my footsteps echo a little louder as I walked toward it? My shoulders prickled; when I reached the door, I paused—but heard nothing. No demon leapt out of the shadows to kill me, no doom fell down upon me. Taking a deep breath, I pulled the steel key out from my bodice. It slid easily into the lock. I turned the handle.

I pulled open the door and saw shadow.

All my life, I had heard the warning, Don’t look at the shadows too long, or a demon might look back. It made me afraid of closed-up, darkened rooms, of dimly lit mirrors, of the quietly whispering woods at night. In that moment, I realized that I had never seen shadow. I had seen objects—rooms, mirrors, the whole countryside—in the absence of light. But through this door lay nothing at all except for perfect, primal shadow that needed no object to make itself manifest. It had its own nature, its own presence, palpable and seething and alive. My eyes stung and watered as I stared at it, but I could not look away.

Then the shadow looked at me.

There was no visible change, but I staggered under the weight of perception and the knowledge I was not alone. Gasping, I grabbed the door and started to push it shut. I leaned my weight against it, but the door moved slowly, as if I were pushing it through honey. When I glanced at the slowly closing gap, I saw nothing coming through the doorway; but when I looked back at my hands, I saw from the corner of my eye a webbed mass of shadow gripping the doorframe with its tendrils.

All this had happened in complete silence. I was too terrified to scream. But when the door was nearly closed, I heard a chorus of children’s voices. It sang the tune of my favorite lullaby, but the words were wrong:


We will sing you nine, oh!

What are your nine, oh?

Nine for the nine bright shiners,

The night will snuff them out, oh.


The sound crawled over my body like a thousand cold little feet. I had been taught charms against darkness, invocations of Apollo and Hermes. But the voices nibbled the knowledge out of my mind, and I sobbed wordlessly as I struggled to push the door shut.