No—she felt rebellious.
And she meant every word.
“Your Darkness—I am not your servant. I am not a possession for you to claim. You have stolen from me my father and my mother. I will not let you have my freedom, too. This is my choice.”
She pulled the vial from her pocket. She was not afraid. She’d been preparing for this all month.
A caw, almost a shriek, echoed through the trees, so loud it startled a flock of woodlarks farther down the river. They took to the sky in a frantic escape.
Serilda uncorked the vial. Inside shimmered a liquid the color of ruby wine. It gave her hope that it might even taste good.
It did not.
As the potion hit her tongue, she tasted rot and rust, decay and death.
A night raven dove for her, knocking the vial from her hand, its talons leaving three deep scratches across her palm.
Too late.
Serilda stared at the blood rising on her hand, but already her vision was starting to blur.
Her pulse slowed.
Her thoughts grew thick and heavy. Filling up with an uncanny sense of dread, coupled with … peace.
She lay back, her head sinking into the patch of moss that clung to the bank. She was surrounded by the smell of earth, and she distantly thought how odd that it could be both the smell of life and the smell of death.
Her lashes fluttered.
She gasped then, or tried to, though air wasn’t coming into her lungs like it should have been. Blackness was edging across her vision. But she remembered—she only just remembered.
She’d nearly forgotten. Her hand scrabbled through the mud, searching. She felt like her limbs were trapped in molasses. Where was it?
Where was?…
She’d almost given up when her fingers found the branch from the ash tree she’d left here last week. Madam Sauer had insisted it be ash.
Don’t let go.
She’d insisted. This had been important.
Serilda didn’t know why.
Nothing seemed important anymore.
The scratches on her palm stung dully as she tried to hold on tight, but she no longer had control over her fingers.
She no longer wanted control.
She wanted release.
She wanted freedom.
Visions of the hunt sped through her vision. The wind stinging her eyes. The raucous cheers in her head. Her own lips pursed as she howled at the moon.
The bellows of the night ravens sounded far away now. Angry, but fading into nothing.
She had started to close her eyes when she saw it through the trees. An early moon rising in the east, though dusk was still hours away. Competing for attention with the guileless sun, not to be ignored.
The Awakening Moon.
How fitting.
Or, if this did not go well—how ironic.
She wanted to smile, but she was too tired. Her heartbeat was slowing. Too slow.
Her fingers went cold, then numb. Soon she could feel nothing at all.
She was dying.
She might have made a mistake.
She wasn’t sure she cared.
Hold tight, the witch had told her. Don’t let go.
The silhouette of a black bird flashed through her vision, soaring northwest. Toward the Aschen Wood, toward Adalheid.
Serilda closed her eyes and sank into the ground.
She let go.
Chapter 48
Serilda lay on her side, staring at her own face, watching herself die. The wisps of dark hair that curled around her ears. The eyelashes against pale cheeks—quite dark, quite pretty—but never noticed because all anyone ever saw were the wheels in her eyes. She had never thought of herself as pretty, because no one else had ever told her she was. Other than Papa, and that hardly counted. All she ever heard was that she was odd and untrustworthy.
But she was sort of pretty. By no means a breathless beauty, but lovely in her own way.
Even as the last bits of color drained from her cheeks.
Even when her lips began to turn blue.
Even when her limbs began to spasm, her fingers twitching against the branch at her side, before they finally stilled and sank into the grass and mud.
Unlike all those lost souls in Adalheid Castle, hers was a soft death. Peaceful and quiet.
She felt the moment the last breath left her. Serilda looked down, pressing a hand to her body’s chest. Her eyes widened as she noticed that the edges of her hand were wisping into the air like morning dew struck by the first ray of sunlight.
Then she started to fade. Her body was pulling apart. There was no pain. Just dissolving. Returning to the air and the earth, her spirit fading into everything and nothing.
Ahead of her, across the river, she spied a figure in emerald green robes, a lantern lifted high in one hand.
Beckoning her. Their presence was a comfort. A promise of rest.
Serilda took a step forward and felt something solid beneath her heel. She looked down. A stick. Nothing more.
But then—she remembered.
Hold tight.
Don’t let go.
She gasped and bent down, reaching for the branch that had been stolen from an ash tree at the edge of the Aschen Wood. At first, her fingers wouldn’t take hold. They slipped right through.
But she tried again, and this time, she felt the roughness of the bark.
On the third attempt, her hand wrapped around the limb, clutching it with the little bit of strength left to her.
Her spirit slowly came back together, tethered to the land of the living.
She looked up again and wondered if that was a smile worn by the god of death, before Velos and the lantern faded away.
This time, she did not let go.
In the hours that passed, Serilda found that she very much disliked being dead. She was gravely bored.
That’s precisely how she would describe it, she thought, when she told this story to the children.
Gravely bored.
They would find it funny.
It was funny.
Except that it was also true. There were no people about, and even if there were, she doubted they would be able to see or communicate with her, not so long as there was daylight. She didn’t know for sure—she’d never been a spirit before—but she didn’t think she was the sort of traumatized, half-corporeal spirit like those that haunted the castle. She was just a wisp of a girl, all mist and rainbows and starlight, wandering along the riverbank and waiting. Even the frogs and the birds paid her no heed. She could scream and wave her arms at them, and they went right on chirping and croaking and ignoring her.
She had no jobs to complete. No one to talk to.
Nothing to do but wait.
She wished she had taken the potion at sundown. If only she’d known. The waiting was almost as tedious as spinning.
Finally, after an age and a year had seemingly passed, the sunset lit the horizon on fire. Indigo blue stretched across the sky. The first stars winked down upon the village of M?rchenfeld. Night descended.
The Awakening Moon shone bright overhead, called such because the world was finally growing lush with life once more.