“No!” I screamed, my arms flinging forward, trying vainly through the holes in the headboard to block the nearest blades from my mother.
The lord stepped to my side at the edge of the headboard. He flicked his hand, and the specters put their blades back into their inner coat pockets. They remained hovering over her.
I fumed. “Don’t hurt her!”
The lord shrugged. “I am not hurting her.”
I pointed at the specters. “Don’t let them hurt her.”
“All right.” He waved his hand.
The specters retreated through the doorway. Six more specters marched in. They were all so similar in appearance and in gait that I had yet to put my finger on whether they were identical or merely brethren.
The six shuffled in on either side of the bed, and each removed a blade from his inner coat pocket.
“Stop!” I yelled.
The lord tensed and didn’t move, but the specters stirred just a little, glancing first at me and then at the lord. After a moment, the lord moved closer, running his hands slowly over the top of the headboard, almost within reach of me.
I clenched my jaw. “I can play this game all night.”
“As can I.”
I backed away from his encroaching fingers, not caring if that put me closer to one of the specters and his extended blade.
“I could think of a way to word it,” I said, not bothering to pretend any longer, “so that I would win.”
“And win you would,” said the lord. He stood upright and made a slight wave of his fingers. The nearest specter grabbed me and pulled me out from behind my small sanctuary behind the headboard, the blade gone from his hand and both hands gripping tightly on each of my arms.
“But you would also lose.”
The rest of the specters lowered their blades toward my mother and I screamed.
Don’t look before love. What if I agreed to the Returning and then he simply vanished at the unmasking? If Ingrith wasn’t crazy, no one would even remember.
No. It was too late for that. The lord knew I wasn’t able to Return to him. And besides, what if he was needed to save my mother? There had to be a way to word it. To win the choice that was owed to me but to save my mother at the same time. Could the specters still respond to those little hand gestures if I commanded the lord to slice off his own fingers? Had they already been ordered to rush to my mother and kill her if I so much as dared? Would it end there? Would they go to the village and slaughter Father and Elfriede, Alvilda, the Tailors, and Nissa? And Jurij? Would it end with my own death or would they drop me in the commune, forcing me to live with the endless trail of blood my choice had wrought? Would the lord’s death be worth it, when with his death, I’d lose all control over the one who held command over the specters?
You sound like a bloodthirsty monster. No different from the men in your dream.
I didn’t have to kill the lord to come out on top. The specters gave me some hope. They seemed different when I gave my orders. They obeyed him, but in that brief moment, they at least appeared confused. That could prove to be my opening, if I could just figure out how to take advantage of it. But before I could risk my mother’s safety, I would have to practice, to push and pull with inconsequential orders and figure out how I could stop the specters from acting, even as I prevented the lord from noticing what I was doing. But he noticed every order. He anticipated it. He must have spent all this time since he met me planning for my refusal, even as I lay ignorant in my bed beyond the woods. If the stories were to be believed, he could have spent a millennia preparing for my refused Returning.
The lord of our village. He who never stepped beyond the woods surrounding his castle. A lord whose birth and parents no one could remember. There were those whispers that he was proof of the tale—that men who couldn’t find their goddesses among the village women would live forever until they did. For if no one remembered when he was born, was it possible that he was older than everyone who lived?
I shuddered to think of an old, wrinkled, spotted man taunting me behind that black veil. To unmask him upon a Returning might be more chilling than seeing him now hidden from view.
My mind swam with faded, unreal memories of the village that was and was not my own.
You said you would help them. And then you left them.
I shook my head. It wasn’t real. My hands reached out for a phantom sheath at my waist. But even if it had been a dream, it lingered with me all these months later.
Because even if I’d seen that lord’s face and not this one’s, they seemed more and more alike the better I came to know him.