Hand in hand with life, that’s how it goes.
“You could let me go,” she says, keeping those blue eyes on the road.
“I can’t,” says Death.
The girl pulls free and turns on him, still gripping her red flower crown. “Why not?”
The question scratches at his mind. He tries to remember what will happen. He can’t. But the knowing is there, solid as the hunger, that he cannot wait too long. He has to take her hand. Has to take her life. The knowing doesn’t have words, but it’s there all the same.
“I can’t,” he says again, willing her to understand.
She crosses her arms, and Death can hear a carriage coming up the road. The faint rattle of a wheel coming loose.
Again, he holds out his hand. “Grace.”
“A life’s got to be worth something,” she says. “What will you give me for it?”
The carriage is rounding the bend behind her.
“What is it you want?” he asks, knowing the answer.
“A day, a week, a year—”
He shakes his head. “It’s your time.”
“Then let me have it. You’re taking a whole life. The least you can give me is a day.”
Death stares at the girl.
The girl stares at Death.
He could hold her down, grip her hands in his, lace their fingers against the road.
“Please,” she says. “You owe me this.”
Death frowns. “I do not owe you anything.”
“Yes, you do!” she snarls as a gust of wind cuts through, tousling her hair, and he remembers.
Why she looks familiar.
Where he’s seen those eyes before. Glazed with sickness, but just as bright, staring up from hollowed cheeks in a heart-shaped face. A woman’s frail fingers reaching for his own. A small girl beyond the window, hair white in the moonlight.
“Yes, you do.”
This time the words are a whisper, but he hears them all the same.
“Do you know what it’s like?” she asks. “To lose so much? Can you even feel sadness, grief?”
He tries to trace his mind around its edges, feeling for the shape, but it is like everything besides his hunger, flat and dull and heavy.
“No,” she mutters. “Of course you can’t.”
Death stares at the girl. He does not know what to say. What to do.
“Dusk,” he says at last. “You can have until dusk.”
Tears spill down her cheeks, even as she sets the crown triumphantly in her hair.
“Shake on it?” he asks, offering his bone hand.
At that, the girl makes a sound as sudden and high as birdsong, shakes her head, and turns away.
It was worth a shot, thinks Death, stepping out of the road as the carriage rattles past.
The wheel stays on.
VIII.
“Why?” he asks when she hands him the boots she nicked from Bobby Cray’s porch.
“Some people track mud,” she says. “You track death.”
He sits on a low wall and tugs the old boots on, and they’re just a bit of leather and cloth, but when he gets to his feet again and takes a few slow steps through the grass, it doesn’t wither. He marvels at this, like a child first learning about tricks of light.
She holds out a leather glove, and he stares at it a moment before slipping it over his bone fingers.
“Last thing,” she says, taking up the crown of green. He bows his head and lets her set the wreath in his red hair, but the moment it touches, the leaves go brown and brittle, and even though he cannot see the change, he seems to know what’s happened, the good humor sliding from his face.
“This isn’t a good idea,” says Death, but this is Grace’s day, bought and paid for with a life, and she will not surrender.
“It’s all right,” she says. “You’ll just have to be a fall sprite instead.”
In the distance, a fiddle begins to play.
A drum sounds steady as rain.
She takes Death by the arm. “Come on. We don’t want to be late.”
IX.
The festival sits with its back to the woods.
It is a circle of tents in shades of yellow and red, white and green; a platform of fiddlers and a pair telling stories and a dozen men and women with tables of food and drink.
The whole town is here.
Death has seen most of them already, making their way to the church that morning. That procession had been quiet, but now they whoop and cheer, their heads ringed with crowns, their lips brimming with laughter.
Death has never seen so much color, so much life.
The sun is high overhead, but men are already dragging dry logs from the forest and into the field, stacking them into a pyramid within a ring of stone.
A ring of stone just like the well, only there’s no drop into darkness, only matted grass and piled sticks ready to be set on fire.
And all the girls have flowers in their hair.
And all the boys have crowns of leaves.
And everyone is happy.
“Here,” says Grace.
She is holding out a piece of ripened fruit, the color of sunrise, and when he bites down, he remembers—laughter, an arm around his waist, lips against his skin. By the time he swallows, the memory is gone, fleeting as blue between storm clouds, but the warmth settles in his stomach, beautiful and sweet.
Someone starts to sing, and he knows that song.
He doesn’t know it.
He can’t remember.
But he can feel the place where it should be inside him, and when she sings the words, he feels them rising in his own throat.
The woman’s voice carries as she sings old songs, of sailors and seasides and runaway girls, the kind of songs that sound like the wind bent into shape and thrum through Death’s bones. An echo of an echo of something he knows. Knew. A flicker in his mind of another time, another name, a girl holding out her hand, and then he’s blinking back the stars of memory, the flares of light made by the light of Grace’s life throwing off embers beside him.
Grace holds out her hand.
“Dance with me,” she says.
And Death hesitates, but the music is stirring something in him, every chord plucking at a string inside his mind, and when she takes him by the arm, he takes her, too, and they are spinning, first in slow circles and then faster, faster, and in between the strings and the turns, he remembers—lifting a girl into the air, a crown of yellow in her hair, a fiddle and a far-off song—but then it is gone, and he is here, in his body, in his bones, in his life without a life, a mind without a memory, and he wants to find his way back, wants to see the girl’s face again, wants to feel more, more, more.
He laughs.
It is a strange sound, like a catching breath, a stranger feeling, like light in his chest, and he holds it close.
X.
They dance until dusk.
Until night falls and the music stops, and sweat darkens Death’s red hair and shines in the hollow of Grace’s throat. Her face is flushed and his is bright, and in that moment it is so easy to forget that he is Death and not just a boy with copper lashes and warm brown eyes.
She has seen him smile.
She has heard him laugh.
But the moment they stop dancing, she remembers.
He remembers, too. She can see it in his face. The flex of his fingers beneath the glove.