Page 10 of Beneath Swan Lake (Deadly Endings #2)

Odette still doesn’t open her eye even when I’m too tired to continue moving us through the shadows, and we crossed over into Swan Lake some time ago. It’s dark enough now that the trees blend into the night and shadows are everywhere. If I wasn’t tired from dragging her with me, I could probably go the rest of the way to Swan Lake Kingdom, or at least get closer to the castle.

As it is, she clings to me long after we stop moving, and I have to shake her off before she lets go. Once we’re no longer tangled together she opens her eye, and I can just barely make out the gold.

My tongue dances over my teeth, waiting for her to say something. When she offers nothing, I decide to shatter the quiet. “Your eye could be a product of Midas’ gold. It’s that golden. Strange, since sometimes it looks green.”

She scoffs. “I’m well aware of King Midas’ golden gift. My eye has nothing to do with that.”

That sparks my interest, and when she starts walking through the dark forest I fall into step beside her. “I thought your parents didn’t visit Midas much?”

“Just because we didn’t visit doesn’t mean we don’t keep tabs on the rulers and their subordinates.” She shakes her head, pulling her hair behind her shoulders. “Go on, ask me something obscure about the Kings and Queens of Mystica. Barring the secrets of Wonderland, I know a fair bit about a lot of the royals. I understand the basics of Midas’ golden power, but I didn’t directly ever speak with him.”

Interesting. I know some details too, but the affairs of Kings and Queens aren’t my direct concern unless they suddenly result in a lot more dead people. I’m not big on history. That interests Zarev more than it interests me. “Okay… who ruled on the throne before Midas?”

She chuckles, and for a moment I wonder if she has a greater knowledge of Rapunzel’s family tree than the princess herself. “That’s an easy one. King Gordias. Depending on what rumors you follow compared to literature, he married Queen Cybele, and both passed when Midas struck a deal with Dionysus who granted his wish, and he gained the golden touch. There’s no precise record of what happened to the former King and Queen, just that once Midas gained his curse they suddenly disappeared.” She tilts her head. “I always assumed if Midas kept trophies in his castle, he probably turned his mom and dad into glistening statues, like he used to do with civilians before he realized gold is a form of torture.”

I’m nodding along, but truth be told I don’t know if what she’s saying is a gross exaggeration or true facts. Before I died beneath the stones, hunted by the Mad Queen, paying attention to the bickering rulers was the least of my concern. From a young age I lived at the tavern, and after the failed attempt to rescue my father the weight of the mature male figure fell onto my young shoulders. I was still a young teenager when my father died, and as the eldest child of seventeen I needed to set an example for my siblings when they were hurting. That kind of responsibility doesn’t sit lightly on a child’s shoulders.

Odette seems to think this is great fun, and I don’t know if it’s the historical side or the gossipy bits that makes her eager to continue. “Ask me another.”

“Obscure trivia it is,” I mutter. If she wants to share, maybe she can tell me something useful about the living. “What about Arthur?”

She wrinkles her nose, something that I think is extra adorable in the shadow. Probably because few others could pick out a motion like that with very little light. “Arthur is boring. His Knights of the Round Table do all the work. He carries around that sword Excalibur and claims to be a noble King, but he’s just a figurehead.”

I almost trip over my own feet at that. I’ve never heard anyone voice a rumor like that. “Figurehead?”

She nods. “For the Knights. Lancelot leads the Round Table, and if there’s any sort of militia or war questions, they go to Lancelot, not to Arthur. The Round Table governs Camelot since the King is helpless without them, and I’ve heard his greed with Tressa made him next to useless. All his attention turned to the treasures there instead of focusing anywhere else. But… ”

Her voice trails off, and I hold out a hand to help her over a set of raised roots. She can feel my touch, and it’s nice that she doesn’t shrug me off immediately. “But?”

“Well, he allied with the Mad Queen,” she continues, giving me a hard look. “You know… after the stones in Camelot killed the four of you. I hear that the spot isn’t messed with at all. No one is willing to touch it.”

My heart tightens at the reminder. Being hunted, branded, and killed really isn’t my fondest memory, but it did change the course of my life. Without that tragic day I never would’ve become a Reaper. It has its ups and downs, but my family no longer goes without. I can provide for my siblings in ways I never could as a mortal.

“Tell me something about you,” she urges, tugging her hand away. “I don’t hear many things about Reapers.” She hesitates. “Other than that you four are terrifying.”

I snort. “We’re only frightening because people get uncomfortable around Death. I’m not scary, and Zarev only is when his temper snaps. Now Lucius and Ban, those two are fearsome.”

Odette nods, but she isn’t being deterred. “No. Something about you, Ray.”

Ray. She gives me such a nice nickname compared to the one I gave her. “There isn’t much to tell. I’m the eldest of seventeen, my father passed away when I was younger. Until I died I helped my mum care for the tavern, and now I reap souls on the side.” When the trees thin out I touch Odette’s arm, eyeing the space. “We need to make camp for the night. The darker it gets the more likely you are to trip, and I don’t have the energy to shadow hop right now.”

“You’re going to make a fire,” she asks, the hope evident in her voice.

Smirking, I reach into my cloak and pull out a jar. It was tucked away deeply enough that she didn’t even notice it until now. “The pixie dust can help with that.”

In no time we have a fire going, and I’m digging through my pack. I didn’t bring along much since this should be a short trip, but I still toss the princess a bed wrap anyway so she can sleep somewhat comfortably. At least setting up camp distracts her from all the questions, and as the fire crackles into the night I toss her some dried meat and a few veggies mum packed from the garden. Mum always does things like that when I’m home, and I’m never going to tell her to stop. It’s like bringing a piece of home with me on my journeys, even if the bed wrap is almost always unused since Reapers rarely need to sleep.

Unfortunately, the silence I love is short lived. “You still have to tell me something about yourself. I don’t know you well, but I would like to if you’ve gone through the trouble of coming out here.”

I almost point out that I’m here as a favor to her parents to keep the peace, but bite my tongue instead. “What exactly do you want to know?”

Odette takes another bite of her food, staring at me from across the fire. There’s a curious look in her eye. “How’d your mum start the tavern? ”

Ah, I can give her the details on that. It’s less about me, more about my family. And all of us have been asked at one point or another how the tavern came to be. “It used to be our home. Mum and Pa would sell goods from the little farm and turn a profit to travelers through Sherwood. They had several children quickly, so my elder siblings are all very close in age. We grew up caring for one another so Mum and Pa could work.”

She nods, and her eye sparking with interest. She’s actually engrossed in the story, which is almost funny to me. It’s not a grand tale like some of my friends.

I take a sip of the water, and her eyes follow the motion. We really should’ve brought more supplies with us, but it won’t matter tomorrow when we reach Swan Lake. “My parents would see all sorts of travelers. They made friends and people even started to stay in a few of the unused rooms when they needed a little extra money. All of my siblings were younger back then and sharing rooms, so it wasn’t that big of a deal.

“One day, pa went out with myself and Tom, trying to teach us some new tricks to hunting. It was supposed to be fun, but a giant stepped into our path. I don’t see those beasts very often in my travels, and very few as large as the one that stole our father. This one was big and robust, and he snatched up my father and threw him into the sky, high up into the clouds.”

This is usually where I start losing people. Birdie just blinked but kept her eye on me. “He… threw your father? ”

“Yes. He went up to the air and disappeared into the clouds. He never came back down and the giant thought it was quite funny. I was still a child then, barely twelve, and the giant’s shoe was as tall as I was. He was massive, and I didn’t have magic or the ability to defy Death back then. When it threatened to crush us we ran like cowards.”

I pause, realizing Odette is no longer eating. She’s staring, fascinated. “We ran home and told Mum what happened. The only thing we could bring her of Pa’s was one of his shoes that fell off. Grief-stricken, she hung the shoe from our clothesline, like a calling card. But Pa didn’t come back to collect.”

“That’s it then? You never saw him again?”

“I didn’t say that was the end,” I reply with a low chuckle. “I was friends with all my Hell Brother’s by this point - Zarev, Ban and Lucius. They each offered to come and help me defeat the giant, so we banded together and wandered around Sherwood for several weeks. None of us could fly-”

I stop for a moment, nearly correcting myself. If Lucius had wanted to, maybe he could’ve taken flight and looked. But he was still in denial of his curse back then. “Anyway, we couldn’t check the clouds, so we worked on the ground. That giant should be easy to find but alas, he didn’t return. We were on the journey for almost a week before we found him. Now don’t get excited - there was nothing to kill. Someone, probably a skilled hunter, had already slain the giant by the time we happened across him. Without him, I didn’t know how to access the clouds and look for my pa. It stands to reason he fell back to the ground as well and died from the impact.”

Looking up, I stare at the stars that peek through the trees before I continue. “We walked for a long time, but I never found my pa. Ban and Zarev even kept their eyes out for over a year when they would wander, but if Pa came back down from the heavens, he didn’t come back home.”

Odette clears her throat. “So the tavern… your mother needs it to take the place of your missing father?”

“Exactly.” I give her a pointed look. “I didn’t become a Reaper until I was thirty, and that was a decade ago. I’ve stopped aging but my siblings have not. The familial genes on my mother’s side are strong, so even my younger half siblings look like we all come from the same father. You think my kid brother Taulric and little Leia were born back when I was twelve? My mum seeks comfort where she can, but she’s always been independent. And we all stand as a united family, even if our fathers aren’t all the same.”

Her wide eyes stay on me, so I clear my throat and move on. “When I returned home from the fool's errand, Ma cried for three straight days, then never shed a tear for Pa again. At least not that I’ve ever seen.”

It sounds heartless when I say it like that, but I’ve never seen my mum love another either. Her romance began and ended with Pa, and seeking company and comfort isn’t the same as falling in love. She mourned him for as long as she would allow, but in the end we were all still young and she had many children to look after.

“Mum officially opened the tavern a couple months later. We built everything ourselves, but Mum had some recipes and before he disappeared Pa did some liquor brewing before he left us. We learned from there, and some of my younger siblings started to string up their shoes alongside Pa’s as they waited for him to return home.”

I meet Odette’s one eye, hating the sadness that’s settled across her features. “He never did come back, and I’m at peace with it now. Strange things happen up in the clouds, and it’s not my job to decide who or what suffers a fate up there. I just hope when my father passed, it was quick. Hell, sometimes I think he just fell back into the earth further away and never truly stayed in the clouds. There’s enough unmarked graves and abandoned bodies in Sherwood that he could be one of the mysteries.”

She’s quiet for a moment before speaking. “Raymundo, I’m so-”

“If you say sorry,” I cut in, “I’ll leave you out here alone in the dark. I don’t need or want your pity. That was years ago.”

Odette flattens her lips into a line, looking back down at her food. She practically scarfed it down, and there’s only a few crumbs remaining. I look at my own dinner, realizing I’ve lost my appetite since taking a deep dive into the past. I’ve barely scratched the surface of my life, but it’s more than I would normally share with a near stranger.

Picking up the food in its original cloth, I circle around the fire and hand it to her. “Here. I’m not hungry.”

“Raymundo-”

“You should eat and rest,” I interject, glaring off into the darkness. “You’ll be home tomorrow, Birdie. Let’s leave the history lessons for another day.”

I can almost feel the weight of her rebuttal, but she grows quiet instead of saying anything. Crossing back across the space, I sit on my side of the fire once more and glare into the flames as she continues to eat. If this is the mood of the evening, it’s going to be a painfully long night.

~~~

Later, when Odette should be sleeping and I’m relaxing, she speaks from across the fire. It’s died down quite a bit, and within the next hour I will need to get up to replenish the flames and poke at the embers. I don’t necessarily need the heat, but I’m sure she does.

“Thank you for telling me about your family,” she says quietly.

I grunt. “Sure. As I said, it isn’t much of a story.”

“But it’s your story,” she argues. “Your tale. And you experienced great loss to be here now.”

“Sure.” The standoffish princess is a little too much for me at the moment. I almost liked her better when she was doing her best to avoid me. “My mum tells it better. She likes the theatrics, and I think it makes her feel better. She calls her tale The Old Lady Who Lives in a Shoe. ”

Odette huffs. “Your mom doesn’t look that old.”

“She isn’t,” I agree. “And we don’t live in a shoe. There’s just a lot of shoes around the place. After my pa died, travelers started bringing shoes from the deceased and Mum would add them to the clotheslines. It’s like a memorial of sorts. They are strung up high on purpose with some thick thread Ban once brought us. People find comfort when they can revisit a spot that honors the dead.”

“I suppose so,” Odette grumbles. “Maybe they should be excited to meet Death instead. Couldn’t they ask you questions or something about a loved one's passing? That should be more comforting.”

I snort. “That isn’t how it works. I’m just a shadow man. I barely remember the names of the last ten souls I helped move on. I wouldn’t remember names if someone brought up a random person to me. No one wants to truly ask the Reapers about Death.”

“Shadow man,” Odette mutters, and I can hear the exhaustion in her voice. “I think I meant a shadow man once.”

Frowning, I roll to my side and prop my head up on my hand. She’s across the fire with the blanket, curled to look over at me. “Do you mean me, Birdie?”

She yawns. “No, not you. This was years ago. I don’t think he was you. He was… haunting. He told me I wasn’t ready to go with Death yet.”

My mind spins. None of the four of us would say something like that to anyone we don’t personally know. Confusing the mind of someone near death or dying can make people question themselves, and that’s how spirits end up turning. “What exactly did he say?”

Another yawn. “Gods, Raymundo, that was over eight years ago. I don’t-”

“Just try and remember,’ I interrupt.

She cracks her eye open to stare at me again. “Um… he said no. No, no, no.” She nods, like she’s silently confirming with herself that that’s right. “He said I wasn’t ready to come with Death. Not yet.” Even hearing the words a second time makes my world tilt.

For a moment, I think of the shadow man that greeted the four of us in the afterlife. When the Mad Queen killed us beneath the stone, she sentenced each of us to a painful and gruesome death. But we all remember seeing a shadowy figure, though none of us can remember exactly what the man looked like.

We’re supposed to be the only Reapers now. The shadow man is a myth that’s faded into obscurity with us. Eight years ago we were the only Reapers. Else the shadow man’s been hiding in the dark all along.

“That’s weird, isn’t it-”

“Go to sleep,” I interrupt, rolling away from her. My mind is going into overdrive and I need time to puzzle this out without the princess listing more things to confuse me. “We’ll finish the journey in the morning.”