Page 65 of Wild Reverence

XLVII

A Wasted Door

MATILDA

Over the years I had spent Skyward, I had come to learn that the eye in the gemstone only opened when someone close to me was dying.

Not necessarily someone I loved, but one whose fate was woven with my own.

The connection could be a brief encounter, or one that spanned endless seasons.

But when the eye stirred, I knew final breaths were being drawn.

A shadow was about to be collected by Orphia; a soul was about to wander the wasteland.

The Gatekeeper sensed their arrival, and so her eye began to open with expectation. She was preparing to greet them at the archway, to weigh their worth when it came to the mists.

Only once had the eye shut prematurely, and that had been in Adria’s case.

It had also been the first time I had felt the eye open.

But of course, the Poet Queen had escaped the wasteland and the mists by evolving, by becoming one of us.

The second time the eye had opened had been when my mother had died, and I had been too stricken to feel the warning heat of it.

I covered the stone with my palm now, my heart falling into a frantic beat.

“Matilda?” Bade sensed my mind was far away, even as I stood close enough to him that our shadows tangled on the tower’s battlement. “Did you hear me?”

I was turning to face him when the shout came from below. A terrible, keening sound. It stirred the hair on my arms; my mouth went dry as summer’s worst drought. More cries spawned, carried on the wind. Angry ones, followed by the clash of steel.

Bade and I both lunged to the edge of the parapet, looking down on Maiden Bridge.

One of the baron’s knights was being wrestled to the ground, but not before I saw a bloodied sword clatter at his feet, knocked free from his hand.

He had killed someone, someone whose fate was twined with mine.

And while my eyes cut through the chaos and tendrils of smoke, I could not see who had fallen.

I could not find Vincent amidst the turmoil.

I pushed away from the crenellation.

Blood crackled through my veins like wildfire; the air burned my lungs when I breathed.

I descended the tower steps at a frantic clip, my hand on the newel to keep my balance.

Bade followed dutifully, as if a cord was wound between us.

It was the salt vow; I could not break it by voice alone.

I needed to write it, word for word, and have us both eat it again in order to fully sunder its power.

He called for me to slow, but his voice was a mere smudge in the air. A roar was consuming me, narrowing my vision to a point, speckled by dark stars.

Whatever I was about to encounter, I was not prepared for it.

I could sense the weak point within myself, as if I was pressing down on fractured ice.

It could not be Vincent.

I would drown if it were him. I could almost feel my grief rising like cold water. How I would swallow it down, mouthful after mouthful, until the heaviness pulled me fully under.

At last I reached the open air of Maiden Bridge.

As I ran forward, I had no choice but to leap over bodies that were scattered like chaff across the bridge, their blood still wet beneath them.

Buzzards had gathered, circling overhead.

Their shadows rippled over the dead and the injured, over abandoned swords and bucklers and arrows with fletching still alight with flames.

I drew closer, drawn to the Wyndrift knights who had formed a loose circle around someone.

Time seemed to slip in that moment, stalling.

The colors leached away and the air swarmed, thick and humid.

It felt like I was moving through honey, slow and laborious no matter how hard I pushed myself to run faster.

But finally, I reached the armored circle.

I slipped between Edric and Hyacinthe to see who was at the center.

Vincent was there, as I knew he would be.

He was on his knees again, but the blood that stained the wooden planks around him was not his. It belonged to the man he held in his arms.

Nathaniel.

I stopped abruptly, as if my feet had put down roots.

He was still alive, defiant of the wound in his neck that poured blood, bright and thin, down his breastplate.

I knew, as did all of us gathered, that it was a mortal blow.

I knew he would not last much longer, and I listened to his breaths.

How shallow and wet they were. How blood bubbled through his teeth and trickled from the corners of his mouth.

I saw how pale his face had become, how the liveliness of his skin had drained away, leaving him white as snow.

His eyes were wide, shining with disbelief, as he gazed up at his brother.

“You are going to be fine,” Vincent said in a gentle tone.

He brushed a lank tendril of hair from Nathaniel’s brow.

“Just hold on a little longer. They… they are coming with some herbs to help with the pain. And a hook and thread, to mend your wound. You always hated hooks, didn’t you?

But now you will have a scar to rival my own. You always said you wanted one.”

I tried to breathe and found I could not.

My throat had closed; my ribs felt like flimsy parchment, curling inward.

I watched Nathaniel attempt to speak, but only indecipherable sounds emerged.

His voice was shorn, cut away. He gave a shudder, his fingers flexing as if he wanted to reach out and hold on to his brother. Hold on to something that was living.

But his shadow was fading quickly.

I saw Orphia coming through the crowd, her black robes billowing in the breeze like storm clouds.

The mortals could not see her, but they felt her cold presence.

They shivered, casting their eyes downward.

Vincent had gone quiet, so still he could have been a tapestry.

A man woven from a hundred threads, frozen in time.

This should not have happened.

I should have remained with Nathaniel, as Vincent asked me to. I should have stayed by his side rather than appointing Bade to guard him, because Bade’s primary concern would always be the salt vow. He had followed me up the tower.

Orphia gathered Nathaniel’s shadow like it was a bolt of dark linen. It hung over her forearm, another one to add to her collection. To hang upon the smoke-stained rafters of her burrow.

She felt my unwavering stare and met it.

For all the places I had roamed and all the divines I had met, I could not read her expression.

It was like looking into a very deep well, and I could only wonder what thoughts rushed through her in that moment.

If she had been the one to weave such a death for Vincent’s youngest brother upon her shared loom, or if it had been Rowena.

Was it you? I wanted to demand, teeth clenched. Did you weave this pain?

Orphia’s gaze dropped to my waist.

She was looking at the eye in the gemstone. Her mother’s eye, I realized, stiffening.

But Death said nothing to me.

She only arched her brow and pivoted on her heel, and it took me two ragged breaths to understand that she was challenging me.

She knew I could venture into the wastes.

She knew I bore her mother’s lost eye on my belt, and that it stirred when Orphia was near to claim life. She knew that I was not just a herald.

She had seen it in my horoscope days after my birth.

Soul-bearer, Adria had likewise written beneath my stars in her journal.

I could chase Nathaniel’s soul in the wastes. I could speak to him, one final time, but first I needed a wasted door.

I thought of the lintel I had passed through before. The door in the castle ruins. It was not too far from here, but I would need a trade wind to reach it in time. And the trade winds blew at the threshold, which was Fury Bridge. A place I could not reach now due to my own barricade.

I swallowed, thinking I had no choice but to go by under realm, and how that would cause a delay I could not afford, when my gaze rose to the tower I had broken. Fury, wreathed in smoke.

I measured its remaining pillar, up to its craggy top, studying it with new eyes.

There was the staircase that had survived my wrath.

It now led to the sky. I had vaguely noticed it earlier but had failed to see that there was also a lintel with its door still intact, its corresponding chamber now part of the rubble.

A wasted door. A door that opened to nowhere.

Anticipation coursed through me. There was no way for me to know if this threshold would shift with my presence, spilling me not into the clouds but into the wastes. Uncertain, I still had to try.

I looked at Vincent again.

He was quiet, solemn, as he stared at nothing. His cheeks were sunken as if he were biting down on them; his face had gone pallid. He continued to cradle Nathaniel in his arms, but he was trembling, as if the shock was wearing thin.

Slowly, he lifted his bloodstained hand. He closed Nathaniel’s vacant eyes.

I wanted to go to him. I wanted to touch him as he had touched me earlier, providing a haven to fall back upon. But if I knelt, I would be caught in the eddy that Death had left behind. I would lose this moment, and so I steeled myself and slipped through the circle of knights.

Make me a shadow, I asked my cloak, and it was quick to oblige.

Invisible, I began to climb through the rubble I had made, and then the remaining length of Fury Tower. I did not pause or look behind. Not until I reached that exposed stairwell, and then I glanced back over the bridge.

Bade was watching with a scowl. He was the only one who had noticed my vanishing. He knew I was climbing the tower, although he would have to wonder where I was going.

My eyes coasted over him to find Vincent again. He had not moved; he still held his brother, and the healer had at last arrived in her dark blue dress and white shawl.

She was a young woman, pretty as a spring morning. Her round face was rosy, her short blond hair the color of straw. She stopped when she reached Vincent, her brow wrinkled in sadness. She laid her hand on his shoulder.

It was a gentle, familiar motion.

I noticed, my vision narrowing.

And I could not name this feeling that shot through me; I had never felt like this before, as if I had dipped my hands in dark green ink. How slick the world seemed to become, darting through my fingers like minnows in water.

I should be with him, and yet I was not.

He was a man, but I was a goddess, about to slip through the hidden seams of the world.

I drew a sharp breath and felt a tear in my chest. It hurt to desire two things at once. To want to be in two different places. And I knew that once the numbness wore away, Vincent would look for me. His eyes would search for mine in the crowd, and he would not find them.

As an immortal, time has always felt different to me.

There is an abundance of it in our halls; I could have cupped the minutes, the fortnights, the seasons in my hands like water from a fountain and drunk my fill whenever I thirsted.

But I felt its fine-haired edge in this moment, as if I were mortal flesh and blood, doomed to die.

How it seemed to lay across my skin like damp clothes.

How it weighed me down, stirring an anxious flame in my breast.

Hurry, I thought. Time is passing.

I raced up the remaining steps. Up to the clouds, up to nowhere. If I was wrong about this door, it would be a painful fall. But I had discovered that the greatest magic happened when I trusted it, wholly. When I closed my eyes and reached out my hand.

My doubt, my worry, this bruised feeling melted as I reached the threshold.

Power hummed along my bones. Possibilities sang through me.

I opened the wasted door and stepped into the sky.