The bell tolled nine times and fell silent. Their feet were still twitching.
Kellan’s voice was gentler now. “I don’t know what you thought you’d see here.” He tried to turn me away to protect me from it, but I twisted from his grasp. Even though being near a transition from life to death always made my stomach turn, I had to bear witness. I had to see.
Mabel’s body had gone completely still now, but the air around her shimmered. It was a strange thing to watch a soul extricate itself from its body, slipping out from the grotesque shell the way a fine lady might step from a muddied, cast-off cloak. When she emerged, she found her son waiting and she went to him. In the instant they touched, they were gone, moving from borderland into whatever lay beyond, out of my sight.
It took longer for Hilda to die. She gagged and spluttered, her eyes bulging from their sockets. When it did happen, it was an ugly thing. Her soul tore itself from its body with what would have been a snarl, if there had been any sound. Hilda’s specter lunged at the woman she’d pointed at in the crowd, but the woman did not seem to notice. Her attention was on the sloppy sack of bones swaying at the end of the gallows rope.
“Would you like to claim your mother-in-law’s body?” Toris asked the woman.
“No,” she said emphatically. “Burn it.” And Hilda’s ghost silently screamed, dragging her intangible nails across her daughter-in-law’s face. The woman paled and put her hand to her cheek. I wondered if Hilda’s rage had given her spirit enough energy to exert a real touch.
I didn’t envy the daughter-in-law. Hilda would probably remain in the borderland indefinitely, following her betrayer, silently screaming, clouding the air around with her hate. I’d seen it happen before.
“Let’s go, Aurelia,” Kellan said. He used my name instead of my title; he was becoming distressed.
The crowd was starting to get raucous, pushing forward as the bodies were dragged down from the stage. Someone next to me gave me a hard shove, and I stumbled forward toward the cobblestones, putting my hands out to catch my fall but coming down hard onto my wrist instead. I wasn’t down for long, though; Kellan was already lifting me to my feet, his arms circling me like a protective cage as he forced our way out of the mob.
My hand went to my empty wrist. “My bracelet!” I cried, straining to look over my shoulder at the place where I’d fallen, though the ground could no longer be seen through the mesh of bodies. “It must have broken when I fell—”
“Forget about it,” Kellan said firmly but kindly—he knew how important it was to me. “It’s gone. We have to go.”
I slipped from his grasp and turned back into the crowd with my eyes on the ground, pushing when I was pushed and shoving when I was shoved, hoping for any glimpse of my bracelet. But Kellan was right; it was well and truly gone. He reached me again and this time held fast, but I didn’t want to fight him anymore; the whistles had begun to blow. Within minutes the Tribunal’s clerics would be marching on the gathering, rounding up any who seemed to lack the requisite enthusiasm for the cause. There were two new vacancies in the Tribunal’s cells, and they were never left empty for long.
* * *
It wasn’t more than an hour later when I found myself standing in the beam of my mother’s antechamber skylight, staring at the half-finished confection of ivory gossamer and minute, sparkling crystals—thousands of them—that would soon become my wedding dress. It would be the most extravagant costume I’d ever worn in all my seventeen years; the Tribunal’s influence in Renalt extended even to fashion. Clothing was meant to reflect the ideals of modesty, simplicity, and austerity. The only allowable exceptions were marriages and funerals. Celebration was reserved for the events that curtailed one’s opportunities to sin.
The dress was my mother’s wedding gift to me, every tiny stitch done by her own hand.
I touched the lace of the one finished sleeve and marveled at its fineness before reminding myself how unhappy I would be the day I had to wear it. Every day brought the occasion closer and closer. Set for Beltane, the first day of Quintus, my wedding was now little more than six weeks away and looming large on the horizon.
Sighing, I straightened and went through the door into the next room, ready for battle.
My mother was pacing on the other side of her table, skirts rustling with each restless stride. Our family’s eldest and closest adviser, Onal, sat straight-backed in one of the parlor’s less comfortable chairs, sipping her tea with pinched brown lips and a carefully cultivated disdain. At the sound of the door, my mother’s blue eyes whipped toward me, all of her anxiety loosed at once, like the snap of a bowstring.
“Aurelia!” She used my name like an epithet. Onal took another slow sip of her tea.
I thrust my hands into my pockets. The gesture was supposed to make me look sheepish and repentant, of which I was neither. But this whole thing would be over faster if Mother thought I was remorseful.
“You went to town alone this morning? Have you lost your mind?” She lifted a stack of papers and shook them at me. “These are the letters I’ve received this week—this week!—that call for you to be investigated by the Tribunal. Over there”—she pointed to a separate pile of paper, two inches high—“are the possible threats against you that my informants have gathered since the beginning of this month. And here”—she pulled open a drawer—“are the more poetic and fanatical predictions of your demise we’ve been sent since the beginning of this year. Let me read one to you, shall I? Let’s see . . . all right. This one contains a very detailed methodology of how to determine if you’re a witch. It involves a sharp knife and a thorough examination of the underside of your skin.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her about the severed kitten’s head I’d found in my closet last week, laid out alongside a poorly scrawled country prayer to ward against witches; or the red x’s that were scratched on the underside of my favorite saddle, an old hex meant to make a horse go mad and turn on its rider. I didn’t need to be reminded of how much I was hated. I knew it better than she did. “They want to peel my skin off?” I asked lightly. “Is that all?”
“And burn it,” Onal supplied from behind her teacup.
“One week until you leave,” Mother snapped. “Can’t you manage to stay out of trouble until then? I’m sure when you’re queen in Achleva you’ll be able to come and go as you please. You can go into the city and do . . . whatever it was you went to do today.”
“I went to a hanging.”
“Stars save me. A hanging? It’s like you want the Tribunal to come after you. We’re very lucky we have Toris there on the inside.”
“Very lucky,” I echoed. She might think Toris, the widowed husband of her favorite cousin, was the crown’s trusted ally keeping the Tribunal in check from within, but I’d never be convinced that he didn’t enjoy the part he played up there on the gallows stand.
“Aurelia,” she said, taking stock of me, head to toe. I knew what she saw: a tangle of pale hair and eyes that should have been blue but weren’t, not quite, erring more on the side of silver. Outside of those attributes, I was not particularly unpleasant-looking, but my peculiar traits and tendencies made me stand out, made me strange. And Renaltans were suspicious enough about me simply because I existed.