Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

by V.E. Schwab

Bury my bones in the midnight soil, plant them shallow and water them deep, and in my place will grow a feral rose, soft red petals hiding sharp white teeth.

Born restless, her father used to say. Which was fine for a son, but bad for a daughter.

The way her oldest brother has for the last year, since taking his place. As if that’s all their father was: a set of shoulders, a stoic jaw, a hardened voice. A space he can so easily fill.

Only later did her mother say that not all sins were boulders, that most in fact were more like pebbles. An unkind thought. A hungry heart. Small weights like greed and envy and want (things that didn’t seem to her like sins at all, but apparently they added up).

And María, who thinks herself afraid of nothing—not the dark corners of the yard at night, or the height of the stable roof, or the spiders that hide in the wood stack—stops in her tracks, the words turned to rocks in her throat.

She smiles and curtsies as she passes, a gesture with all the flair of a curse.

“And how is a miracle different from a spell? Who is to say the saint was not a witch?”

“Careful. In nature, beauty is a warning. The pretty ones are often poisonous.”

The sun is gone now, lost behind low clouds, and up close, she smells like candied figs and winter spice. Up close, her gray clothes are not so dull, but finely sewn, and trimmed in glinting silver thread. Up close, her blue eyes are fever bright, and there are faint shadows in the hollows of her cheeks, and María wonders if she was wrong, and the widow has indeed been sick.

She is many things—stubborn, cunning, selfish—but she has never been a fool. She knows that she was born into this body. She knows it comes with certain rules. The question has never been whether she would wed, but whom.

But María has known, all her life, that she is not meant for common paths, for humble houses and modest men. If she must walk a woman’s road, then it will take her somewhere new.

She stares at the viscount now, seated at her table, as if they have not met before. As if she did not see him riding at the helm of the caravan a month ago. As if he did not see her standing at the edge of the crowd, and follow her across the square and into the shadow of the church. As if she did not lure him there, feigning innocence as he cornered her, spilled praise at her feet and pressed to see what she might give. What he could take. As if he did not reach out and coil a lock of copper hair around his glove. As if she did not see the hunger in his eyes and know that she could use it.

By then she had spent nearly a year honing her gaze on the pilgrims passing through, balancing on that knife’s edge between too brazen and too shy. She had learned when to hold a look, and when to drop it. When to let a smile flicker like light on her lips, and when to b...

“You will learn, it is better to bend than to break.” María stared into the hearth. “Why should I be the one who bends?”

“I know you, daughter. I know you have always wanted more. And you have chosen a grand life. But it will not be an easy one. Men like the viscount, they take what they want.” So do I, thought María

Nothing fits, even if it’s fitted, because it’s not really about the size of the body or how it fills the clothes, but how much space it takes up in the world.

One of the feral girls, who have been planted and watered in their bodies, who have pruned their looks, or let them grow wild, the same girls who turn their full brows into a wolfish power, their painted lips into a weapon.

Rose-petal soft and deep as a well, and then teeth skim her lower lip and her knees threaten to go, and she’s thankful for the door at her back and the girl who now tastes like rain, and honey, and hunger.

and she knows, she knows, she has to go. Has learned to rip the Band-Aid off. The danger’s in the dwelling,

It’s the second time she’s run—the first was after Dad came home from that first date, looking almost happy, like the lights were finally coming on again inside his house, and it was such a relief—or so Alice thought—but Catty saw only a betrayal. As if there was an unspoken agreement that when they buried Mum, the grave would follow them home, a six-foot hollow in the bed, a hole at the table, a plot of land left fallow for their entire lives, and then Dad broke his word by planting something there.

Sabine. Sabine. Sabine. María finds herself holding the name, like a cube of sugar, on her tongue, in the days between their meetings. Dwelling on how strange and sweet it tastes. Sabine Boucher.

“Strange, isn’t it?” she says. “The more you taste, the more you want.”

Husband. A word bitten like a loose thread between her teeth. As the days have grown shorter, Andrés has returned, and this time it seems he means to stay the winter, in her room. In her bed. But something has shifted.

“I want to be free,” she says. “By any means.”

She is a flame in the dark, and the night is full of moths.

That is the maddening thing about the hunger: it is always there. It quiets, or grows loud, varies in scope, in scale, but never disappears. She drinks as though dying of thirst, but she might as well be a barrel shot through with holes. Incapable of being filled. The life leaks right out again. The hunger redoubles in its wake. It clings to her, even in sleep.

“You should always be found ahead of your corpses, and never in their wake.”

Alice gets it now. Why her sister was always breaking things. Because rage shatters out, not in.

That the simple act of having a teenage body, no matter how it’s dressed, has always been enough to justify a man’s attention.

Staring, really, that way some men do, as if looking is fair game, because in their minds, all girls are just asking to be looked at.

Flirting with other girls is a long game, a drawn-out con of longing, and guessing, toeing the edge of a pool before finally, sometimes, in a moment of weakness or exasperation, flinging yourself in.

You are the kind of bloom that thrives in any soil.

I do not want them, she thinks. I do not want their gazes on me. I do not want their hands. I feel nothing when they touch me. I feel nothing when they speak. And when I dance with them, it does not feel like this.

She finds herself thinking of something her father said about her mother—that on the day they were first introduced, it felt like a reunion. As if they’d known each other all their lives, and forgotten, until the moment when they met again. But that was love, and this is friendship. Don’t you see, it must be friendship.

Sabine’s mouth twitches. “It’s the way you cannot hide your feelings. If they do not spill out of your mouth, they shimmer on your skin. They fill the air around you, so loud they almost shout.”

Perhaps that is what makes them monsters—the fact their love is marked by violence, and death, and yet. And yet. She would not change a thing.

This woman, who is a force of nature. Who bends the world instead of bending for it. Who looks at Charlotte with such open want, and touches her without an ounce of shame. Who never steals a kiss, but instead lays claim to it, as if it is already hers. Sabine, who proves a master gardener. And Charlotte, so eager to be tended. So grateful she has found a hand that makes her bloom.