Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

by V.E. Schwab

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.

María feels no maternal urge, no envy when she sees a babe swept up into a mother’s arms. Everyone insists it is her purpose, and it drives her mad, the idea that the shape of her body determines the shape her life must take.

“Is it life,” he counters, “if there is never death to balance it? Or is its brevity what makes it beautiful?”

Reading as much as Charlotte did, she knew there were words, and words between words,

ones that hid in the spaces, the pauses, the breaths. They hung on sentences, weighed them down with all the things that were not being said.

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.

Some people keep their heart tucked so deep, they hardly know it’s there. But you have always worn it like a second skin. It will make your life harder. But it will also make it beautiful.

And here is the awful thing about belief. It is a current, like compulsion. Hard to forge when it goes against your will, but easy enough when it carries you the way you want to go.

Why does Charlotte stay? That is like asking—why stay inside a house on fire? Easy to say when you are standing on the street, a safe distance from the flames. Harder when you are still inside, convinced you can douse the blaze before it spreads, or rushing room to room, trying

“It lives in the mind. A piece you cannot see or touch. A prize you are told to shield for a time you cannot know. Easy enough to part with something so abstract when the alternative is freedom. When the promise is love.”

Sabine did not need to follow her across the ocean. She only had to convince her that she could, so that she would feel hunted—haunted—by the specter of impending doom.