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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.
“And how is a miracle different from a spell? Who is to say the saint was not a witch?”
“You will learn, it is better to bend than to break.” María stared into the hearth. “Why should I be the one who bends?”
“If you tell a soul,” she whispers, her voice low, almost gentle, “I will come back and cut out your tongue.”
Jeez
The illegitimate daughter of a count.
WUT
The difference between missing and memory. Because Catty remembers their mum. And Alice doesn’t.
By the way he still insists on wrapping her hair around his fist as if it is a rope, a rein. More and more she thinks of cutting it off. Her hair. His hand. Depending on the day.
“Did you know,” she would say brightly, “that sometimes I think of the cemetery plot where you will lie, beneath all that dirt and stone, and it brings me joy. And if by some unlucky spot I ever get with child, I will take them there, and let them frolic on your bones.”
“If names are dresses, mine simply does not fit.” “So take it off,” says Sabine blithely, handing her the lavender as if it is a torch. “Who would you be? What name would better suit you?”
“Strange, isn’t it?” she says. “The more you taste, the more you want.”
María doesn’t understand, not until she feels the bright and sudden stab of pain. Her hand flies to her neck, thinking she’s been cut. But instead of a blade, or ragged wound, her fingers find soft hair, the widow’s head bent against her throat. And yet, beneath that softness. Something violent, sharp.
Wut!
Sabine begins to shiver, even though she isn’t cold.
It is not just unripe, but rancid.
There is no sign of the farmer’s wife, but the door stands open, and Sabine decides to let herself in. But she cannot. She makes it to the threshold, but there her body lurches to a stop.
As Sabine watches, one of them sheds his inebriated swagger, easy as a body shedding layers in the heat, revealing a sober stride, a different breed of boldness. Between one step and the next, he is transformed. His companion doesn’t notice, but she does. Watches, rapt, as the man runs a hand through his loose curls, then turns toward his drunk compatriot, and sinks his teeth into his throat.
She does not know where they are going, if they are friend or foe, if this is an enticement or a trap. She only knows that they are like her.
“Sabine.” Her head snaps round, startled by her name on Hector’s lips. She is sure she never said it. “Don’t look so alarmed,” he says, leaning back against the desk. “Some minds whisper. Others shout. Yours is loud. What amuses me, though, is that your name is louder still.” “Sabine, Sabine, it echoes through you like a bell,”
“Those grown in the midnight soil are never alone.”
“Bury my bones in the midnight soil,” he begins, infusing the words with the air of theater. “Plant them shallow and water them deep. And in my place will grow a feral rose.” He leans down to Renata and cups her face, running a thumb across her bottom lip. “Soft red petals hiding sharp white teeth.”
“We are roses.”
“We grow in the same soil, it is true, but some of us wither there, and some of us thrive. In time, you learn,” he adds, eyes dropping to the trinkets layered at her throat, “which of us makes better monsters.”
“You thought I would be threatened. By you. But I am her maker, Sabine. Renata will never look at you the way she looks at me. You will never mean as much to her as I do.”
“Perhaps one day you will understand what it means to truly matter to another. Until then, just remember, little thorn.” He smiles, with not so much as a candle’s worth of warmth. “You may be her plaything. But I am her god.”
herself sinking. Bury my bones, she thinks as her body topples over, one cheek pressed to the soil, as if listening. And there. There it is. The steady beat of a heart.
“If you are so fond of living, why reject the gift of life?” “Is it life,” he counters, “if there is never death to balance it? Or is its brevity what makes it beautiful?”
“We are hollowed, bit by bit, as all that made us human dies. Our kindness. Our empathy. Our capacity for fear, and love. One by one, they slough away, until all that’s left is the desire to hunt, to hurt, to feed, to kill. That is how we die. Made reckless by our hunger. Convinced we are unkillable until someone or something proves us wrong.”
Welcomed home.
What is the point, she thinks, of loving something you are doomed to lose? Of holding on to someone who cannot hold on to you?
“You chose to love a mortal man,” she snaps. “You refused to change him. You knew what would happen. You knew, and you brought it on yourself. What right have you, then, to be surprised by grief? To be so undone by it? If you cannot rouse yourself, you might as well go lie down beside him and let the grave dirt take you.”
It is Alessandro—or at least the absence of him, and the knowledge that he will follow Matteo wherever he goes, from now until the end, like a shadow, a ghost. And Sabine has no desire to be haunted.
Where others rot without, we rot within.
The years die, and she does not.
Though more and more, she begins to wonder what it would be like to spare one. To keep instead of kill, to make them as she is.
“Oh, it’s just a front,” he says, voice dropping at last. “We keep the bodies in the back. Blood orgies on Sunday nights. The password this month is pineapple.”
“Bury my bones in the midnight soil, plant them shallow but water them deep, and in my place will grow a feral rose, soft red petals hiding sharp white teeth.”
because how can she explain this pit inside her, the way she wants to either shrink or grow, go back to when they both were kids, or fast-forward to when they’re both grown up, that either one’s better than this feeling, like the gap between them’s somehow growing, and Alice can’t catch up.
“Sabine.”
Bruh
You are the kind of bloom that thrives in any soil.
“Wildness is like a weed. If it’s not plucked out, it will take over everything.
He arched a brow and said, “We are not equal, Charlotte.”
“In intellect, perhaps. In willfulness, surely. But the simple fact is that you are a woman, and I am a man. And yes, it does afford me certain freedoms. But even so, one day I will need to take a wife, just as you will need to take a husband.”
“It will make your life harder,” she said into her daughter’s hair. “But it will also make it beautiful.”
“Because you are the kind of bloom that thrives in any soil. And who knows, perhaps you will meet a worthy gardener.”
The woman Charlotte met at last night’s ball struck her as neither sad nor lonely. Only free.
A horrible sound bubbles up inside her, half-laugh, half-sob, horror, guilt, and grief, not just for George, but for herself—what she has done.
“Did you find someone brave enough to love you?”
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.
It is the nature of them that brings that quiet harmony.
“Am I not enough?” she says, and even though her voice is quiet, it is as sharp and cold as broken ice.
JEEZ
