The Seventh Bride

by T. Kingfisher

Her name was Rhea. Her father said that she had been named after a great and powerful goddess of the old days, the queen of all the gods,

“The term is sorcerer,” said Lord Crevan from the doorway, raising his voice to be heard over the machinery. “And I am nothing like the conjure wife.”

It was the smile of a man who found nothing funny and everything amusing.

Rhea recognized her tone of voice. She’d heard it before, last spring, when her mother had convinced her father to wait out a really fantastic storm in the cottage instead of running to check on the mill. “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” she’d said, not because she expected it to be fine, but because it didn’t matter whether it was fine or not—there wasn’t anything to be done, and there was no sense in being miserable about it.

It was as if the words they spoke were weaving a kind of net, a net of normalcy and propriety and sanity, around a situation that was anything but.

It’s all very well to cry for any number of reasons, including the fact that sometimes you simply need a good cry. And since a lot of the reasons for crying occur largely in your head—which is not to say that they’re not real—it usually helps. Perhaps the world won’t have changed for the better after five or ten minutes spent sobbing into a pillow, but at least you won’t feel quite so much like crying. The red hollow under your breastbone is emptied out, and things can be faced with more resolution. (And a swollen nose and itchy eyes, of course, but you can’t have everything.)

by the side of a white road that leads somewhere terrible, is that the reason for crying isn’t inside your head. You have a perfectly legitimate and pressing reason for crying, and it will still be there in five minutes, except that your throat will be raw and your eyes will itch and absolutely nothing else will have changed.

“Those are black-eyed Susans,” Rhea told the hedgehog. “And ploughman’s wort and love-lies-bleeding and asters. I don’t think evil people grow black-eyed Susans, do they?” The hedgehog was not inclined to comment on the gardening habits of evil people.

“Roses have thorns,” she said. “That’s the price of roses. When you start to forget that, that’s when things go wrong.” She set Rhea’s breakfast down in front of her, and Rhea ate it slowly, trying to figure out what that meant and if there was any message she could take away from it.

Rhea followed, because when your future husband is a mad sorcerer, following a hedgehog sometimes seems like a good option.

He likes to be challenged, thought Rhea, but only when it’s obvious that it’s futile. He finds defiance funny, as long as you’re still playing his game. It occurred to her that knowing this might be useful, if all went ill and she wound up married to him and trapped in this vast house with his growing collection of wives.

“You’re still beautiful,” said Rhea, not quite sure whether she was telling a kind lie or not. Sylvie smiled and shook her head. “Thank you,” she said. “It shouldn’t matter anymore. But it still does.”

“It is sometimes easier to be punished for something than it is to be a victim of random cruelty. As long as Ingeth can tell herself that her voice was taken from her because she committed some sin, then she has some control of it, you understand? Otherwise it was simply a terrible thing that happened. And if terrible things are allowed to happen to people that don’t deserve them, then the world is terrible and random and cruel. Which it is,” she added, pointing the spoon in Rhea’s direction, “but there’s not much comfort in that.”