The Seventh Bride

by T. Kingfisher

if your parents were wicked, you needn’t worry about pleasing them. When they were doing the best they could, you had no traction at all.

The problem with crying in the woods, 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.

I’ve been acting as if I could get out of this somehow—if I just said or did the right things, he’d have to let me go. But he’s mad, completely mad, and he turns his wives into golems. He needs killing, not negotiation. This thought brought her a strange sense of relief. She was not doing something wrong. She was not failing. She was not a peasant girl marrying above her station and doing it badly. She had run afoul of a murderer, that was all.

Scrubbing the clothes left her hands busy but her mind free to wander. If it wandered too far, Rhea would begin to think familiar—and utterly useless—thoughts about how completely mad it was that there was a murderer in the house and she was doing laundry. Well, as Maria would say, if I sit down and cry, nothing will change and I still won’t have clean laundry.

“She helps him because she believes she is being punished,” she said. “It is all she has left.” Rhea frowned. “I don’t understand.” Maria sighed. “It is sometimes easier to be punished for something than it is to be a victim of random cruelty.

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.”