Page 122 of Untethered
“I do. It’s proved more useful than I’d thought.”
The old woman had cackled before turning her unseeing eyes onto her face. “You look different.”
Lux faltered. “I—”
“Not so dark around the edges, or there—in the middle. You finally decided to let it go then? About time is all I got to say. Grief, now, that’s inevitable. You take it, endure it, and keep looking ahead. It’s that poisonous guilt that’ll wither you away to dead inside. That, and wickedness. Nasty stuff—can’t be giving in to that.” She had puffed on her cigar, staring off over Lux’s shoulder. “You’re free to be a great necromancer now rather than settling for just a mediocre one.” Her cough was loud and deep. “Now, not many know my stories because they don’t care to ask, and I don’t have the time to sit here flapping my jaws when I could be selling, but I’ll tell you a little something if you want? Yes? Well, my family didn’t always live in this city. They were traveling merchants. For generations, first. You want to know a little secret?”
Lux had moved toward her without realizing.
“If you think we’re unique here, just you wait until you see what’s out there.” One blind eye had winked then. “A little soul-devouring forest is nothing.”
The navigator’s empty wagon offered the perfect perch from which to view the marshes as they faded into the background. As they gave way to meadows with bright flowers that Lux had only ever seen crop up bravely once or twice in her lifetime. She leaned back, closing her eyes, smelling their sweet scent, and relishing the sunlight kissing her skin.
Her black boots crossed at the ankles, and her black skirt spread across the wagon bed. It gave way to a black corset with a wicked knife, and only the sunshine-yellow fabric beneath, soft against her skin, shimmered, new.
She would return. Someday. As she was sure she left a piece of her heart tethered behind. But as a butterfly, the first she’d ever seen outside of a book, flitted onto her palm, she opened her eyes and smiled.
The world awaited her first.
Epilogue
Shaw Roser didn’t believein ghosts, and he didn’t believe in curses. But he did believe the devil existed, and that it currently rotted within the belly of a silver-run tree. Every twilight, he trekked to the mayor’s mansion, walked through the wrought-iron gate, across the manicured grounds and through the rose garden. This day was no different.
The stone walls of the great house were nearly impossible to see. Trees grew together so closely, there were portions not even a rat could scurry through. He stepped over roots, brushed aside branches, and all the while his hand palmed the handle of a blade, tucked at his side. It didn’t feel the same as his own. If he did choose to believe a curse, he would think this dagger carried one; it cast a sensation of wrongness through him wherever it brushed his skin. But she’d given it to him for safekeeping—though whether it was to keep him safe or keep the blade itself safe was unclear.
He came upon twin trees then. They were larger than any of the others, with overarching boughs so thick and high that they brought night upon him. He pushed the cap further from his brow—as the autumn rain could not reach him here—and frowned. The trunks were of a similar size, their leaves abundant and oil-slick, their roots gnarled and humped, but where both had glowed silver the twilight prior, only one did tonight.
Nobody knew for certain which one contained Bartleby Tamish and which consumed the conniving Riselda, but she’d told him in no uncertain terms that of all the trees laying waste to the mansion that night, it was these two that had desecrated the mayor’s study and exacted their revenge. And so it was these two he ensured remained whole and unbothered, as he would risk nothing when it came to the devils being devoured within.
Twenty-seven days he’d come and verified all was as it should be. Tonight—four weeks to the day since the one whom made his heart feel like it was the only organ he should pay any mind to left him—things werenot. Shaw stalked nearer, his boots light on the grass, his steps maneuvering around any blackened root. He didn’t know what could cause a tree to become no longer contented with its meal, but he wasn’t about to become its second.
He pulled the dagger free, careful and sure, and drew up short.
His teeth clenched, his grip tightening until he thought he might snap the blade he held. He began at the base and scanned his way higher, absorbing every layered cut.
A godforsakenaxe.
The cuts were vertical, the trunk split, but without any source of light, he couldn’t see for certain. Couldn’t see for certain if those marks were made from the outside—or in.
A flutter caught at the edge of his vision, and he twisted to better view his shoulder. To the slick, black leaf rested there, curled at its edges.
He raised his chin and watched the rest fall.
