The word hung in the air between us, so heavy I could almost reach out and touch it. If there was a murderer, it meant Ama hadn’t lost control. The beast hadn’t yet consumed her, overtaken her. If a human had sliced through Maurice and the seamstress and the Carter boy with a knife, I wouldn’t have to live with the fact that my sister had killed innocents.
And yet, that hope gleamed like a double-edged sword.
If someone else was responsible for these deaths, they were trying to make it look like the beast had done it. And that meant someone was trying to pin the killings on my sister.
She could never come home if the village was always waiting on pins and needles for the next body to turn up. The beast needed to eat, and people in that kind of frenzy would care even when a vagrant or a drunkard turned up dead.
I ran my hands over my face to smooth away these prickly thoughts, and Sebastian gripped my knee.
“Explain,” he said, and I didn’t like the easy way the command rolled off his tongue.
But I did explain, because I didn’t want to be alone with my suspicions anymore.
“When I took Maurice’s body home to clean, I noticed something odd. His wounds were too shallow and there was too much of him left.”
An involuntary shiver ran up my spine as I remembered the body, ravaged but still quite intact.
Sebastian took his hand from my knee and rubbed it over his tired eyes. Perhaps this was too much for him—the tipping point. In the space of a day, he’d learned that my sister turned into an animal and his mother was a witch. A murderer on the loose in his village might have been the thing that pushed him over the edge. But I didn’t want him to fall.
So, I pulled him back.
“All of this is even more reason to find the cure.”
His eyes didn’t focus on me as I said it but stared over my shoulder with a glazed indifference. I moved closer to him on the settee and pressed my leg against his. He startled a little and then leaned into me, pushing his face into my shoulder.
“We can undo what was done to her. If we can find the right spell . . . the cure. Then it won’t matter who’s killing people in the village . . . because we’ll know it isn’t Ama.”
Abruptly, Sebastian sat back and unfolded his legs, stealing his warmth from me, and slipped off the settee. He stood in front of the fire, framed by the orange glow of the flames, his face pinched.
“It won’t matter who’s killing people in the village,” he repeated.
My face went hot and my palms instantly dampened. I hadn’t meant it quite like that, but I realized how horrible it sounded when he spoke the words back to me.
“No, it will matter, of course. It’s just we won’t be responsible—”
“You won’t be responsible,” Sebastian cut me off. “This is still my village, Marie.”
He was right, of course. The villagers were his people, and I was one of the villagers. Suddenly it seemed completely absurd that I’d sat so close to him, held his hand. He was a lord, born to a name with meaning. I was just a villager, one of many, a grain of wheat easily ground. Alone, I was worthless—only together with many others did I become a golden loaf worthy of serving at a banquet.
Peasants were just that—food and fodder. We held meaning only in what we could produce. We were grain and wool, wine and coin collected quarterly. Sebastian didn’t even record our names when we slid light bags across the wide parchment of his book. He ticked off a number and weighed the coin and made a neat little mark with a sharp quill. Then he nodded and waved forward the next villager.
One as interchangeable as the other.
Anger seethed through me—hot, heady. I stood in front of Sebastian and let the heat coil into my fingers and toes. I let it fill my limbs like molten iron so it would harden me against those soft brown eyes.
Because the space between us loomed too large. We’d never be able to bridge it, and I didn’t want to break away pieces of my heart to try and fill it up. His mother’s book of spells wasn’t useful to me unless I knew how to read it. I needed to learn the language of magic to recognize the cure for the curse. The only thing I could think of doing was trying to find the Woods Witch, if she was even real, and seeing if she would help.
I knew what I had to do before I moved my feet, but that didn’t make it any easier. Sebastian stared at me, seemingly bewildered by the intensity of my silence. He opened his lips, but I raised a hand before he could utter a sound.
“You might have a responsibility to the village, Sebastian, but in return you get so much. You’ve never felt the pangs of hunger or counted how many sprouting potatoes were left in your cellar for the winter, have you? You’ve never come home from collecting firewood at the edge of the trees and felt the searing pain as your frozen fingertips came back to life. You hold your responsibility over the village from up here in your grand house with its full pantry, where someone else builds the fires and makes the food. And what happens to you if someone dies in the village . . . from hunger or something else? Nothing. Guilt, maybe. But nothing more. If anyone accuses me of being a witch or Ama of being a monster, they could kill us.”
“Marie . . . I didn’t mean it like that. I meant exactly the opposite! I care who dies in the village.”
He might care, but there were no consequences for him. Suddenly it became clear how very different everything was for us. Lucien might die from consumption, but that was always going to be the case eventually. My sister didn’t have to die and neither did I.
“You take care of yours and I’ll take care of mine.”
Before I could fall under the weight of my heart, I fled the warm comfort of the room and followed the hallway back to the echoing entrance hall. Madame Écrue stood silently on the stairs, twisting her white apron in her hands.
I didn’t pause for her or for the thread of regret that trailed after me from the sitting room. I had to keep going or I’d never get out of there. I flung myself down the stairs to the kitchens and found the secret door in the pantry with ease. Inside, the remaining foxglove sat on the shelf exactly where I’d left it, buds full of poison. I pocketed three; I had none at home and they were useful to have on hand. Then I turned and walked back out through the kitchen.
The door to the garden gave beneath my hands. The cold slapped my cheeks, stung my ears, but I ran into the frigid morning with my arms spread wide. Around the house, down the hill, and past the village, heading for home.
The snow slowed me down, but soon my cottage came into view in its clearing bordered by trees. The little plume of smoke rising from my chimney gave me no surprise. My heart made no leap—I didn’t expect Ama this time. I knew who was inside. He had nowhere else to go either.
Papa was home.