The forest grimm, p.28
The Forest Grimm, page 28
They crash shut.
Everything is darkness, emptiness …
… and then the strangest sensation takes hold of me. It’s as if I’m turned inside-out, though I can’t physically feel how it happened.
I’m in the air. Hovering above Axel. Looking down at him. He’s shaking my lifeless body. Weeping. Calling out my name again and again. The moment is lengthy but brief all at once. Time is different now. Slippery and sludgy. Axel says my name one last time, then he hangs his head. His hand drops from my neck and lands on a book beside him. Sortes Fortunae. He’s brought it with him, along with my pack.
As soon as he unwittingly touches the book, his shoulders go rigid. He looks up at my mother and Grandmère. The two of them are locked in a vicious fight. Mother is holding her own, just as strong as the wolf.
“Is there a spinning wheel here?” Axel asks Grandmère, his words rushed.
Her wolfish head rises. She doesn’t stop wrestling her daughter. “Yes.” She quickly tells him where to find it, not wasting any breath to ask why he wants it. “But do not touch the thorns.”
He races back inside the castle keep. I try to follow, but I’m stuck here, tethered to the view of my body.
I’m dead, I realize.
My body below me is limp and splayed among the ivy, my jaw slack, my skin as pallid as the other dead villagers’. A mangled gash at my throat pools crimson blood onto the stones.
I stifle my horror and turn my ghostly gaze to Mother. Why hasn’t she changed, returned to her former self? She’s still Briar Rose, fangs bared and wrestling with the wolf. I don’t understand. My death was supposed to save her.
“I hate this place.”
I startle to hear Ollie’s voice and see him sitting on a garden wall.
He peeks about our surroundings and shudders at the dead villagers being absorbed by the forest, destined to become trees. He won’t even look at what’s become of my body. “You shouldn’t have come here. I warned you about the woman in red. I said you shouldn’t try to find her.”
I glimpse at the ferocious person attacking Grandmère. “But she’s my mother.”
He shrugs like that doesn’t change anything. “This is what happens when you make the wrong wish.”
He heard me make it? “How was it wrong?” I sweep closer. “It was selfless.”
He juts his chin out stubbornly, but then his lower lip wobbles. “You promised to help me find my pennies.”
“Oh, Ollie…” Guilt swells inside me, but I have no breath to sigh it away on, no means to release it. “Please understand, I had more than you to save.”
“But you didn’t save anyone, and now you’re dead.”
I wince against his words, but I have no heart for them to sting. Instead, the hurt lingers intangibly, and I suffer all the worse for it. “Axel will help you. He knows about your pennies.”
“Axel doesn’t see me or hear me. Until you came along, only the Lost people did. But you see the past, Clara. Ghosts and memories. I was counting on you.”
Ghosts? I hadn’t considered that seeing the dead could be part of my gift. Ollie is the only spirit I’ve encountered. “I’m so sorry.”
Axel runs back to the garden, panting. He’s holding a thin iron rod, twelve inches long and pointed at the end. The spindle. He’s broken it off the spinning wheel.
I worry about the poisonous thorns, but they’re gone, and his fingers aren’t bleeding. He’s managed to remove the thorns and the rose without getting pricked.
He kneels over my body. I hover lower so I can see his face. His skin is flushed, and his eyes shine wet. “Axel?”
He doesn’t hear me. He’s blind to me, deaf to me. I’ve become like Ollie, a phantom lost to his awareness. The thought is crushing.
“I’m not supposed to tell you what I wished for when I was sixteen,” he murmurs to the shell of me lying in a pool of blood. “But you’re dead so I don’t think this counts.” He briefly squeezes his eyes shut when he says “dead” and takes a shaky breath. “I wished that I could bring back to life the person I loved the most.” He wipes at his nose. “I meant my father, but his body was never found, so I could never try what the Book of Fortunes instructed.”
I float an inch nearer, wishing I could touch him, lay a solid hand on his shoulder. I know my voice won’t reach him, but I can’t help asking, “What did it say?”
He strokes my dead face. “I was told to drive a red spindle into the heart of the person I loved more than anyone.” Tears spill from his eyes. “Don’t you see?” His voice hitches on a sob. “That’s you. The book knew this would happen and where we would be when it did … although I never knew what the red spindle meant before. But it’s all right. I think I do now.”
“Red spindle?” I glance to Ollie, as if he can help enlighten me, but the boy has vanished.
The wolf yelps. My thoughts scatter. My mother is sinking her teeth into Grandmère’s neck.
Axel flinches, momentarily distracted, but then he exhales and bows his head. His beautiful golden hair dangles in his eyes.
He draws my cape closed over my chest. Rises higher on his knees. Holds the spindle with both hands in the air above me.
I understand now. I place a ghostly hand on his shoulder. He’s my truest love, the Pierced Swan I’m forever bound to, my Changer of Fate.
“Do it,” I whisper. I choose to live. It’s what my mother—my real mother—always wanted for me. Her greatest desire. Her one wish. It’s why she made me the cape and gave me the acorn and taught me to be bold and fearless.
Axel takes a steeling breath, and in one deliberate and powerful movement, he stabs the spindle into my heart.
CHAPTER 39
I inhale a sharp and desperate breath and jolt upright, yanking the spindle from my chest. It clatters to the stones.
I’m in my body again. Pain flares through my crooked back and throbs in the wound at my neck, and I bless every torturous feeling that tells me I’m alive.
Axel chokes out a laugh that’s almost a sob. He crushes me in his arms, kissing me again and again, my brow, my cheeks, my lips. “It was always you,” he whispers, taking my face in his hands. He presses our foreheads together. “It was always you.”
I’m in a daze of emotions and sensations, still getting my bearings and taking in all that’s just happened—and is still happening. “Grandmère,” I gasp. “We have to help her.”
A few feet away, the Grimm wolf lies near Henni. A low, keening howl peals out of her while my mother continues to feed at her throat.
I glimpse the Book of Fortunes, its spine wet with my blood, and the spindle beside it. A mad idea forms in my mind.
I tear a scrap of fabric from the bottom of my cape and grab the spindle.
“What are you doing?” Axel asks.
“Saving her.”
“The wolf?”
I shake my head. “My mother.”
“I don’t think—”
“I have to try.”
I spring to my feet, momentarily wobbling from lightheadedness. “Mother!” I call.
She doesn’t turn. She keeps drinking Grandmère’s blood.
“Rosamund!”
Again, she doesn’t acknowledge me.
I ball my hands into fists. “Briar Rose.”
She looks up and slowly wipes the blood from her mouth. “You,” she seethes, no recognition in her voice for her daughter, only the victim who shouldn’t be living, let alone standing. “Didn’t I bleed you dry?”
My jaw clenches, but I force a grim smile and grace her with a nod.
“Then why are you still troubling me?”
“I haven’t given up on you.”
She laughs darkly and rises to her feet, looking down her nose at me. “I’ve tasted you, and you gave me nothing. You can’t save me, child.”
“I can. Because I am your child. Your blood is in me. Every stubborn, unrelenting, hopelessly hopeful part of you is in my flesh and bones.” I stride toward her. “It’s given me the courage to overcome insurmountable odds and outrun my fate time and again. And because you’re in me and will always be a part of me, I have the faith to do what I must do now.”
She smirks. “And what is that?”
“Use the red spindle.”
Her brow furrows. Before she can ask what I mean, I hurriedly wrap the spindle in the scrap of my red rampion–dyed cape. I grit my teeth and slam the iron point into her heart.
Her eyes fly wide. She stumbles to her knees. I kneel with her and clasp her arms. “Come back to me, Mother.”
I wait for her expression to ease, her pain and shock to wash away, for clarity and peace to descend over her features. But she only shakes violently and glares at me with horrible accusation.
Her breaths suck in and out, ragged and fractured and gurgled. Blood sputters from her mouth.
I waver. Shoot a worried glance at Axel. This isn’t supposed to be happening. Cold sweat flashes up my neck. “What did I do wrong?”
He digs his hands in his hair. “I don’t know.”
Mother slips from my arms and hits the stones hard, her head smacking with a sickening thud. She moans, and her eyes lose focus. Her gaze roves all around her like she’s trying to find something to cling on to, to keep her pulse pounding.
“I-I’m sorry,” I stammer. “I didn’t mean to…”
Grandmère painstakingly pulls herself up on four legs and comes to join me on Mother’s other side.
“What do I do?” I cry.
She stares down at her daughter, her violet eyes heavy. “There’s nothing to be done, ma chère, except to say goodbye.”
Tears splash down my face. “No, this can’t be goodbye. This isn’t how the story ends.”
“It is, dear heart,” she says, using Mother’s term of endearment for me. “I saw it long ago.”
Unbearable pain wells inside me. I don’t have enough room to hold the ache of it. “Please, please, please.” I lie down beside my mother and pull her close, the embrace I never received when I found her again. “You told me to fight, to live.” I don’t know if it was truly her in my vision at the meadow ball, but I have to believe so because I have nothing left to hold on to but that hallucination of her love. “I did fight. I’m here. Now I need you to do the same. Fight, Mother. Stay with me.”
Her head rolls to the side so she can see my face. Her eyes are my eyes, my mirror reflection. Her trembling hand comes to touch a fold of my cape at the shoulder. She brushes it once with her fingers, then lifts her palm to my cheek. My tears slide over the back of her hand. “Clara?” Her brows lift, tugging inward. “My … beautiful … girl.”
Her breathing stops. Her eyes grow vacant.
My chest collapses. I feel her loss at once, like my own soul has also departed. Sobs rack through my shoulders. I kiss her forehead and tuck my head beneath hers, enfolding my arms tighter around her. “Don’t go.” But she’s already gone.
I want to lie there forever, keep her body warm, remember the echo of her voice when she finally said my name. She remembered me. I felt her love at last.
Memories swell inside me. I’m a little child in Mother’s lap. We’re in the north pasture, weaving clover blossoms into crowns. Two male lambs lope around us, their fuzzy heads butting as they practice being rams. Mother laughs. “Be wiser than boys, Clara.”
Now I’m even younger, maybe four. I’m crying because I stole the sheep shears and cut my own hair, and the result is a crooked disaster of startlingly short bangs. Mother kneels in front of me, turns my head this way and that, and declares, “Quite good for your first try.” She draws her long braid in front of her shoulder. “Now trim mine.”
Now I’m a fussing infant, so young, I realize, that this memory must be Mother’s instead of mine. She lifts me from my cradle, leaving Father asleep in bed, and carries me outside our cottage, under a beautiful starlit sky. “Come, little one. If we’re going to be awake together, we may as well enjoy the wonders of the night.”
Now Mother is alone. She’s knotting the final stitch of the slit she cut in her mattress to hide the red cape. Once it’s done, she rises, brings her candle to light the way, and drifts into my bedroom. I’m sleeping with the covers drawn over my head. She gently peels them back so she can see my face. My dark lashes flutter for a moment, but I don’t awaken. “Choose courage, dear heart,” she whispers, brushing a lock of hair off my brow. “Live fearlessly.”
A powerful shudder runs beneath me. The memories vanish. I’m grounded back to the present, still holding Mother’s body, but the stones below us quake violently.
Grandmère stiffens and looks at our surroundings. “Clara, we must leave! The castle is crumbling!”
I follow her gaze, and my mouth falls open. The ivy and thorns are shrinking back from the castle and its walls. Without them, the stones crash apart, as if they were the only mortar holding them together.
“Clara!” Axel reaches for me, and Grandmère springs for Henni.
I bolt up to sitting, but clutch my mother protectively. “I can’t leave her.”
A large chunk of a tower breaks away. It strikes the ground like a clap of thunder. Stones ricochet. I narrowly duck one that flies by my head.
“Go, Clara!” Grandmère shouts. “You can’t have survived only to die now.”
I meet Axel’s eyes. Behind his desperately urgent gaze, I feel his sympathy. “Your mother would understand,” he says. He secures my pack on his shoulder and tightens his grip on Sortes Fortunae, tucked beneath one arm. “It’s time to say goodbye.”
My vision blurs. More tears fall. I turn to Mother and gently close her eyes. Kiss her cheek. I pull the acorn from my pocket and press it in the curve of her palm, closing her fingers around it. “I love you,” I whisper.
I take Axel’s hand. We rush to Henni, who is struggling to open her eyes. We help her to her feet.
“The veil,” she says breathlessly.
For once I don’t argue about what rightfully belongs to her sister. I pluck the veil down from where it’s strung between the garden walls. I wrap it around Henni’s shoulders.
We dodge tumbling stones and collapsing walls as we race from the castle garden. We dash through the castle keep, the courtyard, the stone arch to the drawbridge, and across the rickety planks to the safety of the forest on the other side.
Grandmère is behind us. The second she crosses the drawbridge, it crumbles apart into the empty moat, and the rest of the castle caves in with it. A great cloud of dust and ash billows upward from the massive destruction. My mother is buried beneath it all. The moment is surreal. I stare numbly, coated in silt, and expel a tremulous breath. I try to accept that this is her final resting place.
My friends stand beside me, our arms wrapped around each other. I sense them also trying to absorb the weight of everything that’s happened … and what can possibly come next.
“What does this mean?” My voice sounds quiet and strange after the cacophony of the castle’s fall. “Did the curse break?”
Axel gnaws on his lip. “Well, there’s one way to find out.” He cautiously removes his scarf and drops it to the ground. As soon as it hits the grass, tree roots snap up and lash toward him. He hastily grabs the scarf and ties it back on again. The roots settle. “I think we can safely say no.”
But I’m not so sure.
Neither is Henni. “Maybe part of the curse broke,” she says, tugging Ella’s veil tighter around her shoulders.
Axel slips his pinkie finger around mine, then weaves our hands together. “At least it broke over your mother, Clara. She was Rosamund in the end.”
“Yes, ma chère.” Grandmère nuzzles closer, a surprisingly loving gesture for someone who never offers embraces freely. “Her soul is at peace now.”
Henni stares in a daze at Grandmère. “I’m not the only one who hears the wolf speaking, am I? I thought I was dreaming back at the castle.”
“The wolf is my grandmother.” I smile. “She’s an Anivoyante, a seer who can possess the body of a wolf.”
Henni swallows hard, like this revelation did nothing to help her accept the reality of a talking animal. “Of course.”
Grandmère’s eyes flicker to the trees. The entombed dead surround us, their terrorized faces frozen in the bark. “You three have been in this forest long enough,” she tells us. “It’s time you return home while the red rampion can still protect you.”
My gaze flits to Henni again. Leaving here will be the hardest for her. “If you want to go back for Ella, I’ll stay with you.”
“I’ll do the same,” Axel adds.
Henni draws a deep breath and burrows her nose in the folds of Ella’s veil. “No, your grandmother is right. We don’t know how to save Ella yet. Once we do, we’ll return.” She lifts her head and squares her shoulders. “Besides, we have Sortes Fortunae now, and my sixteenth birthday is coming up. I’ll make my wish then. I’ll find a way to—” She catches herself. “Well, I can’t tell you what I’ll wish for. But it should help.”
“Just be sure it’s what your heart truly desires,” I say, thinking of my own experience with the Book of Fortunes.
Henni nods solemnly. “I will.”
For all our hope about the future, I can’t help turning my gaze back to the ruins of the castle. So many endings happened there, so many deaths. My mother killed me … I killed her … I also saved her … and Axel saved me. I suppose, for that reason, it’s also a place of beginnings.
It’s too much to process in this moment, too much to believe. It’s also hard to let go of. I don’t trust I ever will, and I wouldn’t want to. My story will forever be linked to my mother, just like it will be linked to Axel. The Fanged Creature and the Pierced Swans will always be the cards drawn for me. I’ll carry them as I live out my life, to face whatever my changed fate has in store.
The Midnight Forest will also remain a part of me. When I leave these woods, I won’t leave behind the imprint they’ve made. This forest is in my blood. I feel that as vividly as the truth that I’m the bloodline of Grandmère and Mother, Marlène and Rosamund Thurn.
