Rachelle’s hand went to her chest. She felt cold, sticky blood, but no pain.
“Stand up.” Zisa got to her feet. “We do not have much time.”
Her body felt heavy and foreign, but Rachelle still clambered to her feet in a few moments. She was surprised to find Zisa a head shorter than her.
“Time for what?” she asked.
“To kill the Devourer,” said Zisa. Despite her height, she seemed to look down at Rachelle. “Did you not give your heart for that?”
“I tried. I did.”
“You did as I did,” said Zisa. “You accepted the Devourer into your body and died with him. Now he is bound to you in your death, as he was to me, and as long as your ghost can linger, he will be trapped here with you between life and death. But you cannot linger forever. Nobody can. And when you fade away, as soon I will, another must die in your place, or else yield the world to darkness. And in the meantime, the Forest will grow at the edges of the world, and the woodspawn will infect your cities, and the forestborn will harry you.”
It was not a bad bargain, Rachelle thought. But it was not a victory.
“Only the leavings of the wolf can kill the wolf,” said Zisa. “That is the ancient truth. Only a child of the Devourer can strike him down. That is why I failed: I did not have the sword when I needed it, so the duty fell to Tyr. And he was much too innocent.”
“But what else can I do?” asked Rachelle. “I did the same thing. I left the sword behind.”
“Have you forgotten what you carry in your right hand?”
Rachelle stared at her.
Zisa tilted her head. “Or have you never known?”
Her hand throbbed. Rachelle looked down at the tiny white scar on her palm. For years she had hardly thought of it because it was so painful, but she had confessed it already to Armand, so she let herself remember again: Aunt Léonie, choking on her own blood. When Rachelle had bent over her, crying, Aunt Léonie had suddenly struggled against her, arms flailing. She must have been surprised while she was sewing, for she was still clutching a needle, and she stabbed it into Rachelle’s hand all the way down to the bone.
Rachelle had choked on a scream. Choked on her tears. And then she had lowered the knife.
“I told you what Durendal and Joyeuse were made from,” said Zisa. “Did you think they could not take that form again?”
Two slivers of bone.
In a sudden frenzy, she clawed at the palm of her hand. The needle twitched in answer; then with a sudden, sharp pain, its tip burst through her skin.
With shaking fingers, Rachelle pulled it free: a tiny bone needle, covered in blood. Durendal.
As she thought the name, the needle grew and lengthened in her hand, until it became a sword entirely made out of bone, a perfect twin to Joyeuse.
“Do you know what its name means?” asked Zisa.
“No,” said Rachelle, cautiously hefting the sword. It had once been a bone in the body of a sacrifice to the Devourer’s hunger: a boy who had forgotten self and name, but not the sister he loved.
“Endurance. It is the sword that hopes all things, bears all things, believes all things, endures all things.” Zisa sighed. “In the end, I could not use it.” Her voice grew softer. “I believe you can.”
She looked up just in time to see Zisa fading away. Her last words were less than a whisper: My time is over now. Good luck.
And Rachelle was alone in the forest of bleeding trees.
Slowly she walked forward, her feet whispering in the soft white dust; little clouds puffed up where she stepped. Many of the trees, in the crooks where their branches split and twisted, were growing teeth.
Her skin crawled. The forest felt less dead by the moment, and she walked faster.
Suddenly a shape loomed between the trees. It was the cottage from her dreams—the house of Old Mother Hunger, just as Zisa had described it. The eaves and lintels were carved with a profusion of figures who at first seemed to be dancing, but on second glance were devouring each other. The walls oozed blood between their planks. The roof was thatched with bones.
The door yawned open.
Rachelle walked quietly to it, her heart beating in her throat, and peered inside. She saw only a single room paneled in wood. There were no carved decorations, but the walls and floor alike were covered in doors, large and small, with barely an inch between them.
She stepped in. The air was cold and still, spiced with the tang of wood smoke and blood.
To her right, the nearest door was tall enough for her to walk through. She flung it open.
Pure, absolute darkness looked back at her, so stark that her eyes watered. No breath of air came through the doorway. But she realized there was a very, very faint murmuring sound, like the wind in very distant trees. Was it coming through the doorway? Or had it been here all along, and she’d only just noticed?
Next was a row of four little cupboard-sized doors, one atop the other from floor to ceiling. She opened them all: the same darkness. Faster and faster, she started opening doors. They all revealed absolute shadow.
The rushing noise was getting louder. It almost sounded like breathing. Rachelle’s body was wound tight and all her limbs jangled with the need to flee, but there was nowhere to run. The nightmare was her world now; there was no way out but fighting it.
The doors in the walls were all open now; she no longer stood in a room with four walls, but in a latticework cage of door frames, with darkness everywhere looking in. That was what it felt like: not an absence, but a ponderous shadow pressing in upon the walls of the room, ready to crush it at any moment.
She knelt and opened one of the doors set in the floor. More darkness.
“My dear little traitor.”
Her head snapped up. Erec stood in the doorway, so unexpected that for a moment he seemed more like one of the wood carvings come to life than the person she had known and trusted and hated.
“Whatever shall I do with you?” he asked, stepping inside.
She raised Durendal. “Stay back.”
The shock on his face sent a little curl of satisfaction through her stomach.
“How did you get that toy?” he asked.
“How did you get in here after me?”
He raised his hand where the crimson thread shone. “We are bound in every world, my lady.”
“You are desperate to believe that, aren’t you?” she said, looking around the room. If it came to another fight, she would probably win, but she didn’t have the time to waste.
There were still at least ten doors left unopened in the floor, but she was starting to think that there wasn’t a right door. Something else was the answer.