Page 23 of Malady

I stop several paces from the door. Whatever’s happening inside, I have no intention of walking into a pestilence house bare-faced merely to satisfy my curiosity. The window will have to do.

My heart thunders as I cross the strip of snow-muffled earth beneath it. The shutters are drawn tight against the cold, but years of rain have warped the wood away from the frame, and the iron latch hangs loose, leaving a slender gap.

I press my face to the opening, wincing as splinters catch the soft skin of my cheek.

The whole room is awash with blue.

For several breaths I can make out nothing but the shifting glow. Then my eyes adjust, and the dark shape kneeling beside Alice Fletcher’s bed resolves into a familiar breadth of black-clad shoulders.

Well. That explains why he didn’t answer Arthur’s knocking.

Iscairn’s back is to the window, one knee to the floor, one gloved hand folded around Alice’s where it rests atop the blankets. The other lies against her shoulder while he murmurs something I can’t quite catch. The light pulses around them both, brightening with each shallow rise of her chest, washing the walls in slow, unsteady waves. Illuminating the bed in one breath. Leaving it in shadow the next.

Oh… The light isn’t around them. It’s coming from her.

With his back still to me, Iscairn raises both hands and unfastens the straps of his mask before setting it aside. The brim of his hat and the sweep of his shoulders hide whatever lies beneath, and I hold my breath, waiting to see it, though he never turns.

A quiet wonder steals across Alice’s face, smoothing the pain from her brow and softening her mouth, until, for one fleeting moment, she looks not like a woman at the edge of death but one who has glimpsed something waiting past it. He says something too low for me to hear. Her bottom lip trembles. Then her eyes fall closed, and she gives the smallest nod.

He leans over her.

The light beneath her skin surges, flooding the cottage, blazing blue through every crack until I have to squint against it. And when I can see again, Alice’s lips have fallen open, and something is rising out of them.

A thread of blue. Wavering as it leaves her, gathering into a slow twisting stream, moving like smoke caught beneath deep water. It curls towards Iscairn as though drawn on the pull of his breath, and with every lungful he takes, more of her comes with it.

What the…

The glow ebbs from her cheeks. Her throat. Thins to a last flickering trace and then to nothing, and Alice Fletcher lies pale and slack against the pillows.

I wait for a twitch of her fingers or the blanket lifting over her chest.

Nothing comes.

I don’t remember stepping back. One moment I’m staring through the gap in the shutters, and the next the wall of the lane is hard against my shoulder. The basket swings from my hip, jars knocking together with a sound that seems to come from very far away.

There’s nothing strange about the house now. The blue is gone. The shutters are only shutters, the cottage only a cottage, and had I passed this way a few minutes later I would have walked straight by it and never known there’d been anything to see at all.

Is that what Alice meant when she asked him to make it as he had for David? Not poppy. Not holding him upright in the dark. This—the mask off, the light drawn out through the mouth. This was peaceful.

She was breathing before he leaned over her, and now she is not. I watched him take that light, and the moment he swallowed it, she died.

He has killed Alice Fletcher.

Except. No. No. She was already dying. He did not bring death into that room; it was waiting there long before him. Whatever he took, he took from her as she went.

Oh, for—that distinction does not improve matters. Somehow it makes them worse.

Think, Ophelia. Not what I imagined. Not what I fear it means. What I saw. What accounts for a woman glowing like a blue coal and a man breathing her in.

So. What, then?

Sorcery? It’s a tempting answer. A witch can be named, reported, and handed neatly to a magistrate, along with the unpleasant burden of deciding what must be done about him.

But witches are meant to inspire terror.

Alice had looked into his bare face as though she had been waiting for it her whole life.

I curl my fingers over the frost-slick top of the wall.