The Devil's Last Wife

The carriage stopped, and Elowen Marrow counted her poisons.

Nine. Two sewn into the hem of her left sleeve, three stitched inside her bodice, three hidden in the heel of her boot, and the ninth, the one that mattered, in a glass vial no longer than her little finger, strapped against her ribs where her heartbeat could keep it warm.

She had been counting since the Marrow road ended and the black road began. Counting kept her hands steady. Her grandmother liked to say that Marrow women were born knowing how to be afraid in silence, and Elowen, who had never forgiven the old woman for anything, had also never managed to prove her wrong.

"We're here, my lady," said Captain Hale.

He sat across from her with one hand on his sword and his eyes on the window, like a man watching the edge of a cliff. In nine days of travel he had not spoken more than twenty words. His voice cracked on the last one.

"You sound afraid, Captain."

"Of the Devil? Yes." He swallowed. "Of what he does to the brides."

"He doesn't do anything to them." Elowen smoothed her grey skirt. "They die. Marrow women do that. It's practically our family trade."

Hale stared at her, and she let him. It was easier for everyone if they thought her cold. Then she opened the door herself, because no one else was going to, and stepped out into Ashfall.

The palace rose out of a plain of cold ash like a wound cut into the sky.

Towers of black glass climbed in crooked spires, and in every window burned a light the colour of old coins. No smoke rose from its chimneys. No birds crossed its sky. The wind carried the smell of a hearth that had gone out centuries ago and had never been allowed to stay dead.

A road of polished obsidian led to the gate, and along it knelt six statues of women, their faces worn smooth by wind until they had no features left at all. Beyond the sixth stood a plinth with nothing on it.

Waiting, Elowen thought. It is waiting for me.

Behind her, the Marrow guards dropped her single trunk onto the road and climbed back up to the carriage at something very close to a run. Captain Hale lingered at the door, his face grey.

"My lady." He lowered his voice. "If there is a way out of this-"

"There isn't," said Elowen. "I read the contract. Twice."

That was true. She did not add that she had also written half of it.

Nobody in the Marrow house knew. Her grandmother, Lady Odalys, believed she had delivered a lamb: a granddaughter obedient enough to walk to the slaughter, because her ten-year-old brother Tobias was kept at Marrow Hall as a guarantee of her good behaviour. The clause granting the Devil's bride unrestricted access to his library, which Odalys had waved through as a harmless vanity, was in Elowen's own handwriting.

Because Elowen knew what the others pretended not to know. Every Marrow woman died at twenty-five. Her mother had. Her aunts had. The six brides sent to Ashfall before her had, one in each generation, and the world had decided the Devil was killing them, because the alternative was a curse no one could explain.

Elowen would turn twenty-five in twelve months, on the anniversary of the Night of Ashfall.

Eleven months and twenty-nine days, she corrected herself.

At the Marrow gate that morning, Tobias had pressed a smooth river stone into her palm. "So you remember to come back," he had said. He was ten years old, and he heard the dead, and he had told her that the whole house had been whispering her name for a week. She had not told him that she did not know whether she would.

Somewhere in the Devil's library, if the Marrow archives could be trusted, was the only record of what had been done to her family, and why.

She had not come to Ashfall to die. She had come to read.

"You're early," said a voice above her.

A man sat on top of the gatepost with one boot swinging, eating an apple. He wore a soldier's black coat and a jester's grin, and a thin scar ran from his brow to his jaw. When he saw her face, the grin did not vanish exactly. It stalled, like a cart on ice.

"Huh," he said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all. This is going to be a disaster." He dropped to the ground, bowed with great and clearly insincere ceremony, and held out a hand she did not take. "Dorian Vale. General of the Ashen Legion, keeper of the Devil's temper, and the closest thing to a welcome you will find here. You're Elowen."

"I am."

"Most of them arrive crying. The last one arrived praying. I preferred the crying. It's quieter." He looked her over again, longer this time, as if checking her against something. "You're not doing either."

"Should I be?"

"No. That's what worries me." He tossed the apple core over his shoulder. "Come on. He'll want to look at you."

"Does the Devil usually greet his brides?"

"The Devil hasn't greeted a bride in a hundred years." For the first time, Dorian did not smile. "He's greeting you."

The gates opened without a hand touching them.

The hall beyond was vast and cold, floored in black glass that held her reflection beneath her like something drowned. Along the walls hung six portraits in tall silver frames, each of a woman in a grey bridal veil. None of them smiled. None of them looked like her. They had round faces, soft jaws, heavy dark brows, nothing of Elowen's narrow bones or her sharp, pale mouth.

She noticed it the way one notices a missing tooth, and she did not yet understand why it felt like a warning.

"My predecessors," she said.

"Adelheid. Marguerite. Philippa. Sabine. Wilhelmina. Rosalind." Dorian named them as if they were comrades fallen in battle. "He never touched any of them, you know. People say he did. He didn't."

"Why not?"

"Ask him." A pause. "Actually, don't ask him."

They walked on. Their footsteps rang strangely, and sometimes Elowen thought she heard a second set of steps beneath her own, light and quick, then silent when she turned her head. She decided it was the glass. She decided it firmly.

At the end of the hall a great staircase rose into darkness, and the air changed. It grew cold in a way that had nothing to do with winter. The lamps along the walls dimmed one by one, as if bowing. The vial against her ribs, which had been warm since dawn, went suddenly icy, as though someone had dropped it into a well.

Dorian stopped walking. "Remember," he murmured. "He'll look at you once. Don't flinch."

"What happens if I flinch?"

"Nothing. That's the worrying part."

At the top of the stairs stood a man.

He was dressed in black, with no crown, no ring, no ornament of any kind, as though he had decided long ago that ornament was for people who needed to be believed. He was younger than she had expected and older than anyone had a right to be: a face of hard, beautiful lines, skin pale as bone, hair as black as ink spilled on snow. His eyes were the colour of embers that someone had tried to put out and failed.

Lucan Dreyvarr. The Devil of Ashfall. Three hundred and forty years old, and said to have burned a king alive for the crime of boring him.

He came down the stairs slowly. Elowen made herself stand still. Ten steps. Five. Three. Beside her, Dorian had stopped breathing.

Then the Devil's eyes lifted to her face, and the world stopped.

It was not dramatic. Nothing shook. But the lamps guttered all at once, and the glass beneath her feet frosted white from her shoes outward, and the hand he had been lifting to greet her, or dismiss her, or kill her, stopped in the air and slowly closed into a fist.

"Dorian," he said, very quietly. "Who sent this one?"

"The Marrows, my lord. As agreed."

"The Marrows send me daughters with Marrow chins and Marrow tempers. They do not send me-" He stopped. When his voice came again it was a blade drawn slowly from its sheath. "Her."

Elowen did not know who her was. She knew only that a man who had survived three centuries was looking at her the way a man looks at a ghost he has been waiting a very long time to kill.

She sank into a curtsy, because her mother had taught her that you curtsy to the thing that might end you. "My lord. I am Elowen Marrow, your seventh-"

"You have my enemy's face."

Nobody moved.

Frost crept across the glass until it touched the toes of Elowen's boots. Somewhere above her, a lamp went out with a small, offended sound.

She had spent forty-one nights rehearsing this moment. She had imagined cruelty, indifference, lust, even boredom, and she had prepared an answer for each. She had not prepared for hatred. Hatred was personal, and she had never met this man in her life.

"I'm told I have my mother's chin," she said. "My grandmother calls it a Marrow weakness. I wasn't aware it came with a grievance."

Dorian made a noise like a man swallowing a cough.

Lucan Dreyvarr did not look away from her face. "Take her back to the gate."

"My lord-"

"Put her in the carriage. Send her home with a letter for Odalys Marrow saying that the Devil declines this bride."

"Then you'll wait twenty-five years," said Elowen.

It was the first thing she had said that he seemed to hear. Slowly, as though turning his head cost him something, he looked at her.

"The window opens once in a generation," she went on, and was pleased that her voice did not shake. "On the anniversary of the Night of Ashfall. Eleven months and twenty-nine days from now. Your Rite needs a Marrow bride's blood, freely given, in the year the window is open. If you send me home, the Marrows have no other daughter old enough, and you will wait another quarter century for the next one to grow up." She tilted her head. "I'm told you're patient."

"Who told you about the Rite?"

"Everyone knows there is a Rite. I am one of the few people who has read what it requires."

That was true, or close enough. The Marrow archive had been dusty and silent, and she had read in it until her eyes ached.

For a long moment the Devil studied her as one studies a locked door. Then he turned away, and his voice drifted back like smoke.

"The Hall of Ash. Now."

The Hall of Ash was where the Devil kept his throne, and where, it turned out, it snowed indoors.

Ash fell from a ceiling too high to see, soft and grey and slow, gathering in drifts against the walls. The throne at the far end was a single piece of fused black glass, sharp as a broken bottle. Lucan sat in it as if he had been poured there.

Elowen walked the length of the hall alone. Dorian trailed ten respectful paces behind her, looking like a man who had placed a bet he was beginning to regret.

She was halfway to the throne when she noticed the ash.

It landed on Dorian's shoulders. It landed on the floor. But around her it parted, drifting aside in a thin hush, as if she walked inside a bell of clear air. When she stopped, the flakes stopped too, an inch from her hair, and hung there, trembling.

On the throne, Lucan had gone very still.

"Interesting," he said softly.

"Is it supposed to do that?"

"No." His eyes were fixed on the ash. "It has never done that."

Behind her, Dorian said, very quietly and to no one: "Oh, no."

Elowen decided she would think about that later. She could manage only so many frightening things at once, and the Devil came first.

"You're angry," she said.

"I am not angry." His voice was perfectly pleasant. "I am deciding whether it would be more efficient to kill you or to let you leave."

"Killing me ruins your Rite. Blood given freely, remember."

"There are ways of making people generous."

"Not with this blood." She reached into her bodice and drew out the vial.

The glass was no longer than her little finger. Inside it, a thread of dark liquid moved, rising and falling in time with her heartbeat, as if it were alive and keeping count.

The effect was immediate. Dorian's hand went to his sword. Lucan did not move, but the ash overhead changed direction and began to fall faster.

"Carefully," said Elowen. "It's keyed to my pulse. If my heart stops, the glass breaks, and whatever is inside spoils Marrow blood. Mine, certainly. I suspect the whole line's. I wasn't able to test the second part."

Dorian made a strangled sound that might have been a laugh.

"You carry your own death as a threat," said Lucan.

"I carry it as an invoice."

The Devil rose.

He did not hurry. He came down the steps of the throne one at a time and stopped a pace away from her, close enough that she could see the grey in his eyes, the ash caught in his lashes, the tiredness beneath the cruelty that no one had ever bothered to look for. This close, she could also see that he was not breathing. He did not seem to need to.

"Do you know what I am?" he asked.

"A man who needs me."

Something in his face shifted. It was not softening. It was a tired, careful calculation, like a man examining a chessboard from the other side for the first time.

"Name your terms," he said.

Elowen exhaled, slowly, so he would not see how long she had been holding her breath.

"One. My own rooms, with a lock, and I keep the only key. Two. Free access to your library, all of it, any hour. Three. A garden, with whatever soil you have." She counted on her fingers. "Four. No one touches me without asking. That includes you, and it includes whoever you send to dress me. Five. I go where I please inside these walls."

"That is a very long list for a bride."

"It is a very short list for a woman who is going to die here."

The words were out before she could stop them. Dorian looked at the ceiling. Lucan's gaze sharpened.

"The library is not a sanctuary," he said. "Most of what it holds eats the people who read it."

"Then I'll read quickly."

"And the garden? What does a Marrow bride plant?"

"Herbs."

"Nine," said the Devil.

Elowen blinked.

"Two in your left sleeve. Three in your bodice. Three in the heel of your right boot." His eyes dropped, briefly, to her ribs. "And one against your heart. You are, by my count, the most heavily armed bride to walk into this palace."

"You counted."

"I count everything that might kill me."

It should not have thrilled her. It did, in a small, cold, ruinous way, the way a good chess opponent thrills a player who has been losing to idiots for years. She kept her face still.

"Then we understand each other," she said.

"We understand nothing." But the corner of his mouth moved, once, and was still. "Your terms are accepted. The wedding is tomorrow at dusk. Dorian will take you to your rooms. You will not remove the poisons. I would be insulted."

"I wouldn't dream of it."

"One more thing." He had already turned away, and his voice lost all warmth. "The Marrows have always sent me a face I could bear. I will not bear yours. Stay out of my sight where you can."

"Whose face is it?"

He stopped.

For three seconds the whole hall held its breath. The ash hung in the air like a held thought.

"Not a question I answer," said Lucan.

Elowen nodded slowly, as though he had given her a gift, and filed it away with the nine poisons. Everything was a weapon, if you held it right.

"One more thing from me, then," she said. "The east wing. I'd like a tour."

"No."

It came so quickly that it did not sound like an answer. It sounded like a door slamming. Dorian went very still. Even the ash seemed to recoil.

And Elowen, who had spent twenty-four years learning to read the faces of people who lied for a living, understood two things at once. The east wing was the place where Ashfall kept everything it was ashamed of. And the Devil, for the first time since she had met him, sounded afraid.

Then, from somewhere deep beneath the palace, very faintly, came three slow knocks.

Not a pipe. Not a door. Knocks, patient and deliberate, as if someone had been waiting a very long time to be asked.

Lucan's head turned toward the sound. Just slightly. Just once.

"Don't," he said, without looking at her, "answer it."

They had laid out a grey dress.

It waited on her bed at dusk, spread like a body, with a long grey veil beside it. Six women had walked down an aisle in that veil. Elowen studied it for a while, then folded it carefully and put it in the wardrobe. She wore the dress, because it fit, and because she had already sewn two pockets into the lining.

She did not wear the veil. If she was going to marry the Devil, she wanted him to see exactly who he was getting.

Before she left the room she took Tobias's river stone from the lining of her trunk and held it until it was warm. It was smooth and grey and no bigger than a quail's egg, with a white ring running around its middle like a collar. He had found it in the shallows behind Marrow Hall the summer he turned seven, and he had announced that it was lucky, in the grave voice of a boy who believed the dead taught him such things.

So you remember to come back.

She turned it over twice, then slid it into the pocket she had sewn that morning. It sat against her hip, small and ordinary and entirely out of place in a palace of black glass.

At the window, where the dusk made a poor mirror, she practised the vow aloud. I bind my word to yours. Her voice came out steady. She tried it again, quieter, and heard how much it sounded like a prayer, which she did not believe in, and a contract, which she did.

"Eleven months and twenty-eight days," she told her reflection. It did not answer. She had not expected it to. She had only wanted to hear the number said in a room where no one else could weigh it.

The Chapel of Cinders lay at the bottom of three hundred steps, and no one came to walk her down them. Odalys had not troubled to attend. Her cousins had not troubled to write.

She took the steps slowly, because a bride who arrived out of breath arrived afraid, and she meant to arrive as neither. The stair spiralled down through bare rock rather than glass, and the lamps along it had been lit by someone who disliked wasting oil: one flame to every twenty steps, so that she walked through bands of dark and light like a woman crossing a river on stones.

At step ninety she heard it again. A second set of footfalls, light and quick, a few paces behind her own. She stopped. The footsteps stopped a moment later than they should have, as though someone had hesitated to follow her lead.

"If you mean to kill me," she said to the empty stair, "I would be grateful if you waited until after the wedding. I have gone to such trouble with the dress."

Nothing answered. But the nearest lamp, a small steady flame in a niche, leaned toward her, the way a candle leans toward an opened door. Then it righted itself, and she went on down, and told herself that a draught was a perfectly adequate explanation and that she was not a woman who needed a better one.

Dorian met her at the chapel doors with an expression of such strained cheerfulness that she almost felt sorry for him.

"You could still run," he said.

"Where?"

"Anywhere. I'd count to a hundred."

"Dorian." She lifted her chin. "Open the door."

He did.

The chapel was long and narrow and built entirely of black glass, so that the candlelight inside it multiplied into a thousand small flames, reflected in every wall. In the gallery above sat the Seven Dukes of the Infernum, in black, silent as carved saints. One of them, a heavy man with eyes like wet coins, smiled at her as she passed. She smiled back, and made a mental note of his face.

She counted the rest, because counting was what she did. Seven seats in a gallery of black glass, and seven faces tilted toward her like birds on a wire. A tall, thin one in silver-grey who studied her mouth rather than her eyes, as though planning how it would look afterwards. A woman so small and so old that her chair swallowed her, in a cloak of crow feathers that rustled whenever she breathed. A broad young duke with a rash of gold rings who yawned openly. They did not look like the lords of a court of demons. They looked like men and women who had been bored for centuries and had finally been given something to watch.

Along the front pews stood seven candles. Six of them were unlit, their wicks pale and dusty. The seventh burned.

She understood what that meant, and kept walking.

Lucan waited at the altar in a black coat as plain as the one he had worn the day before. He did not look at her as she approached. He looked at a point somewhere over her left shoulder, with the fixed attention of a man standing on a gallows platform who has decided to admire the rafters.

Beside him, a thin figure in a clerk's robe unrolled a long scroll. Its hood was empty. Not dark, but empty, a smooth hollow where a face should be. When he lifted his hand to turn the page, a drop of black ran from a cut on his finger and fell onto the glass.

It was ink.

"Magister Quill," he said, in a voice like paper being folded. "Keeper of Contracts. I will be witnessing, recording and, if required, enforcing." The hood tipped toward her. "You have declined the veil."

"Yes."

"There is no clause for that."

"Then I'm in breach of nothing."

The Magister made a dry sound that might have been appreciation. "We begin."

The vow was older than the palace and shorter than she expected.

"I bind my word to yours," read Quill, and Lucan repeated it, flatly, like a man reciting a sentence. "No lie shall pass my lips to your face. What I hide, I may keep. What you ask, I will answer true. This binding holds until one of us is dust."

Elowen's heart did something unpleasant.

She had read the contract three times, and the clause had been there, a single line buried in a paragraph of formalities. She had assumed it was a protection. A bride's right to the truth. A courtesy, perhaps.

She had not understood until now that it bound her too.

No lie shall pass my lips. She thought of the vial against her ribs. She thought of eleven months and twenty-eight days, of Tobias, of a library she meant to ransack, of everything she had decided never to tell this man. She had come to Ashfall with a hundred secrets, and she was about to swear on her own tongue that she could not lie to the person most likely to ask.

"What I hide, I may keep," Quill reminded her gently, as if he had followed her thoughts. "The vow forbids falsehood, not silence. But if you are asked, my lady, you will answer. The tongue does not permit otherwise."

"What happens if I try?"

"It burns." His hood tilted. "Quite thoroughly."

She looked at Lucan. For the first time that evening, he looked back.

There was nothing in his face. No cruelty, no curiosity, not even the flicker of calculation she had seen in the Hall of Ash. He might have been carved. But his hand, resting at his side, was clenched hard enough that the knuckles had gone the colour of bone.

He is afraid of this too, she thought. And she did not know why that steadied her.

"I bind my word to yours," said Elowen.

The candles flared.

"No lie shall pass my lips to your face. What I hide, I may keep. What you ask, I will answer true. This binding holds until one of us is dust."

A ripple ran across the floor, as though the glass had briefly remembered that it had once been liquid. Above them, the Dukes shifted in their seats.

"The seal," said Quill. He drew a thin ceremonial knife from his sleeve and held it out, hilt first. "Blood to blood. Palm to palm."

Elowen took it. She cut her left palm with the steady stroke of a woman who had done it a thousand times, for a thousand worse reasons, and held out her bleeding hand.

Lucan did not take it.

He stood still, his own palm already opened and bleeding, and held his hand out to her, palm up, an inch from hers. Not touching. Waiting.

It took her a moment to understand.

No one touches me without asking.

He had not forgotten. He was asking.

Her throat tightened, annoyingly. "You may," she said.

His hand closed around hers, warm, which she had not expected, and a great deal stronger than he needed to be, which she had.

The chapel went silver.

The light began at their joined hands, a thin, pale glow that spread outward in a ring across the floor, up the walls, through every one of the thousand reflected candles, until the whole place was the colour of moonlight on water. Not red. Not black. Silver, cold and clean and unbearably bright.

Quill dropped his pen.

In the gallery, one of the Dukes rose half out of his seat and sat down again very quickly.

And Lucan, who had been carved from stone for the last twenty minutes, went white. Not pale. White, the way a man goes white when he sees something he buried and it has walked out of the ground.

"No," he said, so quietly she barely heard it. "Not that. Not that."

His hand tightened around hers, not cruelly but convulsively, like someone grabbing a rope as the ground fell away. She felt his pulse in his palm, fast and ragged, a mortal heartbeat in an immortal chest. Under her ribs, the vial beat in perfect time with it.

Then the light faded, and it was only a chapel again, and two people holding hands because neither of them knew how to let go.

They left her alone with him after that.

The Dukes filed out in silence. Dorian lingered at the door until Lucan said, without turning, "Go," and then he went, glancing back once at her with an expression Elowen could not read.

Magister Quill gathered his scroll in trembling hands. "I will record the binding," he said. "I will record the colour."

"You will record nothing about the colour," said Lucan.

"My lord, I cannot omit it. A bound vow is a bound vow."

"Quill."

"I will record it," said the Magister, with the stubborn courage of a man who has only one thing in the world he is good at. "That is the law."

He left too.

The chapel emptied. The thousand candles burned lower. Lucan released her hand, finally, and stepped back as though the contact had cost him, and wiped his palm on his coat with a small, strange gesture, as though trying to wipe something off.

Elowen looked at her own hand. The cut had stopped bleeding. There was no scar.

"Do you hate me?" she asked.

He went still. It was the sort of question the vow made impossible to dodge, and they both knew it.

"Yes," said Lucan.

No hesitation. No softening. She felt it land in her chest like a blow, then, unexpectedly, like relief.

Hatred, at least, she understood. Hatred was a currency she had been paid in all her life, by her grandmother, by her cousins, by the servants who crossed themselves when she passed the pantry with a basket of foxglove. It was kindness that had always cost her something. A man who told her the truth and hated her for it was a man she could do business with. She found, to her annoyance, that the rest of her was a little less steady than that. She had been prepared to be hated. She had not prepared to be hated so cleanly, by a man who had, a minute earlier, waited with his palm open to be given permission.

"Good," she said. "I trust honest men."

Something flickered across his face. It might have been irritation. It might have been the beginning of a laugh that had been dead a long while.

"Do you intend to harm me?" she asked.

"Not tonight."

"That's not reassuring."

"It was not meant to be." His jaw tightened. "My turn. Why did you come to Ashfall?"

The question hung between them like a drawn blade.

She could feel the vow waiting in her throat. Not a lie. She had sworn not to lie. But a truth can be cut into a thousand pieces, and she had been cutting them since she was a child.

"For your library," said Elowen.

It did not burn.

"That," said Lucan, "is a door. It is not an answer."

"The vow says I cannot lie. It does not say I must open every door."

He was silent for a long moment. Then, slowly, he inclined his head, the way a duellist salutes an opponent he did not expect to be worth the trouble.

"No," he said. "It does not."

He turned and walked down the aisle, past the seven candles, six dead and one burning, and stopped at the doors without looking back.

"Good night, bride."

Bride, not wife. The contract made her the second. He could not make himself say it.

When the doors had shut behind him, she tested it. It was the sort of thing a Marrow does: take a rule apart before it can be used against you.

"My name is Odalys Marrow," she said, to the empty chapel, "and I am delighted to be here."

Nothing. No burn, no tightening, no ink-black fingers rising out of the floor. The vow, it seemed, was a thing that lived between two faces. To the dark, to the glass, to the six dead candles, she could lie as freely as she liked. She filed that away beside the nine poisons. It was a very small loophole, but she had built whole fortresses out of smaller ones.

Elowen stayed where she was, in the dim and glittering chapel, while his footsteps faded. Her palm tingled. Her wrist itched, as though someone had breathed on it in the dark.

"My lady."

She turned. Magister Quill had come back. He stood at the edge of the candlelight with his hood bowed and his ink-black fingers knotted together.

"I should not tell you this," he said. "I am not permitted. But I have witnessed four hundred years of marriages in this palace. I have seen vows burn red, and I have seen them burn black. I have never, in all that time, seen one burn silver." He hesitated. "Except once."

"When?"

"Three hundred years ago. On a night the Devil does not speak of." His voice dropped to a whisper. "Be careful, wife of Ashfall. The last time that light was seen, someone died before the year was out."

He was gone before she could ask whom.

Behind her, the seventh candle guttered once, and went out.