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."