The Devil's Last Wife

did not

ian's note folded small against her ribs. Ask him why. One question, and the vow would d

e took from, and she found that she did not want to take t

looking for

ny courtyards, and eve

ong cloister where the arches framed nothing but grey sky. Ash drifted over everything, soft as flour, and under

untain in the middle held a stone fish with its mouth open. Someone had once cared about this place. The paving was l

nd the alarmed look of a child who had been told to expect a witch. He carried a trowel, a hand rake

grow. There's never been anything. Th

was hi

er,

Alder put in

from the hearths. Once a very expe

. "No wonder. He was feeding the

er sleeves, and dug he

ch for it once, because Elowen could always tell the moment a soil was ready: the faint gritty give of earth that w

she thought. And no

packets, a dozen kinds, each one carefully labelled in a private code. Foxglove. Monkshood. Nightshade. The sort of plants her grandmother would have cal

ping half of Marrow Hall breathing through the winter. Monkshood, for numbness. Henbane, for visions. Belladonna, for ladies who wished to be admired and doctors who wished to

red the earth into rows, scattered seed and pressed it down with the flat of her palm. She did not speak. She did not hum. She wor

rchives, and the twenty-six volumes of genealogy she had read twice. To a letter folded against her ribs, and to a man who had sat on the floor outside her door until dawn without once knocking.

oked exactly as it had before. A rectangle of as

k of her wrist, and looked up, and rea

flakes hung motionless, in a perfect circle around her, like snow caught in glass.

s, the ground

pped br

n another. Something pale and thread

ee

e in this grey country of ash and glass that her eyes stung looking at it. More shoots followed. A dozen. Then a hundred. They rose out of t

she wh

grows in

er, she realised, had known he

re rolled to the elbow, and there was ash in his hair. The shadows under his eyes had not improved. But the face he t

here for three hund

seeds didn't ge

ld still bolt. He stopped at the edge of the bed and looked down

t is

ksho

lent for

son,"

stop a horse's heart." She tilted her head. "I

irst living thing in Ashfall in three centu

t a com

vation. It is e

ng grow?" she

ht of the Fire. There was an orchard on this side of the wall. Pears." His gaze did not leave

vow would have made him answer, and sh

ested his forearms on his knees, looking at the shoot. His han

ed him no

ooking up. It was not a boast. It was said the way on

ore than you to

uld

stubborn.

. But what crossed his face was not anger. It was a kind of wary astonishment, as

r work to hide the

rt across from him, and neither said a word. The ash had stopped falling. The light was lowering and golden for the first time

, like an actor remembering his lines. That there was a thin white scar across the back of his left hand, in the shape of a crescent. That his sleeves, rolled to the elbow, showed forearms th

ws. Once, near the top, she thought she saw a lamp flare and gutt

one who brok

en't sl

up, careful. "W

ke a man who's been

thing Dorian had given her. He studied her for a long time. She could see him de

aid Lucan at last. "It i

int. True, she thought. A

et it

you somethi

vow says you don't ha

sking a

asking her permission to ask her a question. She was beginning to suspect that it was the on

" she

ed at h

of ash-grey in the crease of each thumb, a smear of dirt on

eighty of my court and a Duke of the Infernum, and your hands could not keep still." His eyes lifted. "Now you

the throat. The vow, ready and patient, wa

e could have said experience. Ne

without cruelty, an

owen, slowly, "I know e

wai

he looked down at her hands in the black soil, and the words came out of her more qu

ot say wh

his face and the ash on his shoulders, looking at her as though she had put her

were a reply to somethi

di