The Night Country

18

I was a girl born for bad luck. That’s what they told me, in the village where I grew up. Full of hard old men and harder women, and winters so lean you could see your bones through your skin by the end of them.

I don’t know how it is for you, but I have memories of my tale from above and below. Do you know what I mean? I remember all the parts of it that the Spinner spun—my brothers dying one by one, my father long gone, my mother growing old in front of my eyes, old before she was thirty. I remember—everything that came after.

But I remember other things, too. Little ones. Things the tale couldn’t have had any use for. Like shooting a rabbit right through the eye on my very first go—I wasn’t even aiming for it, I’d never have gotten within a mile if I’d tried. I cried and cried. One of my brothers painted pretty things for me, made a little doll I liked to carry around by its seedpod head. That can’t have been in your grandmother’s storybook, could it?

That’s not important, though. What I meant to tell you about is Death. He’s a wily fucker, slippery as oil, and he’s been taunting me since I was old enough to know it. I caught him when I was small. I shouldn’t have seen him, only the dying ever do. And he was there for my father, not me. But I saw him, all right, and he knew it, and slipped away like a back-door man. Six times after that he came for my family—for all my six brothers, one by one—but he never had the nerve to let me see his face again.

There were tricks you could use to catch him. To delay him, confuse him, turn him away—water and earth, copper and heartwood. I tried them all, but nothing worked.

I grew up trying to catch Death, but Death never turned around and caught me. He let me get grown enough to marry, old enough to try to have my own family—to make more of the living I could fight Death to keep. But then the boy I meant to marry got sick, and I knew Death was on his way. That wicked old wolf, that’s what my mother called him. But I’d seen him, and she hadn’t, and she got it wrong. He had skin the color of chestnuts dug out of the coals and eyes like … like the shine of sun on rain, when they both come at once. Or like a cat’s eyes when you look at them from the side, that clear kind of silver. Eyes that see everything, and skin you so fine you don’t feel it till you’re already bleeding.

By then I’d decided he would not take another thing from me. I grew up with nothing six brothers hadn’t gotten to first, I had to scrap with starving boys just to get my share. I wasn’t about to let that pale-eyed bastard take my husband before I could even marry him.

I came to my betrothed’s sickbed with offerings: the soul of a songbird, songs to scatter ashes by. Then I crushed the offerings under my foot, because fuck Death. He can be killed, just like any man, and I’d be the one to do it if it came to that.

And he showed. He came for the boy I loved, and I was there waiting for him. I was ready to die just to show him I meant it, just to prove you can’t take absolutely everything from a girl who’s got nothing.

But what he took was my hand. In his. When he did it I forgot every little thing: the boy on the bed. The smell of sickness. My dead father and stolen brothers and my skin all sticky with sparrow’s blood. Death walked me right through the wall of the sickroom, and into another part of the world, a palace where a king lay dying. I watched him take the king’s life: it took the form of a little colored light. You could just look at it and know what kind of man he’d been, what kind of king.

We traveled all over the Hinterland that night, taking lives away. I saw how heavily they weighed on Death, how he wasn’t a master but a servant. And I guess I fell a little in love with him. With his life: the freedom, the duty.

I was different by morning. When Death dropped me back home, back into my tight fist of a life, he told me the boy I loved would live. That his life was a gift to me, for serving a night as Death’s companion. Like showing someone the entire sea, then giving them a thimble of salt to remember it by.

After that night, I forgot the boy I loved. Thom, his name was, but I made myself forget that name. I waited for Death to return to me. I followed sickness like a plague wagon, and waited for accidents. You never had to wait long, in our village. But Death stayed away. He passed over our village for an entire season.

I figured out then that he was as stubborn as I am, and I’d have to go find him myself. By then I knew I didn’t really love him, but I needed him to know he couldn’t do what he did. You can’t tease a girl with the whole of a world, then think she isn’t gonna come after you for another taste.

I thought I’d set a trap for him. I’d bait the trap with one of the things he carried, in that canteen around his neck: all the little lives he peeled away, all those colored lights.

It was an accident the first time. I killed someone who was trying to kill me. Not that I’m making excuses for it. I won’t make excuses for any of it. When that man’s shitty little flicker of a life didn’t draw Death in, I thought I’d try again. And again. I’d make myself Death’s rival, if he wouldn’t take me as his companion. I killed the worst kinds of folk at first. Then I stopped worrying so much. I’d kill anyone who struck me wrong, whose face I didn’t like. Without meaning to, Death had taught me the trick of it: a person’s life hides in their face, right there in plain sight. You can reach in and grab it if you’ve been taught how. I’d watched him all that night, I was a quick study. Before him I couldn’t even see their life-lights; after I couldn’t look away. They told you everything: who they’d been and would be. If they deserved what I was doing to them. If they didn’t.

Death got wind of what I was doing eventually. I bet it made him mad. I still like to think about that, even though, I’m warning you now, this story doesn’t end so well for me.

It wasn’t all bad. I saw all the corners of the world. I saw its shores and its mountains and its valleys and every town. But I knew it through the creatures that lived in it, most of them as miserable as I was, and I never managed to just settle. Live another kind of life. I guess I couldn’t have, not while the Spinner was watching, but like I said, I’m not making any excuses.

Then there was the night I met a little old man who made me an offer so good I should’ve known the only thing to do was bury him and his offer at the bottom of the Hinterland Sea. But I was desperate. By then I had a canteen full of stolen lives, and the weight of them was killing me. Sometimes I wish they’d finished the job.

The old man showed me a way to enter the land of Death: he gave me something to drink, something that turned the world’s colors to gray, till all I could see against all that foggy nothing was a length of golden thread. Right there, at my fingertips. I pulled myself along it, hand over hand. I followed it through water, right down into the land of Death. I walked through his cold mineral forests, past lakes of frozen fire. The lives around my neck were whispering to me, as if they knew Death was close and thought he’d give them peace at last.

I walked into his ugly palace, unafraid. Well, a little afraid. It was a trap, of course. Everyone I’d ever killed was waiting for me in Death’s hall. I thought they were there to kill me, too. When I saw the way Death looked at me—like I was nothing, like the life I’d turned over to finding him meant nothing—I think I wanted them to.

But Death wanted to set the price I’d pay. He wouldn’t let them kill me.

Instead he took something from me. Something so small you never think you’d miss it. The thing that hides behind your life-light: he took my death. Perfect punishment, right? Who knew Death was a poet?

Life is all that’s left to me now, much good it does me.