The hut sits abandoned at the edge of the woods.
The low fence has fallen in, and Estele’s garden is long overgrown, the house itself slowly giving way, sagging with age and neglect. The door is shut fast, but the shutters hang on broken joints, exposing the glass of a single window, cracked open like a tired eye.
The next time Addie comes, the frame of the house will be lost beneath the green, and the time after that, the woods will have crept forward and swallowed it all.
But today, it still stands, and she makes her way up the weedy path, the stolen lantern in one hand. She keeps expecting the old woman to step out of the woods, wrinkled arms filled with cuttings, but the only rustle comes from magpies and the sound of her own feet.
Inside, the hut is damp, and empty, the dark space littered with debris—the clay shards of a broken cup, a crumbling table—but gone are the bowls in which she mixed her salves, and the cane she used when the weather was wet, and the bundles of herbs that hung from the rafters, and the iron pot that sat in the hearth.
Addie is sure that Estele’s things were taken up after her death, parceled out through the village, just as her life was, deemed public property simply because she did not wed. Villon, her ward, because Estele had no child.
She goes into the garden, and harvests what she can from the wild plot, carries the ragged bounty of carrots and long beans inside and sets it on the table. She throws the shutters open and finds herself face-to-face with the woods.
The trees stand in a dark line, tangled branches clawing at the sky. Their roots are inching forward, crawling into the garden and across the lawn. A slow and patient advance.
The sun is sinking now, and even though it’s summer, a damp has crawled in through the gaps in the thatched roof, between the stones and under the door, and a chill hangs over the bones of the little hut.
Addie carries a stolen lantern to the hearth. It has been a rainy month, and the wood is damp, but she is patient, coaxing the flame from the lamp until it catches on the kindling.
Fifty years, and she is still learning the shape of her curse.
She cannot make a thing, but she can use it.
She cannot break a thing, but she can steal it.
She cannot start a fire, but she can keep it going.
She does not know if it’s some kind of mercy, or simply a crack in the mortar of her curse, one of the few fissures she’s found in the walls of this new life. Perhaps Luc hasn’t noticed. Or perhaps he has put them there on purpose, to draw her out, to make her hope.
Addie draws a smoldering twig from the fireplace and brings it idly to the threadbare rug. It is dry enough that it should catch, and burn, but it does not. It gutters, and cools too quickly, just outside the safety of its hearth.
She sits on the floor, humming softly as she feeds stick after stick into the blaze until it burns the chill off the place like a breath scattering dust.
She feels him like a draft.
He does not knock.
He never knocks.
One moment she is alone, and the next, she is not.
“Adeline.”
She hates the way it makes her feel to hear him say her name, hates the way she leans into the word like a body seeking shelter from a storm.
“Luc.”
She turns, expecting to see him as he was in Paris, dressed in the fine salon fashion, but instead he is exactly as he was the night they met, wind-blown and shadow-edged, in a simple dark tunic, the laces open at the collar. The firelight dances across his face, shades the edges of his jaw and cheek and brow like charcoal.
His eyes slide over the meager bounty on the sill before returning to her. “Back where you started…”
Addie rises to her feet, so he can’t look down on her.
“Fifty years,” he says. “How quickly they go by.”
They have not gone quickly at all, not for her, and he knows it. He is looking for bare skin, soft places to slide the knife, but she will not give him such an easy target. “No time at all,” she echoes coolly. “To think one life would ever be enough.”
Luc flashes only the edge of a smile.
“What a picture you make, tending that fire. You could almost be Estele.”
It is the first time she has heard that name on his lips, and there is something in the way he says it, almost wistful. Luc crosses to the window, and looks out at the line of trees. “How many nights she stood here, and whispered out into the woods.”
He glances over his shoulder, a coy grin playing over his lips. “For all her talk of freedom, she was so lonely in the end.”
Addie shakes her head. “No.”
“You should have been here with her,” he says. “Should have eased her pain when she was ill. Should have laid her down to rest. You owed her that.”
Addie draws back as if struck.
“You were so selfish, Adeline. And because of you, she died alone.”
We all die alone. That is what Estele would say—at least, she thinks. She hopes. Once, she would have been certain, but the confidence has faded with the memory of the woman’s voice.
Across the room, the darkness moves. One moment he is at the window, the next, he is behind her, his voice threading through her hair.
“She was so ready to die,” Luc says. “So desperate for that spot in the shade. She stood at that window and begged, and begged. I could have given it to her.”
A memory, old fingers tight around her wrist.
Never pray to the gods that answer after dark.
Addie turns on him. “She would never have prayed to you.”
A flickering smile. “No.” A sneer. “But think of how sad she’d be to know you did.”
Addie’s temper flares. Her hand flies out before she thinks to stop it, and even then, she half expects to find no purchase, only air and smoke. But Luc is caught off guard, and so her palm strikes skin, or something like it. His head turns a fraction with the force of the blow. There is no blood on those perfect lips, of course, no heat on that cool skin, but she has at least wiped the smile from his face.
Or so she thinks.
Until he begins to laugh.
The sound is eerie, unreal, and when he turns his face back toward her, she stills. There is nothing human in it now. The bones are too sharp, the shadows too deep, the eyes too bright.
“You forget yourself,” he says, his voice dissolving into woodsmoke. “You forget me.”
Pain lances up through Addie’s feet, sudden and sharp. She looks down, searching for a wound, but the pain lights her from within. A deep, internal ache, the force of every step she’s ever walked.
“Perhaps I have been too merciful.”
The pain climbs through her limbs, infecting knee and hip, wrist and shoulder. Her legs buckle beneath her, and it is all she can do not to scream.
The darkness looks down with a smile.
“I have made this too easy.”
Addie watches in horror as her hands begin to wrinkle and thin, blue veins standing out beneath papery skin.
“You asked only for life. I gave you your health, and youth, as well.”
Her hair comes loose from its bun and hangs lank before her eyes, the strands going dry and brittle and gray.
“It has made you arrogant.”
Her sight weakens, vision blurring until the room is only smudges and vague shapes.
“Perhaps you need to suffer.”
Addie squeezes her eyes shut, heart fluttering with panic.
“No,” she says, and it is the closest she has ever come to pleading.
She can feel him, moving closer. Can feel the shadow of him looming over her.