Page 33 of As Many Souls as Stars
‘Oh, yes, all glory to you, Master Martingale: killing women with another man’s rope. That is how you shall be remembered, as a murderer too cowardly to use his own hands.’
‘I am not a murderer.’
‘No? Then what do you call your trials, your accusations?’
‘Righteousness,’ he replied. ‘And it shall be righteousness to hang you, also. You are a witch, Cybil Harding. I am certain of that.’
‘Perchance so, but the crimes you have killed others for are imaginary,’ she told Martingale. ‘You have led innocents to the gallows.’
‘They werenotinnocent—’
Cybil sneered at him. ‘They were victims of your ambition.’
‘I have no ambition. This is a calling.’
‘Your calling is nothing but a fantasy. God will punish you for it one day.’
His eyes widened with fury. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘You are not cleansing the land, Master Martingale.Youare the one corrupting it.Youare the witch.’
Martingale, purple with rage, lifted the spade in both hands. Something feral flashed in his eyes; he brought it down towards Cybil’s throat.
And perhaps Cybil ought to have realised sooner: she took after her father more than she had ever wished to accept. They shared the same hubris, after all. He had believed he could save Cybil. And for a brief, foolish moment, Cybil had believed she could save herself.
How wrong they both had been.
Cybil gasped and said, ‘Richter,’ in both a plea and an accusation. Then metal met skin.
Her windpipe collapsed upon itself, with the same inwards groan as the roof of Harding Hall.
As if shocked by his own actions, Martingale stared down, horrified, at the spade in his hands.
With a gurgling, guttural noise, Cybil began to die.
Miriam was standing by the burial site of Christopher Harding’s grimoires. Her stillness was unearthly: such was the absence ofmovement that a winter moth had taken her for a statue, and it crawled leisurely across her face, one foot stepping on her unblinking eye.
Why had Cybil rejected her once again? Why had she looked at Miriam from within the circle of her arms and told her no, even while her desire was so evident? Cybil was like a reflection in the glass of a window, a pair of images at once—self superimposed upon self. Outside, inside, it was impossible to tell which parts of her were real, and which were those Miriam had constructed in her own mind.
But it did not matter. In her frustration, in her cold and ferocious anger, Miriam had half a mind to shatter the glass. She wanted to make Cybilpayfor denying Miriam that day. Certainly, she would come to regret her fickleness in time, when a noose was looped around her neck, or a hungry fire set burning at her feet; but even before then, there were infinite possibilities for retribution. Miriam would start, perchance, with the mother that Cybil seemed to hold so dear—
Then Miriam heard Cybil’s voice in her head, saying,Richter.
Breaking the silence of the clearing, Miriam breathed once more. Her sigh caused the moth to flutter away in alarm. Cybil wanted her back. She had not rejected her, after all.
Miriam stepped forward, paying a mote of light to the shadows, and then she was in the garden. She saw Martingale standing hunched over, with the spade clutched in his hands. She also saw the prone figure of Cybil lying on the ground, wearing a necklace of bruised and bloody flesh. In her chest, her soul flickered, a dying light. Seeing it fade, Miriam felt a shock and a significance of grief so intense, sohuman, that she trembled at the wrongness of it. What was more significant, she wondered—the loss of the meal? The loss of the woman, the first mortal with whom Miriam had felt some sort of kinship, as fleeting as it had been? That it was even a question felt absurd. It was rare that Miriam recognised some of herself, some of her isolation and her power, in someone else. But that rarity seemed not to merit the sadness she now felt. It seemed a weakness, and an unwelcome one.
Martingale turned around and saw her, jumping slightly in surprise. ‘Who are you?’
Richter stared down at Cybil’s body. ‘You have killed her,’ she said.
‘I did what I had to—’
‘You havekilledher,’ Richter snarled. The darkness coalesced behind her, creeping along the soil towards him. Martingale dropped the spade to the ground in shock.
‘I—’ He took a step backwards. ‘Stay back. Get away from me.’
Miriam lurched forward and shoved the man to the ground. He had only a moment to make a noise of protest—an interrupted squeal, like a piglet being squeezed—before she had her foot on his stomach, her hands around his neck. ‘You were supposed towait,’ she hissed. ‘Why did you not wait?’
