The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab Page 0,11

Hausmärchen it reads, by Brüder Grimm.

Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

Her German is rusty, kept in the back of her mind, in a corner she hasn’t used much since the war. Now she dusts it off, knows that beneath the layer of grime she will find the space intact, undisturbed. The boon of memory. She turns through the fragile old pages, eyes tripping over the words.

Once upon a time, she loved this kind of story.

When she was still a child, and the world was small, and she dreamed of open doors.

But Addie knows too well now, knows that these stories are full of foolish humans doing foolish things, warning tales of gods and monsters and greedy mortals who want too much, and then fail to understand what they’ve lost. Until the price is paid, and it’s too late to claim it back.

A voice rises like smoke inside her chest.

Never pray to the gods who answer after dark.

Addie tosses the book aside and slumps back into the grass, closing her eyes as she tries to savor the sun.

Villon-sur-Sarthe, France

July 29, 1714

VIII

Adeline had wanted to be a tree.

To grow wild and deep, belong to no one but the ground beneath her feet, and the sky above, just like Estele. It would be an unconventional life, and perhaps a little lonely, but at least it would be hers. She would belong to no one but herself.

But here is the danger of a place like Villon.

Blink—and a year is gone.

Blink—and five more follow.

It is like a gap between stones, this village, just wide enough for things to get lost. The kind of place where time slips and blurs, where a month, a year, a life can go missing. Where everyone is born and buried in the same ten-meter plot.

Adeline was going to be a tree.

But then came Roger, and his wife, Pauline. Grown up together, and then married, and then gone, in the time it took for her to lace up a pair of boots.

A hard pregnancy, a ruinous birth, two deaths instead of one new life.

Three small children left behind, where there should have been four. The earth still fresh over a grave, and Roger looking for another wife, a mother for his children, a second life at the cost of Adeline’s one and only.

Of course, she said no.

Adeline is three and twenty, already too old to wed.

Three and twenty, a third of a life already buried.

Three and twenty—and then gifted like a prize sow to a man she does not love, or want, or even know.

She said no, and learned how much the word was worth. Learned that, like Estele, she had promised herself to the village, and the village had a need.

Her mother said it was duty.

Her father said it was mercy, though Adeline doesn’t know for whom.

Estele said nothing, because she knew it wasn’t fair. Knew this was the risk of being a woman, of giving yourself to a place, instead of a person.

Adeline was going to be a tree, and instead, people have come brandishing an ax.

They have given her away.

She lies awake the night before the wedding, and thinks of freedom. Of fleeing. Of stealing away on her father’s horse, even as she knows the thought is madness.

She feels mad enough to do it.

Instead, she prays.

She has been praying, of course, since the day of her betrothal, given half her possessions to the river and buried the other half in the field or at the slope of dirt and brush where the village meets the woods, and now she is almost out of time, and out of tokens.

She lies there in the dark, twists the old wooden ring on its leather cord, and considers going out and praying again now, in the dead of night, but Adeline remembers Estele’s fearsome warning about the ones who might answer. So instead, she clenches her hands together and prays to her mother’s God instead. Prays for help, for a miracle, for a way out. And then in the darkest part of night, she prays for Roger’s death—anything for her escape.

She feels guilty at once, sucks it back into her chest like an expelled breath, and waits.

* * *

Day breaks like an egg yolk, spilling yellow light across the field.

Adeline slips out of the house before dawn, having never slept at all. Now she winds her way through the wild grass beyond the vegetable garden, skirts wicking up the dew. She lets herself sink with the weight of them, her favorite drawing pencil clutched in