line, stretched straight and narrow toward the village square. On the other side, the church stands waiting, pale and stiff as a tombstone, and she knows that if she walks in, she will not come out.
Her future will rush by the same as her past, only worse, because there will be no freedom, only a marriage bed and a deathbed and perhaps a childbed between, and when she dies it will be as though she never lived.
There will be no Paris.
No green-eyed lover.
No trips on boats to faraway lands.
No foreign skies.
No life beyond this village.
No life at all, unless—
Adeline pulls free of her father’s grip, drags to a stop on the path.
Her mother turns to look at her, as if she might run, which is exactly what she wants to do, but knows she can’t.
“I made a gift for my husband,” says Adeline, mind spinning. “I’ve left it in the house.”
Her mother softens, approving.
Her father stiffens, suspicious.
Estele’s eyes narrow, knowing.
“I’ll just fetch it,” she continues, already turning back.
“I’ll go with you,” says her father, and her heart lurches and her fingers twitch, but it is Estele who reaches out to stop him.
“Jean,” she says in that sly way, “Adeline cannot be your daughter and his wife. She is a woman grown, not a child to be minded.”
He finds his daughter’s eyes, and says, “Be quick.”
Adeline has already taken flight.
Back up the path, and past the door, into the house, and through, to the other side, to the open window, and the field, and the distant line of trees. The woods standing sentinel at the eastern edge of the village, opposite the sun. The woods, already cloaked in shadow, though she knows there is still light, still time.
“Adeline?” calls her father, but she doesn’t look back.
Instead, she climbs through the window, wood snagging on the wedding dress as she stumbles out, and runs.
“Adeline? Adeline!”
The voices call out after her, but they stretch thinner with every step, and soon she is across the field, and into the woods, breaking the line of trees as she sinks to her knees in the dense summer dirt.
She clutches the wooden ring, feels the loss of it even before she tugs the leather cord over her head. Adeline does not want to sacrifice it, but she has used up all her tokens, given every gift she could spare back to the earth, and none of the gods have answered. Now this is all she has left, and the light is thin, and the village is calling, and she is desperate to escape.
“Please,” she whispers, her voice breaking over the word as she plunges the band down into the mossy earth. “I will do anything.”
The trees murmur overhead, and then go still, as if they too are waiting, and Adeline prays, to every god in the Villon woods, to anyone and anything who will listen. This cannot be her life. This cannot be all there is.
“Answer me,” she pleads as the damp seeps into her wedding dress.
She squeezes her eyes shut, and strains to hear, but the only sound is her own voice on the wind and her name, echoing in her ears like a heartbeat.
“Adeline…”
“Adeline…”
“Adeline…”
She bows her head against the soil and grips the dark earth and screams, “Answer me!”
The silence is mocking.
She has lived here all her life and never heard the woods this quiet. Cold settles over her, and she doesn’t know if it’s coming from the forest or from her own bones, giving up the last of their fight. Her eyes are still shut tight, and perhaps that is why she doesn’t notice that the sun has slipped behind the village at her back, that dusk has given way to dark.
Adeline keeps praying, and doesn’t notice at all.
Villon-sur-Sarthe, France
July 29, 1714
IX
The sound, when it comes, is a low rumble, deep and distant as thunder.
Laughter, Adeline thinks, opening her eyes and noticing, finally, how the light has faded.
She looks up, but sees nothing. “Hello?”
The laughter draws itself into a voice, somewhere behind her.
“You need not kneel,” it says. “Let us see you on your feet.”
She scrambles up, and turns, but she is met only by darkness, surrounded by it, a moonless night after the summer sun has fled. And Adeline knows, then, that she has made a mistake. That this is one of the gods she was warned against.
“Adeline? Adeline?” call the voices from the town, as faint and faraway as the wind.
She squints into the shadows between the trees, but there is no