Vivienne Von Vexx's Arc

Chapter 21 of 21

Vivienne left Wisteria's chamber with the handkerchief in her pocket and the silver ring still on her finger. She had worn the ring since the hunter pressed it into her palm in the chapel. It had been warm then, warm as a living hand. Now, walking the corridor back to her room, she felt it bite into her skin like something pulled from a winter stream. She stopped at her door and looked down. The band no longer sat plain and silver. Pale blue crystals had bloomed along its edge, small and sharp, and a ring of frost clung to the metal. She pulled it off. The skin beneath was red. She carried the ring outside and down through the grove to a broad flat stone she knew, one edged in moss where the trees thinned toward the river. She set the ring on the stone and knelt. She did not know what the change meant. She only knew that the ring had been given to her as a promise, and a promise that turned cold in the night was a warning. She thought of the hunter alone on the far bank. She thought of Wisteria's words about others who walked at night. She picked the ring up again. The cold had not left it. She closed her fist around the crystals and crossed the water. The fire he kept for her was burning when she reached the far side. He had built it wide and low between two fallen logs, and it threw bright sparks up into the black branches above. He stood when he saw her. She did not slow. She walked to him and opened her hand and showed him the ring. "It went cold," she said. "Tonight. It has never been cold before." He looked at the ice on the band and then at her face. He said his grandmother had told him the ring would change when the one who wore it was in danger of losing what she loved. He said it plainly, the way he said everything. Then he asked her what she wanted to do. She told him the truth. Someone in the castle had watched them by the deer. One had chosen silence. The others would not. If he kept crossing to meet her, one of her brothers would find him, and the ring would go colder still, and then it would stop meaning anything at all. She said she could not ask him to stay on his side of the river forever, and she would not ask him to die on hers. He listened. He took the ring from her palm and set it on a flat rock beside the fire, close enough that the heat should have touched it. The frost did not melt. He looked at that for a long moment. Then he said he was not going back to the village. He said he had already sold what he owned. He said there was a cabin two days' walk downriver where no hunter had ever been, and he would go there, and he would wait, and she could come to him at night for as long as she wanted to come. No fire between them. No water. Just a door she could knock on. Vivienne sat down on the moss beside him. She had carried the face of the one who would stay in her pocket for two hundred years. She had taken it out on bad nights and looked at it and put it back. The face was here now, lit by the fire, waiting for her answer. She said yes. She picked up the ring from the rock. The crystals had begun to soften at the edges. By the time she slid the band back onto her finger, the metal was only cool, and then it was warm again, warm as a living hand. She kept her hand in his while the sparks climbed into the dark above them. In the morning she would tell her brothers she was leaving. They would call it foolish. She would go anyway. The thing she had held small and breakable in her coat pocket was no longer an image. He was sitting beside her, and he had stayed.