He looked at me, almost like a child. “You’re strong, Lia. You were always the strongest of us. That’s what worried Mother.”
He was making no sense at all. His gaze drifted away, and his eyes were glassy and rimmed in red. “There was nothing I could do,” he said. “Not for either of them.”
I grabbed his shirt and shook him. “Walther! What happened?”
He looked back at me, his lips cracked, his hair falling in his face in filthy, oily strands. His voice was passionless. “She’s dead. Greta’s dead.”
I shook my head. It wasn’t possible.
“An arrow straight through her throat.” His gaze remained vacant. “She looked at me, Lia. She knew. Her eyes. She couldn’t speak. She just looked at me, knowing, and then she fell forward into my lap. Dead.”
I listened as my brother recounted each shattered piece of his dream. I held him, rocked him, huddled with him in the squalor and mud. When I saw Pauline and Berdi round the corner of the icehouse, I waved them away. My brother, my strapping soldier brother, wept in my arms. He straddled a line between tears and dispassionate belief and told me every detail, unable to separate the relevant from the inconsequential. Her dress was blue. She had braided her hair in a circle around her head that morning. The baby was moving. They were on their way to Greta’s aunt’s house. It was only an hour’s ride in the carriage from her parents’ manor. Her sister and her family were in the carriage just behind them. They were going to have lunch. Only an hour, he repeated over and over again. An hour. And daylight. It was daylight. They were just about to cross the bridge from Chetsworth into Briarglen when there was a tremendous roar. He heard the driver shout, there was a loud thump, and then the carriage lurched. He was about to look
out to see what had happened when he heard another sound, the thump, thump, thump of arrows. He turned to shove Greta down, but it was too late.
“They were there to destroy the bridge,” he said. His eyes were wide, his voice numb again, as if he had replayed the scene over in his own head a thousand times already. “We came along just as it was going down. The driver shouted at them, and they killed him. Then sprayed us with more arrows before they galloped off.”
“Who, Walther? Who did this?”
“I took her back to her parents. I knew that’s where she’d want to go. I took her back, Lia. I washed her. I wrapped her in a blanket and held her. Her and the baby. I held her for two days before they made me give her to them.”
“Who did this?”
He looked at me, his eyes suddenly focused again, his mouth contorting in disgust as if I hadn’t been listening. “I have to go.”
“No,” I whispered softly, trying to soothe him. “No.” I reached up to push his hair aside and check the gash in his forehead. He hadn’t told me how he got it. In his crazed state, he probably didn’t even know it was there.
He pushed my hand away. “I have to go.”
He tried to get up, and I pushed him back against the carcass of the wheelbarrow. “Go where? You can’t go anywhere like—”
He pushed me away roughly, and I fell back. “I have to go!” he yelled. “My platoon. I have to catch up.”
I ran after him, pleading for him to stop. I pulled on him, begging him to wait, to at least let me wash his wounds, feed him something, clean his blood-soaked clothing, but he didn’t seem to hear me. He grabbed the reins of his tobiano and led him out of the barn. I yelled. I held on. I tried to pull the reins from him.
He spun, grabbed both of my arms, shook me, screamed. “I’m a soldier, Lia! I’m not a husband anymore! I’m not a father! I’m a soldier!”
Rage had made him into someone I didn’t know, but then he pulled me to his chest and held me, sobbing into my hair. I thought my ribs would crack under his grip, then he pushed away and said, “I have to go.”
And he did.
And I knew there was nothing I could do to stop him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
It can take years to mold a dream. It takes only a fraction of a second for it to be shattered. I sat at the kitchen table, holding a piece of Walther’s shattered dream. Gwyneth, Berdi, and Pauline sat with me.
I had already told them everything I knew. They tried to reassure me that Walther would be all right, that he needed time to grieve, that he needed a lot of things I couldn’t even hear them saying anymore. Instead my head throbbed with my brother’s cries. An arrow straight through her throat.
Their voices were soft, tentative, quiet, trying to help me through this. But how could Walther ever be all right? Greta was dead. She fell open-eyed into his lap. Walther didn’t leave here as a soldier, he left as a crazed man. He didn’t leave to go join his platoon—he left to get his revenge.
Gwyneth reached out and touched my hand. “It’s not your fault, Lia,” she said as if she could read my thoughts.
I pulled my hand away and jumped up from the chair. “Of course it’s my fault! Who else’s would it be? Those packs of hyenas are ranging right into Morrighan now because they’re no longer afraid! All because I refused to marry someone I didn’t love.” I spit the last word out with every bit of the revulsion I was feeling.
“No one knows with certainty if an alliance would have done anything to stop them,” Berdi tried to reason.
I looked at her, shaking my head, thinking that certainty didn’t matter in the least anymore. Guarantees weren’t even part of my universe right now. I would have married the devil himself if there had been even the slimmest chance it could have saved Greta and the baby. Who would be next?