The Blood Mirror Never Lies novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: After the Glass
Odette had asked for the edge of the Hollow, and the Council had let her have it.
I went to see her a month later, on a grey morning, by myself.
She had a one-room hut of turf and black stone, just past the last house on the south lane.
Nobody had built it for her.
She had stacked it herself, badly, over three weeks, with her soft hands bandaged to the wrist.
She was sitting on the doorstep with a bucket between her knees, scrubbing a shirt.
Her pale plait had been cut off at the neck.
She looked up when my shadow reached her, and she did not smile.
"Have you come to look?" she said.
"I've come to see if you're alive."
"I'm alive."
"Good."
She went on scrubbing.
The water in the bucket was grey, and her knuckles were red.
"Does it stop?" she asked, without looking up.
"What?"
"The river. The vault. His face when I held out the cup." Her voice was flat. "I see them every night. All of it, in order, as if the glass had come home with me."
I thought about lying.
"No," I said. "It doesn't stop."
"You wanted that."
"I wanted you to know what it was."
She wrung the shirt out, hard.
"Nobody in the Hollow will speak to me."
"No."
"A woman brought me bread yesterday. She put it on the step and walked away without a word."
"That's the Hollow's way of saying you can stay."
Odette looked up at me then, finally, with her blue eyes red and tired and an old woman's age in them.
"Why did you come, Elspeth?"
"Because you asked me to unwrite you," I said. "And I said no. I wanted to see that I could look at it."
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