A Wounded Name (Fiction - Young Adult) (30 page)

Dane will die.

Laertes will follow.

And Horatio …

The best of us will shatter until there’s nothing left.

There’s just nothing left.

The star blazes and burns.

And dies.

CHAPTER 40

There’s a terrible emptiness where my heart should be, where a star danced and twirled and whispered a name that meant so much more than my own.

Just a void, a void that spins and pulls and devours.

Consumes.

It tears the heat from my veins, destroys the tongues of flame.

There’s no cold.

No ice.

Just … nothing.

Dane will die.

Laertes will die.

They’ll both …

But the word doesn’t mean anything, lost to the hungry void and the ring of dazzling darkness that surrounds it, grows with it. It used to mean something, but it doesn’t anymore, the meaning gone along with the whispers and the murmurs and the words inked into my skin with sweat, tears, and kisses.

No one will escape.

The house reeks of death and fear.

Dane made a promise, but he’ll die before he can keep it. A promise is a noose around the neck.

Laertes follows Claudius’ gaze and sees me in the doorway, grabs me with bruising force and drags me up the stairs to my room. He’s frantic, terrified of what he’s about to do, but he’ll do it anyway, because my brother is the biggest kind of fool. He tears Mama’s gowns from the wall, tries to stuff them into the trunk, but there’s too much fabric and too much memory, and it scalds his skin until he runs away.

Always running away.

Running away from the Hunt.

Running away from the stories.

Running away from Mama, from grief, from Elsinore.

Running away from me.

Because Laertes has always been scared of me.

Of
me.

And that kind of fear never dies.

Mama’s wedding dress spills from the trunk like a snowfall, a flag of surrender. I drop my dress to the floor, pull on the cloud of moonlight white. This dress tied Mama to Elsinore, to Father, to Laertes, and later to me, but I was the only one she could stand to be bound to, because I was the only one that understood that bonds didn’t have to be cages. Because I was the one who could never walk away.

All my life, I’ve been a bruise against the world.

Now I’m a ghost.

No one ever sees the ghosts.

Should never.

No good can come of ghosts.

Dark has fallen, the clouds of an endless day of grey blown away. Blue-white flames flicker in the cemetery, the soil hard and frozen beneath my feet. The staff buried Jack beside my mother and decked their graves in the last of the hothouse flowers before they let the doors stay open, let the cold kill the plants that were never truly alive. Ghosts of flowers.

They didn’t find my father.

But Jack’s grave is dark like my mother’s. There’s no ghost to lament the loss of a life.

Jack’s only regret was that he couldn’t keep the flowers alive.

Ghosts can’t help the flowers live.

Jack will never be a ghost.

But Hamlet is and Hamlet is and they watch me from their grave, solemn and weary. The rage still burns within one, but even he watches me with a terrible compassion, side by side with his better half, identical men whose faces have changed so much in death. They say nothing, just watch me pass through the graveyard, and when I look back over my shoulder from the wrought iron fence, they each lift a hand to me. One angel holds a sword, a terrible, patient justice, but the other clutches a dove rather than release it because it’s terrified at the thought of empty hands. “Good night, child,” they whisper together. “Sleep well.”

But beyond the graveyard are the woods, deep and dark and far from silent, and the flashes of white and grey that no one ever sees. So many of the trees are skeletons now, their leaves a dead blanket beneath my feet, and they reach up to the sky with bony fingers that try to pray, and the wind whistles through their branches to give them voice like a death rattle.

And then the hounds bay, mournful and lost, the despair past the cry that human throats can give, and the Hunt approaches. They glow in the night with their borrowed faerie graces, a warning to those who fear madness. They ride and they ride and they ride, a journey without end, every moment praying for the journey to stop. They slow to a walk and then rein in, and the horses’ heads droop with weariness. The men sit bowed and broken in their saddles, their eyes lost to a wildness and endlessness that human minds were never meant to bear, and the greyhounds across their laps bay and cry.

I lift my cupped hands and the nearest hound sniffs my palms cautiously, nuzzles into the unfamiliar touch. Its tail wags, ever so slightly, and then stops; his head drops back to the horse’s withers and the eyes close with a great, heaving sigh.

I look up into the face that was once human, transformed by centuries of hopelessness. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “Not yet.”

Maybe not ever.

The rider touches his hand to his heart, his lips, his forehead, extends it towards me in salute, and nudges his exhausted mount into motion. The others follow slowly, and then each step falls faster, harder against the frozen earth, and they’re a blur of sorrow and rage in the harsh, frigid wind that stings tears into my eyes.

The woods aren’t empty, overfull of despair that chokes and withers all it touches, but it drowns in the spinning void in my chest. A silver-white glow beckons me from the sleeping skeletons, and I follow the trail of the lament as it twists through the wind, follow it towards the weepers, the keeners, the sorrow singers, the wails of a night without stars.

They pull me into their circle, but my voice is suited to laughter, not to song, and through every note I can hear the endless, patient murmur of the lake in my bones, my veins, rushing into the void where my heart used to be. The bean sidhe kiss my cheeks and stroke my hair and re-form their circle behind me, their song soft and gentle and so full of love I would weep if I remembered how, but the lake never shares its water, never gives, only takes.

At the shore, the bean nighe nod from their silver basin, heaping bags of cloth between them. There’s so much there, so much fabric soaked in blood and poison, so much death, but I asked them my question already, and the void doesn’t care who else drowns within it. It’s only ever hungry. They slap the clothes against the washboards, the suds clinging to their bare arms.

The morgens dance and laugh and play around the island, and Mama sits like a queen on its shore, the skeletal fronds of the willows still heavy with dried flower crowns around her. Her pale skin glows in the moonlight, surrounded by a wealth of night-purple hair and bruise-colored eyes, only the beginnings of the legacy she gave to me.

I
could escape.

Not the way Dane wants—I’m as bound to Elsinore as my parents before me—but the way Mama does. She escaped and left the path open for me to follow.

Her wedding dress whispers secrets as I cross to the midpoint of the lake, to the frozen chain that leads to the island and the dance and the laughter. The chain sways when I step on it, and I sway with it, the edges of the skirts soaking up the dark water with every foot of progress. The metal burns my feet, so very cold, and delicate fractals break across the surface as the fabric and the skin drag across the ice that would try so hard to form.

Once upon a time there was a star that blazed within my chest and the heat suffused me, melted the ice that tried to form, but now there’s a great, devouring nothingness in its place and the ice still can’t form.

The lake is just as hungry.

Mama steadies me as I land upon the island, and my bones shake with the toll of the bells of the City of Ys. She pulls a wreath of dried roses from the weeping trees and places it carefully upon my head, twining tangled locks of hair through the weave to anchor it there. The bells toll and the bean sidhe sing and my feet move in their familiar pattern around the corona of dead flowers, skirts spinning and twirling like the star that used to dance and murmur.

There’s a city that waits and waits and waits beneath the lake, where thousands of candles burn like stars in the night sky and the bells toll the hours in dozens of cathedrals to float through the darkness and stillness and silence. There’s a city that drowned and now it waits, waits for another to fall so it may rise, but it gave away a key and the tide came in.

The morgens dance, but Mama doesn’t, she just floats a short distance away and watches me with my eyes. I reach out to her, and our fingers barely touch, she’s too far away, farther even than the dried crowns that hover over the rippling surface that reflects back a million billion stars and galaxies, a million billion points of other pains. I stretch and then I’m falling and she catches me, the lake catches me and cradles me and whispers
mine
, and in the terrible emptiness there’s an echoing cry of
mineminemineminemine
.

“Welcome home, Ophelia,” murmurs my mother, and water soaks through a million secrets and carries me deeper into the darkness, but there, in the distance, thousands of candles burn, candles in windows and streets and the hands of women who laugh and dance and play and left fear and grief far behind.

Sound rushes to my head, a throbbing, panicked beat, an iron band across my chest, but Mama takes my hand and leads me closer to the lights that flicker and weave, and the sound bursts with a great cry.

The rest is silence.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Quite simply, this book would not be in your hands right now without the chances extended to me by the fabulous Sandy Lu, Agent Extraordinaire, and my brilliant editor, Andrew Karre, who was honestly in favor of putting in
more puns
. They took a risk on me, and not only are they a joy to work with, but they took my words and helped me craft them into something so much better. I will be forever grateful to both of them and to the amazing teams at L. Perkins Agency and Carolrhoda Lab. A huge thank-you goes to my family. They’ve put up with any number of quirks and neuroses over the years (like walking into a room only to realize I’m talking out loud to my characters) and have always been relentlessly supportive, even when I didn’t feel like I was accomplishing anything. With silly cakes and clipped-out articles, ridiculous over-the-top story ideas and mocking sales strategies just to make me laugh, they’ve been there every step of the way.

Thank you to the crew at work, not just for being excited for me but also for listening to me prattle on about everything. Also to those at the Archer Road CFA—aka my Writing Cave—for babysitting the girl writing novels in the corner and keeping me well supplied with caffeine and enthusiasm. Veronica, Christine, and Margaret were my first readers in this, so huge thanks for their feedback, especially Veronica, who listened to me endlessly on every neurotic worry and project detail for the last eight years and is probably the only one who’ll ever understand why family trees crack me up. Older gratitude goes to the Ros and Guil gang: Betty-Jane, JD, and Jeff. We drove everyone else (and one another) crazy, but our endless debates and questions are really the genesis of this book, especially the Wine and Laundry Night discussions with Jeff that sparked a lifelong fascination with Ophelia.

I think all modern writers owe a huge debt to their teachers, but there are a few I’d like to mention by name: Dr. Robert Carroll, who saw promise in a ten-year-old’s awful stories and cheered me on long after I was out of his classroom; Tammy Meyers, who taught me how closely writing and drama are linked; Anne Shaughnessy, who had us in stitches with Falstaff and Hal and in awe with
As You Like It
, our first realization that Shakespeare was allowed to be
fun
; Robert Wentzlaff, who not only gave me a chance but also taught me so much about dreams and achieving them; Ted Lewis, who taught me that novels and plays spring from the same impulse; and Dr. John Omlor, my honors thesis adviser, who was the first person to tell me to Do Something with my writing. From all of you I learned more than I can possibly say, and I’m forever in your debt.

Every day I am awed and humbled by the amazing YA community, the genuine fellowship that exists among authors, readers, bloggers, and aspirants. The advice, enthusiasm, and support, the no-holds-barred cheering for everyone’s accomplishments, the open arms with which they welcome everyone transforms a nerve-racking time into something wondrous. A particular shout-out goes to Tessa Gratton, who’s always ready with a hugely inappropriate (i.e.
awesome
)
Hamlet
joke—the Bard, I think, would be proud.

And finally, to you, because readers are the ones who make all of this possible. Thank you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dot Hutchison has worked in retail, taught at a Boy Scout camp, and fought in human combat chessboards, but she’s most grateful that she can finally call writing work. When not immersed in the worlds-between-pages, she can frequently be found dancing around like an idiot, tracing stories in the stars, or waiting for storms to roll in from the ocean. She currently lives in Florida. This is her debut novel. Visit her online at
www.dothutchison.com
.

DOT HUTCHISON
has worked in retail, taught at a Boy Scout camp, and fought in human combat chessboards, but she’s most grateful that she can fi nally call writing work. When not immersed in the worlds-between-pages, she can frequently be found dancing around like an idiot, tracing stories in the stars, or waiting for storms to roll in from the ocean. She currently lives in Florida. this is her debut novel. Visit her online at
www.dothutchison.com
.

Front cover image: © Brooke Shaden.

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