Page 99 of As Many Souls as Stars
Miriam’s eyes narrowed. She tried to take a step back—she couldn’t. When she looked down, she saw a thin line of sea salt surrounding her feet. ‘How…’
‘The wind drew it for me, while we were flying. This ismystorm, Miriam, not yours.’
‘What—what are you doing?’
‘It’s a ritual,’ Rosamund said. ‘One that poor Thomas Harding wanted to attempt, all those years ago, before you reduced his wife to dust. I needed to empower myself for it—I had to give so much of myself away—but it should work. It has to work.’
Miriam said, both incredulous and pleading, ‘You can’t undo the pact. It’s impossible.’
‘I don’t intend to,’ Rosamund replied. And then she began to glow.
A strange, tearing sensation started in Miriam’s chest. She tried to flinch away, but all her power was spent. She could no longer become immaterial, no longer step into the darkness.
‘Rosamund,’ Miriam gasped. ‘I don’t understand. What are you doing?’
‘Don’t worry, Miriam. I made a promise, centuries ago: one I mean to keep. My soul will be yours.’
A searing light surrounded them, so bright it was blinding, that Miriam’s vision was made white as snow. She felt pain,realpain, a pain so intense she couldn’t speak, couldn’t scream. Distantly, she could hear the wind roaring, the crack of thunder.
‘And yours will be mine,’ Rosamund said.
Then—as the shadows within her fell away—Miriam understood. The grimoire had said that salt and water would weaken a demon; the grimoire had given instructions on the swapping of souls. She should have known.She should have known.
It was too late now.
Mortality came to her as a revelation of fire: she felt all the world set itself alight, felt her own life burn from her and then reform, molten. She was falling apart and then she was together again, but the alignment of herself, her heart and bones and blood and darkness, was different and awful andwrong. If this was what it was to be born, Miriam wondered that people could ever be frightened of death. Nothing could be worse than this, the knowledge that you were at the mercy of your own flesh.
Her skin prickled. For the first time, she felt the cold. She felt the ship rock beneath her, and her stomach lurch in turn. She felt the thin layer of salt on her hands, the dampness of her clothes, the weight of them. Her legs trembled. There was a tightness in her chest, and after a moment, she gasped a breath: the relief was immediate. She needed to breathe. Miriam had neverneededto breathe before.
As her vision cleared, she looked at Rosamund.
But she was no longer Rosamund, nor Esther, nor Cybil: she was something else. Her eyes were black and empty, the eyes that studded her arms shimmering with darkness instead of light. When she smiled, the shadows curled themselves possessively around her shoulders.
‘What have you done?’ said Miriam.
‘You know what I’ve done,’ said Harding. ‘I swapped them: light for darkness. My soul is yours, and the pact is fulfilled.’
Miriam looked down at her chest, at the light there, blazing still. ‘No.’
‘A witch’s soul, at least.’ Harding smiled. ‘You haven’t lost everything.’
‘Andyou—’
‘I’ll use my immortality well; better than you have, at least. After three lifetimes of suffering, I’ll appreciate it far more than you ever did.’
‘No,’ Miriam repeated.
Harding said, ‘Yes, my love. And you know something? Fear suits you, too.’
The storm had stopped. The ship creaked beneath them, thunder silenced, clouds above starting to clear.
Miriam said—too stunned to be angry—‘You can’t do this to me.’
‘I can, and I have.’
‘You’vedestroyedme.’
‘Don’t think of it as a destruction. Think of it as—a remaking. A rebirth.’ Harding laughed, tipping her head back. Her voice echoed, skipped over the water like a stone across the pond; it was the most beautiful thing Miriam had ever heard, the most horrifying. ‘The same as you gave me, twice before. You should be grateful.’
