Live embalmings were still against imperial law back then, so they had to bring me into tower lands to get it done.
The last days of my life were spent strapped to a bed, locked away on a ship owned by the man I was supposed to have married. Beneath me, the cargo hold was crammed full of a few hundred cadavers pickled in maple vinegar. The boy I’d tried to run away with was down there, dead in the hold, pickled with all the rest. Just thinking about him made me want to scream—but I couldn’t make a sound over the safety gag crammed into my mouth. They were worried I’d bite out my own tongue to spite them.
Honestly, I doubt I had it in me. I’d been an obedient daughter all my life, and it had taken everything just to run away from the marriage to this pale baron. I was wrung dry even before they locked me up for this week long trip to my death.
My father came to see me one last time as we were pulling into port. A servitor waited at the door with his coat. The cheap, mummified undead were everywhere on the pale baron’s ship.
A gangly fox of a man, my father had given me my thick crimson hair, and nothing else but the strap. I loved him, but I feared him far more. Given what he was planning to do to me, I’d say that fear was justified.
“This is the last chance, Aveline.” He yanked the gag out of my mouth and loomed over me. “You didn’t let that boy ruin you, so that sham marriage is nothing but an irritation; it’s not too late. Marvale will still take you, Heaven can only say why.”
I coughed my mouth clear, rubbed the saliva away on my shoulder, and fell into mindless begging. “Please, Father, please. I c-can’t marry that man. I’ll marry anyone else. Anyone but him. After what he did to Dorien—please. Anyone but him.”
Dorien and I had three weeks of paradise after running off to elope. Those were the best weeks of my life, even if we’d been living in a shack in the swamp.
When they finally found us, Marvale had his men drown Dorien in front of me while I screamed and begged.
My father leaned over me. “You killed that boy, you idiot child. Spinning out some fantasy of flitting away? What did you think was going to happen?”
I cringed away from him, pressing my shoulders back into the bed. “Just take me home, p-please. You don’t have to do this.”
“Of course I have to do this! How do you think I look when my own daughter runs off on a marriage contract? I put my honor on the line for you! Did you think of that, you frivolous fool? What will they think of our family? What will they think of me? Is my honor nothing to you? What am I supposed to do, Aveline?”
“I’m sorry,” I whined, losing a decade in atavistic panic and sobbing up at him the way I used to when I was nine. He had to stop this. It was all just some elaborate threat to scare me. It had to be. He couldn’t actually be planning to kill his own daughter, just for honor.
“Are you going to do your duty or not?” Father said.
“Just not him, please, anyone else and I—”
He shoved the gag back in my mouth and stalked to the door. That can’t be it. I screamed into the gag and wept, grasping out with my cuffed hands.
“I ask you for this one thing after all I’ve done for you, and this is how you repay me?” My father shook his head in disgust. “Disobedient child. You forced my hand, Aveline. When they’re pumping your veins full of embalmer, remember that you chose this, not me.”
Those were the last words my father spoke to me while I was still alive.
The embalmer’s smile was stiff and full of stolen teeth. His features were puffy and unsettlingly expressionless, like some alien thing that crawled out of a bog and stuffed itself into a man’s skin.
Before they scrubbed me down, he injected a paralytic into me that turned my every muscle to syrup. I couldn’t even cringe back when his cold hands inspected my bare flesh. They’d stripped me down and scrubbed me raw before laying me on this cushioned medical slab. I could still feel everything: the needle in my arm; the aching hunger in my belly; the paper dry hands of undead servitors rasping across my skin as they buckled my ankles into straps.
I felt everything, and all I could do was blink and weep as the embalmer prepared for the procedure. The cyan light of coldfire flickered from treated bones burning in a lantern overhead.
One by one, the embalmer brought out his set of polished tools, tubes and vials and hooks and needles, and the fear consumed me. I prayed like a lost child, begging every Saint I’d ever known for salvation. Some cowardly wretch in my heart wanted to scream out that I’d changed my mind, that I’d been a fool, that I’d marry anyone my father chose, even that murderous scum who killed my real husband, and that I’d let that man do anything he wanted to me, just so long as he didn’t do this. If I’d been able to speak a single word, I’m sure I’d have given in to the terror. Everything would have been different.
But I could only blink and weep and pray.
Something had to save me. I couldn’t die on an embalmer’s bed, staring up at flickering coldfire, with Dorien dead and sold on as a nameless cadaver. This couldn’t be the end.
“She is a darling little thing, isn’t she?” the embalmer said. He traced the curve of my cheek. “A real pinelander’s pale beauty. I can work with this. No surprise you want it done right. Escoviel would have butchered the job if you took it to him. The man has no finesse.” The embalmer prodded my left breast. I tried to scream. Nothing escaped. “These are going to be a problem, though, if we’re using adder’s poppy. This much fat will soak the adder up and it’ll crystalize. It’ll go stiff, and you’ll get unpleasant clumps. Best is a removal of the breast tissue. We have some reasonable alternatives, and my needlework is top notch. You’ll hardly notice the difference.”
It was like I was already dead. A cadaver cage for a silent a mind.
And I was dead, wasn’t I. I may as well have been. Since Marvale’s men took Dorien to the ground and broke him? Since my father made me watch him get pickled him in maple vinegar?
No. I’d been dead for long before that. I’d been dead all my life, and those three weeks with Dorien were the only time I’d ever been alive.
Marvale spoke up. “Just use pale syrup instead.” I hadn’t known he was in the room, and hearing him made me want to crawl under the bed and die.
Something clattered over my head. They could have cracked open my skull, and I couldn’t have done a thing.
The firelight flickered across the ceiling, cyan and cold.
The embalmer moved into my line of sight. He tweaked the strap around my throat. “That’s not really possible unless we’re dealing with a limb, where we can easily isolate the vasculature. The adder’s going to slither in there.”
“Then just use pale syrup for the whole thing.”
The embalmer laughed, tightening the strap across my forehead, but when Marvale stayed silent, the embalmer frowned, his expression mangled by the puffy ruin of his face. “You’re serious? But the cost?”
“I want this done right. Can you make it happen or not?”
“I… yes, sir, of course.”
“How long will it take?”
“With pale syrup? Three days alive, and another two to finish it off.”
Three days? It was going to take me three days to die? What sort of sick civilization would allow this? Were they all psychopaths, or were they simply burying their guilt under mounds of gold?
What did this embalmer think I’d done to deserve this? Surely he had to have some justification. He’ll find out I did nothing but run out of a marriage, and he’ll let me go. That’s what’s going to happen.
“Good,” Marvale said. “I can take her back with me on my trip home. Leave us for a moment, I need a word before you start.” Marvale waved the embalmer out of his own lab.
I’d never felt more exposed in my life than when Marvale strolled up to me. I wanted to beg, to run and scream, to do anything but just lay there, staring up at him in unbridled terror. This man was about to have me murdered—and then he was going to take my body with him, and keep it as toy.
Anyone but him.
“What idiocy compelled you to choose that vagrant over me?”He trailed a finger across my lips. I tried to bite his finger. It was an absurd impulse, like a wounded rabbit scratching in a panic—but I couldn’t even accomplish that. A trapped rabbit had more power than me. “Well whatever it was, I’m sure you’re regretting your choices now, aren’t you?” Marvale leaned in, skin immaculate, orange eyes like hammered brass knives, dissecting me, piece by piece. “You humiliated me, you know that?” He trailed his fingers through my hair, almost tenderly.
Marvale grinned like an open wound and straightened, disappearing into the blur of my tears. “But we’ll get even in the end.” He strolled out of the lab. “Best get started.”
No no no, there has to be something. This can’t be it.
But the embalmer walked back into the room. I blinked furiously, following his puffy face with my eyes, watching for some sign. He’d collapse. That had to be it. Or someone would rush in at the last minute, papers in hand, demanding I be set free. Something. There had to be something. This couldn’t be how I died.
But it was.
They threaded the first needle in through the vein in my hollow of my elbow. Pearlescent white fluid pumped into my veins, spreading out a frigid gnawing ache, like starving hunger that saturated out every muscle fiber, and just when that ache had grown agonizing enough I’d tear out my own arm at the socket just to get free from it, the worst came—a violent, impaling hell, like someone was rolling a sea urchin up the inside of my veins, creeping ever closer to my heart.
My mind splintered, and slowly, I lost my hold on the world, swallowed by the sensation. Time smeared out in a river of hell. The embalming fluid percolated through my muscle fibers, saturated the structures of my brain. It pulsed in the chambers of my heart, cold as the northern wastes.
I died, one organ at a time. I died in my skin. I died in my bowels. I died in my eyes, losing my grip on vision. I died in my muscle fibers and my bone marrow, died in my lungs and my fingertips. I died slowly, and then I died all at once.
But I didn’t stay dead for long.