Seventh Bride Read Online Free PDF Page B

father was nowhere to be seen.
    Magic.
    Well, then.
    There is a road , Lord Crevan had said.
    And such a road. The cobbles were white and round as skulls. Red leaves washed like blood beneath the trees, making dark puddles under the moon.  
    She took a step forward. She didn’t want to, but the alternative was to stand there until daybreak, because she already knew that she couldn’t go back.  
    She took another step.  
    The sound of the crickets was muffled now, but there were other noises from the wildwood—bugs, birds, tree limbs. She could hear a whippoorwill off in the distance, shouting whip-poor- wil! whip-poor wil! in defiance of any others of his kind that might be nearby.  
    She kept walking.
    Her anger drained out of her with every step, like water sloshing out of a bucket. What did it matter if she was angry? The white road didn’t care. Lord Crevan didn’t care. Her being angry made no difference at all.
    Nothing Rhea did made any difference at all.
    Something groaned in the woods that definitely wasn’t a whippoorwill. It was a gassy bubbling noise, like a belch.  
    Did bears belch? What about trolls?
    She kept walking. Her footsteps were slow and plodding. The road shone savagely before her, and she might as well have been a dark-shelled beetle crawling along it. There was a bear or a troll or maybe a giant savage man-eating whippoorwill in the woods.  
    She didn’t realize she was crying until the road had become too blurred to see, and then a great aching sob came up her throat and she staggered sideways off the road and into the grass.
    It’s all very well to cry for any number of reasons, including the fact that sometimes you simply need a good cry. And since a lot of the reasons for crying occur largely in your head—which is not to say that they’re not real—it actually helps, because after five or ten minutes sobbing into a pillow, the world may not be any better, but at least you don’t feel quite so much like crying. The red hollow under your breastbone is emptied out, and things can be faced with more resolution. (And a swollen nose and itchy eyes, of course, but you can’t have everything.)
    The problem with crying in the woods, by the side of a white road that leads somewhere terrible, is that the reason for crying isn’t inside your head. You have a perfectly legitimate and pressing reason for crying, and it will still be there in five minutes, except that your throat will be raw and your eyes will itch, and absolutely nothing else will have changed.
    Rhea’s throat was raw and her eyes itched, and she realized that she didn’t have a handkerchief. Her face was wet with tears and all the other unfortunate fluids that show up when you’ve had a really good cry, and the lack of a handkerchief seemed like a whole new reason to cry again.  
    She put her forehead on her knees and made a low, animal sound of misery.
    She was feeling so wretched that it took several minutes before she realized something was touching her leg.
    Rhea looked up.  
    There was a hedgehog sitting next to her, with one small paw pressed against her thigh.
    She made the awkward gulping noise of someone who was trying to stop crying because something completely unexpected has just occurred.
    The hedgehog saw that it had her attention and held up something in its paws.
    It was a leaf.
      She stared at the leaf. It was rather large and silvery, with a slight fuzziness to it.
    The hedgehog bobbed its head and pushed the leaf towards her in an unmistakable gesture.  
    The smaller part of her brain had stopped crying and was saying No. No, no, no. This is crazy. This is not normal hedgehog behavior!  
    However, the larger part of her brain, the automatic part that covered her mouth when she sneezed and said, “Excuse me,” when she moved through a crowd, felt that all such concerns were secondary, because she needed a handkerchief right now. Things were happening in her nose that needed to be stopped