Cobweb Bride by Vera Nazarian

breath unless she consciously willed it.
    There was no need for heartbeat, or for breath, now.
    The Infanta stood before them, dead and yet living, and their hands shook while they crossed themselves, in terror.
    “I will see the Birthday Gifts now,” she whispered.
     
    T he man came riding like the wind. He swept through the darkness of the village Oarclaven, waking Percy from her freezing sleep as she sat on her father’s porch.
    He wore red and gold, muted by the night, and yet the design of his livery and the pennant he bore was recognizable as the Duke Vitalio Goraque’s own colors.
    “Neither side wins!” he cried. “It’s a riot, but neither side wins! Witchcraft and unholy abomination is upon us!”
    And as people started to come out of their houses, the messenger’s hoarse voice continued railing and dissolving into echoes as he receded along the streets, on his way to the heart of the Dukedom, the Castle Goraque.
    Percy got up, stomping her wooden feet, not feeling anything in her frozen extremities—were these her toes, her fingers, or some other’s?—just as the door behind her opened and her sister Patty’s face peered from the inside, silhouetted against the fireplace glow.
    At the same time the neighbors from two houses down opened their door, in turn causing old uncle Roald from directly across the street to step out into the cold in nothing but his long nightgown and sleeping cap. “Heh? What was that about?” he bellowed, sending the dogs to barking and thus waking up the rest of the neighborhood as surely as the messenger had managed to disturb only a portion of their slumber.
    Percy’s father was now standing behind her, his face shadowed, and his large palm on Patty’s tiny shoulder, moving her gently out of the way and stepping onto the porch.
    He saw his middle daughter and came awake, it seemed. “What’s this? Go inside, girl, you’ll freeze  . . .” he whispered hoarsely, his voice leached of all strength by tears.
    Percy obeyed, gratitude welling within her—despite a wall of winter-ice atrophy that seemed to have grown solid, taken hold of her flesh (death had latched onto her but did not consume). She had dreamed as she sat in the cold, it seemed, dreamed of unresolved moving shadows and delicate white cobwebs. And now she slipped past her father and sister into their dwelling, into the firelight and the stilled death and air only slightly warmer than the winter outside.
    Out in the street the neighbors continued conversing. She heard their familiar voices talk of Ducal armies and battles fought on ice in the dark. But all she could see was her mother Niobea’s stonelike form, sitting at the bedside of Gran, holding the icon of the Mother of God at her breast, while the same shadow stood in the corner.
    That and her grandmother’s rhythmic death rattle.
    It would not stop.
     
    H ours later came dawn, but no respite for old Bethesia. Only the winter sun had risen, turning the sky milk-grey.
    Belle and Patty had fallen asleep in their chairs, and Niobea seemed not to breathe as she sat with her eyes closed, as the dawn seeped in through the slits in the poorly shuttered windows.
    The fire in the hearth had burned down sometime in the middle of the night, soon after Alann had gone to fetch the priest after all. The priest’s residence was on the other end of the village and he would probably show up only after it was light.
    Percy sat at the table, watching them all, hearing Bethesia’s regular dying breath, until her thoughts clouded with weariness and she was hallucinating.
    Or so she thought. Because the shadow of darkness seemed at times to move like vapor and then again be frozen in repose as a human figure, never looking at her or anyone else but the old woman, watching and waiting.
    As the light outside deepened, there were harsh sounds of metal and many horses—heavy cavalry. The Duke’s knights were returning.
    Niobea looked up once, slowly, her gaze drawn to