Cobweb Bride by Vera Nazarian Page A

the windows, but she did not go to open the shutters. This was an ongoing wake and death was in the house. Or so she thought.
    Belle came awake with a start. Her first look was toward the old woman in the bed, but no need to ask—the labored breathing could be heard from across the room, dissonant solemn music. And so she moved and stood up, shivering, and then gently came to stand at Niobea’s side.
    “Should I start the fire?” she whispered.
    Niobea wordlessly nodded.
    Outside in the street, under a silent dusting of snow, Duke Vitalio Goraque’s army continued their clanging march home.
     
    A lann came back with the priest just before noon. Father Dibue was a large man with a craggy face, coarse ruddy skin, and a jutting chin. He wore his hood tight over his face and underneath there were many layers of grey shawl. His mittens were thick and barely worn, and his woven belt held a number of key rings and pouches.
    “Ah, blessed Mother of God!” Niobea exclaimed at the sight of him. She quickly stood up, losing balance for a moment from having sat still all night long.
    “Bless you, my daughter,” the priest replied in an automatic and habitual monotone. “Make room now,” he added, stepping forward to lean over the bed.
    He stared in silence, punctuated only by the old woman’s breathing, then straightened and said, “Rejoice, Alann. Your good mother is not of this world much longer, and a finer place awaits her clean soul. She is fading even as we look upon her.”
    Alann cleared his throat.
    But it was Niobea who again spoke. “She’s been fading thus since last nightfall, Father, and it does not look like she will be taken into the Arms of the Lord any time soon.”
    Father Dibue cleared his throat, wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, then began removing his coat and shawls and mittens. Underneath he wore the dark wool robes of the parish. Belle stepped up to receive his articles of clothing and hung them up carefully on pegs near their own.
    “Sometimes,” Father Dibue said, “though everything is in the Lord’s Hands, undoubtedly, there’s the urgent need to administer the Holy Sacrament of the Last Rites. Otherwise, the humble servant of the Lord lingers, such as now, waiting for grace, for absolution.”
    “Then proceed, Father, I beg you,” Alann said.
    The priest nodded and reached for his bag.
     

 
     
    Chapter 3
     
    H e was numb and cold as winter.
    Ian Chidair, Duke Hoarfrost, had no blood inside of him. It had drained completely from his body by the time he walked up the sloping incline of the shore and stopped before his men.
    The soldiers stood holding torches against the heavy blue twilight, some mounted, many on foot. His son, Beltain, sat on his warhorse.
    They had grown silent, all of them. It was peculiar to observe the stricken expressions on those nearest, and the hastily concealed signs of the cross that swept across the ranks in pure animal reflex.
    “Father? Are you my father? Are you . . . dead? ” his son had asked him.
    And Hoarfrost had to pause and think, his mind sluggish and devoid of emotion as though he resided in a waking dream.
    “My . . . son. I don’t . . . know.” The words came with uncustomary difficulty, forced and hissing, because his chest was constricted somehow—indeed, frozen like a side of meat.
    Ian Chidair realized that he was not breathing and made a conscious effort to inhale, so that he could form words, so that he could speak. But as his chest expanded that first time, his lungs were burning, seemingly on fire, endlessly so, with  . . . ice; they had stiffened in rigor mortis.
    Or maybe it was the simple action of cold upon water. Each intake of air caused him to fight against a new crust of ice that filmed over the insides of his lungs, and each ballooning of the membranes was breaking that ice, over and over, so that there were permanent razor-shards inside him.  . . .
    Along with the everpresent ice there was