Kill the Dead by Tanith Lee

or bears or cats. In various of these fantasies she was physically present, instigating and directing them. Later he met deaths with slower and more subtle formulae, and then she was not there. Later still, she did not think of his death at all, only of him. He had been far younger than she had expected, from the stories. She imagined to herself his youth, his childhood, his birth even. She imagined his old age still to come; sickness and poverty, wealth and loneliness and joy—all his, and she was almost impartial now. She came, in the last descent of night, to behold him as a life, separate from her, a man, an entity. Her hate was no longer a force directed against him. Her hate had become Parl Dro. He stood like a black tree against a backdrop of pure nothingness. She could think of no other thing.
     When the birds began to tell off their notes to the lightening sky, Ciddey rose. For a moment, she was unsure of where she meant to go, and why. Then she recalled, with a dry ebbing at her heart, how everything was settled, that she had no need to concern herself with plans. She had only to act.
     Outside, a bar of cloud lay low on the horizon, like another hill behind the hills. The mountain glistened, cool and sculptured, in the preludes of the morning.
     As she walked along the rims of the slopes, treading north, the dark started to lift, in level sweeps, like flocks of birds flying up from the land. These things were so known to her. The lift and fall of day and night, the mountain, the country. She seemed only a figment of everything that was, only a memory of some other girl who had lived long in this place.
From a rise, quite soon, she saw the stream shining before her.
The yellow asphodel of the spring was gone from its banks. She glanced about bewilderedly, searching for some token flower, but there were only summer daisies in the grass. Nor was the stream as clear as in the spring. It was tinged with the brown clay that lined the channel. Nor did it flow so swiftly as when the melted snow, from the high shelves of its source, ran with it.
Ciddey took off her shoes, as if she meant to go wading in the stream. She set them neatly, side by side, on the bank.
The night chill, retained by the water, made her gasp as she stepped into it. For an instant, she felt incapable of continuing the deed. She stood shivering balanced against the syrupy freezing push of the current, looking wildly about her. Almost at once, a man appeared on the rise beyond the bank, about eighty feet away. It was the man who had sung under her window the night before, who must have done so at the order of Parl Dro to distract her. Fate had directed him.
She stared at the man and he at her. Suddenly he began to wave his arms, one green, one red, and to shout. Then he began to rush toward her down the slope, and the instrument jounced behind him.
He must not reach her in time.
Ciddey let herself fall directly back into the stream. The cold liquid came over her face, entering her nostrils and eyes. She did not strike the stream bed hard, the water was too buoyant. Already it raised her and bore her forward. She was not yet leaden enough to sink and to lie still.
Her braids were coming undone. She should have rebound them. She had not thought to.
She had held her breath, but now she breathed, and let the stunning cold darkness into herself. She was so cold now that she no longer felt it at all.
Somewhere far away she heard the man scrabbling in the stream, not at the right spot, for the current had moved her quite some distance.
         Everything slid away, almost gently now. All but one thing. She understood she must not let go of that.
         The very last sight she had, before all human seeing went out of her, was of the two black eyes of Parl Dro. They seemed to draw her from herself, right out of her bursting, suffocating flesh. Her consciousness, narrowed to a thread, passed through them as through the eyes of needles.