“A bridegroom hears them calling, wakes from eternal sleep, to seek his love, his Geneviève, who married her Louis. Beyond her glowing window, fair Geneviève doth sing”—despite his mother’s request, the boy began humming along—“to the babe upon her breast. The bridegroom starts to weep.” She hesitated now, her hand stilling on the boy’s hair as he continued the song without her.

“The dead should not remember. Beware the night they dream. For in their chest is memory—”

“Of a heart that cannot beat,” the woman said softly, no longer singing. The boy grinned, and together, they finished the disturbing lullaby. “Beneath the moon of harvest, a ripple stirs the leaves. The veil is thin, the babe a’grins, and even ghouls shalt grieve.”

The boy let out a loud, delighted cackle. “He was a zombie. Right, maman? The bridegroom was a zombie?”

“I think a ghoul,” she offered, her eyes unfocused. She still clutched the boy’s head to her chest, tighter than necessary. “Or maybe a different sort of spirit. A wraith.”

“Will I become a wraith too, maman?”

She closed her eyes as if pained. “Never.”

The conversation drifted from there. Nausea churning in my stomach, I watched as they eventually stood, walking hand in hand back the way they’d come. Nicholina did not blink. She stared at the boy’s back with naked longing, unwilling to spare even a glance at the woman. At the boy’s mother. Nicola. “What was his name?” I asked quietly.

She answered with equal softness. “Mathieu.”

“Mathieu le Claire?”

The boy grew smaller and smaller in the distance. “I was only seventeen,” she whispered instead, lost in her memories. I saw the events in her mind as clearly as the field of lavender: how she’d loved a man—a fair-skinned, ginger-haired man from their mountain village—and how they’d conceived a child who they in turn loved without question, completely and unconditionally. How the man had died unexpectedly from the cold, how their son had fallen ill shortly after, how she’d tried everything from magic to medicine to heal him. She’d even taken him to a priest—or the closest approximation to one—in a distant land, but he’d explained Mathieu’s sickness as “divine retribution” and turned them away.

Nicholina had killed him. His had been the first life she’d ever taken.

She hadn’t known La Voisin then. If she had, maybe Mathieu would’ve—

“Out of my thoughts, little mouse,” she snarled, jerking her head back and forth as if to dislodge an irksome fly. “We don’t want to see it, no, we don’t want to see—”