After a while of following the bound spirit’s sprightly but rather ungainly pace, Gabrielle tired of their silence.
“Do you have a name?”
“One that no longer fits.”
“Well, I have to call you something. Will Pumpkin do?”
“It most certainly will not. It’s completely degrading and beneath my station.”
“Well pardon me, your Majesty. Will Pumpkin Prince suffice?”
“Once again—”
“I’m glad we’re in accord. Now, where are we going?”
“The Sunset Fields.” He said this as if it were a self-evident truth.
“Right, now what is that exactly?”
The Pumpkin Prince let out an exaggerated sigh, but it was an improvement from his earlier dolorousness, so Gabrielle didn’t comment.
“It is, as the name implies, a place of repose before the spirit returns to the mortal coil. A final place to contemplate and come to terms with the cycle of life. It is also, if I may be so bold as to assert so, the most beautiful locale in this realm. Picture, if you will, red and gold lilies blanketing a flat expanse of grassy field. In the light, they shine with muted warmth and wave in the gentlest of breezes, murmuring as spirits picnic together, sharing company and elderberry wine as they prepare to fade into their next existence.”
Gabrielle smiled at the imagery, feeling the ghost of warm breeze on her cheeks. “Certainly better than the Candlewood, or that puddle-filled mire.”
The Pumpkin Prince shot her a narrowed-eyed glance.
“What were you doing in the Candlewood?”
Any pleasantness from the Sunset Fields imagery vanished as mud sucked at Gabrielle’s chest and panicked fog filled her head. She tripped and grabbed onto the Prince’s arm, which felt like a gnarled branch.
“It was awful. The Candlewood, the Maze. I wasn’t myself in either of them. I didn’t mean to enter them, I didn’t know, and they sucked me right in. If Mother Hall hadn’t found me, or if I hadn’t ended up at the Snake-”
“Snake?”
“Huge snake, with the world in his eyes. He told me a nursery rhyme.” Gabrielle laughed a hiccup laugh. “I thought this place couldn’t get any stranger.” She shrugged and looked at the Prince, expecting a commiserating camaraderie. Instead his eyes held a light like awe.
“You met with the World Snake? With Tavaros?”
“Accidentally,” Gabrielle said hurriedly. “And that was after the river had ‘washed me right clean.’” It was an important concession, but she wasn’t sure why.
“Right,” the spirit said, unconvinced. “Well, you are a playing piece.”
“And isn’t that just grand. I get to travel this lovely place. Might be worth it to see these fields of yours, though.”
The Prince shifted his shoulders, uncomfortable. “This isn’t the land at its best. My absence— that is, in my absence, the state of the realm has deteriorated. Rapidly.” He threw out an arm, and it took Gabrielle a second to realize he was gesturing at the realm and not just flailing for balance. “Usually there are spirits everywhere, walking about on their paths so that the hills glimmer with them, not shut up in the grave towns, Candlewood, or memory caves. People are passing on without passing through their paths. Death is not as it should be.”
Strange to think that Death, mysterious and foreign, had a status quo. Gabrielle smiled at the thought, a bit wistful.
“What is it like? Normally?”
“Beautiful.” Though his face looked horrific skewed by his knife-thin smile, it still conveyed his pride. “At a certain point in their journey, spirits just open up. They talk to everyone. There is no fear, no shame, none of the petty hostility of life. They realize, ‘I’m dead, you’re dead, we’re all dead, what’s the point of worrying about country or creed?’ And when that occurs, so does the learning, the acceptance, the realization. Two spirits meet on the hill, who maybe met once in battle, and they sit down for a chat.”
“They didn’t talk to me,” Gabrielle muttered, remembering the village she had first found herself in.
“Well, that’s different.” The spirit pulled at a loose string on his purple jacket. “You’re alive.”
“Oh. I guess so.”
The spirit paused for a moment and faced her. “Why do you say it like that?”
“Like what?”
An agitated shrug. “Like a surprise, or a disappointment. Like you forgot.”
“Oh.” Gabrielle looked at the lavender sky and winking orange moon. “I do forget. This realm, though it feels so often like a dream, like a world barely held together, illogically, at the seams… it feels more real than my life out there, in the waking world. Or, it feels more familiar. Out there, it was all wrong. Love, laughter, and all those things that colored life, I lacked. It felt predestined at the time, but looking back, it was as if I had never found my footing. And then the Kaerents whipped me away to that stupid school for two years, and that shred of purpose I had as a Candlemaiden, as Mother Hall’s heir, that was stolen away from me.”
Gabrielle bent and tore out a handful of grass, which slipped from her fingers in an unfelt wind and faded away. Digging her nails into her palms and squeezing her eyes shut, she took a short breath. “I only felt right again, like I was doing something right again, when I bound you in that pumpkin, and clearly that was a mistake, so I ask you, what good does it do for me to be out there? To be alive? As least this journey, this quest, gives me a sense of purpose, lets me know concretely that I’m doing something. That my life, or my death, or — whatever — my existence matters.” Gabrielle pushed her fingers in the hollows between each eye and her nose, and swept them to the side with bruising force. She struggled to find her next words.
“You’ve got it all wrong,” the spirit said, quietly, without a scrap of his customary smugness. “That’s the beauty of life. There is no defined path. It’s not like Death, with its waystations and checkpoints. You can wander as much as you want, take all the roads untravelled or never stray from your village square. There’s love and hatred and vitriol, but you don’t have to make sense of it all. You can’t. That’s what this realm is for.
“I’m not saying you should stumble through life blindly. But no one feels perfect when they’re out there, and the ones that almost do are usually ignoring the truth. You have to find your own purpose, to forge your own routes and orchards, caves and grave towns. No one can give it to you. Or, no one can force it on you. Not even the Ladies. You get to choose what you believe and what it means, and even if you’re wrong, well, maybe you’ll have better luck next time.
“I never understood it, the human preoccupation with death. The fear. It’s a part of life’s cycle. The day coming to a close, the sun setting so it may rise again on the morrow.”
“Harkenhilt,” Gabrielle said, “The archivist called this realm Harkenhilt.”
“A good name,” the Pumpkin Prince agreed, nodding gravely. “Enna has good taste.”
“You know the archivist?” At Gabrielle’s surprised tone, the earnest mood was suddenly broken, and the Prince looked at her with what Gabrielle now— Ladies help her— fondly regarded as his normal condescension.