The End of the Sentence by Maria Dahvana Headley, Kat Howard

were the stakes? Tell him you will help.  
    Hands holding hooves. Whose hooves? What was Dusha Chuchonnyhoof? No one had told me that, for all that there were threats and vows and promises. No one had said what sort of creature he was. No one sees him, Warden Kern had said. No one had described the goblin I was meant to keep bound. No one had told me why he needed binding. 
    The bedroom window was open and I could smell fall coming in, leaves beginning to crumble into dust. There was a cool breeze hitting the back of my neck, but in the closet it was hot as a forge. 
    Beneath each of the sets of shoes, there was a letter.
    No, not a letter. A contract. 
    The first one was written out in fading brown ink, the handwriting unfamiliar to me. It had a location too, Gretna Green, Scotland . 
    I picked the paper up from the shelf, and shuddered. Beneath it, there was a long braid of hair, two different sorts. One red, one black, twisted into a coil and tied with a faded string. 
     
    Samira Eld is wedded to Theodore Miller this first of November, in the year of our lord seventeen hundred and fifty-four. Witnessed by the blacksmith priest, the former trapper and New World traveler Joseph Weyland, in the blacksmith’s shop at Gretna Green, upon the wedding anvil belonging to this shop. The anvil is rung by the blacksmith priest, and these two are handfasted, promised by their fingers and by their blood to one another, and to their witness, a man of this town, brother-in-marriage (now bereaved) to this blacksmith, who shall watch over them, and in deeds, repay them their gifts. 
     
    Beneath that, the signatures of the couple, the signature of Joseph Weyland, and a mark. The C and W brand. Followed by the signature of the wedding’s witness. The flowing looping lines, the dark ink, the handwriting I knew all too well.
     
    With this hammer and this anvil, with this promise, I take your hands to mine, 
     
    the last line of the contract read, and then, it was signed. 
     
    Dusha Chuchonnyhoof.

16.
     

    I went through the rest of the contracts quickly. Name after name, each one witnessed (witnessed or much more?) by Chuchonnyhoof. Centuries of marriages. 
    The weddings moved from Scotland to the deck of Glashtyn , a ship somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean. I quivered, imagining a monster aboard a ship, though what monster I still didn’t know. Hooves on a deck. Two hooves, not four. There were never four shoes, and it was only now that I considered that. A picture of Dusha Chuchonnyhoof assembled itself in my mind, hooves on animal legs, a man’s muscled torso. 
    The next wedding was in Massachusetts, the two women, and I thought about that for a moment, the time that this had occurred, and the place. Inez Weyland and Isabella Fuller. At last, the anvil seemed to have shifted to the Oregon Territory, where, for a hundred eighty years and more, the anvil weddings had been, it seemed, taking place here, at the blacksmith’s shop in Ione. 
    It dawned on me that blacksmith’s shop in Ione meant my house. The anvil below this property was the anvil upon which these weddings had been performed. 
    Beneath some of the contracts, there were other items. I found a pocketwatch with a locket containing a delicate portrait in watercolor, a beautiful woman whose face reminded me of Lischen’s, the entirety of the image no larger than my fingerprint. All of the contracts had locks of hair, braided together, presumably from the married couple. 
    They’d all taken place on the first of November. Beginning in America, some of the contracts had additional clauses. 
     
    Robert March is wedded to Annika Miller, this first of November, in the year of our lord eighteen hundred and three. Witnessed by the blacksmith priest, Marvel Weyland, here in the blacksmith’s shop at Ione, in the Oregon Territory, over the wedding anvil belonging to this shop. The anvil is rung by the blacksmith priest, and these two are handfasted, promised by