It was still white, and it still glowed under the moon, and the cobbles were still as rounded as old skulls, and the leaves still looked like splashes of blood across the stones, but Rhea felt better. She was still going somewhere terrible, but she had a hedgehog, dammit.
The Seventh Bride (2015) written by Ursula Vernon under the pseudonym T. Kingfisher is a retelling of the story of Bluebeard.
Fifteen year old Rhea is an unremarkable miller's daughter whose main job is making sure that mice and gremlins don't disturb the milling process and that her arch-enemy swan doesn't steal yet another lunch from her. Her relatively care-free existence comes to a screeching halt when a mysterious nobleman by the name of Lord Crevan visits the mill one day and asks for her hand in marriage out of the blue. Even in Rhea's magical world, noblemen don't marry a miller's daughter of no particular beauty (at fifteen, no less), so Rhea and her family feel understandably nervous and suspicious about the nobleman's sudden interest.
As it turns out, Lord Crevan has quite a bit of hidden history simmering behind his polite, but sinister facade. And he is a man with a plan...
The story contains the following tropes:
- Affably Evil: Lord Crevan is polite and very well-mannered, never raising his voice. It's all an act, as he is a thoroughly rotten person.
- Beautiful Singing Voice: Before her marriage to Crevan, Ingeth had such a voice.
- Big Bad: Lord Crevan is a cruel, vain and selfish bigamist who steals things from his wives (magic, voice, eyesight, willpower, even death) and sells them to rich customers.
- Big Damn Heroes: The hedgehog summons hundreds of other hedgehogs to help Rhea complete her first task successfully.
- Big Fancy Castle: Lord Crevan's abode is not only a beautiful mansion, but it's suggested that it has a mind of its own. Crevan managed to tame it by marrying the heiress of the family who owned the mansion, the Lady Elegans.
- Body Horror: As a result of Crevan's thefts, Ingeth has horrific scars on her throat, and Hester has been transformed into a sort of undead creature.
- Broken Bird: Sylvie's health and her mind have been affected by what Crevan did to her. Unbeknownst to anyone, a part of herself had been stuck in the clock tower for years, which further accentuated her mental fragility.
- Ingeth is a rather unsympathetic example, but she qualifies. A very religious woman who is implied to have genuinely loved Crevan, she blamed his other wives for his actions until Crevan took her voice and sold it, leaving her with a terrible neck wound in the process. Maria theorizes that she remained subservient to him as a coping mechanism; it was easier for her to see the theft of her beautiful voice as a punishment for a sin she committed than to accept the fact that she was the victim of random cruelty.
- Building of Adventure: A darker example. Although most of the adventuring happens outside, in the garden, the house is implied to have a mind of its own and the tiles in the great hall drop suddenly like clockwork. The tile drop is caused by the Clock Wife who hopes she will be able to catch Crevan like this and kill him.
- Cloudcuckoolander: Sylvie, especially the part of her which became stuck in the clock.
- Cool Horse: Rhea remarks on beautiful and unusually colored horse Lord Crevan is riding.
- Deal with the Devil: Lord Crevan managed to turn his own marriage contract into one, without the knowledge of his future brides. He realized that marriage is a contract which entitles him to take away one thing from his bride, and used his marriages to take away his wives' sight, voice, life, death and sell it to the highest bidder. By the time he wants to marry Rhea, Crevan is aging and wants to take her youth.
- Dissonant Serenity: Maria and Sylvie came come across like this, as they are fairly serene for women who have been tricked into marriage, robbed of their precious gifts and forced to live with (and in Maria's case, serve) their oppressor. Maria explains this in a roundabout way when she says that if she sits and cries about things, it's not going to change anything, so she might as well save her energy.Rhea: And this is insane—and you're making biscuits!Maria: Yes, I am. We could both sit down at the table and cry about it. And in a few hours things will still be insane, and the golem-wife will still be hanging there and there will still be no one we can tell, and the only thing that will be different is that we will be hungry. And there will be no biscuits.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: Together with Maria and the Clock Wife, Rhea takes down Lord Craven and frees the wives and the region of his influence, but the road to victory was long and very emotionally-taxing.
- Evil Sorcerer: Crevan, although he stole his magic from Maria, a genuine witch.
- Familiar: Rhea's hedgehog and Maria's bear.
- Golem: Crevan is fond of experimenting with golems and creating different creatures subservient to him. The golem birds who greet Rhea on her way to the mansion qualify, as well as the poor Golem Wife.
- Immortality Seeker: Lord Crevan is getting old so he wants to steal Rhea's youth. That's why he proposes when she is so young, and why he's be interested in an otherwise completely unremarkable miller's daughter.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Three.
- Rhea is ready to give her death to the Clock Wife. But instead...
- Maria takes this upon herself and sacrifices her death to the Clock Wife instead. And finally...
- Ingeth clings to Crevan and prevents him from saving himself from the abominations who wanted to get him, leading to both her death and Crevan's.
- Hidden Depths: Maria is more than just Crevan's cook. She was a powerful witch who still retains a bit of her magic and who is biding her time until she finds an opportunity to get rid of Crevan.
- Lady in Red: Rhea receives a red dress from Lord Crevan, to serve as her wedding gown.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Crevan benefited immensely from Ingeth's religion-fueled Stockholm Syndrome. At the end of the book she even tries to save him from the wrath of the clock wife, who's reluctant to hurt her. Seeing this, he tries to use Ingeth as a Human Shield. When moments later the road-demons he'd conjured up come for him, Ingeth refuses to let him save himself.
- Marry for Love: Some of the wives fell for Crevan initially. He doesn't bother charming Rhea, since their relative social standings mean she has no actual choice in the matter, but he had to court and win some of the others. Ingeth maintains a twisted devotion towards him, in spite of what he did to her.
- Meaningful Name: Crevan. 'Craven', craving (for whatever he can take and the benefits he reaps selling it), creep.
- Mysterious Past: We never really find out much about Lord Crevan's past beyond his relationship with his wives..
- No Name Given: We never find out what the Clock Wife was called, if she even had a name to begin with.
- Non-Human Sidekick: On her way to Lord Crevan's hidden mansion, Rhea meets a very intelligent hedgehog who decides to accompany her on her journey, and even helps her complete one of Crevan's tasks.
- Old Man Marrying a Child: Crevan is probably in his forties (if not middle aged) and Rhea is only fifteen. She thinks that she is too young to marry, and is unsettled by the fact that Crevan wants someone so young.
- Only Sane Woman: Before Rhea's arrival, Maria was this among Crevan's household. Sylvie was too mentally shaken by her ordeal (and because part of her was trapped in the clock, unbeknownst to anybody), Ingeth had developed Stockholm Syndrome, the Golem Wife wasn't human anymore and the Clock Wife was slowly going mad on a different plane.
- Rule of Seven: Rhea is the seventh bride of Lord Crevan.
- Sadist: Lord Crevan. Two cases stand out in particular: he took one of his wives' willpower and turned her into a golem who is completely dependent on his whims to do and feel anything (even thirst), and seems to take particular pleasure in mocking her by calling her a scarecrow. The second instance happens when he sends Rhea into the garden at midnight with written instructions to murder Sylvie. Rhea realizes that he expected her to stay until morning and agonize whether she should do it or not, which infuriates her.
- Sadistic Choice: Rhea must make one, courtesy of her captor's games. If she doesn't murder Sylvie, she fails the third task and must marry Lord Crevan, who plans to steal her youth. To her immense credit, she doesn't even entertain the idea of killing Sylvie and is infuriated by both the horrific task and the fact that Crevan earnestly believed she would be tormented and indecisive about it.
- Scylla and Charybdis: Rhea faces this early in the story, when she must choose between marrying a sinister sorcerer with a suspicious motive and risking her family's fall into homelessness and poverty by rejecting the unwanted marriage (Lord Crevan is friends with the nobleman who rules the region and owns the land on which Rhea's mill is built).
- Social Climber / Gold Digger: Crevan is implied to be one, as he seems to use his spiel with the marriage contract to either enrich himself ( such as inheriting Lady Elegans' mansion or sell the gifts he stole from his wives to royalty.
- Stockholm Syndrome: A tragic case with Ingeth.
- Team Mom: Maria the cook takes care of Sylvie and acts kindly towards Rhea. She is even polite towards Ingeth.
- This Is a Work of Fiction: "This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, places, large waterfowl, events, or actual historical personages, living, dead, or trapped in a hellish afterlife is purely coincidental."
- Tranquil Fury: Lord Crevan is on the receiving end of this from his Clock Wife, once she is released from her imprisonment.
- Witch Classic: Maria. Remarkably, her magical talent was so powerful that not even Crevan could strip her completely of it.
- Worst Wedding Ever: Rhea's joyless wedding with Crevan. She's wearing an ill-fitting dress, she's surrounded by guests whom she doesn't know or care about (aside her worried parents) and desperately hopes that the Clock Wife will be able to stop the ceremony. She does.
- Vanity: One of Sylvie's main characteristics. Even though she is blind and her health has been shattered, she still wants to be the most beautiful woman around and when Rhea arrives at the mansion, she asks Maria if the newcomer is more beautiful than her. Maria says no to indulge her. Normally, this would make her somewhat unsympathetic but she is in such a pitiful and sad state that Rhea can't bring herself to dislike her.
- Unwitting Pawn: While in the clock, Rhea is shocked to find Sylvie wandering around, confused and realizes that Maria sent Sylvie on the same kind of quest before her marriage to Crevan. For a while, she believes that both she and Sylvie have been tricked and betrayed. They haven't. Maria had no idea that a part of Sylvie was stuck in the clock.
- Wham Line: Rhea didn't know what else to do so she stabbed him.
