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Ada
“We shall bed down at the tavern,” Enosh said, steering toward the glinting lights of the town ahead. “You need a warm meal, a bed, and rest. Something I should have taken into consideration, but… I haven’t had to care for a mortal in a long time.”
He said it as though he wanted to apologize for starving me half a day but didn’t quite know how. “Thank you.”
The tips of his fingers slowly raked over my scalp, which he did often, seemingly content with the monotone motion. “How come you never remarried?”
“Probably because proposals are sparse around barren women who got their husbands killed.” Beyond tired, I let myself sink back against his chest. “Eternity will feel twice as long if I keep wondering so… will you tell me how Njala died?”
There was a long beat of silence until he finally cleared his throat. “There was an argument between Lord Tarnem and me when he demanded more corpses than we’d agreed upon. Against my telling her not to get involved, Njala left the Pale Court without my knowledge to speak to her father.”
“Orlaigh helped her sneak away?”
His chin brushed along the side of my head as he nodded, first stubbles catching on my strands. “He kept her from me, sending her across the land with Commander Mertok, trying to force my hand by keeping her out of my reach. When he refused to come to his senses, I marched thousands of corpses to his hold. He offered a parley then, stating a misunderstanding, saying that he himself had fallen victim to a betrayal. He lured me into a frozen valley.”
“And trapped you.”
“Ah, my little one, a moment of utter folly on my part, but gods are not free of failure, and I was desperate. Eventually, I freed myself and leveled his kingdom to the ground. I chased across the lands beyond the Soltren Gate in search of my companion. But by the time I reached Njala, months later, Commander Mertok slit her throat as… as an act of revenge.”
My ears pricked at the hesitation. “You didn’t chain her soul?”
“It departed quicker than I could act.”
Quicker than he could act.
An unexpected hollowness formed in my core. When I turned to look at him, I shuddered beneath his unguarded stare and how those hairline cracks in his icy mask opened into gaping craters. Shadows played around his face in the setting darkness, as though wanting to hide what I discovered behind the fractured facade of the cruel god.
For the first time since Enosh had taken me captive, I saw the man beneath the immortal, heartbroken and vulnerable, the reasons for his undying rage clearer the more he shared with me. For us mortals, grief ended with death, but his lasted for an eternity, spent as what had to be a lonely existence.
I straightened and looked forward once more, not liking how all this softened me toward him. “If you killed those responsible for your loss, then why condemn the rest of us?”
“Because the depravity at the mortals’ core is to blame for all this, their never-ending hunger for power, which is not for them to have.”
“If we’re all so bad at the core, then why keep me? I’m one of them.”
“Mmm, yet you carry the least of it, a precious particularity about you I failed to recognize when you first came to me.”
There was that word again.
Precious.
My core expanded at the sheer sound of it, my ears utterly unaccustomed to the word. How twisted my life had become, where I tried to escape the man who refused to let me go, only to get back to the man who’d once wanted rid of me.
I rubbed at my itchy eyes. “One step out of your court and you could’ve cut one of those virgins down some idiots had sacrificed off a trunk two hundred years ago.”
“Lift your chin. Higher!” His fingers wrapped around my throat, tilting my head back until he had access to kiss along the side of my neck where he whispered, “For as much as I torment you with need, you do the same to me, mortal, or I would have tossed you outside to let you die among the corpses. Servant, plaything, treasure… above all, you are my woman.”
I shuddered.
Not an unwoman.
Not a woman.
His woman.
He held no power over my body out here, but his words infiltrated me just the same, sending gooseflesh across my skin. The ardor in his tone even over a word such as plaything, the possessiveness of his grip where another had once threatened to discard me… The urgency with which he wanted me roused a faithless flutter in my belly.
I ignored it. “Maybe—”
“There he is!”
My gaze swung around.
My fingers numbed.
A handful of villagers hesitantly approached from a dark orchard, carrying limp corpses or wheeling them on handcarts, the moonlight breaking against the blades strapped to the three men among them.
Enosh hissed at the sight of the torches they carried, the horse dancing underneath us as if it sensed its master’s fear.
He feared fire.
Why else would the feathers grow damp against my skin where he dug his fingers into my belly, pulling me against him as he shouted, “Return to your hearths!”
They didn’t turn but at least they stopped, exchanging glances, shrugs, and mumbles. Of course, gossip about a man riding a dead horse had spread.
“M’Lord…” A woman stepped forward, the girl draped over her arms a pale blue even against the orange flickers of fire, old sores speckling her cheeks. “This is A
My throat shrank to suffocating tightness as I glanced over my shoulder at Enosh. His jaws clenched; eyes so fixed on the flames licking the moist evening air that he spared the girl not even a glance. The girl wasn’t mine but, had I been blessed with a child, wouldn’t I beg the same as this woman did?
Yes, I would.
Only when I pressed my hand to Enosh’s chest did he look down at where I touched him, then his eyes met mine as his deep voice verged a predatory growl. “Little one, the answer is no.”
I swallowed against the grip of heartache and hatred. “She’s just a child.”
The one I never had, yet I felt her mother’s agony bone-deep. Whatever had happened to Enosh, these people had nothing to do with it. Least of all this little girl, her brown hair neatly braided, the end tied with a purple ribbon.
“Enosh,” I whispered. “Can you do this for me? Just this once? Please? Rest them, and they’ll be on their way.”
At that, the muscles in his jaws jumped, but he neither barked nor grunted. Was he considering it? He had to be. Oh, please, please, he had to give me this one thing.
But he shook his head ever so faintly, letting my heart sink as he looked back at the woman. “I have no use for your earthly possessions. Go home.”
“But Lord!” The woman ran up before me, her little girl’s lifeless limbs tossing about, but it was the hiss of fire following behind her that straightened Enosh’s spine. “I am your humble subject. Whatever you wish of me, I will…” Her voice trailed off, eyes going to me once more before she rearranged the lifeless body of the spindly girl. Then, head lowered, she pushed the threadbare cotton of her dress down, exposing a breast. “If you wish to lie with— Augh!”
The man beside her fisted her hair and yanked her about with brute strength, but still, she didn’t let go of her daughter as arms flopped about. “How dare you whore yourself out in front of everyone?”
“She’s doing it!” The woman stabbed a finger at me, voice tight with grief and anger. “He can sard me forward and backward, plunder all my holes—”
Smack.
Her husband’s palm hit her hard enough that the woman spun, then sunk to her knees on a groan. “Shut your mouth before I beat you close to death. Harlot!”
A cry lodged from my throat. “Enosh, please—”
“Be quiet,” he snarled, then turned to let the strength of his voice shatter through the night. “This is my only warning. Leave, before I let the corpses open the ground and swallow you whole.”
I trembled at his roar.
No, the ground did.
It shifted beneath us, letting some people stagger sideways while a wooden wheel vibrated off its axis. The handcart broke down, letting two beaten corpses roll off and splay out in the dirt. A woman cried out.
“Enosh, the ground is shaking…” My words drowned beneath the villager’s screams. “Wh-what is happening? Oh my god, oh my god, oh my— Are you doing this?”
The corpses twitched.
Their death-veiled eyes blinked open.
They jerked to their feet.
Except for the girl.
Still resting in loving arms, A
It was too terrible.
Too painful to breathe through.
“Stop it!” I shouted, hands pressing to my mouth as I watched the dead chase the living. Whatever rage my voice carried, in the end, it distorted into a long wail of helplessness. “She’s just a little girl…”
Enosh held me tighter. “Be still!”
He let the horse thrust into a canter, passing town after town until my arse burned nearly as much as my tear-filled eyes. The wind made it only worse as we thundered along a dirt trail that eventually changed into the ca-lop-ca-lop of iron clashing cobblestone, lights illuminating windows from afar. I twisted and dug my face into Enosh’s shirt, dampening it with my tears.
This late in the evening, villagers paid us no mind. Not until a man spotted the horse’s white eyes, starting that first mumble, which soon hushed across the village like the foreboding breeze of a storm. They all came together—some wearing their nightcaps—while sleepy-eyed children hid behind skirts as they took in our dead steed.
After Enosh passed the scorching waft of heat from a quiet forge, he rode the horse up to the tavern and dismounted. “I sense the tension in your muscles and the sickness roiling in your belly.” He pulled me down, immediately steadying me on my gnarled legs. “Dare run, mortal, and I shall have the most decrepit corpses the ground has to offer drag you back.”
Sickness wasn’t nearly strong enough a word to describe all the nasty things I wanted to spit at him. After a month at the Pale Court, I’d nearly forgotten how the world outside suffered, fathers feeding their dead children to the wolves just to keep them from wandering.