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Ada
The polished fangs adorning the bodice of my dress clanked with each step as I headed across the bridge toward an empty throne. Enosh had left through the Æfen Gate earlier, undoubtedly assessing if soldiers lined the Blighted Fields in an attempt to cap—
“…keep yer rotten mouth quiet.” Orlaigh’s hushed mumble invaded my thoughts, putting a hitch into my next step.
She glared up at the throne from the bottom of the dais, one hand clasping Enosh’s shirts in need of washing, the other shaking a scolding finger at… at one of the corpses?
A shudder lifted the hairs at the nape of my neck. Had they groaned again? They did that sometimes, their muffled nocturne almost forming words; wasn’t it for how the sounds broke against the skin pasted over their mouths, distorting it all into blood-clotting grunts.
“All it’ll do is get me bones braided into the throne right next to ye,” she said and pressed a palm against her forehead, releasing an exasperated sigh. “Ach, if me Master ever finds out the truth… Foolish, foolish girl.”
My heart beat faster, no matter how I tried to breathe it into quiet compliance as I inched closer. Orlaigh had called Njala a foolish girl, but what truth was she talking about? And to which of the corpses in the throne?
Another step.
Another clank of my fangs.
Orlaigh spun toward me, lifting a smile too tense around the corners. “Ach, lass, I was about to get ye.”
Arms wrapped around myself, I crossed the rest of the bridge and walked up to her. “Who did you talk to?”
Her belly shook with a chortle. “Talk? Di
Me, and two soul-bound corpses. “I heard you from the bridge.”
She swatted the air dismissively. “Aye, time makes yer own head yer best companion. Di
“But I—”
“Me Master has a surprise for ye, lass.” She stroked her palm down my arm. “But ye ca
Whatever suspicion my body held fell away, quickly replaced with a buzz of energy tingling my toes. “Enosh is taking me outside?”
“Aye, lass. Did ye eat the pudding I brought earlier?”
My pulse quickened at her question, then some more when I said, “I woke feeling a bit ill and had no appetite.”
The way her eyes dropped to my belly roused an expectant flutter around my heart I couldn’t afford. Probably nothing but an upset stomach. That, or the sad mind of a woman who’d always welcomed her monthly bleeding with tears. It was too early for me to have such signs of pregnancy, no matter how subtle.
“Wait here while I fetch ye a fur,” she said, then made her way toward my room.
My eyes wandered back to the corpses in the throne. Enosh had the terrible habit of restoring them some, only to let them rot away until their faces crumbled off in pieces. If they had mouths, what stories would they tell?
Hesitant steps brought me closer. One more, and my shins pressed against the throne until they ached. I leaned in close enough that I caught a whiff of their subdued stench, like soured milk mixed with the fumes of burnt incense.
Lord Tarnem’s eyes made a blood-curdling sound as they shifted to focus on me, like boots sinking into deep mud. Gray and woven with hairline cracks, his right jawbone shifted, and the brown skin across his mouth groaned as it stretched and—
“Hmmp… mhh.”
I shifted back on a gasp as my heart thundered like the boom of hooves in my chest. His mumbles continued with such urgency, a tendon slowly frayed at the motion. Heavens, I couldn’t make out a single word. What was he saying?
Back and forth, my eyes followed the movement of his tongue pressing against the skin from the other side. And if I cut into it, would I find a mouth behind it? Did I want to know what it had to say?
I clasped one of the fangs dangling from my bodice, pointed enough it might pierce the leathery skin. Seconds passed with nothing but the frantic rush of blood in my veins. What would this serve me, other than to feed this skin-itching curiosity?
It would gain me nothing. Trouble, perhaps. And still the fine thread of skin gave a crk as I ripped the fang off. I lifted it toward Lord Tarnem’s mouth.
He mumbled faster, louder.
Sweat broke on my forehead.
I pressed the fang against the skin.
I pushed down, and—
“What are ye doing, lass?”
Letting the fang retreat into my palm, I trailed my finger over the brittle skin, then turned to Orlaigh. “Just looking if he still has a mouth.”
“Aye, one full of lies.” Orlaigh’s heavy stare remained on me for another moment, the valleys beneath her cheekbones filling with patches of shadows. “Time has a way of twisting the truth.”
Apparently, in a way that put her at risk of gracing the throne. For that reason alone, there was no point in pushing her for it.
She came up the dais as I let the fang clank to the ground on a cough, put a light fur around my shoulders, then ushered me toward the Æfen Gate. “I prepared me Master a satchel with enough food and drink ye di
“Home?” My steps echoed along the dark incline, toward where the first streaks of light appeared, which broke against the outline of Enosh beside a horse.
“Yer wife,” Orlaigh said, “as me Master requested.”
Enosh secured a burlap bag to the harness the brown horse carried, then turned and reached his hand out in invitation. “Come to me, little one.”
I let my fingers intertwine with his. “Where are you taking me?”
He guided me beside the horse and let his knuckles stroke along my cheek, his gunmetal eyes fixed on mine. “To Hemdale, so you may point out John’s grave and visit your father. Briefly.”
Weakness gnawed at my knees until they softened beneath me, and a sudden rush of joy blurred my vision with tears. Brief or not, I would see Pa at least one final time. He wouldn’t have to spend the rest of his life wondering about me.
Unable to contain my excitement, I thrust myself at Enosh, arms struggling to wrap around the entirety of his upper body. “Thank you.”
“Mmm, how nicely your heart stumbles over its cadence.” He encapsulated me in his embrace, then let his hands shift to my hips. “Is my mortal pleased?”
“Very,” I said, reaching for a handful of mane as he lifted me onto the horse’s back. “You couldn’t have given me a better wedding gift.”
“Wedding gift?” He arched a brow at me, then mounted. “Oh, mortals and their customs.”
Orlaigh cleared her throat and held out her rot-speckled hands. “Master, me flesh?”
“Upon my return. Hemdale is not such a far span away, and we shall be back by night.”
Enosh let the horse trample over the carpet of corpses. One of them twitched, then another. Soon, several struggled themselves onto their battered legs to limp behind us, spears of bone forming in their palms.
“Did you see danger?” I asked as we rode up a winding path a recent storm must have carved into the hillside, the air moist with traces of moldy leaves.
“Nothing concerning or I wouldn’t have brought you along, but we ought to have protection. They will follow at a distance as not to draw too much attention while we stay away from the roads.”
I glanced back at them and how they shrank as the distance increased, their clothes nothing but tattered shreds here and there. One had a broken jaw, which dangled on a tendon bouncing against his chest.
Behind me, Enosh exhaled audibly. “You have no disgust for the dead, do you?”
A chuckle escaped me. “As a child, I cut more tangled corpses from Pa’s fish cages than I could count. Orlaigh told me Njala didn’t like the Pale Court.”
His chest hardened against my spine. “No, she found no appreciation for the beauty it once carried.”
The benevolence in his tone ached me somewhere, inching me toward a question I’d ignored for days. “Do you love her still?”
“Mmm, my dutiful wife, I am not as fickle-minded as my brother.” He nuzzled my temple before he let his whisper break against the shell of my ear. “No, I do not. Perhaps I no longer possess a heart to gift you, but you own my loyalty.”
Every single one of his words touched me in a million different places, stirring a concerning tingle underneath my ribs. “A simple no would have sufficed.”
A chuckle against the top of my head. “Ah, but a simple no would not have inspired such a flutter in your core.”
Heat crept into my cheeks. Damn him and how he stripped me of the ability to deny how he worked himself under my skin.
“Perhaps my woman’s silence comes at little cost after all,” he mused after a while, the slightly elevated pitch of his voice giving away his amusement. “I shall enjoy it for the few beats it lasts.”
It lasted for what felt like an arse-numbing eternity, but likely was no more than three hours from the height of the late-morning sun. Dead horses traveled quicker since their hooves never mis-stepped and no exhaustion claimed their lungs, or so Enosh had once explained.
I shifted my dull muscles and peered back at the crown of the Pale Court as it disappeared into the horizon. “A traveler once told me he walked around the Pale Court, though we call it the Graying Tower, and he only ever found one entrance. How come, if there are three more?”
“I ca
“And the third?”
“The world is Eilam’s court.” Shifting on the horse, he assessed the forest in all directions, then pointed at the lush patch of grass speckled with deep green shamrock and red clover. “We shall rest here so you may eat and… tend to your other mortal needs.”
“What a fine way of saying that you know how badly I have to piss.”
Something I executed promptly behind a nearby shrub. When I returned to the horse on straight legs, Enosh took the satchel from the harness and handed it to me.
“Did the old woman pack a blanket as well?”
Enosh huffed as if I’d insulted him, crossing his arms in front of his chest as streams of bonedust drifted around us on the wind. They came together in four sturdy posts, forming a rectangle, intricately tooled with motives of thorny vines swallowing creatures. Alabaster crossbeams appeared above us, with rings of bone from which the sheerest fabric weaved itself toward the ground on all four sides.
It wafted in the wind with an iridescent shimmer, its ends catching on the backrest of a large daybed. It formed at the center, beautifully shaped of the whitest bone, topped with pelts of gray mink.