Queen of rot and pain

Ada

Enosh stared up at me from a face flayed to weeping flesh, turning my stomach upside down and my guts inside out. If this compulsive urge to skin himself had anything to do with my remark on his smell, I couldn’t say, but I regretted mentioning it.

I took the bone knife from him, then jutted over my shoulder back at the children. “Can you tell them to sit down? Or at least stand back? I’m in no mood to fish them out of the water again.”

Their bony little bottoms thudded as they hit the stone, where they folded their legs and stared up at me. Beside me, bone dust shaped into a deep bowl.

“Taking the skin off alone will do little,” Enosh said, the ends of his dark brows tainted red where they regrew above his unmarred lids. “You ought to pour water over the exposed flesh before my skin mends, which will happen quickly.”

I squatted by the edge of the spring, taking in a whiff of rusty metal as I watched tiny strings of fresh skin web across his face. “I can tell.”

He observed me from his silver eyes, the bridge between them already fully restored to flawless skin, not a single scar in sight. “Does it appall you? The blood? The inflamed flesh? The throbbing veins? My ruined face?”

“I’ve seen worse on you.” Heavens, his handsome face was the source of at least half my problems. “Turn around.”

To my surprise, he did so without fuss or reprimand. “Why go through the trouble of washing the corpses, little one? Surely, you have noticed the progression of their decay?”

I sat down, gathered the train of my dress, and let my legs dive calf-deep into the spring on either side of his body. “The way the skin on their bellies lifts and shifts makes it pretty clear that you’re not… maintaining them.”

“Answer my question.”

The severe undertone in his voice put a tremble into my stiff fingers as I set the blade down to the left of his spine. “You know full well why I’m doing it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have given them to me in the first place.”

“Yet more evidence for how much love you hold for children,” he said with a sigh. “Never will my wife cease to confound me, even in the expected.”

“Take a deep breath.”

Sharp as it was, the blade sunk into his skin easily against the expanse of his inhale, then cut downward. Angling it almost parallel to the sway of his muscles, I ensured I took mostly skin off.

Mostly.

Blood welled from the spots where I used too much pressure, carving into his flesh as nausea bubbled at the back of my throat. I’d ski

Because I needed answers, even if I had to cut them out of him.

When the blade severed the skin at the height of his waist, I quickly reached for the bowl and dunked it into the spring.

Splash.

Water hit wound.

Enosh groaned, pulling his shoulder blades together and arching his back. “Continue.”

I set the blade down beside where tiny droplets of blood wept from the exposed flesh, only for new growth of thin skin to encapsulate it. “It only takes seconds to mend. Is it like this for all of them?”

The shifting of muscles on Enosh’s back came to an abrupt halt. “All of them?”

“Your brothers.”

There was a pause that lasted a second too long for comfort before he said, “Yes.”

One word.

It carried an edge of caution.

A whole-body shiver wracked through me, and the silence of the cave echoed. I’d searched for him the moment I’d noticed how the black veins on my hands had disappeared, but what if Orlaigh had gotten to Enosh before me? What had she told him?

I ran the blade down with one hand and used the other to press on the loose skin so it wouldn’t fold over and get in the way. “You once told me that the Pale Court shaped around you when you… came into existence. How did you learn of your duty? Who taught you what to do?”

“Who taught you how to breathe?”

I flinched when I severed the second strip and let it slip off the blade, where it hit the ground with an awful slap. “So you’re saying that you just knew? All three of you?”

Splash.

He once again pulled his shoulder blades together against the impact of the steaming water, letting a pink river form along his spine. “Such curiosity about my brothers.”

Only how to get to them. “I remember the Court Between Thoughts. Rich fabrics. Pillows. Warm light. So different from the Pale Court.”

Silence roared between us, vibrating against my heart with such ferocity it nearly mimicked a heartbeat. Every memory of every encounter I’d ever had with Enosh urged me to shut my mouth.

I circled my hand around my belly.

No, I need to do this.

Taking a useless but comforting breath, I pressed the blade to the right of his spine. “I don’t remember how I got there.”

More silence.

“Neither how I ended up in your arms, as though pieces of my memory are missing.” A slice. A grunt. A splash. “You found me dead in the village, didn’t you?”

Enosh rolled his shoulders, letting the joints crackle under the release of tension. “You called to me from among the dead, your voice panicked. I came as quickly as I could...”

“I was scared. The moment they chased after me, I knew.” My head shook all on its own. “Knew it wouldn’t end well. Felt it in my guts, really. I internally screamed, asking you to come save me.”

He turned his head slightly, just enough for me to glimpse his perfectly angled cheekbone draped in smooth skin. “In this, I have failed you. I will not deny it.”

Oh, he’d failed me in so many things, but mentioning any of that now would neither change the past nor help me set right the future. “Did you cry for me? You had tear tracks on your face.”

“Does it surprise you, little one?” He slowly turned, his face fully mended, yet something broken seemed to sit at the depth of his mercury eyes. “Do you believe gods do not weep? That we do not suffer and ache? Hope and wish?” Pouting, he reached for the scar on my cheek, tracing the puckered skin. “Mmm, I wept over your dead body, Ada. I grieved your death. I celebrated it. Then I grieved it some more.”

“Celebrated,” I repeated. “Because you knew I would never want to escape you again. Not after you had Yarin bind my soul.”

“Mmm, the living warm but the dead obey.” A twitch of his upper lip. “Except for the Queen of Rot and Pain… who does neither.”

“Do you regret binding my soul? Taking me to the Court Between Thoughts?” A swallow ran down my throat, thick and painfully dry. “To Yarin.”

“Yarin. Yarin.” Enosh shifted his lower jaws around. “You seem to have taken a rather strange interest in my brother. Your… master.”

I dropped my gaze to the ground, as though fearing he could read the truth from my eyes. “It’s just… so curious.”

“Curious?”

I was treading on thin ice, I knew. “How he shapes out of thin air. How his court appears and fades. Just how does one get there?”

My breath stilled.

Wrong question.

Enosh’s features turned to stone, so stiff and ungiving, not even his upper lip twitched anymore. “Do you wish to seek him out?”

Yes. “No.”

His hand shot out of the water and gripped my crown, pulling my head until his lips brushed against my earlobe where he whispered, “Liar.”

My rotten heart dropped into the pit of my sour stomach. What now? Tell him the truth? Lie myself out of this mess?

No, I might have been a poor fisher, but I was an even more miserable liar. I was no liar at all! But that didn’t mean I was stupid enough to blurt the truth. Yet.

“You have nerves calling me that,” I snarled as I gave into his hold, easing the tension on my skull. “As though you’ve never spoken a lie.”

He scoffed, “I have never told you anything but the truth.”

Against his grip on my crown, I angled my head until my lips pressed against the shell of his ear. “Liar. You told me Joah killed Njala in an act of revenge, where we both know that she asked him to kill her. That she refused to return to you because she did not love you. She loved him.”

He flinched as though I’d stabbed him.

Ice-cold fear shivered down my spine. Not over how the tremble in his hand vibrated into my skull or even how he stuttered out a never-ending breath. No, it was the endless silence that followed that made me fear for a life I’d already relinquished.

His chuckle shattered it, a terrifying sound like claws scraping over my skull. “No, little one, she never found love for me.”

I swallowed, but it lodged in my throat, producing an ugly gagging sound. “Enosh, I—”

“And how could she have, hmm?” He yanked on my crown, nearly ripping me into the water wasn’t it for how he climbed out of the spring with one quick, fluent movement and gave a shove at it. “Am I not a monster? The devil?”

I scrambled back, legs kicking and arse scooting, only to crash into a wall of little corpses. “Enosh, what are you—”

“Who could love such a cruel bastard?” He yanked me up by my crown and dug his fingers into my waist until it burned. “Not you. Never you. Oh no, all you have for me is hate and deceit.”

My feet left the ground.

The cave shifted, spun.

Enosh swung me over his shoulder, letting the world turn upside down as my face slammed against his shifting back muscles. “Mmm, my faithless wife, once again scheming her escape. A collar ca

His throne.

Now I’ve done it.

Numbness spread from my terrified core into every brittle bone, every quiet vein, every dull fiber of flesh, sending me into paralysis. Clack-clack-clack made the children as they ran behind us, the sound so grinding it sent me straight into hysteria. No! No no no!

“Please, not the throne!” I grappled at his back, clawed at the barely mended wound along his spine until skin and flesh collected beneath my nails. “Oh my god, please! Not your throne!”

“Whyever not? Have you not made friends there?” He hurried along the dark corridor, leaving wet footprints on the ground that changed from rock to bone as my palms shifted over his wet skin. “I shall weave your body into my throne between them, so you may hush and whisper, hate and scheme. But one thing you shall never do, my beloved wife, is escape me.”

“No!” I drummed my balled hands against his back, pounded into the ungiving wall of damp, naked muscle. “I didn’t plan to escape!”

“No? You weren’t trying to find a way to reach the Court Between Thoughts?”

“Yes, but—”