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Enosh
I pulled Ada against me where we stood at the center of my brother’s domain, her legs as unreliable as the staggering beat of my heart. “Do you know where you are?”
She nodded, eyes frantically going from the pile of red and green pillows in the center of the room to the man whose lips were currently wrapped around my brother’s length. “The Court Between Thoughts.”
“Quite right, Ada.” Yarin lounged naked on a daybed of red velvet, one hand pushing the corpse’s copper thatch of hair closer, the other balancing a metal cup in its palm from which he sipped. “And how delighted I am that you have chosen to— Oh my, sweet thing, would you look at yourself? Whatever happened to your hair and… is that a crown of bones upon your head?”
I let a jacket shape around me, having arrived nearly as bare as I had left the spring in my… unforgivable burst of fury. “Make yourself decent.”
“Afraid your wife will find too much appreciation for my form? We both know I’m the handsomest among the three.” With a chuckle, he tossed his cup across the room until it clanked against the sandstone wall, then thrust into the man’s gagging mouth. “Pathetic, how you claimed you’ve never had relations with a man, yet you suck with such vigor. Go on, finish me off.”
I turned my wife away from the debauched scene, and myself with her. “This is a serious matter.”
“When is anything pertaining to you ever not serious, hmm? You’ve always… always been— Ah, yes! Swallow everything. Mmm, look how you suckle my cock. I don’t believe for a second you have never bedded a man.” A pop resonated behind me. “Anyway, you’ve always been the broody one, Enosh… always so serious. My favorite, to be certain, but oh, such a bore. Ada, has my brother ever suspended you from a harness of skin, fucking you while corpses pinch your nipples and another pushes a femur up your tight—”
I let out a warning hiss. “Dare speak to her like that again, and I shall—”
“What? Stab a bone spike through my throat, as is my favorite brother’s preferred way of killing? I don’t think so.” Because he knew full well I held little power here, where everything shaped at the whim of thoughts. “Well, I didn’t think you have. For a god, you are rather prude. Have you come to ask my advice on matters of your marriage? As it so happens, I am an expert in all things pertaining to the mortal heart.”
“You are an expert of sin and insanity.” When the unhurried hrk of buttons pressing through fabric resonated behind me, I turned to face my brother, and how he closed the golden clasps on his richly embroidered green felt jacket. “When you bound her soul, you spoke of something that… resisted.”
“Out!” he shouted over his shoulder, chasing soul-bound corpses from the pillows like rabbits from their burrows, sending them to scurry in all directions. “I don’t recall—”
“Sheltering itself away in a blind void of nothingness.” Ada stepped away from the embrace of my arm and toward my brother, her hair nothing but a tangled mess of bones, grass, and loam. “That’s what you said.”
“Had I? Interesting… not.” Yarin strolled over to a round table, plucked a grape from the diamond-studded platter, and popped it into his mouth. “Anything else? There are souls to collect and thoughts to shape. Unless you wish to put aside your dull character for a moment, brother, and partake in my corpses together with—” His eyes shot to my wife, and he tilted his head as a grin shaped his lips. “Did you just tell me to shut up? Nobody has ever told me to— Actually, many have told me to shut up, but never through their thoughts. Oh, Enosh, she is so very special, this one.”
Yes, she was, yet I had allowed century-old doubt to come between us. “Does she carry my child? My divine child we ca
All mirth fell away from him, lending his posture a straightness I’d seldomly witnessed on the God of Whispers as he stepped in front of Ada. “A divine child, you say?”
My knees shook.
No, not mine.
Ada’s legs trembled, threatening to snap, no matter how well she hid it behind the dirt-smudged fabric, feigning strength where I knew she had none left. I did not need to sense her soul to know it was agonized, my brother’s potential answers equal in their torture.
“I sense…” Yarin clenched his eyes shut, a mere inch of distance between the tips of his fingers as he hovered them from her forehead to her chest and lower. “Sadness. Anger. So much. A hope you fear, a fear you hope. And… nothing.” His fingers stopped, clenching and unclenching below her navel. “A void that will not answer me. Right here.”
In her belly.
Something I had sensed whenever I’d delivered Ada’s flesh and bone from decay, shrugging it off as nothing more but yet another part of her embodied resistance to me. To us.
Time stuttered to a halt.
How blind I’d been.
“You feel it, too?” Yarin set his grass-green eyes straight on mine and, when I nodded, he sighed. “I hold no control over it. Never have I encountered something like this before.”
“Eilam said something ab-bout—” A sob cut through Ada’s voice, her bones heavy with pain. “That there was a lot of life in me… more than in others.”
“So he sensed something amiss as well.” Yarin tortured his upper lip. “Are we agreed on what this is, then, Enosh?”
“It is Elric.” The sound of the name sparked old anger in my core, only to flare into bright joy before it died into paralyzing sadness. “My divine child, trapped alive but unable to grow in the belly of my dead—”
I grabbed Ada’s arm where she swayed beside me, pulling her against my chest before she collapsed to the ground. My ears pricked at her wail, and my muscles tensed at her violent tremble as her entire weight pulled on my arms.
“My ba-ha-aby.” Her high-pitched scream shattered from the yellow stone before it penetrated my chest, needling straight into my heart. “Oh my god… Oh my god— Ah!”
Unable to steady her on legs that continued to sway no matter how I willed them, I picked her up and cradled her tightly against me. “Shh…”
Her little fists pounded against my chest once more, but quickly died down, only to hang limp from her quivering body. Face contorted into a hundred wrinkles of pain, she cried without tears, each sniffle and sob like a bone blade digging between my ribs.
My blurred gaze shot to Yarin. “Do something!”
“Hush, hush, shh…” He placed his palms on her temples and brought his whispering lips to her ear. “Listen to my voice…”
It faded into nothing but hums and murmurs, unintelligible to my ear, though I sensed how Ada softened in my arms. Her stare lost itself in the nothingness of the arched ceiling and her muscles slackened. No more than a breath later, she stilled.
I commanded her lungs to expand and retract, focusing on an even rhythm so she may find comfort in it, then allowed her eyes to flutter shut. Together, Yarin and I placed her soul-bound body into a twilight state of subdued consciousness that closely resembled sleep.
“Her soul is in such anguish, it is fighting my bonds.” A rare glint of something other than amusement came over Yarin’s eyes, his voice void of his usual aloofness, stripped down to a growl. “What have you done?”
My stomach convulsed.
Where to begin?
I swallowed past a knot at the back of my throat, coiled in a tangle of emotions I had little experience with. “Most recently, I prepared a grave for her, lowered her into it, and had corpse children fill it with dirt.”
“Brother, when you try for the affections of a woman, you give her flowers,” he turned away on a scoff and slumped back on the daybed, letting another appear across from it, “not bury her beneath them.”
Excruciating sorrow strangled my guts.
Every inhale burned within my lungs, searing, scalding, charring its way straight into a heart I’d claimed I did not possess, only for it to bleed out all over again. A punishment I received gladly, for I had never deserved it more.
I stood there, a god shamed into silence, consumed by guilt and utter self-contempt. Oh, how I’d wronged my wife. My little one had not lied. No, she’d truly tried to return to me, and what had I done…?
What had I done?
I had driven her away. Punished her for a betrayal she’d never committed, causing her nothing but excruciating pain. Three times, she’d lost the child she always wanted. First to a blade, then to my blindness, and now to the truth.
And I had lost it, too.
For the second time in my cursed existence, I’d lost a child. Njala’s daughter might not have been mine, but I had grieved her just the same. Now I grieved again, yet my pain would likely never compare to the agony Ada must have carried all this time.
All by herself.
Because I was not there.
Had left her alone with her sorrows.
Instead of defeating the loneliness of my existence with her by my side, I had abandoned Ada to it. How could I ever undo the damage I’d caused between us in all my glorious ignorance?
“Pray tell, Enosh, how can this be?” Yarin pushed himself up to sit, formed a golden goblet in his hand, and took a sip. “My mind is utterly confused. Dazed, truly. How come we felt Njala’s baby, clearly mortal, but this one evades us in all its godly arrogance?”
Ada could likely not perceive it, but I sat on the daybed across with her and stroked the shell of her ear the way she enjoyed. “Njala—”
“Oh, I think I figured it out.” He chuckled, but even my brother failed to give it its usual air of cockiness. “My, my, my… Enosh. And here I thought you do not share your women. Not such a prude after all, I see.”
On any other day, I would have slit his throat and bled him out on his pillows, but I could barely bring myself to lift my head. “Orlaigh kept her reckless infidelity a secret, in all of mortals’ never-ending depravity.”
Trapping me in false grief for two centuries over the loss of a daughter that had not been mine. Oh, she’d concealed her betrayal well. Had riled me up against my wife the moment I woke, poisoning my mind with wariness and suspicion.
Where I expected fury and the urge to return to the Pale Court to weave her into my throne, I only found forlorn sadness.
Apathy.
Fatigue.
Two centuries of rage and distrust, and what had it given me? A dead wife full of justified anger, a child lost at the expense of my own, and a broken heart that beat ardently for both of them.
I loved Ada.
Loved her like I had never before, with no precaution over the pain it had already caused me, nor the pain that was certainly yet to come. I loved her with a ferocity that was not save for me or her. Certainly not for this world.
How to fix this?