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Ada
I awoke to the sensation of my head being lifted, only to sink seconds later. Up again. Down. Something brushed over my back in caressing swirls, with deviations of serpentines up along my spine. A finger?
Blinking my eyes open, I caught familiar glimpses of the few black hairs scattered across Enosh’s bare chest. I rested against him, naked, blissfully absorbing the all-engulfing heat of his body. How long had I been like this?
“I feel you rousing.” Enosh pressed a kiss to the top of my head. “Are you well?”
Was I?
I assessed the ease of my inhales, the laxness in my muscles, the gentle hum beneath my skin at this wash of warmth. In truth, I felt better than I had in a long time—my sorrows not gone but somehow, not as suffocating.
Which could only mean one thing…
“Yarin did something to my head, didn’t he?”
“Your soul was suffering, shattering right before my eyes.” Enosh’s fingers trailed along the side of my head, scraping over my scalp until it tingled, making me lean into it. “My brother merely calmed your thoughts, allowing you to… come to terms with things in a dream-like state.”
Come to terms.
My teeth wanted to clench, but I forced my jaws to shift. From the moment I’d learned the truth, I knew that convincing Enosh of my i
It was enough.
It had to be.
I took a deep breath, pulling a lungful of ash sprinkled over snow down into my chest. Enosh smelled like a thousand sins and salvations, like my lover and my husband. My captor, whose scent swaddled me in the comfort of familiarity.
Comfort I’d told myself I no longer wanted from him, the man who had twisted my bones but mended my dignity, who had put me in the collar of a prisoner and the cruel crown of a queen. What a lie.
I needed it.
I needed him.
Had wanted nothing more for the past month but to curl into his broad chest, to hide away from the world and what it had done to me. Wanted to escape the coldness of death, and instead, soak my bruised flesh in his heat.
As though he felt it in my bones, Enosh wrapped his leg around mine, continuing to draw symbols along my back. “You are safe. Nothing and nobody will ever harm you again.” Shoulders curling, legs angling, I made myself so very small, rolling myself up like a cat.
Beyond us stretched a circular room, its walls engraved with motifs of oak trees surrounded by long bushels of grass that swayed in the breeze.
His room.
Enosh had shaped it the day he opened the Pale Court, appointed with elaborately tooled furniture made of tusk and bone. Thin braids of hair hung from the high ceiling, each decorated with teeth, fangs, and nails. They reflected the magical glimmer coming from the bone and clanked together in a monotone symphony.
Realization seeped into me when his nails parted my hair with ease, letting a mumble roll from my lips. “My crown’s gone.”
He cupped my cheek and gingerly brought my gaze to meet the calm gray of his eyes, set into a face dusted with several days’ worth of black stubble. “And the two boys and the girl are at rest.”
I ran my thumbnail over his thick, stubborn whiskers, loving the way they scraped at my skin with quiet hrk-hrk-hrks. “Heavens, how long was I dreaming?”
“I’ve held you like this for nearly three days.”
He’d held me.
For days.
“Adelaide.” His lips pressed into a thin line for a moment as though my name had left cuts on his tongue. “I came into existence knowing my duty, my powers, and how to wield them. I know the world, its people, and all the languages they speak. Yet I do not know how to apologize in a single one.” A deep exhale. “However, I shall try.”
I lifted myself up a bit because I damn well deserved to hear it. “Go ahead.”
He took a deep breath, twirling a strand of my hair around his finger like he’d used to before he tucked it behind my ear. “I have not protected you, letting you fall prey to chaos borne of my own mistakes. I have wronged you, accusing you of betrayal when your character has never given me cause to doubt your honesty. I have given you pain, such pain, emotionally abandoning you in your time of need. For all this, I apologize.”
Seconds ticked into a silent minute, only for time to trap me in the echo of his words, touching my dead, cold core and breathing a warm spark of life into it.
I wasn’t sure what I’d expected him to say.
But not this.
Not with such candor, where he exposed his failures without a single attempt at justifying them, causing a flutter in my heart that grew awash in the heat between our bodies.
I couldn’t say how long I stared at him, but he eventually lifted a brow, adopting an almost sheepish look. “I did it wrong.”
“No.” He did it too well for a man, letting his cruelties of the last month fade too quickly into the darkest cra
“For nearly three days.” The corners of his mouth hiked and fell, as though uncertain if he should dare the hint of a smile. “I want us to start anew. Do you forgive me?”
Against the remnants of rage in my muscles, I allowed them to slacken, lowering my head onto his chest. I was only a mortal… a dead one. Neither resistant to this wash of heat Enosh provided after endless weeks of cold, nor immune to the rather poignant apology of a god.
“I’ll consider it.”
He scoffed, “Stubborn woman.”
“Arrogant god, thinking that a handful of pretty sentences would make a woman forgive so easily.”
“Nothing about you is easy, Ada, but you are worth all of my troubles ten times over,” he rasped against my ear, providing me this sense of value only he could, in all its retched glory. “I realized my many mistakes when Yarin… confirmed it.”
My chest heaved with an unexpected sob, but I swallowed it down, letting it rot among shattered dreams and broken wishes. This is enough, my mind chanted like a prayer. This is as good as it gets.
And yet the sob hiccupped straight back up, parting my lips as I said, “I wanted this child.”
“As did I.” Hushing me, Enosh wrapped his arms around me, likely expecting me to cry where I fought not to. “Among my many regrets, the way I failed you both weighs on me the heaviest. I do not know how to be a husband, understand even less about how to be a father. Yet I understand I have failed at both.”
That flutter came to my core once more, drifting not on the words of a god, but a man humbled. Was this truly Enosh? Or was I still dreaming?
I pushed myself up once more, assessing the sway of his dark brows, the curvature of his lips, the straight nose. Still as a
What was it? His eyes?
Yes.
Not so much their gray color, but how the foreboding storm at the depth of his irises had somehow settled. What remained was a gaping cleft of emotions for me to stare at.
And he let me.
Enosh neither turned his head nor distracted from it with a twitch of his upper lip or the smug lift of a brow. I stared right into the face of my god husband, seeing the finest wrinkles at the corner of his eyes, the faintest blemishes of his complexion… and the pain of loss that so closely resembled mine.
He, too, had lost a child.
Twice.
At least in his heart.
Enosh reached his hand up, swiping a finger over my brow where it must have gone into disarray pressed against his chest. “What does my wife see?”
“You.” Beautiful and terrifying, gentle and cruel. “I’m sorry you had to find out about Njala and the baby like this. I know you loved her.”
“So I’d thought but…” His face scrunched up for a moment, and his gaze wandered into the room as though visiting old memories. “None of it compares to how I feel about you. Which makes me wonder if it was not so much her I loved, but the idea she resembled of children, family, life. In the end, this arrogant jerk could not inspire her love. Maybe gods ought not to be loved, but only hated, worshipped, and feared.”
That brought a little tug to the corners of my mouth. “Or maybe you simply couldn’t claim her heart because it had already belonged to another.”
That returned his gaze to the here and now, which he set straight on me with uncoy intensity. “When you first arrived at my court, did your heart belong to another?”
“No.”
“Good.” He pushed himself up to sit and pulled me right along with him, leaning us against the wall of bone. “There’s something I wish to show you, but we ought to dress you first to keep you warm.”
“Dress.” That word sent a shudder over me. “What happened to Orlaigh?”
“Not much… for now.” He slipped out of bed and took my hand, pulling me to my feet as breeches formed around him. “I could either see to her punishment or watch after my wife, and I chose the latter.”
“That must’ve cost you a great deal of self-control.”
“Not at all,” he said. “I wasted two centuries on hate and anger and will give the past my attention no longer beyond the necessary. Certain things ought to be taken care of… but after, I wish to live in peace.”
“What will you do to her?”
That question gave him a moment’s hesitation as he stared down at me. “What do you wish me to do?”
Braid her into your throne.
The words choked up onto my tongue out of nowhere, their taste bitter and unfamiliar, so I gulped them down. Did Orlaigh deserve to be punished? Yes. But she’d been betrayed by a loved one she’d tried to protect. How should that affect the severity?
“Punishment is your area, not mine. And now that we are speaking of corpses, Lord Tarnem was the one who helped shed light on all this in exchange for my promise.”
“Promising what?”
“Um…” I thought for a second. “That I would shed light on this.”
“And so you have, remaining as true to your vows as always.”
“I guess that’s one way of looking at it.” My eyes fell to my belly and to the three lines where my wounds had been, each one now shaped into pale-puckered vines with flowers blooming beneath its foliage. “You gave me scars.”
“I like your scars, your imperfections, written across your body like a story that tells me fragments of your mortal life. However…” Inhaling deeply, he took my hands in his, looking at me with solemn eyes. “One word from you, and I shall make them go away as though it never happened. The choice is yours.”
My choice.
Such strange words.
My throat turned parched beyond its usual state. Did I want them gone? The wounds had caused me so much grief, yes, but the scars may serve as a sobering reminder of the world out there… the unfairness, the depravity.