Текст книги "King of flesh and bone"

Автор книги: Liv Zander

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

“We certainly don’t need three gods, should this woman carry the spawn of the devil,” Dekalon snarled. “Priests across the land are spreading my word. Should this woman ever emerge, people are to bring us the wife of the devil and the spawn she carries in her womb.”

I sought the high priest’s eyes, no matter how mine faded in and out of darkness. “Hear me, m-mortal… your head will g-gr-grace my throne. Your bones w-will serve me for eternity, for I am your god.”

“My god is Helfa,” he said. “Watch and see, Enosh. Watch and see how my god will do his divine duty of keeping the world in line.”

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Chapter 22

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Ada

I wrapped my calloused fingers around the thick rope. With each pull on the line of fish cages, ripples hushed across the water’s surface. My breath rose in billows, more fervently with each strenuous tug against a weight that quickened the pulse in my veins.

Finally!

Rose looked up from where she sat on a boulder, a half-gutted trout in one hand and a knife in the other. “Heavy catch, huh?”

“Has to be,” I said, sensing the chill creep into my cheeks the wider I grinned. “I’ll give you one of the smaller trout if you help me pull them to shore. The last thing I need is a cage to rip from the line once they hit that current there.”

She tossed the fish and knife into her basket, letting her arm brush a few auburn curls from her forehead where they’d escaped her wimple, and waddled over. “Would be a shame if you lost another cage. Better make it two.”

“Two then.” I nodded. “Now grab the rope. On three, we walk back and drag them all the way in. One.” I braced against the river rocks underfoot. “Two.” My stomach tightened. “Three.”

Gripping the rope tightly, I shifted my weight back for leverage. My heels dug into the shifting rock as I fought for every inch, ignoring how exhaustion blurred the edges of my vision. Against the chill lingering in the crisp morning air, sweat broke along my spine. Heavens, this catch had to be worth quite a few coins.

I needed them.

Desperately.

When the cages hit the current and the one at the end of the line bobbed and tossed on the white cap of the surface, I hung my entire weight on the rope. “Pull harder!”

“I am!” Rose heaved behind me as a handful of curses tumbled from her mouth. “Make that three fish!”

She could have four and the rest would still bring me enough money that I could finally haggle with Thorsten in earnest, and get the flea-bitten gray in his stables.

Three loud cracks threatened those hopes.

One of the cages broke apart, and pieces of wood first tossed in the air before they hit the water. The current swallowed them whole, sending them down the falls where it would sink to the ground next to the cage I’d lost four damn days ago.

But I wouldn’t let the rest go.

It was still heavy.

Against the tremble in my arms and the pain searing along my shoulder, I pulled, fighting backward against the current, until the first cage dragged over the rock. I counted two trout jumping in its belly. Another cage emerged with one more measly trout.

A knot formed at the back of my throat, but I swallowed it down. “Careful with the last one. An entire swarm must’ve caught in that one.”

One final pull and all resistance fell away as the cage tumbled to shore. I stumbled back, straight into Rose. We careened over each other, but she caught her balance while my knees hit the ground.

A rock cut through the cotton of my dress and scraped my skin, ripping a hiss from me. “Devil be damned, there better be an eel in there, too.”

Rose scoffed and circled a hand over her pregnant belly. “Not unless they grow beards now.”

When my eyes snapped to the last cage, my stomach bottomed out, sending a lap of bile onto the back of my tongue. “No…”

“I still want those fish you promised me,” she said. “I pulled, Elisa. Not my fault you caught a corpse.”

For a moment, I just sat there, listening to the treacherous sound of water lapping against the shore and how it distracted from the violent current hidden beneath its surface. A little over two weeks, and I was no closer to the Pale Court. Two weeks without a sign from Enosh, but all the more talk about how they’d captured the King of Flesh and Bone.

A sob built at the back of my throat, mixing with the acid that kept rising from my empty stomach. Three coins for the healer, two more for the tenancy on our little hut, and another for Pa’s herbs… At this pace, I would never make it home.

Behind me, Rose groaned, one hand pressed against the small of her back. “Augh, this babe is killing me. When it gets like this, I can barely make it down the hill.”

“Lean over and brace your thighs.” I got up and positioned myself behind her, letting my thumb press against the nerve along her tailbone through the cotton of her dress. “His head is coming into your pelvis. Not much longer now. Better?”

She straightened, shifting her hips this way and that, humming with relief. “Curse this place and how we have no midwife. We women could do with someone like you who knows how to make the aches go away. Where did you learn this?”

“Saw it somewhere once.” I walked over to the cages and pulled my knife from its sheath by my belt. “Idiot got himself so tangled during the full moon, I don’t even know how to cut him free without damaging the rope.”

Rose walked over and glanced down at the man, his blueish face waterlogged and swollen, algae woven through his red beard. “You’ll have to bring him to the cellar so they can lock him up. Magistrate said it’s the law now.” When I cut her a glare, she shrugged. “Don’t give me that look. Leave him here, and he might start twitching.”

Something corpses across the land had reportedly done after Enosh’s capture. They’d crawled from the dirt, only to collapse three steps later, and so it went on.

Rise. Collapse. Rise. Collapse.

“None of them have moved in at least a week.”

My guts tied into a knot. I couldn’t stomach what that might mean. That, maybe, whatever they were doing to Enosh was so gruesome, he no longer called the dead to his aid. Curse these lands and all these fools. I’d been so close. So close to fix this mess. And then they had to capture him, ruining everything! Perhaps Enosh was right about the depravity at our cores? Was there truly no fixing it?

“As if I could drag a grown man all the way there.” I leaned over, feeling the corpse’s arm for a joint to sever as I swallowed past a swell of bile. “My handcart’s too small—”

My stomach heaved. My chest convulsed, strangling that swallow of bile straight back up. It burned along my throat, bittered the back of my tongue, clenched my gums until—

I retched onto the rock to the sound of Rose shuffling away from me as she said, “By Helfa, you better brought no sickness here.”

Using the train of my dress, I leaned over and wiped the yellow strings from my mouth. “Just had no breakfast.”

“You said the same thing yesterday when you retched behind the bushes. No village as small as ours takes well to strangers, but even less so if they come with a pestilence.”

I took my starched wimple off, placed it on the rock beside me, and wiped the thin layer of sweat from my forehead. “It’s no sickness.”

It was worse.

For days, I’d woken nauseous, unable to keep much down, lest I nibbled on stale bread. It got better as the day grew older. Combine that with the fact that I was late on my bleeding, and you didn’t need to be a midwife to figure out just from what condition I might suffer.

Joy.

Dread.

Two emotions warred at my core, pulling my mood from cheerful to scared. For so many years, I’d prayed for a child. The answer couldn’t have come at a worse time. But how, if Enosh had sensed nothing? Perhaps it had been too small then?

“Maybe it’s a sickness after all.” Maybe I was finally going mad, my mind stuffed with head-spinning confusion about this entire ordeal. “I’ll have to cut the rope, then see if my father can mend it. Take your fish from the cages.”

She didn’t.

Rose only stood there, her stare fixed to the dark streaks and onyx discoloration painted across the white cotton on the inside of my wimple.

Sheathing my knife, I quickly grabbed it with my other hand. I placed it back on my head and shoved escaped black wisps into it, forcing my gaze to look at her basket, a nearby oak, the crow in its branches. I looked at anything but her, anything but how her eyes narrowed on me in the corner of my vision.

I took my knife out once more and ran the blade along the fraying rope. “You don’t want ’em?”

“Sure I do.” She blinked out of her thoughts, then retrieved three fish from my cages, leaving only enough behind to feed Pa and me for perhaps three days, four if I made stew again. “I better hurry. Nobody trusts fresh fish once the sun stands too high, no matter how cold it is.”

While Rose filled her basket and eventually left, I ruined the last of Pa’s ropes. I detangled the corpse and took off the cages. Once I gutted the few fish I’d caught, I loaded everything onto my groaning old handcart and headed to the village, leaving the dead man behind.

The wooden wheels of my cart creaked along the muddy path that led through Elderfalls, a village with too many fishermen and not enough fish. A woman emptied a bucket of scraps into the pigpen beside her hut, the air ripe with the stench of piss and poverty.

When I passed the iron-studded hutch to the cellar, a biting odor crept into my nostrils, but it was gone at my next step. Instead of a pit, Elderfalls kept the dead in a dungeon beneath its courthouse. We no longer released them during a full moon. High priest’s order.

“Elisa.” Thorsten dipped his head as he raked a flake of straw from the pile beside the stables. “Come to haggle with me again?”

I sighed and waved at my basket. “Only if you’ll take the coin I offered last week and four small fish.”

He chuckled, but the sound held a tone of kindness. “I want double the coin for the mule now.”

I clenched the rough cart handles. “Are you joking? We both know the animal is lame on the right hind.”

“Afraid not. All stablemasters raised their prices in the other towns and villages; why not me? We might be far out, but someone will find the mule. Temples are giving out coin so the militia can buy horses and mules.”

My pulse throbbed at the tips of my fingers. “Such a fuss, still, even though they caught the King?”

He shrugged. “They’re looking for someone… a woman.”

I’d figured as much, but that didn’t stop my heart from racing and a new layer of sweat to break at the nape of my neck. “What woman?”

“Can’t say. Heard no name. No word of who she might be.”

Still, a shudder chased across my skin, but it stayed the longest around my exposed neck, where my collar had been. On reflex, my fingers wandered there, rubbing, searching for the comfort of it, only to find it gone. Strange how the absence of something that had once made me feel like a prisoner now caused panic to settle at my core.

Where are you, Enosh?

My fingers itched to reach into my pocket for the stone Pa had cut from my collar, but I thought better of it. Yes, it would buy me a mule—a lame one, right along with a new set of problems. Even if Thorsten didn’t ask how I came by such a treasure, others would once he traded it for coin. Might even think I had more of it. And if that happened faster than I could escape on a mule with teeth as long as my thumb…? The way my luck went with mules, the old thing might just die underneath me halfway across the stretch.

I took a deep breath. “Just… let me know if someone comes and wants the mule, and I’ll see what I can do.”

Maybe I needed to offer my services as a midwife, after all? But wouldn’t that put me in even greater risk of being found out? How much longer until that woman the priests wanted had a name? A description? An occupation?

I needed to leave this place and reach the Pale Court, but how? Fear crippled me, making me doubt every idea I came up with. Then I doubted it a second time, asking myself if I was just making excuses, stalling to make good on my promise.

I’d tried to escape Enosh for over a month, and now that I had, I didn’t know what to do. What to think. What to feel. What did I want beyond rest for the dead that might as well never come now? Curse this devil, what did I feel for my husband beyond sympathy? What was this heavy weight I dragged around in my chest? How did any of this make any sense, given how—

The cart stopped.

A splinter drove into my palm.

I pulled back with a hiss, shoes sinking into the mud as I tried to get the wheel unstuck. Life had never been particularly kind to me, but had it ever been this miserable? Perhaps it was a matter of perception, and mine had changed after two months of soft pelts, sweet berries, and always enough food in my belly.

When I finally reached the house at the end of the village, I brought my cart underneath its thatched overhang. Inside, dried herbs hung from the rafters, scenting the air with traces of rosemary and chamomile. Dozens of little drawers lined one wall, each labeled with whatever it stored behind, from mushrooms I recognized to names I couldn’t pronounce.

But I could read most.

The healer lifted his gaze from a book that rested in his palm and pushed the spectacles higher up the bridge of his nose. “Yes?”

I cleared my throat. “My father’s tea? For his lungs?”

“Ah. Yes.” He placed the book on its wooden stand on a table beside him, then rummaged through a woven basket. “Has he coughed less blood?”

“He coughs less, though the blood comes in larger swells whenever he does.”

I trailed my finger over the letters in the book, loving the feel of parchment against my fingers. What if I offered my help to the healer? Not many could read, and he might need someone to sort stock or mix ingredients for potions.

“Are you a piss prophet?” I asked.

“No. There’s a piss prophet two villages over. I never studied the taste of urine during—” His magnified stare dropped to how my finger traced a letter, his disapproval so obvious in the arch of his brow that I abandoned my silly idea. “Your father’s tea.”

I took the pouch he handed me. “What do women do around here to find out if there isn’t even a midwife?”

“These grains right here.” Another shove on his spectacles, then he pulled a small bowl from a shelf behind him with two depressions, each filled with a different seed. “Urinate on both chambers. Cover it for five days in a warm place. If both kinds sprout with the same vigor, there will be a child.”

“I’ve heard of this before.” An ancient method for those who had nobody trained in the taste of a pregnant woman’s piss. “How much?”

“With the tea?” A smack of his lips. “Two shillings.”

I pulled the coins from my pocket, dropping them to the table with a clank. “I do this at any time of the day?”

“Morning is best,” he said as he took the money. “Your husband works the mines? Died?”

My husband couldn’t die. “Died at Airensty.”

“My condolences to you, woman.” He nodded, but his interest shifted back to his book. “I shall look in on your father in two days.”

And waste me another coin.

Pa could barely get out of bed anymore without choking on his own blood, let alone travel to the Pale Court, even with the aid of a mule. I would have to leave him behind to die. Alone. In a strange village. All because I’d returned.

And what if I made it to the Pale Court only to meet my end there? Lord Tarnem had held Enosh captive for a fortnight. For all I knew, the priests might keep him locked up for months, years, even. Maybe I would sit on his throne for a decade, watching my skin wrinkle while I remembered the day I left my father to die in a bed of moldy straw.

My heart sunk in my chest. I had to make a choice. Should I stay with Pa? Use the stone and risk suspicion? Or spend the last coin on good shoes so I could walk the whole damn way?

My hand wandered to my stomach, daring one circling caress, then another. And I realized that, for the first time in my life, I might have to do what was best for my child.

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Chapter 23

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Enosh

Black spots dotted my vision through the haze of pain. I wheezed, but I’d stopped thrashing against the fire long ago, letting the hot metal burn my wrists and ankles as my weight dropped toward the restless tips of endless flames.

When I rose to the highest point of the wheel, the priest standing on the scaffold dug his bloodied hand back into the gaping cleft on my abdomen. He rummaged through my organs with one hand, giving his nods and frowns, then let the quill in his other hand note all the peculiarities of an undying god.

“What a curious creature you are,” he murmured, his robes drenched in sweat from the sweltering heat that radiated back from the ceiling. “A stab to the heart will do as little to you as the removal of your guts, aside from weakening you temporarily. Another turn, please.”

A swell of blood oozed from the hole in my body, veining across the welts and pustules that covered my skin. How long I’d been here, I couldn’t say—I’d stopped counting the days when they’d cleaned powdered bone and spikes from the furrows in the rock.

The high priests had gone through great trouble indeed, amassing enough knowledge to keep me here; reducing a god to a drooling creature with his guts dangling from a crater in his abdomen, while somewhere between hisses and pops, his penis shriveled away once more.

When the fire engulfed me, again and again, I couldn’t think past the dense fog of misery. One turn blurred into the next, and the only thing keeping my mind from descending into hysteria was the memory of Ada’s vow. I needed my little one; I needed to return to my wife. I was growing more and more willing to scream for it, beg for it, to throw myself at the goodness of mortals I knew did not exist.

I emerged from the flames to the creak of hinges. An armed mortal entered my dungeon, his trembling hand wrapped around the pommel of his sword. Sweat glistened on his forehead and his shoulders bobbed with each studded step of his metal-plated boots.

“What is this about?” the man by the wheel said. “High Priest Dekalon ordered that nobody—”

His words died on the sword as it sunk into his ribcage, only for the blade to sever his spine and let him collapse to the ground at an odd angle.

A spark of hope.

Until the wheel shifted, slowly at first, only for my weight to rip me down into the fire once more. Coals seared into my chest to the sound of metallic clanks. The stench of burnt blood ripped a scream from my throat until my voice died at the scorching, scalding heat that flayed my lungs from the inside.

Die.

I wanted to die.

Wanted to die…

Wanted to—

“Ew.” Yarin’s familiar voice wafted through the thick smoke of charred hair as I lifted toward the ceiling once more. “Let me tell you, breathing through the stench alone calls for at least fifty corpses, sixty if you need me to stuff your guts… Oh my, is this truly my brother? Hard to tell with half your face carved down to the skull—” A hiss. “Bastards cut your pecker off. Oh, I do commiserate with you on that particularity.”

I blinked him into sharpness as he climbed over me and lifted the heavy chains to thread them through the spokes. “I… called… for you.”

“Yes, about that.” He brushed a rust stain from his tailored green jacket before he set to work on another chain. “See, I wanted to come to your aid sooner, you have to believe me. In fact, I was at a brothel when thoughts about your torture reached me. I wanted to come immediately. Right after I finished. But then Eilam showed up. Oh, what a mess it was. Uh… do help me with breaking this chain.”

Against the weakness in my limbs, I braced my heel against a spoke and fought the constraints of iron. “Pull harder…”

 “That’s what she said, but then Eilam came. And as it so goes with our brother, everyone dropped dead. There I was, my hands on this woman’s hips, about to pull her onto my length…” He ripped through the chain with a spark, then let it clank down along the wheel. “So confusing. What does one do in such a moment? Should I stop? Should I finish? What are the divine rules here? After all…”

His voice faded away.

My mind spiraled on its wobbly axis as I sat up and stared down at my gnarled legs. Their bones had healed into the weave of the spokes, leaving me no choice but to break them once more. Nine pounds of my fist shattered them into a hundred pieces, allowing me to pull first one, then the other, from the constraints of the wheel.

“I dare say I had an onslaught of… morality of some sort,” the God of Whispers continued as he climbed back onto the scaffold. “Such a lovely woman. Anyway, Eilam threatened to follow me to every whorehouse across the realms should I aid you. What a waste of fine women that would be. Oh, you vexed him so, Enosh. The drowning didn’t help our thoroughly dysfunctional family. Oh, you do look rather beaten. Good thing I convinced that archer to kill most of the guards.”

Saliva pooled beneath my tongue as I pushed my liver back where it ought to be for faster healing, only one thing on my mind. “I have… have to go home.”

Back to my wife.

Nothing else mattered.

Not yet.

“Home. Yes, of course. You ought to rest.” Yarin made his descent, his voice like fangs digging into my brain. “In the end, I mentioned balance. There has to be balance, but how, if our brother is being carved up like a pig?”

I inched toward the scaffold. My legs refused to obey; still broken enough, I had to lift and drag them by hand. No matter. Out. Just out. I let myself roll over the edge. My arms paddled the thick air, and I sucked in a sharp breath before—

Crack.

My skull shattered on the rock, and all air burst from my lungs. Blood seasoned my teeth as the dungeon spun around me, and Yarin’s chatter faded into blissful silence. A ringing followed, then the pop of flames, and finally…

“Ah, ten corpses should be appropriate,” Yarin said. “I am not a greedy god, and I can only divide my love and attention between so many.”

As my senses returned and my skull mended, I glanced around my prison. The priest lay beside me on the ground, his eye nothing but a black, oozing socket where the sword must have thrust through his head. The armed man kneeled not far from him, the blade embedded in his own chest.

I jutted my chin toward the lot of dead men and let them rise for my protection. “You may have them once they have ensured my escape.”

Yarin lifted a brow at me. “I said I have no preferences; I didn’t say I have no taste.”

“Suit yourself,” I said, and let them march ahead of me toward freedom.

I crawled over the stone like vermin, up a short set of stairs and through the oaken door, dragging my useless legs behind me. Once I reached the light of day, its brightness stabbed into my head. Bile soured the back of my throat and my stomach cramped before strings of vomit driveled from my lips. It tainted the air with bitterness and saturated the seashells beneath me.

Streaked blood-red at the horizon, the chaotic morning sky matched the color of the flayed skin flapping from my chest. Naked to nearly bone, I rose, blood still dripping from my crotch. Torture had certainly changed over the span of two hundred years, each new instrument an attest to mankind’s depravity.

I sent the corpses to clear the area, some sort of temple grounds surrounded by walls carved from the rock. “High Priest Dekalon?”

“Not here, I’m afraid,” Yarin shouted over the screams of the remaining soldiers as the dead turned temple to tomb, biting through arteries and breaking necks. “Oh, I do understand how eager you are to chain his soul. Bring him to me, and I shall do this for you in exchange for the corpses.”

He would die many gruesome deaths. But not yet. I had other priorities. As promised, my wife was waiting for me. And as promised, I would return to her.

Forever return to my Ada.

Letting armor form around me from the skin of the dead guards and priests, I walked over to a chestnut mare that stood saddled beside a weapon rack. A bucket of water sat by her side, showing me the reflection of something that looked nothing like the man Ada knew, but all the more like a monster.

Ribs exposed and charred black on one side, half of my face peeled down to the bone, my hair a tattered mess of singed strands and new growth. No, I would not let her see me like this. I needed to heal before I could dare hold her, kiss her, sink into her arms.

“How long?” I asked. “How long was I held captive?”

Yarin shrugged and grinned down at the corpse of a dead woman. “A little less than a fortnight, perhaps.”

I cut the mare’s throat with a bone knife, only to let her rise moments later, turning her toward the Pale Court. I needed rest. Perhaps I would even find much-needed sleep in my little one’s arms, so I may wake and pretend that this had been nothing but a terrible dream.

“This one,” Yarin said. “The rest… mmm, nothing but brutes with hairy arses. I shall call on you once you are… Wait, where are you going?”

“To my court.” I raised the woman, her soul already shackled to her form. “My wife is waiting for me. Perhaps you should come with me and ease her mind. She has to be terrified.”

“Oh, she was. So overtaken by panic, fragments of her thoughts resonated in my head over the span of towns.” He reached for the confused woman, helped her onto shaky legs, and pulled her into his embrace as he hushed her. “But your wife is not at the Pale Court.” A chuckle. “Not unless you have recently acquired a new servant named Rose and fish cages.”

Your wife is not at the Pale Court.

I froze, rendered utterly dazed and confused by his words. Fish cages? My jawline stiffened as doubt and distrust tore the veil that hid old memories shaped by vile betrayal and set into my core in the shape of a broken heart.

I gulped past a lump of blood and ire. “Where is my wife?”

“How would I know? I have more important things to do than to listen to your wife’s internal ramblings about frayed ropes and what to put in her stew.”

Frayed ropes?

Stew?

Raw and violent, mistrust crackled through every fiber of my being, an emotion I was too familiar with. Why was she not where she ought to be? I had ensured her return to the Pale Court, yet she was not there. Neither could she be held captive if she pondered fish cages and stew. I stumbled back a step, my mind suddenly spinning again.

How…?

Why was she not…?

None of this made sense.

I’ll hide in the back of beyond until my hair’s gray, Ada’s words infiltrated a mind already standing at a crumbling edge, with the black void of madness gaping below. How could I not want to leave you? Any woman in her right mind would. I hate you.

A feverish chill crept over my mending skin, tightening around my skull until my temples throbbed. Had this not happened before? Had I not been snared? What if my wife had escaped me after all? What if this wicked woman had played me for a fool like—

No!

She’d promised.

Had given me her vow!

My wife had come to care for me, had she not? At least some? Had I not tried to please her? Had put my doubt aside and trusted her? But I had trusted before. Had tried so hard to please, and what did I get in return? Betrayal. My child taken from me. A return to loneliness.

I hate you. Hate you so much, not even your brother is powerful enough to change that.

Somehow my legs gave out underneath me, and I sunk to the ground. No, none of this made sense. I just wanted to go home to my little one. My flesh was exhausted, my mind muddled from—

She had not returned…

“I thought you knew,” Yarin said. “After all, you can sense her flesh and bone.”

All I’d sensed for weeks was pain, bought with the assurance that Ada would be safe at the Pale Court. Assurance that she would wait for me. But she was not there. She was…

Where was my wife?

Closing my eyes, I disentangled my mind from the clank of stones shifting on the mountain and the flaps of wings on the breeze above. Instead, I listened to the beating flesh of hearts and the ba-boom-ba-boom of their cadence. I searched its undertones for that one out-of-tune beat, that particularity that was my wife’s—

Ba-boom-boom.

An echo.

As though Ada’s heart called to me, my senses steered themselves northeast. Was she in Hemdale? And would that not make sense after—no. Not Hemdale. My mind traveled higher. Higher yet. All the while, my heart sunk deeper into the raging pit that was my stomach. A fortnight, and my wife wasn’t even a furlong closer to the Pale Court. Instead, she’d gone north.

Away from it.

My fingers itched.

Away from me?

My nostrils flared, faster the closer my senses came to her form. Her heart drummed its odd beat, her hand gently stroked around… something. Comfortable warmth encapsulated the skin of her arm, whereas I had boiled in fire for weeks. A smile curved her lips where mine had been charred away hundreds of times. Her chest was lighter than ever before, whereas mine had suffocated in the stench of my burnt flesh.

I sensed everything on her.

Everything but despair.

Everything but heartache.

Everything but the agony of something being amiss or the pulse-quickening dread of prey in hiding. My wife’s body felt lighter than it had since she’d come to the Pale Court, as though she’d unburdened herself of her shame, her guilt… unburdened herself of me. Her happiness overwhelmed my senses. How could she be this happy when she must have known of my dire circumstances? How?

A roar built at the back of my throat, my ribcage not large enough to contain this brutal pain, like a thousand fires burning within me. “Listen to her thoughts. I want to know what she’s thinking right this moment.”

Yarin peeled his lips over his teeth and sucked in a hiss of air, tilting his head this way and that. “She is far away from here, brother, giving me nothing but fragments.”

“Tell me!”

“She is thinking of going farther north, where fewer people pray to Helfa,” he said, letting me choke on a spike of anger. “Something about a mule. And, um… Elric. It comes into her thoughts often. Elric. Elric.”