Текст книги "Queen of rot and pain"

Автор книги: Liv Zander

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Chapter 26

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Ada

My nostrils burned with the smoke quickly filling the chamber as flames came together into nothing short of an inferno. Worse was how the corpses littering the ground caught fire, skin melting to their faces like wrinkled leather—something they hadn’t done for two-hundred years.

Enosh must have lifted his curse, but I commanded them to rise, regardless. If they tossed themselves onto the flames blazing along the furrows, I might be able to escape, but where to? The corridor I’d come from had been full of pine pitch and was likely already roaring.

Eyes burning, I glanced back at the metal screen, trying to blink it into focus against the violent heat that brought tears to my eyes. If I ran that way, what were the chances they hadn’t poured the amber resin into the stone there as well? Small.

With a single thought, I commanded the corpses to throw themselves onto the flames back toward the corridor. At least there, I knew where I was going.

Obeying their mistress’ command, they collapsed onto the flames two and three at once. I sprinted down the dais and crossed pile upon pile of soldiers like bridges.

Bridges doused in oil and set ablaze, for the flames engulfed them too quickly. They blackened the train of my dress, singed my hair until its bitter reek crept into my nostrils, scalded along my arms until it blistered.

Pain prickled my skin like a thousand needles driven into my flesh at once, ripping several whimpers from me until the first scream wedged from my throat. A cough doused it, doing my lungs no favors as I heaved and pulled boiling air into my chest.

Was I going the right way?

Orange flames depleted the air as they frantically danced all around me, suffocating me, making my mind go blank. Floor, walls, ceiling… everything burned.

W-where is the temple?

Where…? Oh my god, which way lay the gate?

A sudden roar ripped through my focus as my dress finally caught fire. Dissolving one of the corpses into nothing but bone dust, I let it sprinkle onto me, extinguishing the flames. Another end of my train caught fire instead.

My chest heaved in tight convulsions as my legs gave underneath me. I collapsed to the ground, screaming in silent agony as the fire burned me alive, causing such havoc on my focus that I couldn’t sense a single speck of bone. This was it. I would crawl out of here charred to—

Gravity shifted around me.

No, I shifted as someone picked me up, pressing me against the ungiving hardness of a familiar chest.

Enosh!

He said something, his voice nothing but deep vibrations against the roar of flames as I tossed in his arms. Darkness devoured me as he let something form around me, leather perhaps, shielding me from the worst of the flames while they certainly devoured him.

I jostled about, screaming against his chest as the heat continued to bite at my body. The pain was agonizing, but it had nothing, nothing on the shock of gnawing cold that suddenly drove its sharp fangs into my flesh. Were we… outside?

Enosh shook the leather off me, hushing me from lips black with soot, set into a face almost as disfigured as the day I’d died. He looked like the monster people made him out to be. But this one was mine, my god husband, who had gone through fire to save me.

“Soldiers are coming,” he ground through his teeth, visibly in pain as he spoke. “The valley is too narrow to escape them easily.”

Mind reeling, I only reached up, watching my fingers, charred to the first knuckle, cup his blistered cheek. “You saved me from the fire.”

“I have told you I would stand at the center of flames for you and our child, have I—” Enosh stumbled, and everything spun once more before he sunk to his knees with a hiss. “Listen to me, little one. Gather bone with me as fast as you can from wherever you mind reaches and pile it around us, yes?”

It wasn’t so much his words that instilled blood-curdling fear in me, but the tension in his voice. When I looked around the distorted landscape, I understood the urgency.

A frigid breeze numbed my face, amplified by the sight of mounted soldiers galloping toward us. Hundreds of them, maybe even a thousand. Their hoofbeats drowned beneath the roar of flames coming from the open gate of the temple, and smoke rose in raven-black billows from the stone buildings.

Chaos surrounded us, trapping us between a large army storming ahead, archers running to the wide arrow slits in the battlement behind us and chains of hills to our left and right. How could we possibly escape this without—

“Ada!” Enosh shouted, startling me out of my daze. “Bone. We need bone!”

Bone. Yes.

Against the panic in my chest and the pain of my burn wounds, I focused on whatever bone was in reach. Skeletal remains of rodents trapped between boulders, beetle shells hard enough to break through the frozen ground, the corpses inside the temple… I gathered it all, letting it drift toward us like a snowstorm.

Arrows whistled.

One embedded itself into Enosh’s upper arm, ripping a grunt from him. More followed, thudding into the snow all around us as the hoofbeats of too many horses shook the ground on which we kneeled.

“Enosh,” I whimpered, fearing immortality more than I had ever feared death. “They’re closing—”

He threw himself atop me, ripping me to the ground with a hiss. Another arrow must have struck him somewhere with the way he flinched, and again, curling himself around me.

“When I say now, you blow the bone in all directions at once with as much force as you can!” His command was harsh because it needed to be, yet I sensed how his fingers stroked along the back of my head, offering comfort as he pushed me into the snow. “Wait.”

Pressed against the ground like this, I couldn’t see much. But I didn’t need to. I heard the sharp thuds of arrows puncturing the ground, sensed each flinch when one struck my husband, and felt how the beat of hooves bore all the way into my heart.

When the bone around us trembled, barely distinguishable from the snow, Enosh stroked my head with more fervor. “Patience, Ada. Patience.”

He jerked once more.

Another moan.

“Wait,” he mumbled as though he’d sensed the panicked rage build in my core, the brutal urge to kill all those out to hurt us. “Wait. Wait. Now!”

It emerged as a cry toward the gray clouds, the energy that thrust the bone we’d gathered into all directions like a deadly tidal wave, rippling on the surges of my rage and grief.

Trembles ransacked my entire body, stiffening my spine to such a degree, not even Enosh could hold me down as the surge of bone ripped through the line of soldiers.

Like a powerful gust, it threw everyone and everything back, lifting horses off the ground only to let the beasts collapse several feet away. Some of the spiked walls blew across the field, lancing soldiers and horses alike, leaving them to wiggle and squeal.

My chest nearly burst with glee.

The army was… gone.

Whatever was left screamed and wailed, but a loud rumble soon overshadowed it as parts of the bailey broke off with a deafening boom. The crumbling stone ripped the archers down, burying them and their pestering arrows beneath it.

A smile ached my cheeks.

The temple was gone, too.

Nothing remained around us but severed limbs, chaos, and a few soldiers who walked about the field of slaughter disoriented. But not much longer.

I struggled myself onto my wobbly legs and lifted my arms, my voice a mere whisper but the dead heard it just the same. “Rise.”

Soldiers pushed themselves up to stand, screaming in panic and confusion as their limbs moved at my will, their souls mere onlookers that would depart soon enough.

“Kill them,” I said. “Kill them all.”

They spread out like a mischief of rats, cleansing this place of its remaining depravity.

I kneeled back down where his upper body swayed, where he sat with at least five arrows protruding from his back. “Enosh.”

“Cannot die,” he murmured as he strained to lift his head, his face still badly burned, his lips black with soot and crimson red from the blood he coughed up.

“I’m so sorry.” For how I, one after another, pulled the arrows from his flesh, sending jolts and grunts of pain through him. “You’ll heal faster like this.”

“You have done so well…” Enosh wrapped his blistered arms around me and pulled me against him. “We will… rest here for only a moment, little one. Only… only a moment. Then we will go home.”

Home.

To our Pale Court.

Nodding, I allowed myself to go slack against him, only now noticing my badly burned legs, not a shred of wool left around them. No, he was right. We needed to heal before we would return home.

So there we sat for an hour or two or forever, a god and a goddess mending in each other’s embrace. Perhaps he was the liar. Perhaps I was the monster. I didn’t care.

Neither did love.

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Chapter 27

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Enosh

A few months later…

“You are counting, yes?” Kiss after kiss, I pressed my lips to Ada’s swollen belly where she lay sprawled out naked in the grass of her garden.

Until something pressed back.

I jerked upright, barely able to contain the nervous excitement in my veins as I watched for more movement. Ada had told me how our child had begun to stretch in her womb, sometimes showing a hand, other times a heel. Always when I was out to spread rot.

Ada lifted herself onto her elbows and grinned. “Did you see it? Because I felt it.”

“Sensed it against my lips,” I said, my eyes fixed on her belly with rapt attention. “I am starting to wonder if I will ever—”

There!

What had to be a foot so small pressed against her belly from the inside, lifting the skin before it sunk back down. My child poked a limb up from the other side instead, letting Ada’s stomach ripple and shift with the movement, filling me with wonder.

Here I sat, a god undying, who sensed all the dead, all the living. An immortal who had witnessed the rise of civilizations and their downfalls. Had seen the world turn to ice and fire steam into oceans.

Decades. Centuries. Eons.

But never had I seen anything so precious.

There it was, my godly child, turning its father speechless, rendering him mute with astonishment. How small a limb it was, showing me that he or she was alive and well, growing beneath the beat of Ada’s heart.

“It is… beyond words.” I gently lowered my hand onto the protrusion, laughing at the way our baby did not yield, but rather, pressed into my palm. “As stubborn as its mother, to be certain.”

Ada turned onto her side with a smile and a groan, allowing me to behold the beauty of her condition and how it was changing her form. Her breasts had become fuller, her hips a bit wider, and a few pinkish lines of torn tissue appeared below her belly now and then.

I lowered myself down behind her, pressing my bare body against her backside. “Where is the pain?”

“Everywhere.” A sigh accompanied her hand as it motioned toward her lower back. “But especially there with all the kicking your child does.”

I brought my hand to her waist, gently kneading toward her spine and up along the muscle from there. Ah, gone were the times where a second’s thought had cured her ailments. No, the King of Flesh and Bone now rubbed his wife’s strained muscles until his thumbs ached.

Like a mere man.

My chest lightened at the thought, and how this woman had given me the responsibilities of a husband. Soon, those of a father would follow, turning eternity into a precious promise indeed.

How our child would place itself in this world remained to be discovered. Perhaps it would one day ride the lands with us, as I allowed Ada from time to time whenever her pleas became too pestering.

Or whenever she just left without my permission…

As much as death had emboldened her, immortality had turned her into a force to be reckoned with. She, too, had the power to spread rot. But mostly, she spread death, which angered Eilam greatly. Together, we had returned order to the lands beyond the Æfen Gate.

Across most parts.

Others would follow.

One ought not to expect mortals to worship their true deities after two centuries of absence. Not until we would tear down every temple and string every priest onto Ada’s tree. No, such transitions took time, understanding, and patience.

I placed a kiss onto the nape of Ada’s neck, her hair somehow darker than it had been, though she accounted it to the pregnancy. “Better?”

“No,” she said, running her fingers over the silken grass. “Perhaps because you’re pushing more fervently against the wrong part of my body. My pains are along my spine, not between my legs.”

“Yesterday, you claimed the opposite.”

I pushed my hard length against her thighs, and the way she braced to feel all of me didn’t go unnoticed. My little one had become rather insatiable as of late, demanding much of me. I gave her all the attention I could. The world could wait. My little one remained impatient.

“Spread yourself for me.” I took her hand and brought it to her buttocks, giving it a hard squeeze. “Open yourself wide and invite me in. Show me how much my little one wants my cock.”

She didn’t.

Of course, my woman didn’t, and instead, she reached behind herself to grip me, placing my crown at an entrance slicker with need than I had first assumed. “Is this invitation enough?”

“Quite sufficient.”

I pushed into my little one’s needy cunt, groaning at the way it gripped me so tightly, beckoning me deeper with how wet she was. “Dripping with lust, taking all of me so eagerly, my good little goddess.”

How sweetly she moaned, her back arched to allow deep thrusts while my hand cupped her belly. How strangely arousing this was, sensing the movement of my child against my palm while I drove into my wife.

And yet, Ada soon pressed a hand to her forehead, her hips stilling. “Not again.”

Another spell of dizziness. It happened often lately when she rested on one side too long, likely because the weight of the child narrowed the blood flow of an artery, but who could say? Her flesh and bone evaded my powers, but a good husband ought to work around that.

I slung my arm around her, helping her up as the leaves of the willow above us rustled. “Up with you.”

Skin braided itself down from the bony white branches of the tree, weaving together into a harness beneath her buttocks. Two thicker ropes formed beside her arms so she may hold on to it, creating a kind of swing that lifted her off the ground.

Stroking her thighs apart, I stepped up between them. I brought Ada’s hands to the ropes, then once more pushed inside her. Suspended like this, she gently shifted back at each thrust, only to fall onto my length with more energy.

“More,” she said as her knuckles stiffened beneath my hands.

I let my hands fall to her hips, holding her steady in the contraption of the swing as I fucked her harder. I observed the angle at which she shifted her pelvis, listened to the sound of her moans, and paid close attention to the rise of her nipples.

However much of a god I was, my divine wife left me stripped bare to the skills of a man. And when we reached our pleasure together, only to fall into each other’s arms after, neither of us could disguise what we had as anything but love.

Achingly true love.

For eternity.

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Chapter 28

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Ada

One year later…

I stepped into the tavern, the air thick with the scent of sausages, herbs, and sizzling lard. It had brought many a patron to the rough-hewn tables that stood about, most decked with foam-capped tankards and wicker baskets that held slices of bread.

Men and women turned their heads, then bowed as they ought to as they mumbled, “My queen.” Amidst the occasional screech of bench legs over wooden planks, none dared to leave. That might have earned them my suspicion—something best avoided.

Because worse than a god in love…

… was a goddess out for revenge.

I walked over to the keeper, an old woman whose wimple hung as crooked as her back, and handed her a coin of goodwill. “How many?”

“Your Grace,” she said with a bow that lacked more grace than my own ever had, and jutted her chin toward the stairs. “First room to the right. Three priests and two men with swords.”

A sigh escaped me.

Five men?

How dreadfully boring.

But alas, such was our plight these days, chasing those last followers of Helfa from the small taverns, musty cellars, and secret hideouts in damp caverns.

I lifted the train of my dress, its fabric the sheerest skin, with petals of black beetle shells shaped like a thousand spring roses. Around each, white feathers shifted with each of my steps in lieu of leaves. A crown of fingers that had once pointed at me came together into a crown upon my head, scraping along the low-hanging ceiling as I ascended the stairs.

Traitorous mumbles soon resonated the corridor, hushed whispers and lies that came muffled from behind the door. A door I kicked open but a moment later, letting a priest tumble from a bench while the rest of the lot scurried into the corners.

“The Queen of Rot and Pain. My queen!” One of the priests, who hid a metal pendant in the shape of a sun behind his cotton tunic, raised his arms. “This is but a small gathering of friends, I swear it.”

The hairs bristled along my arms.

Oaths. Promises. Vows.

Nothing but lies.

Proven at my first step toward them, when one of the men unsheathed his sword in all his foolish courage. “We meant nobody any harm.”

Except for me and my husband with how they’d preyed upon us last month, when we wanted nothing but a peaceful walk with our daughter about the meadows.

My eyes fell to the pommel of the man’s sword, engraved with the spread wings of a falcon. “Ah, the crest of House Tertiel. Remind me, mortal, how long has it been since your lord bent his knee, vowing us his loyalty? Three months? Four?”

He slipped his hand from hilt to pommel, covering the symbol as though it could be made unseen. “I came of my own account.”

“I shall put your statement to the test once I come for the bones of your lord’s ailing wife.” What a fine new archway she would span by the Æfen Gate, along with these five dissidents. “For now, I am convicting you for planning an upheaval against your deities. Up, up, into the branches you go.”

“No! Please, Your Grace,” one of them shouted as chains of bone shaped around his wrists. “Please, have mercy!”

“Oh, but I do.” After all, in the generosity of my kindness, their souls would be allowed to depart to the Court Between Thoughts. “You are lucky my husband—”

One of the armed men stormed at me, sword raised high above his head and ready to strike. “I won’t let you slaughter me like—”

I sent a bone dagger at him, letting it clank against his sword and rip the blade from his palm. Metal hit wood. I gripped his throat. A foolish mistake, because something bit me in the belly.

I stared down at the knife protruding there, close to my waist, where he’d driven it in with his other hand. Nothing too severe. Bleeding, yes, but I was more upset about the damn hole in my dress. Fashioning myself such an ensemble was no easy feat.

“Fool.” I pulled the knife from my body, turned the blade around, and rammed it into his belly. “Such a mess on my dress for nothing. You want to cause me pain? Make me suffer? Well, mortal, then you ought to stab like so.” One pull, and I cut upward into his ribcage before I stepped back and let him slump to the ground. “How wasteful of my time.”

There I stood, counting the minutes to eternity while the man bled to death. The others waited neatly bound and attached to a bone chain, whimpering, and begging, and regretting their—

Ah, finally dead.

“Now rise.” I watched how the man stood, how he stared down at himself in shock, as they always did. Next, he would scream, so I gagged him with a patch of skin. “Take the chain and lead your friends outside. Hurry now. Against what rumors may say, I do not, in fact, have all the time in the world.”

I turned around and went back down, the tavern as silent as the grave aside from how the five men shuffled behind me, bone chain clanking across the ground.

“Follow me,” I said as I crossed the empty market, and left the little village through a slender copse of trees that opened into a spring meadow dotted with orange tulips. “No need to litter this quaint little place with your intestines. That is far enough. Now kneel before your queen.”

Against the dead man’s grunts of protest, he kicked his four friends into the back of their knees. At my silent command, he unsheathed a knife, bringing it to the priest’s throat as tendrils of braided skin slithered about the calf-high grass. Hay season. My favorite.

“I’m growing tired of the likes of you.” Most of all, I was growing tired of how the priests prayed to Helfa. Still. “You know, if you prayed to me instead, the kind part of me might yet be swayed. Ask my husband. Too caring, he calls—”

“Ada! Come and see!” Enosh’s voice came from downhill, strained with unbridled excitement. “Ada!”

“What now?” I mumbled as I turned away, leaving the men behind to piss themselves some more.

I walked down the sway of the hill, palms outstretched so I may feel the gentle scrape of the cat grass along my knuckles. Not far down, Enosh sat on a blanket of braided hair, his hair tousled from the spring breeze, carrying a blueish tint with how generous the sun shone down this day.

And there, in front of him, was Amelia.

A chain of red clover blossoms her father must have tied together sat among her black wisps, bringing out the rich blue of her eyes. She gingerly rocked back and forth on her hands and knees. Would she do it this time?

I stopped several feet away from them with an excited tingle in my chest, watching our sweet daughter with rapt attention. How she carefully lifted one hand and reached forward, chunky legs going wobbly. With a high-pitched squeal, she shifted her balance forward. So close.

Until her other arm gave out underneath her. She quickly jerked herself back into a sitting position, skipping the warning cries and going straight to screams and tears of disappointment. Dramatic, just like her father…

“Shh…” The sweetest hushing sounds resonated the meadow as Enosh picked her up, pressed her against his chest, and tenderly rocked her. “Patience, my love. Not much longer now, and you will crawl about court. Oh, how Orlaigh will groan as she chases behind you.”

Something the old woman would do gladly, considering that it kept her out of Enosh’s throne. It had taken little more but soiled clouts, a bout of colic, and teething pains to convince my husband that we needed a maid.

Raising a child is more exhausting than I had anticipated, Enosh said often, usually right before he went to bed. There, he lowered Amelia onto his chest, one arm wrapped around her as the two of them slept for a day or three.

My heart clenched at the memory, but it burst with ardor when Enosh pressed a kiss to Amelia’s forehead, then shoved the tip of his nose into her hair, breathing her in. He was a good father, showering her with attention and love, often taking her on walks.

Enosh glanced over his shoulder back at me and smiled. “You missed it.”

I walked over to them and sat on the blanket, and gave my little Amelia a kiss. “I’ve been watching you all along.”

“My little princess is in need of a nap,” he said as he gently stroked his thumb from her forehead down the bridge of her nose. “The mortals?”

“Waiting for death up the hill.”

“Finish, so we may go home.” He pressed his lips to mine in a loving kiss, but it was the way his other arm came around my middle that had me hiss in pain. “What’s this?”

I looked from the blood on his fingertips up into the approaching storm in his eyes. “It is but a scratch, borne of a mortal’s stupidity and my eagerness to get this over with.”

Enosh was having none of it and rose, pressing Amelia tightly against him as he stormed up the hill. “Who was it?”

“Not now, Enosh. She’s tired.” I got up and hurried behind him. “Besides, the mortal is already dead.”

“With his wicked soul still about,” he growled down at the gagged corpse, who shuffled back a step. “You dared to touch my wife? Draw her blood while our daughter is learning to crawl only a handful of feet from her?”

Beside them, Yarin quickly came into his form with a wide grin lining his lips. “Amelia finally crawled?”

“No, she got scared, but it can’t be much longer now,” Enosh said, then lifted our heavy-lidded daughter into Yarin’s arms. “Hold her.”

“Sweet little thing, Uncle Yarin is here.” He took her, drumming the tip of her nose in a way that never failed to lure a giggle from her. “Oh, how tired you look, but there is mischief to be had, Amelia.”

Enosh swatted the chain from the corpse’s hand, gripped the hair at the back of his head, and all but dangled him by it to a nearby boulder. “Another family memory stained by the likes of you.”

He slammed the mortal’s face against the rock. Crack. And again. Crack. And a third time. Slosh.

The corpse hadn’t slumped to the ground yet when Enosh spun around, assessing the cut on my side even as he let out an annoyed grunt. “You promised to be careful.”

“I was.” Not truly. I’d been bored, letting down my guard at the dreadful premise of coming all this way for merely five men. “It is nothing, Enosh.”

After he convinced himself of it, he nodded and took my face between his palms, letting his forehead sink against mine. “No more, Ada. Not until your bleeding comes, and certainly, none of this should you be with child again. Yes?”

“Yes,” I whispered, finding a strange comfort in this hint of ash sprinkled over snow that we shared in. “Let me finish this real quick.”

One after another, I shaped a bone dagger in my palm, ramming it into the bellies of three men.

The fourth one, one of the priests, stared up at me from tear-drowned eyes. “I cannot say, Adelaide, which one of you is worse. You or your husband.”

“The answer to that is simple, mortal.” I leaned over and stabbed into his belly, placing my lips by his ear. “We’re equally terrible.”

This concludes Queen of Rot and Pain. If you have a moment, please consider leaving my story a review. What an ending, huh? Wanna talk about it? Find out what’s next? Join me in my Facebook Reading Group. It’s fun there. I have chocolate and coffee. Occasionally wine.

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