Текст книги "Queen of rot and pain"

Автор книги: Liv Zander

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

My swallow got stuck between a parched throat and the biting angle at which he kept my neck trapped. Everything made so much sense now, from how he must have felt my joy over the pregnancy to how his brother had once more helped himself to my thoughts.

I struggled my voice over the bitter taste of grief in my mouth. “Our baby… if it would have been a boy. My excitement you sensed was over finding that I carried your child in my belly. Still do.”

A moment of stillness.

A beat of suspended time.

Stepping back, he once again robbed me of his warmth, even removing the precious pain of his finger on my chin. “Now you have extinguished any doubt in me that you are a liar.”

I ignored the sinking feeling in my stomach and how it caused my wounds to itch beneath the blood-damp cotton. “Why would you say such a thing? Can you not sense it?”

“There is… no… child.” His voice came forth like the freezing trickle of a wintery creek, treacherously beautiful in its calm cadence. “There never was. There never… will… be.”

I placed my palm onto my belly, and a hint of doubt penetrated the anguish in my chest. What did that mean, there never was? I once more shifted my thighs, but sensed no wetness in my braies, nothing that would indicate that I had expelled… but how could this be?

“You’re wrong.” My tendons stiffened. “I… I had the morning sickness, and—”

“There is… no… child.” He stared at me with somber austerity, unshaken conviction chiseled into the hard edges of his jaws. “How dare you serve me this lie to distract from your betrayals.”

Anger flared to life at the back of my throat. “They stabbed me three times, but they killed twice!”

A muscle jumped in his jaws. “I might have believed that your mind conjured it up when it was not so, out of your desperate desire for a child. But I told you in the forest that you were not pregnant after your time of fruitfulness. Even told you that our coupling in the forest would not result in one, which renders this a farce.” He swallowed. “A most disgusting one.”

“Maybe… maybe it’s too small that you can’t feel it yet.”

“I sense everything, from the hair follicles breaking open with new growth to what might become a child settling in its mother’s womb.”

The room spun around me and my upper body swayed. “You’re lying.”

“Spare me your theatrics, trying to make yourself look like a fool when we both know you are not.” His upper lip twitched, a hairline crack in his detached demeanor. “I have never been anything but honest with you, a fact I now regret deeply. You dare serve me a lie about how you thought yourself pregnant to conceal your betrayal? After I told you how much I grieved the loss of my daughter?”

I flinched. “No. I… The grains, they… there is—”

“There is no child!” The Pale Court shook with the rage of Enosh’s shout, bonedust rilling from the walls before the god clenched his eyes shut. When he opened them again, the damage on his mask repaired, he leaned into me, capturing my cheek in the biting trap of his palm. “You never intended to return, for you found this damn happiness I never managed to inspire in you. Or anyone, for that matter. Who is Elric? Ought I hunt him down? Punish him for touching what is mine by setting his corpse into my throne like I have done with… Joah? I shall find him, and…”

His voice faded into the rush of my turbulent mind as the last fraying string of my sanity tore with a pop at some faraway cranny of my mind. Trembles ransacked me to the core, and I stumbled back into the biting chill of death. What had Enosh told Yarin at the Court Between Thoughts?

Thought that she carried my child.

Thought.

That word echoed.

Had I imagined it all? Had wanted Enosh’s promise to prove true so desperately that I’d talked myself into it? Could my mind truly cling to the hope of a child with such desperation that it had wrenched the food from my stomach each morning?

Perhaps I had.

When Enosh shifted in my periphery, once more turning for the bed, I grabbed his arm and let my hand brush over my wounds. “Please make them go away.”

Enosh stared at me, his face a still landscape of desolation as his eyes slipped to the wounds. “I find them quite pleasing to look at. You shall keep them, little one, offering us an eternal reminder of your faithlessness.”

His leather armor retreated as he stepped away from my touch and toward the bed, where he slumped onto the furs, leaving me behind to stand and stare for a minute or an hour.

For years, I’d wanted nothing more than a child. Within a day, I’d lost it twice. Once to a knife, and the second to Enosh’s shout.

They hurt equally.

As the room turned silent around the sleeping god, long after Orlaigh had fled the argument, all that existed was agony. That, and the piercing chill of death, driving me toward the only source of warmth in this cold, cold kingdom.

Enosh.

Dazed and confused, I climbed into bed but, no matter how many furs I draped over myself, my teeth chattered. How strange this was. When I’d first come to the Pale Court, Enosh had been drawn to my warmth. Now here I was, inching closer to where he slept, embracing the heat that emanated from his mutilated body.

My teeth ground together as I brushed my hand over his still face, sensing the thick, sticky soot collecting on my fingertips. I stroked down along his stomach, over the tip of a rib that protruded from mending flesh, and around what looked like a hole in his abdomen.

He must have gone through agonizing pain, and I wasn’t sure who to blame for all this. The god for abandoning his duty and enraging the people? Myself for insisting on rotting my late husband, who’d brought me nothing but sorrow? Or my own kind, who’d killed me when I’d only tried to help?

Maybe we all were in dire need of forgiveness.

Something Enosh threatened I would never receive from him, letting me depart a nightmare only to slip straight into hell. I curled up beside him, letting coldness drive me into the arms of the devil who ruled it.

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Chapter 3

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Ada

Only hunger.

Only hunger.

My mind recited the words like a prayer where I soaked in the boiling spring—had for long enough that my skin resembled a dried prune. Salt and sulfur seasoned the stagnant air and the water gently lapped at the stony edges in time to each vibrating gurgle roiling in my stomach.

That strange sensation in my guts—like subtle, yet constant shifts of air—was neither the decay of my innards nor the wiggles of maggots. It was…

“Only hunger.”

The familiar tap-a-tap-taps of Orlaigh’s hurried steps echoed from the corridor, but they stilled at her sigh. “Lass, ye cannae brine in the water for hours like a pork shoulder on a Sunday morn.”

I wiped the steam from where it had settled on my cold forehead and frowned at the blackish half-moons along my nail beds. “It’s the only place that keeps me from shivering.”

Aside from Enosh.

For days, I’d pressed myself against him while he slept and slept. Good thing he did, because I knew he wouldn’t have tolerated me near him otherwise.

My ribcage shrank around my organs. “I’ve ruined this so completely.”

“Come now.” Orlaigh squeezed the dark water from the ends of my hair, letting the remnants of the walnut dye prattle onto the rock. “Ever seen what happens to cuts of meat when left in a warm place too long?”

“No.”

She made a disgruntled sound at the back of her throat. “It’ll go gray and slippery as it rots.”

When I curled my fingers into my palm, sensing a layer of slick on my skin, my stomach clenched—from hunger. With a sigh, I climbed out of the spring and huddled into the fur she held out.

“How c-can you st-stand the cold-d-d?”

“In time, the cold will mean nothing to ye, or how ye long for… something warm.”

That something being Enosh.

His omnipotence had turned into a visceral force that pulled me toward him, so strong it sent a wash of longing through me that almost mimicked warmth. It explained how I wanted nothing more but to melt into him.

Not so much how this emotional wreckage between us leeched the remaining blood from my quiet heart…

Orlaigh patted my shoulder as she dried me off, then reached for the broad band of cloth sitting on a rock. “Enough of all this wallowing in yer sorrows. What ye need is sun, lass. Aye, there’s not much the fresh air and sun cannae fix on the mind.”

I lifted my arms, staring down at how she wrapped the cloth around my abdomen, letting my wounds disappear behind the cotton. “Outside?”

She nodded. “This place reeks of death, and it’s not me own breath yet.”

“I don’t want to leave.” I nearly groaned at that statement. A month of trying to escape this place, but now something inside me revolted at the thought alone. “Neither do I want to get stabbed for a fourth time the moment we step outside.”

“Reckon ye cannae die of it again, lass.” She snorted at what had to be corpse-humor and held one of my dresses out, waiting for me to step into the circle of black feathers. “Certainly not beyond a gate where everyone’s dead already, anyway. Those poor souls who survived the wrath of a god dinnae dare come near it. I go there sometimes. Wasn’t born there, but the lands are still me home.”

Beyond the Soltren Gate.

A new shudder chased along my spine, and my palm circled my belly in some cruel, distorted instinct I somehow couldn’t shake. How strangely my fate echoed the one of Njala, calling my thoughts back with its persistent resound.

“I still don’t understand any of this.” Making it impossible for me to rid myself of this mourning over the loss of something that had never existed in the first place. “How could I’ve been so wrong? As a midwife…? I retched up every breakfast.”

“If I had fish heads for breakfast, I’d retch’em up, too.”

“Well…” I couldn’t even argue with that. “What of the grains, then?”

“Aye, ye were injured lass, scared and all alone with yer hardships. Of course, yer stomach would’ve gone sour with worry.”

“But—”

“Hush now.” She ran the fur along my strands, haphazardly drying them off. “Let it go, lass. All this talk, the false grief… What does it change?”

My chest deflated.

Nothing.

Deep down, I knew I should be relieved at this revelation. I would never be a mother, yet I had to do the motherly thing and find peace in the fact that my child was safe and well.

Also imagined.

When another shift in my stomach vibrated against my knuckles, I quickly dropped my hand. “Maybe I should wait for Enosh to wake so he can take the rot away.” The way wrinkles formed between her brows dragged heavily on my confidence. “He’ll… make it go away, right?”

“Lass, have ye ever met a man who woke from a nap in a mood other than sullen and irritable? Removing rot takes me Master—”

“Great effort.” I swallowed nothing but air faintly tainted with the rancid onset of my own decay. “Yes, I remember. I just can’t imagine he would be quite so cruel.”

A humorless chuckle vibrated her chest as she gestured for me to step into my slippers, then ushered me into the corridor. “Nay? Then ye have lost yer wits right along with the beat of yer heart.”

Maybe I had.

Personally, I blamed the wedding.

After I’d given my vows, Enosh had lifted his mask of the bitter god one vulnerable inch at a time, letting me glimpse the loving man beneath. He’d spoiled me with the sweetest words and the most tender of touches. He’d torn down the last of my hate-forged defenses, leaving my cold, silenced heart helpless and exposed.

With his mask back in place and seemingly poured from iron, what fate would await me once he woke?

My fingers went to my belly once more, pushing the feathers where the cotton beneath caught on my wounds and burned. “I want these gone. Can’t stand how they still cause me agony. Do you think he’ll truly let me keep them forever?”

“Ach, lass, everything will be awright.” Her words smoothed over the pressure of dread in my chest, but only until she stopped, held her arms out, and pushed the sleeves of her checkered dress past her wrists. “So long as ye brave yerself for the worst.”

Sour gall burned at the back of my throat as I stared down at the deep red wounds on Orlaigh’s arms, like rings of raw flesh past her wrists. “You’ve never showed me these before...”

“Because ye never asked how I died,” she said as she tugged the fabric neatly back over the wounds, continuing toward the bridge. “Ach, how angry me Master was for letting the little lady get taken away, her belly round with his babe. Aye, I’ve warned her, but who listens to old Orlaigh? Chaperoning her was like herding a bunch of flea-ridden cats.”

“What did Enosh do?”

Shrugging, she crossed the throne room. “Dragged me behind his horse until Eilam came for me breath.”

My muscles tensed at the sound of that name, until my feet faltered to a halt at the first gaping hole in the bridge toward the Soltren Gate. “If I go outside and Enosh wakes, he’ll think I’m trying to escape.”

Orlaigh’s voluptuous body shook with a chortle. “No matter which direction ye run, lass, ye will always end up straight in his arms. If me Master had any fear of you escaping, I reckon he would not be sleeping the time away.”

Shoulders slumping, I nodded and weaved behind her, around the holes of the decrepit bridge. Death was my collar. The Pale Court was my cage. And my chain...? A pressure inside my chest, like an invisible force that urged me to turn around.

It strengthened as I navigated along the sharp rock walls that snaked toward the chirping birds. Whereas the Æfen Gate had an incline, this tunnel opened straight into a cutting breeze that pulled on the bright green bushels of grass spread before us.

My mouth gaped open as I turned back toward the gate, blinking quickly to adjust to the sudden brightness out here. The wind tousled through my hair, letting smudged blonde strands flutter across my face before the gusts broke against the rock, scattering into a dozen whistles.

I assessed the archway set into the stone of a mountain, which extended in ledges of rock to both sides. From there, they spread across the landscape as far as the eye reached, coming together in gray chains that rose and fell through meadows of lush green.

I reached my hand toward the cloudless sky, ignoring how the sun intensified the contrast of dark veins webbing across my arm. “It looks as though I can almost touch it.”

Orlaigh smiled, climbed onto a boulder, and patted the sunny spot beside her. “The living used to call this mountain Brockenberg.”

Gravel crunched beneath as I walked over and sat beside her, moaning at the sudden warmth of the rock against my palms. “They spoke a different language here?”

“A great many.” Her gaze went adrift on a landscape seemingly abandoned, aside from a small group of horned sheep that munched on the vegetation sprouting between the rock not far from us. “Aye, the little lady could recite poems in four different ones.”

“How did you come to these lands?”

“Me mam and da came to these lands by ship, serving a fine household.”

When she squinted, I let mine follow her line of sight but could make out nothing but specks of gray and green. “So high up, and I don’t see a single village. No towns. No roads.”

“Ah, they’re there if ye ken where to look.” Her lips pressed into a fine line before she swatted a fly. “Hergenheim Castle, the town of Steinau, the Duke’s Road going between them… it’s there, sleeping beneath a blanket of vines and thorns.”

Would Enosh decide a similar fate for the lands beyond the Æfen Gate? Or would he just kill every poor man with the name Elric, thinking that… Just what exactly was the thinking? No matter how often I mulled over his words, they remained a convoluted mess.

“Looks like its nearly summer in these lands.” Yet another strangeness, along with the purple flower I plucked from a gap in the rock, where more of it grew without any soil. “Who was Joah?”

Orlaigh tilted her head ever so slightly toward me, side-eyeing me for a moment. “Ye dinnae remember, lass? I told ye on the dais once. Commander Mertok.”

I flinched.

Commander Joah Mertok.

“Right.” An unnerving pinch ached my ribs. “You only mentioned it once, and Enosh rarely bestows the honor of calling someone by their given name, so I forgot.”

Enosh had mentioned his name when he didn’t believe how I’d thought myself pregnant. Not only that, but he’d threatened to hunt Elric down and weave him into his throne.

Like he’d done to the commander…

… who’d touched what was his.

My temples ached at the onslaught of questions whirring through my head. What did that mean? Had Joah and Njala become lovers after he took her away? And wouldn’t that make sense of his threats? The depth of his gaping disappointment? His acute distrust?

Shaken by Enosh’s shout and the devastating truth about my pregnancy, my mind hadn’t comprehended his words as anything but rage-sparked nonsense. But it hadn’t only been rage, had it?

The god was jealous.

One fact, however, challenged that conclusion. If Njala and Joah had indeed developed feelings for each other, why had he slit her throat when Enosh had closed in on them? Had his sense of duty to Lord Tarnem outweighed his love for her?

“Commander Mertok slit her throat as… as an act of revenge,” Enosh’s voice resonated in my mind, as well as the hesitation it had held when he’d told me on our way to Airensty. “Her soul departed quicker than I could act.”

My breathing flattened.

Quicker than he could act.

Enosh had once explained to me how souls departed slower when death came suddenly. Did that mean Njala had seen hers coming? Because her death had been… what? Anticipated?

Even planned perhaps?

Had she fallen so hopelessly for the commander that she’d chosen death over returning to Enosh? The idea alone gave me chills, and my hand lifted toward my stomach as agony infiltrated my core once more. I could never condemn my baby to death over forbidden love, or—

There is no child.

I dropped my hand back to my lap. What reason did I have to grieve a child? What right did I have to assume that I understood a wink of dying with one in my belly?

None.

I shifted on the rock until I faced Orlaigh. “When Lord Tarnem sent his daughter away with the commander, did the two fall in love?”

Everything in the old woman stilled, safe for how the wind lured wisps of white hair from her braid, her pale skin speckled with the first signs of rot around her ears. I took that as a yes. So I was right.

“If ye ken what’s good, lass, ye best dinnae bring up such talk inside the Pale Court.”

Good for whom?

Enosh knew of her emotional betrayal and how she’d never grown to love him, only to do it with another. Why else would he mention Elric and Joah in the same sentence, threatening to do with one as he had with the other?

Devil be damned, I’d shoveled myself into a hole inside a muckheap. Enosh accused me of betrayal—perhaps the one thing he judged harsher than any other offense—and on top of it, he accused me of infidelity.

Could I blame him?

Once bitten twice shy might be a mortal saying, but likely no less true for my god husband. With no child in my belly, I had no explanation for the joy he’d sensed within me during a time of such terrible hardship for us both. All I was left with were explanations for my delay, and even those had started to take on the echo of excuses.

Because I did have doubts.

They’d cost me everything.

My goal.

My life.

My husband’s trust.

As it so often went with distrustful minds, Enosh had conjured up his own explanation for all this. The same he’d experienced once before, making it a reasonable choice in the head of a man… another man.

Internally, I laughed.

Heavens, as if I didn’t have anything better to do but find myself another of those. God or mortal, either way, they were nothing but trouble and could slowly but surely kiss me where no sun ever reached.

I sighed. “Why did Joah slit her throat?”

Orlaigh shook her head ever so slightly as she flung her hand at what had now become a small swarm of flies. “Lass, let old tales rest.”

I pulled my knees against my chest, giving the wind less surface to rob me of the sun’s warmth. “She didn’t want to return to Enosh, so she asked Joah to kill her instead, right?”

Perhaps Njala had never wanted the baby in the first place? Once again, the woman’s story left me confounded, tossing me puzzle pieces that refused to fit, no matter which way I turned them.

No matter how long I stared at her, Orlaigh provided no answer. Neither was I foolish enough to ask Enosh. He might just snap at the mere mention of it, turning this into a mind-boggling mystery I might never uncover.

Unless I asked Joah…

For a moment, my veins seemed to have a pulse as they buzzed beneath my skin. Only the warmth of the rock. If I ever grew bored of my eternal state of decay, I might get to the truth of all this, but not before I’d somehow placated my enraged husband. But how? How to convince him of my flawed but sincere reasoning?

Orlaigh eventually rose under huffs and puffs. “We best get back before the flies start eating away at us. Pesky beasts.”

I hurried behind her into the Pale Court, fanning my hand before my face to keep the flies from settling on my lips. “They’ll leave us for the dead animals soon enough, or so—”

I stumbled to a halt by the edge of the bridge, all former holes meticulously filled with the whitest bone. Not a single dead beast remained anywhere, a sight that let another shift of air roil through my guts.

My husband was awake.

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