Текст книги "Queen of rot and pain"

Автор книги: Liv Zander

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

I pondered that question for what felt like an eternity as I combed through their tousled strands until an idea struck. What if I avoided Enosh’s suspicion and Orlaigh’s deceitfulness altogether and went straight to one of the other gods?

I frowned.

Not Eilam.

Aside from the fact that I trusted him the least—not that Yarin could be called trustworthy by any means—his court was the world. That was a pretty big place to go looking for a god.

But what about the Court Between Thoughts? I’d been there before. Could I somehow go there again? Would Yarin notice the potential of a divine child and convince his brother of it?

It was an option.

My only one.

I just needed to find out how I could get there, given that it was no physical place. At least, I didn’t think it was. If I remembered correctly, then it was between my thoughts… wherever that was.

In her wariness, Orlaigh would be of no help with this, leaving me no other choice but to pry hints from Enosh. And while I was at it, I could contemplate how to explain to a god that he’d been made a cuckold…

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter 10

OceanofPDF.com

Enosh

I observed my wife from the concealing shadows of a horse statue, my mind well-rested from days of sleep, yet no less confounded. Perhaps even more so.

Ada sat on a daybed I’d created at the center of a pavilion… eight pillars carved from bone, with triangular sheets of skin stretched between them for a roof. A gentle breeze from the Æfen Gate weaved through braids of hair where they created sheer curtains around the structure, each strand decorated with white feathers.

What was I to make of this?

In my anger, I’d given her a crown shaped from the little fingers of children—a punishment for her ruse of feigned affection, her talk of how she’d chosen to come to me, and a stolen kiss that had wrecked my defenses. And what did she do?

She made it look stunning.

My ribs shrank around my organs as though I had only punished myself. There she sat on a pile of gray furs, plaiting the mousy brown strands of a girl—one of three child corpses I had commanded to follow her, offering her yet another reminder of how she’d tormented me with the most hideous lie.

Ah, what a mistake.

These children had neither soul nor awareness, yet Ada must have washed the filth off their emaciated bodies. They sat on the ground by her feet, their tatters replaced with clean tunics and the two boys’ lackluster hair neatly combed.

If anything, my punishment served as a reminder of why I had come to admire this woman. Had come to love her?

My breath stuttered at the premise of having allowed myself to love once more. Such a terrible emotion, love; perhaps the only emotion capable of soothing a heart one moment, only the rip it in half the next. What else explained this… this shift in me?

My mind wandered back to how I’d held her draped over my lap, resonating through the Pale Court with the loud smacks of my palm meeting her reddened backside. It had aroused me, yes, but the pain I’d instilled on her body had ached me more. So much so, I had stopped at seven.

What was wrong with me?

I was a man of my word, never false in my threats and promises, be it suffering or death. Yet where my wife was concerned, I could not seem to uphold a single one. No matter how she angered me—as though intent on unleashing my wrath—something always stopped me.

Something that soothed.

Something that hurt.

Ah, now she placed a kiss atop the girl’s head, sending a sense of nervous reluctance to burn along my veins. Ada’s care for children knew no bounds, extending beyond death where she offered their bodies dignity and love.

It did nothing to cure me of how uncertainty crept in, and the relentless confusion about this entire ordeal.

Orlaigh walked up beside me, frowning at the way Ada placed a makeshift shoe onto the girl’s foot. “What’s the lass doing now?”

“Caring for the children entrusted into her keep.” This… something shifted beneath my ribs, a sensation as unwelcome as it was persistent, no matter how hard I had tried to deny its existence. “Would such a woman truly use a child as a lie to hide her deceit?”

My age-old servant cocked a brow, giving me the whole weight of her concerned stare. “Are ye growing doubts about her betrayal, Master?”

I bit down on the tip of my tongue.

Was I?

My mind had been… unwell after I’d escaped the priests, exhausted from a fortnight of the most horrendous torture. Shaped after mankind, I suffered its shortcomings, its flaws. I made mistakes. Might have reacted rashly, overwhelmed by thousands of memories of past betrayals and shocked by my wife’s disappearance.

“Has she not proven her upright character more times than she has strayed from it?” I countered. “Did she not look convinced of her own lie?”

Ada was no fool, but she was a woman scorned, having wanted nothing more than a child. A mortal’s form was capable of doing wondrous things in conjunction with a soul’s desires—even wrench food from a stomach. What if she had truly thought of herself with child?

Orlaigh’s gaze lowered to the ground as she fingered a faded ribbon on her dress. “The looks of mankind are deceiving. Yer own words.”

My breathing altered. “Indeed.”

Was I a fool for a liar once more?

I observed my wife’s rounded spine, and how she let her palm glide from sternum to belly where she circled once, twice. Why would she display such mannerisms if not for grief? False, yes, but no less painful.

Had I wronged her?

My chest tightened. How utterly strange that she could suppress the reflex to breathe, yet not the urge to caress something that was not there. Oh, she’d wanted it so dearly.

As had I.

Had wanted nothing more than a woman and a child… many children. To make a family. A desire that had grown over centuries of watching them in their glorious innocence, pure and untouched by mortal’s depravity.

Now, it would never be.

This, the mortals beyond the Æfen Gate, had ensured in their stupidity. Oh, look what they’d done to my Ada, her body so cold, her heart so terribly quiet, robbed of its odd cadence.

Look what they’d done to us.

Wicked, wayward mortals.

“I shall ride beyond the Æfen Gate and assemble my army.” And bring justice to those who’d dared to touch my wife, then to those who’d dared to touch me. “Ah, death will walk the lands once more until the soil trembles in fear.”

Orlaigh shifted beside me, stroking over the faded ribbon with more fervor. “Will ye fix the corpses in the throne before ye leave? Aye, their constant bewailing is grating on me poor nerves.”

That took me aback. “How so? They have been blessedly quiet for decades.”

She swatted her hand at the air. “Ach, reckon ye haven’t seen them yet since ye woke, and how the lass cut their mouths open.”

Cut their mouths open.

Their lying mouths.

An itch started beneath the skin along my arms, bringing my attention to the stench of ash and how I wanted to scratch myself bloody for it. My wife had dared yet another transgression. Why?

“She spoke to them?”

“Aye, I saw her sitting on the throne, whispering as quietly as a wood mouse in a bucket of corn.” Orlaigh shrugged. “Maybe hushing secrets, maybe hushing lies. Who can say?”

Lies.

On instinct, every single muscle on my face stiffened with wariness, a reaction forged in the endless lick of flames and hardened in the chill of heartbreak. Was there no end to women’s fickleness? My wife’s scheming?

“Aye, the lass said ye’re worse than ever before,” Orlaigh went on. “Ach… the disgust in her eyes when she speaks of me Master. The hate.”

Hate.

The blood heated my veins with a new ripple of suspicion. “Nothing good ever comes when traitors put their heads together, whispering between them under the cover of their master’s sleep.”

“I told ye…” Orlaigh said. “From the beginning, I told ye that this one has her wits about her.”

And that she would run from me.

Was she trying to?

My fingers curled into my palms. Mmm, the dead had little interest in escaping me for I was their master, yet even in death, my wife proved obstinate.

She conspired with those who’d wronged me, had inquired about my brother, and even drowned herself to throttle her desire for my warmth—the latter being particularly impressive.

A muscle twitched near my temple. What if she tried to find refuge with my brother? Was she that desperate? Or was she trying to find a way to rid herself of Yarin’s shackles on her soul? Escape me into eternal death?

It was possible.

Such a frail thing, a soul, requiring a form to cling to. No soul-bound corpse had ever achieved breaking the shackles, for it required a great deal of self-mutilation. An act utterly against a mortal’s sense of self-preservation.

But then again, no corpse had ever managed to drown itself at the bottom of my spring, suppressing the innate reflex to breathe.

Only my wife.

My wicked wife.

Dread tensed my muscles at the premise of losing her. Losing her for eternity. Ought I to make her a new collar? A new chain? Five chains?

A brutal surge of anger scalded my veins, burning me from the inside. More painful was the rise of an entirely different compulsion—a possessive urge to put my little one into a cage of bone.

Better yet, my throne.

An unforgivable act.

Ada would forever hate me.

No, she already hated me.

Did it matter then?

Had the feelings between us not wilted away past the point of forgiveness? Of saving? Was she not mine to do with as I pleased, unconcerned of her judgment? Or was I once more too harsh? Too quick to judge?

I took a deep breath, trying to calm a heart that was fraught with pain and distrust. “I ought to think on this.”

“Think on this?” Orlaigh’s fingers gathered more checkered fabric from her dress, kneading it. “Well… while ye do, I best keep an eye on her.”

It wasn’t so much her words that gave me halt, but the way a toe curled in her shoe. “Why so restless over something that does not concern you?”

“Ach, Master, it’s been two hundred years, but not a day goes by where I dinnae regret the part I played in the little lady’s disappearance.” Orlaigh’s pale lips thinned into a fine line. “The least I can do is watch out for yer heart and warn ye. Aye, it would break me own to see ye betrayed yet again.”

The creases on her forehead supported her words, so why this hardness in my stomach, why the heightened senses where my ears pricked at each of her inhales? Aside from her… misstep, had she not served me for two centuries? Had kept me company in all those decades of isolation?

Yes, she had.

“Watch her,” I commanded, then turned toward the spring. “Inform me if she speaks to the corpses again, or if she steps even a toe outside this court.”

“Yes, Master.”

I crossed the Pale Court and its many bridges, finding no joy in my creation for how my veins throbbed with anger. Oh, my resourceful wife, likely searching for a way to escape me among the memories of those who had failed to do so.

When I reached the spring, I undressed and slipped into the water. Its heat ripped a moan from me as I waded along the outline of rock. Until steam climbed into the back of my throat, rancid and biting, ripping a gag from me.

Ash.

Bitter, bitter ash.

It drove me mad, the disgusting stench that refused to abate, no matter how often I bathed, scrubbed, oiled myself. Why would it not lessen?

Because it was trapped.

Under. My. Skin.

Calling upon the generous amounts of bone stored across the Pale Court, I let a knife form in my palm, its tooled handle rough against the pad of my fingers. One steadying breath, then I brought it to my arm.

Sharp and burning, the bone blade carved itself beneath my skin, letting rivers of blood vein down along my arm. They collected around my elbow, drip-drip-dripping onto the water where they formed circlets of crimson, seasoning the thick air with iron.

I pressed down on the flap of skin, trapping it between thumb and blade. With one swift motion, I peeled off my flesh, laying my embedded veins bare.

Shred after shred, I relieved myself of the bitter reek for a long while, peeling it off me wherever my hands reached. Whenever a new tatter of pink-tainted membrane flapped onto the damp rock, I submerged the body part, letting the salt burn away the foul putrefactions.

“Not again.” No other but my wife emerged from the dark corridor and walked up to the edge of the spring, one of her arms pressed against a boy’s chest to keep him from falling into the water. “How many times will you shed yourself like a snake?”

I was a god shaped to perfection, yet I turned my face away, hiding my temporary disfigurement with how I’d peeled myself down to meat. “As many times as it takes.”

My little one remained utterly still where she stood and stared down at me, her golden tresses woven through the spindly nest of fingers that crowned her head. How beautiful she was. The prettiest, most dangerous corpse. Why had she come?

A heavy gulp went down her throat. “Need help with your back?”

Her unexpected offer instilled as much surprise as suspicion. “Are you jesting?”

“You fused children’s fingers to my skull and gave me an entourage of corpses. Clack. Clack. Clack. All day long, they clatter behind me with their bony heels,” she said, which explained the meticulously tied shoes on their little feet. “It’s driving me to the edge of madness. No, Enosh, I’m not jesting… I just feel like skinning you alive.”

“Ah, a wife peeling the skin off her husband, what can this be if not true love?” Either that, or yet another ploy. Likely the latter, but I was curious to see what she had planned now, so I reached her the knife. “Indulge yourself.”

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter 11

OceanofPDF.com

Ada

Enosh stared up at me from a face flayed to weeping flesh, turning my stomach upside down and my guts inside out. If this compulsive urge to skin himself had anything to do with my remark on his smell, I couldn’t say, but I regretted mentioning it.

I took the bone knife from him, then jutted over my shoulder back at the children. “Can you tell them to sit down? Or at least stand back? I’m in no mood to fish them out of the water again.”

Their bony little bottoms thudded as they hit the stone, where they folded their legs and stared up at me. Beside me, bone dust shaped into a deep bowl.

“Taking the skin off alone will do little,” Enosh said, the ends of his dark brows tainted red where they regrew above his unmarred lids. “You ought to pour water over the exposed flesh before my skin mends, which will happen quickly.”

I squatted by the edge of the spring, taking in a whiff of rusty metal as I watched tiny strings of fresh skin web across his face. “I can tell.”

He observed me from his silver eyes, the bridge between them already fully restored to flawless skin, not a single scar in sight. “Does it appall you? The blood? The inflamed flesh? The throbbing veins? My ruined face?”

“I’ve seen worse on you.” Heavens, his handsome face was the source of at least half my problems. “Turn around.”

To my surprise, he did so without fuss or reprimand. “Why go through the trouble of washing the corpses, little one? Surely, you have noticed the progression of their decay?”

I sat down, gathered the train of my dress, and let my legs dive calf-deep into the spring on either side of his body. “The way the skin on their bellies lifts and shifts makes it pretty clear that you’re not… maintaining them.”

“Answer my question.”

The severe undertone in his voice put a tremble into my stiff fingers as I set the blade down to the left of his spine. “You know full well why I’m doing it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have given them to me in the first place.”

“Yet more evidence for how much love you hold for children,” he said with a sigh. “Never will my wife cease to confound me, even in the expected.”

“Take a deep breath.”

Sharp as it was, the blade sunk into his skin easily against the expanse of his inhale, then cut downward. Angling it almost parallel to the sway of his muscles, I ensured I took mostly skin off.

Mostly.

Blood welled from the spots where I used too much pressure, carving into his flesh as nausea bubbled at the back of my throat. I’d skinned plenty of rabbits in my life, but none had ever grunted as Enosh did, the god quivering against the bite of the blade. Devil be damned, why had I offered this?

Because I needed answers, even if I had to cut them out of him.

When the blade severed the skin at the height of his waist, I quickly reached for the bowl and dunked it into the spring.

Splash.

Water hit wound.

Enosh groaned, pulling his shoulder blades together and arching his back. “Continue.”

I set the blade down beside where tiny droplets of blood wept from the exposed flesh, only for new growth of thin skin to encapsulate it. “It only takes seconds to mend. Is it like this for all of them?”

The shifting of muscles on Enosh’s back came to an abrupt halt. “All of them?”

“Your brothers.”

There was a pause that lasted a second too long for comfort before he said, “Yes.”

One word.

It carried an edge of caution.

A whole-body shiver wracked through me, and the silence of the cave echoed. I’d searched for him the moment I’d noticed how the black veins on my hands had disappeared, but what if Orlaigh had gotten to Enosh before me? What had she told him?

I ran the blade down with one hand and used the other to press on the loose skin so it wouldn’t fold over and get in the way. “You once told me that the Pale Court shaped around you when you… came into existence. How did you learn of your duty? Who taught you what to do?”

“Who taught you how to breathe?”

I flinched when I severed the second strip and let it slip off the blade, where it hit the ground with an awful slap. “So you’re saying that you just knew? All three of you?”

Splash.

He once again pulled his shoulder blades together against the impact of the steaming water, letting a pink river form along his spine. “Such curiosity about my brothers.”

Only how to get to them. “I remember the Court Between Thoughts. Rich fabrics. Pillows. Warm light. So different from the Pale Court.”

Silence roared between us, vibrating against my heart with such ferocity it nearly mimicked a heartbeat. Every memory of every encounter I’d ever had with Enosh urged me to shut my mouth.

I circled my hand around my belly.

No, I need to do this.

Taking a useless but comforting breath, I pressed the blade to the right of his spine. “I don’t remember how I got there.”

More silence.

“Neither how I ended up in your arms, as though pieces of my memory are missing.” A slice. A grunt. A splash. “You found me dead in the village, didn’t you?”

Enosh rolled his shoulders, letting the joints crackle under the release of tension. “You called to me from among the dead, your voice panicked. I came as quickly as I could...”

“I was scared. The moment they chased after me, I knew.” My head shook all on its own. “Knew it wouldn’t end well. Felt it in my guts, really. I internally screamed, asking you to come save me.”

He turned his head slightly, just enough for me to glimpse his perfectly angled cheekbone draped in smooth skin. “In this, I have failed you. I will not deny it.”

Oh, he’d failed me in so many things, but mentioning any of that now would neither change the past nor help me set right the future. “Did you cry for me? You had tear tracks on your face.”

“Does it surprise you, little one?” He slowly turned, his face fully mended, yet something broken seemed to sit at the depth of his mercury eyes. “Do you believe gods do not weep? That we do not suffer and ache? Hope and wish?” Pouting, he reached for the scar on my cheek, tracing the puckered skin. “Mmm, I wept over your dead body, Ada. I grieved your death. I celebrated it. Then I grieved it some more.”

“Celebrated,” I repeated. “Because you knew I would never want to escape you again. Not after you had Yarin bind my soul.”

“Mmm, the living warm but the dead obey.” A twitch of his upper lip. “Except for the Queen of Rot and Pain… who does neither.”

“Do you regret binding my soul? Taking me to the Court Between Thoughts?” A swallow ran down my throat, thick and painfully dry. “To Yarin.”

“Yarin. Yarin.” Enosh shifted his lower jaws around. “You seem to have taken a rather strange interest in my brother. Your… master.”

I dropped my gaze to the ground, as though fearing he could read the truth from my eyes. “It’s just… so curious.”

“Curious?”

I was treading on thin ice, I knew. “How he shapes out of thin air. How his court appears and fades. Just how does one get there?”

My breath stilled.

Wrong question.

Enosh’s features turned to stone, so stiff and ungiving, not even his upper lip twitched anymore. “Do you wish to seek him out?”

Yes. “No.”

His hand shot out of the water and gripped my crown, pulling my head until his lips brushed against my earlobe where he whispered, “Liar.”

My rotten heart dropped into the pit of my sour stomach. What now? Tell him the truth? Lie myself out of this mess?

No, I might have been a poor fisher, but I was an even more miserable liar. I was no liar at all! But that didn’t mean I was stupid enough to blurt the truth. Yet.

“You have nerves calling me that,” I snarled as I gave into his hold, easing the tension on my skull. “As though you’ve never spoken a lie.”

He scoffed, “I have never told you anything but the truth.”

Against his grip on my crown, I angled my head until my lips pressed against the shell of his ear. “Liar. You told me Joah killed Njala in an act of revenge, where we both know that she asked him to kill her. That she refused to return to you because she did not love you. She loved him.”

He flinched as though I’d stabbed him.

Ice-cold fear shivered down my spine. Not over how the tremble in his hand vibrated into my skull or even how he stuttered out a never-ending breath. No, it was the endless silence that followed that made me fear for a life I’d already relinquished.

His chuckle shattered it, a terrifying sound like claws scraping over my skull. “No, little one, she never found love for me.”

I swallowed, but it lodged in my throat, producing an ugly gagging sound. “Enosh, I—”

“And how could she have, hmm?” He yanked on my crown, nearly ripping me into the water wasn’t it for how he climbed out of the spring with one quick, fluent movement and gave a shove at it. “Am I not a monster? The devil?”

I scrambled back, legs kicking and arse scooting, only to crash into a wall of little corpses. “Enosh, what are you—”

“Who could love such a cruel bastard?” He yanked me up by my crown and dug his fingers into my waist until it burned. “Not you. Never you. Oh no, all you have for me is hate and deceit.”

My feet left the ground.

The cave shifted, spun.

Enosh swung me over his shoulder, letting the world turn upside down as my face slammed against his shifting back muscles. “Mmm, my faithless wife, once again scheming her escape. A collar cannot keep her. Chains cannot hold her. But I know a place that can.”

His throne.

Now I’ve done it.

Numbness spread from my terrified core into every brittle bone, every quiet vein, every dull fiber of flesh, sending me into paralysis. Clack-clack-clack made the children as they ran behind us, the sound so grinding it sent me straight into hysteria. No! No no no!

“Please, not the throne!” I grappled at his back, clawed at the barely mended wound along his spine until skin and flesh collected beneath my nails. “Oh my god, please! Not your throne!”

“Whyever not? Have you not made friends there?” He hurried along the dark corridor, leaving wet footprints on the ground that changed from rock to bone as my palms shifted over his wet skin. “I shall weave your body into my throne between them, so you may hush and whisper, hate and scheme. But one thing you shall never do, my beloved wife, is escape me.”

“No!” I drummed my balled hands against his back, pounded into the ungiving wall of damp, naked muscle. “I didn’t plan to escape!”

“No? You weren’t trying to find a way to reach the Court Between Thoughts?”

“Yes, but—”

“Maybe to break the shackles on your soul. More likely to find refuge with the god who placed them. I should have known the moment you called him your master…” His voice dripped with venom, poisoning my thoughts with panic. “Do you long for another master, little one? For the sweet things he whispers into your mind? Oh, Ada, I ought to warn you, my brother is not quite right in the head.”

“None of you are!” I screamed my lungs bloody through the black fog distorting my vision, and the blur of lines beneath me. The dais? Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. “I carry your baby!”

He stopped so abruptly his next footfall never landed, the force of it slamming my face against his back.

Thud.

Pain spread across my face.

A morbid nocturne resonated the throne room as Lord Tarnem and Joah moaned, grunted, and wailed. But the truth once more crumbled under rot and decay.

Enosh didn’t move for one ragged breath, two, three, letting the bit of blood I still possessed pool around my spinning thoughts. Should I tell him everything? Nothing? A little bit at a time? What if I told him—

“A change of heart.” He swung around. “A grave it shall be.”

OceanofPDF.com