Текст книги "Queen of rot and pain"

Автор книги: Liv Zander

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Chapter 14

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Enosh

I pulled Ada against me where we stood at the center of my brother’s domain, her legs as unreliable as the staggering beat of my heart. “Do you know where you are?”

She nodded, eyes frantically going from the pile of red and green pillows in the center of the room to the man whose lips were currently wrapped around my brother’s length. “The Court Between Thoughts.”

“Quite right, Ada.” Yarin lounged naked on a daybed of red velvet, one hand pushing the corpse’s copper thatch of hair closer, the other balancing a metal cup in its palm from which he sipped. “And how delighted I am that you have chosen to– Oh my, sweet thing, would you look at yourself? Whatever happened to your hair and… is that a crown of bones upon your head?”

I let a jacket shape around me, having arrived nearly as bare as I had left the spring in my… unforgivable burst of fury. “Make yourself decent.”

“Afraid your wife will find too much appreciation for my form? We both know I’m the handsomest among the three.” With a chuckle, he tossed his cup across the room until it clanked against the sandstone wall, then thrust into the man’s gagging mouth. “Pathetic, how you claimed you’ve never had relations with a man, yet you suck with such vigor. Go on, finish me off.”

I turned my wife away from the debauched scene, and myself with her. “This is a serious matter.”

“When is anything pertaining to you ever not serious, hmm? You’ve always… always been– Ah, yes! Swallow everything. Mmm, look how you suckle my cock. I don’t believe for a second you have never bedded a man.” A pop resonated behind me. “Anyway, you’ve always been the broody one, Enosh… always so serious. My favorite, to be certain, but oh, such a bore. Ada, has my brother ever suspended you from a harness of skin, fucking you while corpses pinch your nipples and another pushes a femur up your tight—”

I let out a warning hiss. “Dare speak to her like that again, and I shall—”

“What? Stab a bone spike through my throat, as is my favorite brother’s preferred way of killing? I don’t think so.” Because he knew full well I held little power here, where everything shaped at the whim of thoughts. “Well, I didn’t think you have. For a god, you are rather prude. Have you come to ask my advice on matters of your marriage? As it so happens, I am an expert in all things pertaining to the mortal heart.”

“You are an expert of sin and insanity.” When the unhurried hrk of buttons pressing through fabric resonated behind me, I turned to face my brother, and how he closed the golden clasps on his richly embroidered green felt jacket. “When you bound her soul, you spoke of something that… resisted.”

“Out!” he shouted over his shoulder, chasing soul-bound corpses from the pillows like rabbits from their burrows, sending them to scurry in all directions. “I don’t recall—”

“Sheltering itself away in a blind void of nothingness.” Ada stepped away from the embrace of my arm and toward my brother, her hair nothing but a tangled mess of bones, grass, and loam. “That’s what you said.”

“Had I? Interesting… not.” Yarin strolled over to a round table, plucked a grape from the diamond-studded platter, and popped it into his mouth. “Anything else? There are souls to collect and thoughts to shape. Unless you wish to put aside your dull character for a moment, brother, and partake in my corpses together with—” His eyes shot to my wife, and he tilted his head as a grin shaped his lips. “Did you just tell me to shut up? Nobody has ever told me to– Actually, many have told me to shut up, but never through their thoughts. Oh, Enosh, she is so very special, this one.”

Yes, she was, yet I had allowed century-old doubt to come between us. “Does she carry my child? My divine child we cannot sense?”

All mirth fell away from him, lending his posture a straightness I’d seldomly witnessed on the God of Whispers as he stepped in front of Ada. “A divine child, you say?”

My knees shook.

No, not mine.

Ada’s legs trembled, threatening to snap, no matter how well she hid it behind the dirt-smudged fabric, feigning strength where I knew she had none left. I did not need to sense her soul to know it was agonized, my brother’s potential answers equal in their torture.

“I sense…” Yarin clenched his eyes shut, a mere inch of distance between the tips of his fingers as he hovered them from her forehead to her chest and lower. “Sadness. Anger. So much. A hope you fear, a fear you hope. And… nothing.” His fingers stopped, clenching and unclenching below her navel. “A void that will not answer me. Right here.”

In her belly.

Something I had sensed whenever I’d delivered Ada’s flesh and bone from decay, shrugging it off as nothing more but yet another part of her embodied resistance to me. To us.

Time stuttered to a halt.

How blind I’d been.

“You feel it, too?” Yarin set his grass-green eyes straight on mine and, when I nodded, he sighed. “I hold no control over it. Never have I encountered something like this before.”

“Eilam said something ab-bout—” A sob cut through Ada’s voice, her bones heavy with pain. “That there was a lot of life in me… more than in others.”

“So he sensed something amiss as well.” Yarin tortured his upper lip. “Are we agreed on what this is, then, Enosh?”

“It is Elric.” The sound of the name sparked old anger in my core, only to flare into bright joy before it died into paralyzing sadness. “My divine child, trapped alive but unable to grow in the belly of my dead—”

I grabbed Ada’s arm where she swayed beside me, pulling her against my chest before she collapsed to the ground. My ears pricked at her wail, and my muscles tensed at her violent tremble as her entire weight pulled on my arms.

“My ba-ha-aby.” Her high-pitched scream shattered from the yellow stone before it penetrated my chest, needling straight into my heart. “Oh my god… Oh my god– Ah!”

Unable to steady her on legs that continued to sway no matter how I willed them, I picked her up and cradled her tightly against me. “Shh…”

Her little fists pounded against my chest once more, but quickly died down, only to hang limp from her quivering body. Face contorted into a hundred wrinkles of pain, she cried without tears, each sniffle and sob like a bone blade digging between my ribs.

My blurred gaze shot to Yarin. “Do something!”

“Hush, hush, shh…” He placed his palms on her temples and brought his whispering lips to her ear. “Listen to my voice…”

It faded into nothing but hums and murmurs, unintelligible to my ear, though I sensed how Ada softened in my arms. Her stare lost itself in the nothingness of the arched ceiling and her muscles slackened. No more than a breath later, she stilled.

I commanded her lungs to expand and retract, focusing on an even rhythm so she may find comfort in it, then allowed her eyes to flutter shut. Together, Yarin and I placed her soul-bound body into a twilight state of subdued consciousness that closely resembled sleep.

“Her soul is in such anguish, it is fighting my bonds.” A rare glint of something other than amusement came over Yarin’s eyes, his voice void of his usual aloofness, stripped down to a growl. “What have you done?”

My stomach convulsed.

Where to begin?

I swallowed past a knot at the back of my throat, coiled in a tangle of emotions I had little experience with. “Most recently, I prepared a grave for her, lowered her into it, and had corpse children fill it with dirt.”

“Brother, when you try for the affections of a woman, you give her flowers,” he turned away on a scoff and slumped back on the daybed, letting another appear across from it, “not bury her beneath them.”

Excruciating sorrow strangled my guts.

Every inhale burned within my lungs, searing, scalding, charring its way straight into a heart I’d claimed I did not possess, only for it to bleed out all over again. A punishment I received gladly, for I had never deserved it more.

I stood there, a god shamed into silence, consumed by guilt and utter self-contempt. Oh, how I’d wronged my wife. My little one had not lied. No, she’d truly tried to return to me, and what had I done…?

What had I done?

I had driven her away. Punished her for a betrayal she’d never committed, causing her nothing but excruciating pain. Three times, she’d lost the child she always wanted. First to a blade, then to my blindness, and now to the truth.

And I had lost it, too.

For the second time in my cursed existence, I’d lost a child. Njala’s daughter might not have been mine, but I had grieved her just the same. Now I grieved again, yet my pain would likely never compare to the agony Ada must have carried all this time.

All by herself.

Because I was not there.

Had left her alone with her sorrows.

Instead of defeating the loneliness of my existence with her by my side, I had abandoned Ada to it. How could I ever undo the damage I’d caused between us in all my glorious ignorance?

“Pray tell, Enosh, how can this be?” Yarin pushed himself up to sit, formed a golden goblet in his hand, and took a sip. “My mind is utterly confused. Dazed, truly. How come we felt Njala’s baby, clearly mortal, but this one evades us in all its godly arrogance?”

Ada could likely not perceive it, but I sat on the daybed across with her and stroked the shell of her ear the way she enjoyed. “Njala—”

“Oh, I think I figured it out.” He chuckled, but even my brother failed to give it its usual air of cockiness. “My, my, my… Enosh. And here I thought you do not share your women. Not such a prude after all, I see.”

On any other day, I would have slit his throat and bled him out on his pillows, but I could barely bring myself to lift my head. “Orlaigh kept her reckless infidelity a secret, in all of mortals’ never-ending depravity.”

Trapping me in false grief for two centuries over the loss of a daughter that had not been mine. Oh, she’d concealed her betrayal well. Had riled me up against my wife the moment I woke, poisoning my mind with wariness and suspicion.

Where I expected fury and the urge to return to the Pale Court to weave her into my throne, I only found forlorn sadness.

Apathy.

Fatigue.

Two centuries of rage and distrust, and what had it given me? A dead wife full of justified anger, a child lost at the expense of my own, and a broken heart that beat ardently for both of them.

I loved Ada.

Loved her like I had never before, with no precaution over the pain it had already caused me, nor the pain that was certainly yet to come. I loved her with a ferocity that was not save for me or her. Certainly not for this world.

How to fix this?

I’d been so full of old hate and wariness, letting it snare me, corrupt me to such a degree that I’d hurt the most honest woman to walk this earth. The woman who had chosen to come to me. Might have held affection for me. Inklings of love?

But that was before…

Before I’d condemned to carry mortal’s viciousness carved into her belly. Before I’d refused her my warmth, even though I knew the harrowing coldness of death. Before I’d given her a crown of children’s fingers. Before I’d lowered her into a damn grave.

“An immortal child…” Yarin mused as he ran his thumb across his bottom lip, staring at the tip of his boot where he’d crossed his legs at the end of the daybed. “It just occurred to me that I might have sired thousands of those, unknowingly leaving them behind in the rotting bellies of countless whores. Not even I can find anything to laugh about that. You know full well how much I love children… such pleasant thoughts in their heads.”

I pulled Ada’s limp body tighter against me, taking another searing inhale until the lick of shame scalded my core. “It cannot die, or its decay would have noticeably affected her womb, but it cannot grow, either. This… void in her belly has not altered since her death, remaining the size of a pea at best.”

“Unless…” His nail tapped against the bottom row of his teeth a few times. “Unless you can convince our beloved brother to restore her. With her soul bound to her intact form, your woman is but a breath away from life.”

Eilam’s breath, for he was the god of life and its absence. Where most mortals spent their existence without ever crossing my or Yarin’s path, each one had met my brother at least once.

“Rebirth.” A capricious flutter came to my chest, rousing a hope that collapsed into despair but a moment later. “He will never agree.”

“Hmm… Yes… the drowning.”

And likely that one beheading six centuries back… “Among other things.”

“No, you are quite right, Enosh. He will refuse.” Yarin raked his fingers through his auburn strands, then propped his arm beneath his head. “Unless you leave him no choice but to agree. Nothing vexes him more than a good old sweep of annihilation.”

My shoulders stiffened.

If memory served, my last act of rage had devastated the lands beyond the Soltren Gate to a degree it had still not recovered after two centuries. Oh, what a mess that had been. Should that cause me hesitation?

Drowned lands, devastated towns, the decimation of entire bloodlines mortals valued so dearly… What was it to me? The Pale Court would forever endure, sheltering my wife and child within.

Yet one problem remained.

“My wife has a kind heart, carrying so little of mortal’s corruption.” What had gained her my admiration now proved an issue. “I shall have the high priest’s head, this much I vow, and I will destroy this false god they pray to. She will understand. But the rest of the retched lot…”

… needed to die, too.

How many?

Only my brother knew.

Ah, I’d told Ada that her hate did not bother me, so as long as I had her. Perhaps I was a liar after all, for I wanted little more than for her to love me back. Yet the moments where I showed mercy to the wicked had softened her toward me.

Mercy would not return her breath.

Only devastation.

Yarin sighed. “They stabbed her in the belly. Surely your wife must now see their offense and carry a hint of hatred?”

“A hint will not do.”

“A hint is all I require for my whispers to go unnoticed. As always, my powers are at your disposal. Interest free.”

“Now I know you’re up to no good.” Eager to twist my wife’s head where I wanted our love to be true, and not tainted by illusions of any kind. “I do not want you anywhere near her thoughts. Unless she leaves me no choice.”

“Such jealousy is unbecoming of a god,” he tsked. “I presume you could try to… make her see sense.”

Make her see sense.

My heart burned, and for once, not at the feverish mercy of shame and guilt. No, it was the searing edge I would have to balance, whetted with the choices of saving our child or gain my wife’s love.

Could I achieve both?

Perhaps one with the other?

But something else burned inside me, too—a sudden realization that made me curl around Ada’s still body. Death was her eternal prison, tethering her to me if I ensured she remained in my presence. In life, she’d slipped me once, and she might slip again.

Yes, Eilam could give her life.

And life meant freedom.

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Chapter 15

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Ada

I awoke to the sensation of my head being lifted, only to sink seconds later. Up again. Down. Something brushed over my back in caressing swirls, with deviations of serpentines up along my spine. A finger?

Blinking my eyes open, I caught familiar glimpses of the few black hairs scattered across Enosh’s bare chest. I rested against him, naked, blissfully absorbing the all-engulfing heat of his body. How long had I been like this?

“I feel you rousing.” Enosh pressed a kiss to the top of my head. “Are you well?”

Was I?

I assessed the ease of my inhales, the laxness in my muscles, the gentle hum beneath my skin at this wash of warmth. In truth, I felt better than I had in a long time—my sorrows not gone but somehow, not as suffocating.

Which could only mean one thing…

“Yarin did something to my head, didn’t he?”

“Your soul was suffering, shattering right before my eyes.” Enosh’s fingers trailed along the side of my head, scraping over my scalp until it tingled, making me lean into it. “My brother merely calmed your thoughts, allowing you to… come to terms with things in a dream-like state.”

Come to terms.

My teeth wanted to clench, but I forced my jaws to shift. From the moment I’d learned the truth, I knew that convincing Enosh of my innocence would not give me back my child, only his trust and goodwill. A sense of normalcy between us—whatever that meant.

It was enough.

It had to be.

I took a deep breath, pulling a lungful of ash sprinkled over snow down into my chest. Enosh smelled like a thousand sins and salvations, like my lover and my husband. My captor, whose scent swaddled me in the comfort of familiarity.

Comfort I’d told myself I no longer wanted from him, the man who had twisted my bones but mended my dignity, who had put me in the collar of a prisoner and the cruel crown of a queen. What a lie.

I needed it.

I needed him.

Had wanted nothing more for the past month but to curl into his broad chest, to hide away from the world and what it had done to me. Wanted to escape the coldness of death, and instead, soak my bruised flesh in his heat.

As though he felt it in my bones, Enosh wrapped his leg around mine, continuing to draw symbols along my back. “You are safe. Nothing and nobody will ever harm you again.” Shoulders curling, legs angling, I made myself so very small, rolling myself up like a cat.

Beyond us stretched a circular room, its walls engraved with motifs of oak trees surrounded by long bushels of grass that swayed in the breeze.

His room.

Enosh had shaped it the day he opened the Pale Court, appointed with elaborately tooled furniture made of tusk and bone. Thin braids of hair hung from the high ceiling, each decorated with teeth, fangs, and nails. They reflected the magical glimmer coming from the bone and clanked together in a monotone symphony.

Realization seeped into me when his nails parted my hair with ease, letting a mumble roll from my lips. “My crown’s gone.”

He cupped my cheek and gingerly brought my gaze to meet the calm gray of his eyes, set into a face dusted with several days’ worth of black stubble. “And the two boys and the girl are at rest.”

I ran my thumbnail over his thick, stubborn whiskers, loving the way they scraped at my skin with quiet hrk-hrk-hrks. “Heavens, how long was I dreaming?”

“I’ve held you like this for nearly three days.”

He’d held me.

For days.

“Adelaide.” His lips pressed into a thin line for a moment as though my name had left cuts on his tongue. “I came into existence knowing my duty, my powers, and how to wield them. I know the world, its people, and all the languages they speak. Yet I do not know how to apologize in a single one.” A deep exhale. “However, I shall try.”

I lifted myself up a bit because I damn well deserved to hear it. “Go ahead.”

He took a deep breath, twirling a strand of my hair around his finger like he’d used to before he tucked it behind my ear. “I have not protected you, letting you fall prey to chaos borne of my own mistakes. I have wronged you, accusing you of betrayal when your character has never given me cause to doubt your honesty. I have given you pain, such pain, emotionally abandoning you in your time of need. For all this, I apologize.”

Seconds ticked into a silent minute, only for time to trap me in the echo of his words, touching my dead, cold core and breathing a warm spark of life into it.

I wasn’t sure what I’d expected him to say.

But not this.

Not with such candor, where he exposed his failures without a single attempt at justifying them, causing a flutter in my heart that grew awash in the heat between our bodies.

I couldn’t say how long I stared at him, but he eventually lifted a brow, adopting an almost sheepish look. “I did it wrong.”

“No.” He did it too well for a man, letting his cruelties of the last month fade too quickly into the darkest cranny of my stunned mind. “You practiced, didn’t you?”

“For nearly three days.” The corners of his mouth hiked and fell, as though uncertain if he should dare the hint of a smile. “I want us to start anew. Do you forgive me?”

Against the remnants of rage in my muscles, I allowed them to slacken, lowering my head onto his chest. I was only a mortal… a dead one. Neither resistant to this wash of heat Enosh provided after endless weeks of cold, nor immune to the rather poignant apology of a god.

“I’ll consider it.”

He scoffed, “Stubborn woman.”

“Arrogant god, thinking that a handful of pretty sentences would make a woman forgive so easily.”

“Nothing about you is easy, Ada, but you are worth all of my troubles ten times over,” he rasped against my ear, providing me this sense of value only he could, in all its retched glory. “I realized my many mistakes when Yarin… confirmed it.”

My chest heaved with an unexpected sob, but I swallowed it down, letting it rot among shattered dreams and broken wishes. This is enough, my mind chanted like a prayer. This is as good as it gets.

And yet the sob hiccupped straight back up, parting my lips as I said, “I wanted this child.”

“As did I.” Hushing me, Enosh wrapped his arms around me, likely expecting me to cry where I fought not to. “Among my many regrets, the way I failed you both weighs on me the heaviest. I do not know how to be a husband, understand even less about how to be a father. Yet I understand I have failed at both.”

That flutter came to my core once more, drifting not on the words of a god, but a man humbled. Was this truly Enosh? Or was I still dreaming?

I pushed myself up once more, assessing the sway of his dark brows, the curvature of his lips, the straight nose. Still as annoyingly handsome, that bastard, yet something had changed.

What was it? His eyes?

Yes.

Not so much their gray color, but how the foreboding storm at the depth of his irises had somehow settled. What remained was a gaping cleft of emotions for me to stare at.

And he let me.

Enosh neither turned his head nor distracted from it with a twitch of his upper lip or the smug lift of a brow. I stared right into the face of my god husband, seeing the finest wrinkles at the corner of his eyes, the faintest blemishes of his complexion… and the pain of loss that so closely resembled mine.

He, too, had lost a child.

Twice.

At least in his heart.

Enosh reached his hand up, swiping a finger over my brow where it must have gone into disarray pressed against his chest. “What does my wife see?”

“You.” Beautiful and terrifying, gentle and cruel. “I’m sorry you had to find out about Njala and the baby like this. I know you loved her.”

“So I’d thought but…” His face scrunched up for a moment, and his gaze wandered into the room as though visiting old memories. “None of it compares to how I feel about you. Which makes me wonder if it was not so much her I loved, but the idea she resembled of children, family, life. In the end, this arrogant jerk could not inspire her love. Maybe gods ought not to be loved, but only hated, worshipped, and feared.”

That brought a little tug to the corners of my mouth. “Or maybe you simply couldn’t claim her heart because it had already belonged to another.”

That returned his gaze to the here and now, which he set straight on me with uncoy intensity. “When you first arrived at my court, did your heart belong to another?”

“No.”

“Good.” He pushed himself up to sit and pulled me right along with him, leaning us against the wall of bone. “There’s something I wish to show you, but we ought to dress you first to keep you warm.”

“Dress.” That word sent a shudder over me. “What happened to Orlaigh?”

“Not much… for now.” He slipped out of bed and took my hand, pulling me to my feet as breeches formed around him. “I could either see to her punishment or watch after my wife, and I chose the latter.”

“That must’ve cost you a great deal of self-control.”

“Not at all,” he said. “I wasted two centuries on hate and anger and will give the past my attention no longer beyond the necessary. Certain things ought to be taken care of… but after, I wish to live in peace.”

“What will you do to her?”

That question gave him a moment’s hesitation as he stared down at me. “What do you wish me to do?”

Braid her into your throne.

The words choked up onto my tongue out of nowhere, their taste bitter and unfamiliar, so I gulped them down. Did Orlaigh deserve to be punished? Yes. But she’d been betrayed by a loved one she’d tried to protect. How should that affect the severity?

“Punishment is your area, not mine. And now that we are speaking of corpses, Lord Tarnem was the one who helped shed light on all this in exchange for my promise.”

“Promising what?”

“Um…” I thought for a second. “That I would shed light on this.”

“And so you have, remaining as true to your vows as always.”

“I guess that’s one way of looking at it.” My eyes fell to my belly and to the three lines where my wounds had been, each one now shaped into pale-puckered vines with flowers blooming beneath its foliage. “You gave me scars.”

“I like your scars, your imperfections, written across your body like a story that tells me fragments of your mortal life. However…” Inhaling deeply, he took my hands in his, looking at me with solemn eyes. “One word from you, and I shall make them go away as though it never happened. The choice is yours.”

My choice.

Such strange words.

My throat turned parched beyond its usual state. Did I want them gone? The wounds had caused me so much grief, yes, but the scars may serve as a sobering reminder of the world out there… the unfairness, the depravity.

“But it did happen.” And if I stepped outside right now? It would surely happen again. “No, I want them to remind me.”

No sooner had I spoken, did Enosh let a dress of brown pelts shape around me, heavy and lined on the inside. A black jacket was still forming around him as he took my hand in his, guiding me toward a set of stairs that hadn’t been there before.

I followed beside him up the alabaster steps, letting my other hand trail over the smoothed bone of the banister toward a set of looming doors. “Where are we going?”

“I took the liberty of making you this while you rested.” At his next step, the doors opened for him to lead me through. “A wedding gift I very much hope you will accept, for the last one ended in torture and death.”

“A wedding—”

My words caught in my throat.

Devil be damned, my husband had been busy.

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