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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your wife is not at the Pale Court.

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

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

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

Frayed ropes?

Stew?

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

How…?

Why was she not…?

None of this made sense.

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

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

No!

She’d promised.

Had given me her vow!

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

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

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

She had not returned…

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

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

Where was my wife?

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

Ba-boom-boom.

An echo.

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

Away from it.

My fingers itched.

Away from me?

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

I sensed everything on her.

Everything but despair.

Everything but heartache.

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

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

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

“Tell me!”

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

Farther. North. Mule.

Elric.

Joah. Oh, where is my beloved Joah?

It started as a slight tremble in the ground, that moment where the truth of her betrayal stabbed between black ribs and squeezed my heart—twisted it, ripped it out, and held it before the eyes of a fool. No, she’d never even tried to return to my side… wicked, wayward mortal.

Liar!

The word dug its nails into a mind racing back, clasping, clawing, containing, but the madness at its core swelled until it spread across the lands. It shook the bone in the ground until the mountain behind me roared, rock crumbling as it sent billows of dust into the sky.

Yarin held his arms out, fighting for balance as he stared at the shaking ground. “Ah, we have no luck with women, brother. Mine run into my arms, only to slit their wrists; yours keep running away from you, only to have their throats cut.”

I mounted, letting an army of corpses rise so they may protect me while I hunted down my wicked, wicked wife. “Oh no, brother… death will offer her no escape from me.”

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Chapter 24

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Ada

Elric.

Elric.

Yes, I liked that.

Pure, unadulterated joy soared through my chest as I smiled down at the sprouted grains, dozens of bright green stems emerging from the seeds. And if she was a girl? Amelia… after her grandmother.

I pressed my hand against my belly, stroking the child growing beneath my palm. Even before the grains had sprouted, I had no doubt I was pregnant. Still, seeing the growing proof soothed over the feeble remnants of guilt and shame, banning it to the deepest, darkest crannies of my core.