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
Chapter 12
OceanofPDF.com
Ada
Cold, freezing panic surged, locking my joints into place and numbing my fingertips. “What?”
“Are we not agreed that I am a man of my word?” Enosh let black breeches shape around his legs as he descended the dais. “I have threatened a grave, have I not? This time, little one, I shall not waver. I shall not.”
