“Yes, yes, yes, but much better dressed on her funeral.” Yarin flung himself toward a pile of still twitching corpses, only to land on a tufted daybed that had appeared out of nowhere atop them, shifting in their final struggles as the legs sunk into their flesh. “Between us, Enosh, I shall never bed a warm woman again. No, I have sworn them all off. Since this renders Eilam’s threat to kill all whores before I even touch them quite irrelevant—well, I might as well partake in this, um… divine vengeance, crusade, soiree… whatever you wish to call it.”
Enosh clenched his jaw. “If you insist, brother. But at the very least, make yourself useful and watch my wife while I call upon the third.” He lifted me over the carpet of corpses, put me on the daybed beside his brother, then leaned in for a menacing growl. “Watch. Not touch.”
“I would never. If only because your possessiveness over her might be potent enough to get an immortal killed.” The moment Enosh turned away with a sigh, Yarin let a golden platter of fruits shape in his palm and reached it to me. “Hungry? Oh, I forgot.” He tossed it away, letting apples thud against skulls and grapes scatter across limp bodies. “Dead. No good with food. My apologies.”
Enosh walked over to the bound men. “Kneel.”
At the command, the seven fell to their knees in front of the corpses, lining up before us less than ten steps from the daybed. Fear flitted across their features, eyes wide and chins trembling. One of them—a squire who probably hadn’t seen his fifteenth summer yet—soaked his breeches, letting them darken around his crotch.
“Still so young.” The sight of his rosy cheeks, red pimples, and patchy blond facial hair brought an unwelcome hollowness to my guts that I couldn’t afford. “What will Enosh do with him?”
“Something that will vex Eilam like nothing else,” Yarin said with a devious grin lining his lips. “Never got along, those two. See, Ada, Eilam gets rather flustered when we cut a mortal life short before its due time, since it affects him in a way we cannot quite grasp. And there truly is only one thing that upsets him even more…”
My throat tightened. What could possibly anger the god of life more than such a slaughter, where hundreds died in seconds?
My husband slowly walked along the men lined up for death, letting the snow crunch beneath his boots before he squatted before the youngest one—the one who’d pissed himself.
“Mortal, you have a choice to make.” A bone knife formed in my husband’s palm, of which he brought the sharp end to the squire’s eye. “Deny what I ask of you, and I shall carve your eyeballs out with this, slowly. They will dangle on a string of cartilage as I hang you upside down from a tree.”
No sooner had Enosh spoken that last word, did the earth tremble. Corpses tossed on the ground about half a furlong ahead of us as a flare of wind whirled up snow, blowing it toward them.
My breathing stumbled to a halt.
No, not snow.
Bonedust wafted from the copse of trees lining this valley, the old piles of corpses around the Æfen Gate, and the open meadows behind us. It came together in an avalanche, burying slain soldiers beneath a dusting of it as it roared toward us. The dead scrambled, crawling away from…
From what?
“As it so happens, my wife is fond of trees,” Enosh said, letting his dark voice loom over the squire’s whimpers like a foreboding shadow. “So I shall grow a magnificent tree right in front of our home for the world to behold, decorated with the twitching, wailing bodies of those who betrayed their god. Starting with you, mortal.”
Raw, numbing shock looped around my organs as the waves of bone collided, sending a puff into the dreary sky. The impact alone shook the world hard enough that nearby twigs snapped and a few horses broke loose to take off in a flight, their hoofbeats a terrified substitute for my heart.
A massive tree shaped right in front of my eyes, big enough one would be able to see its crown from Hemdale and beyond. Thick branches sprouted from it, gnarled and grotesque, like the gout-ridden fingers of an old witch, left naked without a single leaf of skin.
Instead, strings of something, hair perhaps, braided themselves downward like the swamp vines on the sunken trees in the western wetlands. From there, they formed offshoots that slithered across the ground. Some of them came toward us, only to wrap around the men’s boots.
With a start, the squire glanced over his shoulder at the tree—as did the others—his mouth falling open wider the higher his gaze wandered—up toward the treetop scraping at the winter-gray clouds.
“From this tree, you shall eternally hang.” Enosh pressed the bone blade against the squire’s cheek, returning his gaze to meet the god’s with a bloody cut. “And the crows shall peck at the two holes in your face. Greedy as they are, they will peel the skin off and dig their beaks through your skull before you manage to die. Or…” He tossed the blade in the air, gripped it by its blade until blood dripped from his knuckles, then reached the handle over. “Each one of you shall take a blade and, one after another, open the veins along your arms.”
My survival instinct leapt in my chest, shoving a gasp past my lips. A whiff of iron and sweetness crept into my mouth, quickly tainting my gums with the stench of urine and guts, letting my stomach spin for reasons I didn’t want to explore.
Had Enosh not warned me of his plan to bathe the lands in blood? Had it not made sense, terrible as it may be, for mortals had brought this day of reckoning onto themselves? If we wanted revenge on those who’d wronged us—to destroy all under the Sun of Helfa and gain life for me and our child—then these men needed to die.
But the squire was no man.
He was a boy.
Innocent.
Barely old enough to grow a damn beard, let alone lift a sword. Devil be damned, he’d probably spent all week watering the horses, filling cups of ale, and pouring the commander’s pisspots into the latrines.
“P-please, Your Highness,” the boy stammered, letting my gloved fingers curl into the mink of my dress no matter how I didn’t want them to. “I… I have a younger sister at home who… She’s carrying my babe.”
Well… maybe not innocent.
But not terribly guilty, either.
Yarin chuckled. “Tsk, tsk, tsk… not even I am depraved enough to rut my own sister.”
“If only because we do not have one,” Enosh clipped over his shoulder, then turned his attention back to the man. “Are you suggesting that you wish to feed the crows?”
“No!” the boy blurted, eyes nervously flitting from Enosh to the blade as he hesitantly nodded. “Unbind me, and I… I will do it.”
His arms fell forward right then.
I breathed.
Breathed again.
It was all I could do to keep down this desperation, this inkling that these lands I called home might soon resemble those beyond the Soltren Gate.
And if we found a young alemaid in some tavern, would she have to cut her wrists, too? What of the stable boys? What of the motherless babes screaming inside the temples? When Enosh had said bloodshed, whose blood had he been talking about, exactly?
Watching this boy pick up the blade… it shook me beyond comprehension.
As it shook him, for he dropped the blade into the snow with how his hand quivered. Nausea bit at my throat when he lifted it from the white powder. He shoved back the leather covering his arm, brought the blade to the pale skin, and—
“Stop,” someone said.
Me.
I’d said that.
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Chapter 19
OceanofPDF.com
Ada
