I reached my hand toward the cloudless sky, ignoring how the sun intensified the contrast of dark veins webbing across my arm. “It looks as though I can almost touch it.”

Orlaigh smiled, climbed onto a boulder, and patted the sunny spot beside her. “The living used to call this mountain Brockenberg.”

Gravel crunched beneath as I walked over and sat beside her, moaning at the sudden warmth of the rock against my palms. “They spoke a different language here?”

“A great many.” Her gaze went adrift on a landscape seemingly abandoned, aside from a small group of horned sheep that munched on the vegetation sprouting between the rock not far from us. “Aye, the little lady could recite poems in four different ones.”

“How did you come to these lands?”

“Me mam and da came to these lands by ship, serving a fine household.”

When she squinted, I let mine follow her line of sight but could make out nothing but specks of gray and green. “So high up, and I don’t see a single village. No towns. No roads.”

“Ah, they’re there if ye ken where to look.” Her lips pressed into a fine line before she swatted a fly. “Hergenheim Castle, the town of Steinau, the Duke’s Road going between them… it’s there, sleeping beneath a blanket of vines and thorns.”

Would Enosh decide a similar fate for the lands beyond the Æfen Gate? Or would he just kill every poor man with the name Elric, thinking that… Just what exactly was the thinking? No matter how often I mulled over his words, they remained a convoluted mess.

“Looks like its nearly summer in these lands.” Yet another strangeness, along with the purple flower I plucked from a gap in the rock, where more of it grew without any soil. “Who was Joah?”

Orlaigh tilted her head ever so slightly toward me, side-eyeing me for a moment. “Ye dinnae remember, lass? I told ye on the dais once. Commander Mertok.”

I flinched.

Commander Joah Mertok.

“Right.” An unnerving pinch ached my ribs. “You only mentioned it once, and Enosh rarely bestows the honor of calling someone by their given name, so I forgot.”

Enosh had mentioned his name when he didn’t believe how I’d thought myself pregnant. Not only that, but he’d threatened to hunt Elric down and weave him into his throne.

Like he’d done to the commander…

… who’d touched what was his.

My temples ached at the onslaught of questions whirring through my head. What did that mean? Had Joah and Njala become lovers after he took her away? And wouldn’t that make sense of his threats? The depth of his gaping disappointment? His acute distrust?

Shaken by Enosh’s shout and the devastating truth about my pregnancy, my mind hadn’t comprehended his words as anything but rage-sparked nonsense. But it hadn’t only been rage, had it?

The god was jealous.

One fact, however, challenged that conclusion. If Njala and Joah had indeed developed feelings for each other, why had he slit her throat when Enosh had closed in on them? Had his sense of duty to Lord Tarnem outweighed his love for her?

“Commander Mertok slit her throat as… as an act of revenge,” Enosh’s voice resonated in my mind, as well as the hesitation it had held when he’d told me on our way to Airensty. “Her soul departed quicker than I could act.”

My breathing flattened.

Quicker than he could act.

Enosh had once explained to me how souls departed slower when death came suddenly. Did that mean Njala had seen hers coming? Because her death had been… what? Anticipated?

Even planned perhaps?

Had she fallen so hopelessly for the commander that she’d chosen death over returning to Enosh? The idea alone gave me chills, and my hand lifted toward my stomach as agony infiltrated my core once more. I could never condemn my baby to death over forbidden love, or—

There is no child.

I dropped my hand back to my lap. What reason did I have to grieve a child? What right did I have to assume that I understood a wink of dying with one in my belly?

None.

I shifted on the rock until I faced Orlaigh. “When Lord Tarnem sent his daughter away with the commander, did the two fall in love?”

Everything in the old woman stilled, safe for how the wind lured wisps of white hair from her braid, her pale skin speckled with the first signs of rot around her ears. I took that as a yes. So I was right.

“If ye ken what’s good, lass, ye best dinnae bring up such talk inside the Pale Court.”

Good for whom?

Enosh knew of her emotional betrayal and how she’d never grown to love him, only to do it with another. Why else would he mention Elric and Joah in the same sentence, threatening to do with one as he had with the other?

Devil be damned, I’d shoveled myself into a hole inside a muckheap. Enosh accused me of betrayal—perhaps the one thing he judged harsher than any other offense—and on top of it, he accused me of infidelity.

Could I blame him?

Once bitten twice shy might be a mortal saying, but likely no less true for my god husband. With no child in my belly, I had no explanation for the joy he’d sensed within me during a time of such terrible hardship for us both. All I was left with were explanations for my delay, and even those had started to take on the echo of excuses.

Because I did have doubts.

They’d cost me everything.

My goal.

My life.

My husband’s trust.

As it so often went with distrustful minds, Enosh had conjured up his own explanation for all this. The same he’d experienced once before, making it a reasonable choice in the head of a man… another man.

Internally, I laughed.

Heavens, as if I didn’t have anything better to do but find myself another of those. God or mortal, either way, they were nothing but trouble and could slowly but surely kiss me where no sun ever reached.

I sighed. “Why did Joah slit her throat?”

Orlaigh shook her head ever so slightly as she flung her hand at what had now become a small swarm of flies. “Lass, let old tales rest.”

I pulled my knees against my chest, giving the wind less surface to rob me of the sun’s warmth. “She didn’t want to return to Enosh, so she asked Joah to kill her instead, right?”

Perhaps Njala had never wanted the baby in the first place? Once again, the woman’s story left me confounded, tossing me puzzle pieces that refused to fit, no matter which way I turned them.

No matter how long I stared at her, Orlaigh provided no answer. Neither was I foolish enough to ask Enosh. He might just snap at the mere mention of it, turning this into a mind-boggling mystery I might never uncover.

Unless I asked Joah…

For a moment, my veins seemed to have a pulse as they buzzed beneath my skin. Only the warmth of the rock. If I ever grew bored of my eternal state of decay, I might get to the truth of all this, but not before I’d somehow placated my enraged husband. But how? How to convince him of my flawed but sincere reasoning?

Orlaigh eventually rose under huffs and puffs. “We best get back before the flies start eating away at us. Pesky beasts.”

I hurried behind her into the Pale Court, fanning my hand before my face to keep the flies from settling on my lips. “They’ll leave us for the dead animals soon enough, or so—”

I stumbled to a halt by the edge of the bridge, all former holes meticulously filled with the whitest bone. Not a single dead beast remained anywhere, a sight that let another shift of air roil through my guts.

My husband was awake.

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Chapter 4

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Ada