He stopped when he reached the corner, raising his hands to claw suddenly at his face, fingers sliding deep into his mouth. His hood slid off. Blond stubble coated his jaw, a hank of sandy hair sticking to his forehead. She didn’t recognize him. Had his appearance been a coincidence? Maybe he’d come from the tavern, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
She grimaced as another rush of vomit puddled on the ground and redoubled her efforts picking at the lock, jimmying it back and forth while she kept her eyes on the man. He seemed to have recovered somewhat, no longer glued to the wall. Slowly, almost fretfully, he patted himself down from shoulders to waist. He felt around his neck, moving up to palm his nape.
The latch slid open with a metallic squeal just as the man looked up.
Pressure built suddenly behind Maeve’s eyes. It took a concerted effort to push it back, to wrestle for clarity because there was something,someoneshe needed to see fully. The small, thrashing part of her brain still her own screamed for her to look.
She pressed both hands hard into her eyes, gritting her teeth against the pain.
She opened them to a face she knew staring up at her from the street below.
Elden.
43
Jude
Jude awoke in increments too small to catalogue. One moment, he was sleeping, dreaming, something dark and lingering on his tongue like overripe fruit; the next, he was awake. Salt flooded his nostrils. Sea air stung his lips and the tender flesh under his eyes.
He groaned. The muscles lining his throat ached. Slowly, he cracked open his eyelids. At first, he could only make out the faintest suggestion of daylight coming from somewhere to his left but as his vision came into focus, so did the reality of his situation.
He remembered bells. Saints, carved and staring, mouths opening to scream. A light, growing with a voracious hunger, so bright it ate him whole. A hand on his shoulder, a cloth between his teeth.
Elden.
Fuck.Fuck.
His closest friend, someone he’d slowly come to view as a brother. Someone he hadtrusted.
Had it been an easy decision for Elden to make? Or had he laboured over it, chewing on it like gristle? How Jude longed to ask him. To demand the reason he was so easy to hurt.
He scraped his hands over his face and unpicked the thought, one biting thorn at a time. A spot behind his left ear ached furiously. He probed it gently, wincing when his fingers came back sticky with blood. They must have knocked him out.
Wonderful.
He was in a bed, at least, though the room was barren and cold outside of the thin blanket – rough hand-spun linen in a washed-out blue that reminded him of the sky just before dawn. A glass of water sat beside the bed. He sniffed it carefully before taking a long drink, washing some of the stale taste from his mouth.
A lone window faced the bed. The view – narrow, webbed with iron grating and showing little more than a smooth blanket of cloud – urged him to his feet. Gold spun in the furthest reaches of his vision as he fought to keep his trembling legs underneath him.
Outside, waves crept forward in a steady crawl. Thoughts of escape were little more than a half-realized idea, intangible and lurking too far to grasp. Somewhere in the distance, singing began.
Time passed in a steady trickle. Waves and singing; singing and waves.
He should have known better than to come back. He should havefuckingknown.
Had Elden been in contact with them since they had left Ánhaga? Or, worse, had he always been in their clutches? Was that the reason he’d been sent to Jude in the first place? Not because he begged for company, not as a boon for his continued silence, but to watch him.
In the end, it didn’t matter. He’d been dragged back to the place of his unmaking and left to await the final toll of judgement. Letting in the past and all its concealed pain wouldn’t change anything, only taint the sweetness he left behind.
He should have stayed.Sheshould have stayed.
He felt Maeve in his bones, between his ribs, and it throbbed like a bruise. Jude bit his lip until he tasted blood. He’d abandoned her; left her vulnerable and alone. Had they entered the inn after carting him off, searching for her next?
Maeve – their iconographer turned saint. He couldn’t protect her. Not here, not anymore.
Behind him, the door creaked open.
Jude braced himself. He didn’t turn from the window, though the back of his neck prickled in warning. Noises. Someone set a plate down, cutlery rattling together. The smell of charred meat turned his stomach despite his hunger.
