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Weakness gnawed at my knees until they softened beneath me, and a sudden rush of joy blurred my vision with tears. Brief or not, I would see Pa at least one final time. He wouldn’t have to spend the rest of his life wondering about me.
Unable to contain my excitement, I thrust myself at Enosh, arms struggling to wrap around the entirety of his upper body. “Thank you.”
“Mmm, how nicely your heart stumbles over its cadence.” He encapsulated me in his embrace, then let his hands shift to my hips. “Is my mortal pleased?”
“Very,” I said, reaching for a handful of mane as he lifted me onto the horse’s back. “You couldn’t have given me a better wedding gift.”
“Wedding gift?” He arched a brow at me, then mounted. “Oh, mortals and their customs.”
Orlaigh cleared her throat and held out her rot-speckled hands. “Master, me flesh?”
“Upon my return. Hemdale is not such a far span away, and we shall be back by night.”
Enosh let the horse trample over the carpet of corpses. One of them twitched, then another. Soon, several struggled themselves onto their battered legs to limp behind us, spears of bone forming in their palms.
“Did you see danger?” I asked as we rode up a winding path a recent storm must have carved into the hillside, the air moist with traces of moldy leaves.
“Nothing concerning or I wouldn’t have brought you along, but we ought to have protection. They will follow at a distance as not to draw too much attention while we stay away from the roads.”
I glanced back at them and how they shrank as the distance increased, their clothes nothing but tattered shreds here and there. One had a broken jaw, which dangled on a tendon bouncing against his chest.
Behind me, Enosh exhaled audibly. “You have no disgust for the dead, do you?”
A chuckle escaped me. “As a child, I cut more tangled corpses from Pa’s fish cages than I could count. Orlaigh told me Njala didn’t like the Pale Court.”
His chest hardened against my spine. “No, she found no appreciation for the beauty it once carried.”
The benevolence in his tone ached me somewhere, inching me toward a question I’d ignored for days. “Do you love her still?”
“Mmm, my dutiful wife, I am not as fickle-minded as my brother.” He nuzzled my temple before he let his whisper break against the shell of my ear. “No, I do not. Perhaps I no longer possess a heart to gift you, but you own my loyalty.”
Every single one of his words touched me in a million different places, stirring a concerning tingle underneath my ribs. “A simple no would have sufficed.”
A chuckle against the top of my head. “Ah, but a simple no would not have inspired such a flutter in your core.”
Heat crept into my cheeks. Damn him and how he stripped me of the ability to deny how he worked himself under my skin.
“Perhaps my woman’s silence comes at little cost after all,” he mused after a while, the slightly elevated pitch of his voice giving away his amusement. “I shall enjoy it for the few beats it lasts.”
It lasted for what felt like an arse-numbing eternity, but likely was no more than three hours from the height of the late-morning sun. Dead horses traveled quicker since their hooves never mis-stepped and no exhaustion claimed their lungs, or so Enosh had once explained.
I shifted my dull muscles and peered back at the crown of the Pale Court as it disappeared into the horizon. “A traveler once told me he walked around the Pale Court, though we call it the Graying Tower, and he only ever found one entrance. How come, if there are three more?”
“I cannot say,” Enosh confessed, steering our horse around tall birch trees, toward a clearing that twinkled ahead in a play of light and shadow. “When I came into existence, the Pale Court shaped around me as such, as did the Court Between Thoughts for my brother.”
“And the third?”
“The world is Eilam’s court.” Shifting on the horse, he assessed the forest in all directions, then pointed at the lush patch of grass speckled with deep green shamrock and red clover. “We shall rest here so you may eat and… tend to your other mortal needs.”
“What a fine way of saying that you know how badly I have to piss.”
Something I executed promptly behind a nearby shrub. When I returned to the horse on straight legs, Enosh took the satchel from the harness and handed it to me.
“Did the old woman pack a blanket as well?”
Enosh huffed as if I’d insulted him, crossing his arms in front of his chest as streams of bonedust drifted around us on the wind. They came together in four sturdy posts, forming a rectangle, intricately tooled with motives of thorny vines swallowing creatures. Alabaster crossbeams appeared above us, with rings of bone from which the sheerest fabric weaved itself toward the ground on all four sides.
It wafted in the wind with an iridescent shimmer, its ends catching on the backrest of a large daybed. It formed at the center, beautifully shaped of the whitest bone, topped with pelts of gray mink.
