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I swallowed past a lump of awe. “Now I understand what you mean by the beauty of the Pale Court. You could create palaces… entire kingdoms.”
He took the satchel from me. “These lands are ripe with flesh and bone.”
Ripe.
The word caused a shift in my core, amplified by how Enosh placed a hand around my middle and guided me to the daybed. “May I ask you something?”
“You may.”
“Am I… am I pregnant? You could feel it before my bleeding is due, could you not?”
He lowered himself onto the daybed, one leg outstretched and the other angled at the edge, and planted me in front of him. “I sense no child growing inside you.”
My chest constricted.
I counted one shallow breath, two, three, waiting for a sense of relief, a lightness in my chest—hell, I would have done with a long exhale. Instead, old cracks of pain veined across my heart.
It was disappointment.
Disappointment and guilt, because my neck shortened in preparation for a “You have failed to conceive yet again, Adelaide,” or “What a useless wife you’ve turned out to be, Adelaide.”
But Enosh placed his hand on the diamond of my bone collar and pulled me back to rest against his chest as he whispered, “Patience.”
That only made it worse.
He wasn’t supposed to be this calm and unconcerned about something he clearly wanted so much. Just as I wasn’t supposed to soak up the word and slacken, content with his conviction that I would soon carry a child I shouldn’t want.
“Open,” he said, bringing a little red ball of a fruit I had no name for to my lips.
My lips parted obediently as he fed me like he often did, all while his other hand combed through my hair, turning me soft underneath the skilled fingers of a god. And what if I wanted this child he promised? Did that make me gullible? Selfish? Did I have a reason left to judge myself so harshly when others had done it for years?
I contemplated on that throughout the meal until a cutting breeze wafted from the forest to the left, ruffling the feathers of my dress and pebbling my skin.
Enosh tugged on my shoulder fur, letting it thicken into the softest pelt, taking great care as he gathered my hair and lifted it over the fur with scalp-tingling tenderness. “Better?”
“Yes.” Heat swarmed my belly at the concern in his voice, so I forced my attention to the blossoms carved into the backrest of the daybed. “The way your brother made it sound, the Pale Court was once a lively place with music and… and dancing. I can’t picture it with you.”
“My little wife, your husband is a formidable dancer, unmatched by any mortal man. When gods dance, time itself stands still, so it may watch us in our grace.”
I couldn’t help but grin up at him. “Oh, gods and the stories they tell.”
A spark came to his eyes, followed by his telltale smirk of mischief. “I shall prove it.”
“Wha—”
He promptly rose and pulled me against him. With his arm around the small of my back and his fingers intertwined with mine, my feet scrambled for footing underneath me as he swayed us into the first circle. At the second, the sheer fabric glided over us as he led me into the clearing. Shamrock and clover spun around us, dotting the edges of my vision as my feet found the rhythm.
Tufts of grass wafted around our steps, gently whispering a melody while the air filled with the earthiness of the moist loam beneath our dance. One filled with all the graces one might expect from a god, yet a sparrow danced about on a nearby branch, cocking its head this way and that as it watched us.
“Time is unimpressed,” I said. “Seems to me you dance like any mortal man.”
“Ah, my wife, but can a mortal man do this?”
At the next sway, white feathers drifted away on its current, some catching on the fabric while others flowed into the forest. In their stead, little buds emerged on my dress. When my feet left the ground—Enosh’s hands firm on my waist as he lifted me—the buds bloomed into a thousand pale brown roses, only to wilt and waft into the branches. There, they reshaped into… into what?
I stared up at what appeared to be the flutter of wings, so mesmerized by the beauty of it all as joy illuminated me from within. Enosh let them form into butterflies, with spindly bones for their thorax and the sheerest skin for wings. They slanted into their capricious movement, rising and falling in an unpredictable pattern until, in one surge, they landed on the remaining roses on my dress.
“Do you see its beauty?” Enosh lowered my toes back to the forest floor and stared down at me from the gray storm of his eyes. “The perfection of flesh and bone when in the hands of its master?”
