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“Ah, ten corpses should be appropriate,” Yarin said. “I am not a greedy god, and I can only divide my love and attention between so many.”
As my senses returned and my skull mended, I glanced around my prison. The priest lay beside me on the ground, his eye nothing but a black, oozing socket where the sword must have thrust through his head. The armed man kneeled not far from him, the blade embedded in his own chest.
I jutted my chin toward the lot of dead men and let them rise for my protection. “You may have them once they have ensured my escape.”
Yarin lifted a brow at me. “I said I have no preferences; I didn’t say I have no taste.”
“Suit yourself,” I said, and let them march ahead of me toward freedom.
I crawled over the stone like vermin, up a short set of stairs and through the oaken door, dragging my useless legs behind me. Once I reached the light of day, its brightness stabbed into my head. Bile soured the back of my throat and my stomach cramped before strings of vomit driveled from my lips. It tainted the air with bitterness and saturated the seashells beneath me.
Streaked blood-red at the horizon, the chaotic morning sky matched the color of the flayed skin flapping from my chest. Naked to nearly bone, I rose, blood still dripping from my crotch. Torture had certainly changed over the span of two hundred years, each new instrument an attest to mankind’s depravity.
I sent the corpses to clear the area, some sort of temple grounds surrounded by walls carved from the rock. “High Priest Dekalon?”
“Not here, I’m afraid,” Yarin shouted over the screams of the remaining soldiers as the dead turned temple to tomb, biting through arteries and breaking necks. “Oh, I do understand how eager you are to chain his soul. Bring him to me, and I shall do this for you in exchange for the corpses.”
He would die many gruesome deaths. But not yet. I had other priorities. As promised, my wife was waiting for me. And as promised, I would return to her.
Forever return to my Ada.
Letting armor form around me from the skin of the dead guards and priests, I walked over to a chestnut mare that stood saddled beside a weapon rack. A bucket of water sat by her side, showing me the reflection of something that looked nothing like the man Ada knew, but all the more like a monster.
Ribs exposed and charred black on one side, half of my face peeled down to the bone, my hair a tattered mess of singed strands and new growth. No, I would not let her see me like this. I needed to heal before I could dare hold her, kiss her, sink into her arms.
“How long?” I asked. “How long was I held captive?”
Yarin shrugged and grinned down at the corpse of a dead woman. “A little less than a fortnight, perhaps.”
I cut the mare’s throat with a bone knife, only to let her rise moments later, turning her toward the Pale Court. I needed rest. Perhaps I would even find much-needed sleep in my little one’s arms, so I may wake and pretend that this had been nothing but a terrible dream.
“This one,” Yarin said. “The rest… mmm, nothing but brutes with hairy arses. I shall call on you once you are… Wait, where are you going?”
“To my court.” I raised the woman, her soul already shackled to her form. “My wife is waiting for me. Perhaps you should come with me and ease her mind. She has to be terrified.”
“Oh, she was. So overtaken by panic, fragments of her thoughts resonated in my head over the span of towns.” He reached for the confused woman, helped her onto shaky legs, and pulled her into his embrace as he hushed her. “But your wife is not at the Pale Court.” A chuckle. “Not unless you have recently acquired a new servant named Rose and fish cages.”
Your wife is not at the Pale Court.
I froze, rendered utterly dazed and confused by his words. Fish cages? My jawline stiffened as doubt and distrust tore the veil that hid old memories shaped by vile betrayal and set into my core in the shape of a broken heart.
I gulped past a lump of blood and ire. “Where is my wife?”
“How would I know? I have more important things to do than to listen to your wife’s internal ramblings about frayed ropes and what to put in her stew.”
Frayed ropes?
Stew?
Raw and violent, mistrust crackled through every fiber of my being, an emotion I was too familiar with. Why was she not where she ought to be? I hadensuredher return to the Pale Court, yet she was not there. Neither could she be held captive if she pondered fish cages and stew. I stumbled back a step, my mind suddenly spinning again.
How…?
Why was she not…?
None of this made sense.
I’ll hide in the back of beyond until my hair’s gray,Ada’s words infiltrated a mind already standing at a crumbling edge, with the black void of madness gaping below.How could I not want to leave you? Any woman in her right mind would. I hate you.
