Nobody's Goddess (28 page)

“Tell me where Jurij is,” I said, my tongue suddenly snapping back into action.

“On the top floor,” he replied. “In the room next to your mother’s.”

“What have you done to him?”

“I staunched and treated his wounds.”

My lower jaw was grinding. “To the best of your ability?”

He didn’t hesitate to answer. “No.”

“What are you going to do with him now?”

“Nothing.”

I sighed and rapped my fingers on the table impatiently. “Why did you bring him here?”

“To heal him.”

I snorted. Really, he had been so eager to follow my orders for once that I had forgotten to actually form the words correctly. “Tell me why you brought him here.”

“To heal him and to punish you.”

There it was. I laughed and breathed a sigh of relief. “Release Jurij.”

The black hands waved upward. So the specters were still able to follow his orders even when not within sight of their master.
Is this how he is always watching?
I wondered if somehow my wedding escorts had seen the kiss and had alerted their master from a great distance, or if it was the goddess curse that wreaked the pain of the kiss straight to his heart. I hoped it was the latter.

“Release my mother as well,” I said.

Another wave of the black hand.

How simple. How dubious.

“Prove to me that they’re going home.”

A black glove gestured to the open window. I moved across the room, keeping a suspicious eye on his extended hand. I tore my eyes from the lord and let them fall outside the window, my body still facing the billowing curtain.

After a few moments, specters carried Jurij and my mother from the castle door to the two awaiting black carriages. Jurij, his face wrapped in bandages, shifted slightly, but my mother didn’t stir. For a moment, I wondered if they were well enough to travel, but my instinct was to get them as far from the lord as possible.

Mother and Jurij were laid one after the other into the carriages. Without a sound, the black horses started moving, and the carriages disappeared down the dirt path through the middle of the woods. The specters who didn’t drive the carriages walked in two steady lines after them. More and more specters poured from the castle door and out into the woods until finally, the last of the specters disappeared from view and into the trees. There had to have been a hundred at least, more than enough to keep watch over the entire village.

I faced the black curtain. There had to be a trick, a plan for the specters to strike when out of sight, or to wait perhaps, until they could capture Father and Elfriede, Alvilda, Nissa, and the Tailors, and everyone else within the village before they made their deathly blow.

“Command me to tell you if this is a trick,” spoke the lord, as if reading my thoughts.

I wasn’t willing to play the game just as he wished it. “Don’t ever harm the people I love.”

Something odd stirred in the lord. A black-gloved hand clutched the edges of the lace tablecloth, an unnatural dam causing ripples along its otherwise unblemished surface. “I will not harm the people you love.”

“Don’t ever let your servants harm the people I love.”

“I will not let my retainers harm the people you love.”

I clenched my fists together. “Tell me if you have already ordered harm to come to them.”

“I have not.”

He released his grip on the tablecloth. The ripples he’d made diverted seamlessly back into smooth waters of lace.

There had to be something I was missing, something he had planned to stay two paces ahead of me. Because now there was nothing holding me back.

“Tell me why you aren’t fighting my orders.”

“I never stood a chance against you, in the end.” His voice was barely a whisper. His hands tugged carelessly at the bottom of the curtain.

My heart emboldened. Laughably, I felt that surge of pride that I had once known as a girl, when I was the little elf queen defeating monsters in the shadows of the secret cavern.

And here sat a monster, hidden in the shadows of that black curtain.

I stepped forward. “You will not harm me.”

“I would never harm you.”

“You will not seize me or grip me by the hands or arms.”

The lord tugged at the curtain, and I heard a small rip among the clattering of the curtain’s rings. “I will not hold you.”

I started, my tongue stumbling for a brief moment. It was off, but it would do. “You will keep no servants in this castle, and no one under your control will ever harm me.”

“They are gone. They will not harm you.”

I nodded. “You will do nothing to stop me from leaving.”

“I will not stop you.”

I paused mere paces from his side, only a thin layer of billowing curtain between us.

“Remove the curtain and show me your face.”

The black gloves didn’t hesitate. They took the bottom of the curtain in their grip and pulled. Rings the color of Elfriede’s and Mother’s hair, only brighter and shinier, fell like shattered glass all around us, to the floor and to the table.
I’ve seen a ring like that before—a bangle around Lord Elric’s arm in my dream—in the past.
I didn’t flinch as the curtain fell, letting the elf queen inside of me revel in her moment of glory. Nothing touched me. The curtain floated briefly before me as it made its leisurely descent.

My chest was an inferno, and I could feel the flame spark on the skin of my breast. My cheeks blazed, and the very blood that ran throughout my veins seemed ready to light my body aflame.

For he was beautiful. And he stabbed me through the heart with his beauty.

His dark hair came down to his shoulders. Like his hat had often done, the hair caught the flicker of the flame in the fireplace and showed me that it wasn’t black like the men in the village’s, but a dark, succulent brown that only masqueraded as black.

Just as I suspected, he did so look like Lord Elric. But he was paler, much paler. Almost like he was halfway to becoming a specter himself. His skin had an odd, creamy, rosy quality overlaying the soft white. His lips were dark red, as if they had been stained by blood. His nose was thin and straight—and familiar somehow. His brows came together in an almost perfectly straight line, and the bones in his cheeks practically burst through the strange, alluring skin.

His ears were as I expected. They poked through the dark tundra of his tresses and rose upward into jagged points. I stepped closer, my hand extended forward against my will to finger the sharp edges. I stopped and pulled my hand back before I touched him.

A timid smile slowly splintered his faultless face. His lips parted, and I could feel the warmth of his breath cross the few paces between us.

“And so you have made your choice at last, Olivière.”

The fire in his eyes burst into red flames. And then he was gone.

Elgar must have proven essential to getting back to that place. Or it was all a dream after all, despite what I knew in my heart to be true. I tried jumping in again to no avail. Every time I came to the surface, I came back here.

Home and not home. But not at all that place I’d once been, that place with Avery and Ailill, with the darker lord and Goncalo.

So I’d given up. I lived among those who were lost among the living. I carved and I whittled, I sat and I stood, I walked and I lay. The few men who populated the commune did not disturb me, so lost were they in their own torment. We watched together daily as the farmers—men, women, girls, and boys alike—marched past from the village and into the fields beyond our heap of dilapidated shacks. They marched past again what felt like years later as the sun set, the women and the girls with their heads held high despite the fact they faced the east. They didn’t look our way, and we didn’t stir. And that was the most we could hope for of peace.

After the lord vanished, the earth trembled. My memory turned black, and then I woke up in a large field of dirt.

A field where the castle should have been.

I dragged my feet forward numbly, cradling my arms to my chest in the chill of the moonlight down the dirt path back to the village. I paused at the edge of the trees where I usually broke off the path to visit the secret cavern. I’d try jumping into the violet sphere beneath the waters during the days that followed. But that day, I just wanted to be sure everyone was well.

I arrived at my home, recognizing the windows on the house on the horizon lit brightly by the flame of the fireplace.

When I opened the door, I was greeted first with surprise and then with warmth by Arrow, Elfriede, and Jurij. His face was untouched, not a scar or injury to be seen.

“Where’s Father?” I croaked. “Was Mother brought home to him?”

The light fell from Elfriede’s jovial face. “Mother and Father are dead, Noll.”

She brushed her palm across my forehead. Jurij peered over her shoulder, his face full of concern.

“Were you out in that cavern again?” he asked. He touched my shoulder, and I shivered perceptibly. Still, Jurij didn’t notice. “Did you swim? You don’t appear to be wet from the pool.”

Elfriede tugged gently on my elbow. The force was not one I couldn’t fight against should I have wished to, but I had no such desires then.

She led me to the bed we shared and tucked me in.

“Rest now,” she said.

She’s forgiven me.
I closed my eyes but didn’t fall asleep.

Hushed voices held counsel over my questions.

“Why did she come back here?”

I should have known she was still angry.

“I don’t know. She’s acting delirious.”

“Why did she ask for Mother and Father? How could she forget Mother died from her illness almost a year ago now?”

Impossible.

“Or that Gideon followed her shortly thereafter? I don’t know. She doesn’t seem … right.” The way he spoke the last word made me wonder what the “right” me would be.

I flitted in and out of consciousness. A long time later, I heard the soft moans and rustles from behind me in my parents’ bed, and I shuddered, pulling my quilt tightly over my head. In the morning, I glanced at the coupling intertwined in one another’s arms, Arrow resting at their feet, breathing easily in their slumber. My gaze fell upon the delicate valley of lilies carved into the unfamiliar headboard. I left without a word, dragging my feet back down the dirt path and through the village.

I stopped in front of the Tailors’, wondering if I might find shelter there. But I thought of Luuk and Nissa—the little Jurij and Elfriede in training. What room would there be for me? What place was there for me, among the sewing and the clothes? I walked westward.

I paused at Alvilda’s door.
No. No, that wasn’t home, either.

The commune was just a few paces away. When the pool brought me nowhere, I had nowhere else to go.

And there it was that I sat now, carving life into a block of wood. At first, I left the commune only to speak with Alvilda, to borrow tools and to get supplies. She was as concerned for me as Elfriede and Jurij had been—perhaps more so because she wasn’t lost in the bliss of Returned love as were those two. But she didn’t pry.

I had but one question for her. “What became of the castle and the lord of the village?”

She ran her sawdust-covered palm over my forehead. I let the dust settle in my eyebrows. “What are you running your mouth on about now? What castle? What lord?”

There was no castle, no lord of the village. And there never had been.

I was nobody’s goddess—odd, but not worth much notice in the village where all were concerned with their own exchanges of love and Returning. Maybe my man would be born a few decades later, they thought—it’d happened on occasion before. Old Ingrith didn’t even have a man yet when she died, they said. Of course, I knew better.

She hadn’t lied. She’d seen her man’s face before she loved him, and with that, she killed him.

Pity she was gone now, too. She might have been the only one who could understand me.

For I knew now what she meant when she talked of killing a man no one else remembered. The fate worse than death that lurked around every corner for a masked man was that the eyes of a girl or woman upon his face would make him vanish not from life, but vanish completely from existence. It would be as if he never lived, forgotten to all but the woman who granted him that fate.

I had two visitors once, early on. And only once. Luuk and Nissa stopped by, the cart they dragged full of hides.

Nissa gasped when she saw me. “It’s true! You’re living
here
!”

Luuk’s bear face tilted slightly. “Why?”

I looked up from my carving and opened my mouth only to find the airwaves cracked and coated with dust, my lips too dry to form words. The kids watched me expectantly. “I have no home,” I said at last.

“That’s not true!” said Nissa, her hands on her hips. “You were supposed to move in with Alvilda, the night of Jurij and Elfriede’s wedding.”

Alvilda told me that herself the first day I’d spoken to her. A new cot still took up a corner of her home, its quilt coated with sawdust.

Luuk pointed to the figure in my hand. “I thought you were going to become Auntie’s apprentice. That you would take up a trade while you waited for your man to finally find you.”