Chapter Thirteen #2
“I’m not an artist,” she said hurriedly.
“So?” Shadach continued shaping the mural with his hands.
“It will be terrible.”
He laughed, soft and unassuming. “We’re facing possible death and you’re worried about technical skill?”
“I … I mean …” A clatter. A crash. Aoife’s breathing went tight as the noises above grew louder. The soldiers. They were coming back. Shadach didn’t flinch.
“Come on,” he said, keeping his gaze on his work. “Do you have something better to do right now?”
Voices. Shouting. Aoife’s heart, thrashing.
And then, slowing. She watched Shadach. So calm.
So peaceful. The mural was a forest, the sun and stars meeting in the sky.
Were those people he was making? Or animals?
She’d have to wait and see. As she watched him, it occurred to her: she had nothing to lose.
The soldiers were ripping apart the temple. They could find her at any minute. She could sit here terrified of what was going to happen or she could do something she wanted to do. Something she’d been too scared to do.
“How do you …” Aoife’s voice came out as a whisper.
Shadach paused. Looked at her. His eyes were smiling.
“Normally, the dirt would be slightly wet, and it would be cured by the stars after so it sets permanently. But, we don’t have water just now and there’s no stars in here, so …
just mould indentations and create what’s in your head.
Or just get started and see what happens. ”
He said it so simply. As if it were easy. As if it were harmless. Aoife stared at the dark patch of dirt in front of her, Mum’s laughter at her teapot shrieking in her ears. Mum’s not here. Soldiers of death are.
Aoife leaned forward, her blood roaring, her head ready to split from the pounding of her heart. She reached out. She traced a line in the dirt. She waited, holding her breath, as if God himself were waiting to smite her for going against what was right and good and true in the world.
Nothing happened.
The soldiers continued their carnage. Shadach continued his mural. Aoife sat in the dark. Not struck down by God. She made another line.
Nothing.
Another line.
Still nothing.
One more line.
Nothing yet again.
Aoife stared at the box she’d made. It was just a silly box.
And yet, she wanted to laugh. To smile. She dug into the dirt with both hands, no idea what she was making, but desperate to make it.
The earth wheedled underneath her fingernails, coating her fingers in brown.
How she had loved making that teapot. The feel of the cool clay, the contact of her skin against earth, the feeling of being preciously and beautifully alive.
As if she had been communing with divinity.
“See?” Shadach said. “It’s better than worrying about the soldiers.”
For a moment, Aoife had forgotten he was there.
It had been just her and the art. But when she looked over and saw him working with a similar fervour, her heart beat twice as fast. The memory of his kisses flashed through her mind, of his fingers inside her driving her wild.
Aoife turned back to her mural in an attempt to block out the memories, but instead the passion seemed to funnel into her work, into her need to make whatever she was making.
And even more than that, to make it beside Shadach as if he were fuelling her passion. Her inspiration.
“I suppose,” Aoife said, “now really is a good time for art.”
Shadach’s laugh made her heart skip. Then, there was silence.
Comfortable, beautiful silence. Aoife moulded the strong earth with her hands, clueless as to what the final product would be, but excited to find out.
Beside her, Shadach finished what was no doubt a masterpiece.
But Aoife didn’t want to see it yet. She feared if she looked, she’d be ashamed of what she was making and give up.
She wanted to see this through. She needed to. She didn’t know why exactly, but she—
“Check in there!”
A voice. A soldier’s voice.
Aoife’s heart sank to the pit of her stomach, shattering at the sound of the door above splintering to pieces.
“Hurry.” Shadach’s whisper was fierce.
Before Aoife knew what she was doing, she grabbed her blue orb off the floor as Shadach kicked dirt over their murals, smothering them into oblivion.
Aoife clutched the orb to her chest. She would never know what she might have made.
A silly thing to mourn at a time like this, and yet, she couldn’t help it.
Shadach grabbed her hand, pulling her deeper into the underground network of rooms.
“There’s nowhere to hide,” Aoife whispered, looking into the darkness, seeing nothing but blackness. She could hear the soldiers clattering down the stairs, armour on their bodies and death in their hands.
“There’s always somewhere.” Shadach knelt to the floor.
A flicker of light cut into the distance. The soldiers were almost here with their torches. And their swords. Aoife’s pulse thrashed in her head. This was it. This was the end. They were going to—
Aoife fell through the floor. A door above her slammed shut. Aoife opened her mouth to speak. To scream.
She froze. She was lying beside Shadach, chest to chest, in a tiny hole in the floor.
A secret compartment beneath the secret rooms beneath the temple.
So many hidden things. Their bodies were pressed so tight Aoife could barely breathe as the soldiers clambered overhead, their boots knocking dirt loose around them.
It was just as well Aoife couldn’t breathe.
She was holding her breath, afraid to make the slightest noise.
“They have to be somewhere,” a voice said overhead.
Aoife looked into Shadach’s eyes, searching for fear, for hope. For anything. She found only calm, and that rich smell of heat and lust.
“Are there more compartments?” a soldier said.
They were going to be found. Any minute now, the soldiers would find them.
Kill them. It would all be over. And nobody, not Aoife’s family, not Eimear, not anyone would know what had happened to her.
She never should have walked through those Gates.
Those Gates that had promised lust and love and everything she’d ever wanted from a man.
The memory of the Knitting Widow and her being pressed between the bar and Shadach’s hard, gorgeous body flashed through Aoife’s mind.
She crashed her lips to Shadach’s.
If she was going to die, she was going to die doing something that made her feel alive.
Shadach kissed her back, his breath hot as he felt her.
Tasted her. There was so little space, Aoife couldn’t even run her hands over his body, but she could feel every inch of his hardness against her.
She savoured the heat that poured through her, the sweet taste of his lips, memorising every sensation as if she were a prisoner on death row trying to savour her last meal.
The door above them rattled. The light of torches poured into their tiny hiding place.
Aoife kissed Shadach harder. Harder. Harder until she was pulled off him.
This. This was the end. Aoife blinked into the light, daring herself to be brave once more, to look death in the eye as she had when Aristen had been about to kill her.
A woman’s face stared back at her.
Not just any woman.
A priestess.
Aoife blinked again. She looked around. No soldiers. Just a lone priestess. Shadach was climbing out from the hiding place in the floor.
“They’re gone,” the priestess said.