Chapter Ten
The carriage was lined with sumptuous fabric, a deep green that seemed to accent all the furnishings of the god of knowledge as the vehicle rumbled down crooked streets, higher and higher through the city.
‘Where are you taking me?’ Elara asked, looking blankly at the grey stone that blurred around her.
‘To my manor,’ Eli replied, and she could feel the tension in his voice, drawn taut.
‘You have a home here?’
‘I stay in it when I’m not in the heavens,’ he said shortly.
‘Where are Merissa and Leo?’
‘There.’ Another clipped response.
She flicked her eyes to his, studying his profile. His own bored into the window, chin resting against his hand, clenched into a fist.
‘What happened back in the pits—’
‘Was unforgivably stupid.’ She wished she hadn’t caught his attention, for to be under the full weight of his ire, of that dark stare that seemed to hold so much, left her feeling as though she was being buried alive.
In one swift and jarring movement, he’d filled the gap between them, gripping her chin.
Her mouth worked, terror creeping viciously inside her bones. ‘What are you doing?’
That dark gaze scanned hers, up and down, and up again. Whatever he saw in her eyes made him release her, though he did not answer her question. She sucked in a breath as he finally put space between them again.
‘I had it under control,’ he said, smoothing his hair back, though she was shocked to see that hand tremble. Stars did not tremble. ‘Merissa was seducing Madame Miramere in the box. Who is dead now, by the way.’
Elara blanched.
‘She’d already decided that Leo was going to win the match. She’d just revealed where she was keeping the snakestone. And you…you—’
‘Saved my friend,’ she hissed. ‘I know that’s a difficult concept for you to grasp as a Star with a cavity where your heart is meant to reside, but what I did, I did for love. He was dying, and no one was doing a thing.’
She sat back, letting her anger fizzle out. Merissa was safe. Leo was safe. They would wake Enzo. She repeated the mantra over and over.
‘You know, you and I were friends once,’ Eli said when she finally thought he wouldn’t reply. ‘In your…past life.’
She frowned, recoiling. ‘We were?’
‘Yes. Though I don’t see a drop of that goddess within you now.’
He turned in disgust, and she felt like slapping him.
‘And I don’t see a drop of the benevolence and value you must have had as my friend back then,’ she spat.
He let out something like a snort, and silence permeated the carriage once more. Elara tried to divert her mind every time it conjured images of those wet corpses, to shove the memories into a box. But alas, the box was open, destroyed. She had nowhere to run any more.
‘You saved the pirate,’ Eli said, breaking her from her thoughts.
‘I did. They would have killed him. All for me. For my head.’ She shook it. ‘Death follows me. I see it even when I dream.’ It was the most she’d admitted of the terrible vision she’d had at the inn.
Something passed over his face that she didn’t quite understand. Ire? Sorrow?
The landscape drifted past until, instead of the slate-grey, dreary stone, moors began to expand before her, the grass an insipid shade in the gloom. She felt the carriage lift, as though they were being notched higher, and the clatter of cobbles changed to the squelch of mud.
She peered out into the darkness, eyes widening as she saw they were entering a marshland. Trees bent over the carriage, dimming the small bit of light that the moon gifted them. She heard a creaking and leaned forwards in alarm.
‘Is this carriage quite safe to traverse a marsh?’
The terrible anger within his eyes momentarily transformed into amusement. ‘I should hope so.’ When Elara failed to look impressed, he added, ‘The carriage is specially designed by the brightest of Castorian minds to travel across this kind of terrain.’
The slush of stagnant water lapped past, and she glimpsed a few tombstones in the distant marsh flats, sticking up from the ground at jagged angles, sparse and laid far apart.
She shivered as she thought about what might be lurking in the bog.
The prickles of unease hadn’t left her since the vision of the priest, and now, after glimpsing what might have been the Nevercrow, she was becoming less and less trusting of her own mind.
She felt as though someone was watching her, waiting.
Before long, the marshland made way for solid terrain once more, and she felt the carriage lowered—such a strange sensation—as it returned to normal. Ahead stretched a beautiful, if ominous, manor built entirely from black brick.
Two angels, reminiscent of the weeping women on the Bridge of Tears, hands covering their faces, knelt in stone on either side of black gates, open and waiting.
The house itself towered, the points of its roof spiky, a little crooked.
When the carriage ground to a halt, she stepped out, noticing to her surprise that though the vehicle was pulled by horses, no coachman sat at the wheel.
She tentatively reached out a hand to one of the horses, a beautiful lilac-grey mare.
The mare huffed into her palm, and she stroked the softness of its muzzle.
She turned as she heard Eli get out, his footsteps crunching across the gravel drive to the front doors.
She followed him, noticing a well-manicured maze of hedges, part of the sprawling grounds to the side of the house.
Everything was immaculately tended, from the spindly blackthorn trees that lined the drive to the snakesnap flowers that twisted up in various shades of green against the walls of the house.
Eli whispered a word to the snakes upon the relief and they writhed, the doors swinging open.
He turned to her, flourishing a hand. She could see a cosy glow beyond, so far removed from the cold god before her.
‘Welcome to Vipervale Manor.’