CHAPTER FOURTEEN
T he room pitched.
She stumbled and swayed as the floor heaved forwards and back. Around her the walls leaned in and rotated. Violent need to retch assaulted her throat and thick, sour fluids flooded her cheeks.
Rand’s steady grip was there but she fought him. He caught her around the waist when her body bent forward and heaved itself out of her mouth. But she pushed him away. She fell and he picked her up from under the arms. Like a cornered feline, she swung around on him, claws and teeth bared.
Ugly things came from her mouth. She blasphemed and wished every bodily affliction on Rand. And the more he remained patient, the more he sought to steady her, the more she screamed at him, hated him for the empathy carved across his features.
It can’t be! It can’t be! He wouldn’t have taken his own life!
No one who lived with such purpose robbed themselves of that purpose! To provide and keep his family safe brought him joy and pride. How many times had he stated such in his letters? Telling her that when the days were hard it was the thought of her and their mother that strengthened him.
Gone by his own hand? How?
In those moments before he suffocated or the instant before the rope snapped his neck, didn’t he think of them at all? If he carved into veins or plunged a blade into his stomach, while he felt life stream away, did he think of the people he loved? A person could not end their life and still profess love for those around them. To commit suicide was cowardly. To look in the face of hardship and decide it was better not to live was weak.
Aldney wasn’t weak! Aldney wasn’t a coward!
“No! I don’t believe you! Nothing would have made him take his life!” She lunged at him. “My brother was not a coward!”
Like one brushes aside a dragonfly whose chattering wings linger too long, Rand spun her around and pinned her to himself with one arm across her chest and the other in control of her wrists.
Sternum to spine with her he said, “Not all who take their lives are guileless. Your brother took his life to save himself.”
Petra flung her head into his chest. “You lie! He was slain! Nothing could have made him kill himself!”
“You’re wrong. He kept a great deal from you and that is why I did not explain his death in the letter.”
“He asked you not to?”
“He did.”
The gravitas in his voice, the utter calm, seized her heart with terror.
“Liar!” she hollered back. “Aldney kept nothing from me!”
“This he kept. Out of shame.”
Though it was useless, she strained against him. “Then tell me! Tell me what could have made my brother take his life!”
He let go. She spun around, faced with a resigned pain across his countenance that spoke more truth than words. Immediate tears in her eyes burned and felt like they sliced open her skin as they drained down her cheeks.
When those steady hands fell upon her shoulders again, she could not bear the weight and grabbed his arms.
“Tell me, Rand. I beg you,” she whispered.
“Very well. But I will show you where he is buried so you can be near him when you hear. It’s hideous.”
“I’m not afraid.”
***
H IS ELK WAS SADDLED , and he pulled her up behind him, reminding her to hang on with what was left of her wherewithal. Although she thought she gripped his shoulder, it must have been the touch of a ragdoll. He took her arm and held it around his waist as they rode up the main road.
Petra was out of her body and out of her mind. She saw the approach of the emperor’s palace but did not comprehend that they rode past the main stairs, back to where a network of narrow paths led to the small residences of palace staff. The crisscross pattern of those narrow roads began to curve and wind as the dwellings moved behind them and low-built walls rose.
It became a labyrinth. The walls got higher. The paths turned back on one another and stopped, sometimes blocked by a barricade. Rand knew the way; the elk never faltered. Petra lost all sense of direction and was sure they rode in circles.
It was hushed here. The walls kept out noise and the entire city felt leagues away. She had no idea how long they rode. Her body felt like it hovered above the animal’s back, and she watched herself from a perch on her own shoulder.
After what seemed like hours, the serpentine paths ceased. In front of a solid bronze gate attached to golden walls stood two sentries. Fully garbed in armor with spears in their hands, they seemed more statues than men.
Rand dismounted.
“Stand down,” he commanded.
The sentries moved in unison, like clockwork springs. The spears lowered and pointed at Rand.
“Only the worthy may pass.”
“The soil of the garden is my blood.”
The words meant nothing to her, but the guards moved back to their positions and dropped the tips of their weapons to the ground.
He turned to her. “Come. Stay close.”
She slid off the elk. The mere rustle of fabric and the sound of her feet were loud here. In Rand’s wake, she followed as he approached the gate that had no lever or handle. He placed his hand on the metal and spread his fingers.
Petra saw nothing. The gate did not open. One moment she stood behind him and in the next, the sentries, the gate, the elk, and the walls of the labyrinth vanished. In an instant, they were within what the bronze and gold protected.
A garden.
A garden beyond the makings of man. Perpetual daylight above them with constellations of stars from eons ago. Moss, thicker than velvet under her feet, in verdant greens and purples, swayed back and forth like ripples on a lake in spring. Short trees, with trunks so rotund they appeared pregnant, bore silver oblong leaves on their branches. They fluttered in a breeze Petra could not feel, twinkling with a silver, crystalline sound. For as far as she could see, there seemed to be no end in sight. Fantastic flowers, short, tall, and willowy, bloomed. All their petals were opalescent, touched with hoarfrost.
Hovering above the ground, rounded puffs of what she could only determine to be clouds, floated. Sometimes hovering, sometimes ambulating, they were transparent, fading in and out of sight. Many seemed to collect over a pond of aquamarine water so still it might have been a mirror.
“What—what is this place?”
“In essence, eternity.”
He looked around as if steadied and refreshed, but Petra crept forward.
“How is this...possible?”
“This,” he answered, gesturing to their surroundings, “is what gives the city its might to rule. What rests here is far more powerful than any man or woman on the throne. Eternity chose Vale to rest on earth. This is where Aldney is buried.” He turned around, commanding her gaze, his voice hushed and reverent. “And this is where he was raped by the fourth captain of Shivalry and Lady Melisende. This is where he took his life to break the seal they tried to force upon him.”
Soft moss cradled her knees as she sank down. It melted between her fingers as she clawed and squeezed, like she might reach through the soil and touch her brother’s bones.
Raped .
In her mind’s eye, she saw greedy hands tear at his clothes, strip the light from his eyes, and rob his dignity. When they had him where they wanted him, the woman who masturbated at his memory and the man with the forked tongue, what then? Did Melisende force him from the front and Larkin...penetrate him from behind?
Did her brother’s body respond to her touch, to his? The moment she held his manhood between her legs and Larkin thrust his rod into his anus, did Aldney gasp and cry out for no one to hear?
She vomited.
“No!” Petra shook her head. “I don’t believe you. I can’t!”
“He confessed to me, Petra. I saw his perpetrators fleeing when I arrived. Their attempt to seal him as a Sacrifice failed because he grabbed one of the low branches you see and stabbed himself in the neck.”
“I don’t,” she sputtered, “I don’t understand anything you’re saying!”
He helped her stand. “Come with me.”
Further and farther, they moved into the Eden. Petra walked but the ground did not appear to change under her feet. Nor did their surroundings. The only notion she had of going deeper was the glass pond, in front of her before, now on her right side.
Rand led her to a roughly shaped sphere. Its surface was like that of coral, porous and uneven. However, the large stone orb glittered in the perpetual daylight with colors moving across its surface. All the colors were cast in shimmering shades and moved with such supple motion they almost appeared liquid. In this unthinkable place, she might lift her hand to a rock and find water.
As she stared, Rand explained. What rested before her was the Antediluvian Stone. The day it had been tossed from the clouds, men strong enough to touch it and not perish rolled it into the garden. These men became sentinels of great size. It was said they could push over trees with one hand and their skin was tougher than leather.
The land was younger then. Wilder. It was not an emperor ruling Vale but a sultan who had sired twelve daughters from the same woman before she died of exhaustion.
The sultan prized the beauty of his daughters, and their fairness was considered worthy of only the finest, most virile men. The men to wed his daughters must be paragons of their gender and until they were found worthy, his daughters must be protected.
Only men who lived after touching the Antediluvian could be considered. And thus came the inscription Petra could see etched onto the surface, pristine, as if it had been carved mere days before.
Upon this stone whose hand is set asserts the power to claim an unpayable debt. She shall be the sacred created to his price of sacrifice. Speak the words of claim and it is set in bones and blood lain.
“Can you read?” he asked.
“I can.”
“Then read it silently. The stone listens.”
“I don’t understand what the limerick means.”
He sighed. “The daughters of the sultan laid their hands and claimed the men as their Sacrifices. No hurt could be brought to the daughters and the men were bound to them body and soul. The bond could not be broken until the man was beheaded by her husband.”
Over and over, Petra read the three lines but how it applied to Aldney, she could not fathom. Her confusion must have been plain across her face. Rand continued to explain.
“In the end, it wouldn’t have worked, what they tried to bind your brother to. That’s not the purpose of the incantation. It’s for protection of a woman by a man. A Sacred and her Sacrifice. He must be willing to die for her. Their intention was for him to be a slave to Melisende’s lusts and Larkin had long desired her.” Disgust dripped from his voice. “Larkin knew of this place. I saw him that day with Melisende and Aldney in his wake, entering the labyrinth. Your brother was blindfolded. I followed. I guess Larkin believed he’d win her favor and have the unique bragging experience of penetrating a man. Without knowing, Aldney did himself mercy. His death from the perversion of the incantation would have been gruesome.”
She lifted her eyes to his. The umber, red color was clear in this light and air. She felt she might look deep and see the events as they played out in translucent truth.
However, even in the pure atmosphere, she could not make that sight anything less than a nightmare. Though the prose was plain and the stone in front of her, she could not internalize it. Even though every word Rand spoke was plain and without dramatic emphasis, she would die before she let herself accept the truth.
“I won’t,” she murmured between clenched teeth. “You can’t make me believe it!”
“Petra...”
“No!”
“The truth is before you.”
“You lie!”
“Why would I lie to you? In this place? The trees here have breasts to nurse a child! The air here exists nowhere else on earth. At the bottom of the pond is the door to eternity beyond the clouds in the sky!”
She flung her hand outwards and slammed it on the stone. “On your life!”
Rand stepped back. “Don’t be foolish,” he commanded.
She could not hear him over a thrumming, golden sound resounding in her body from the touch of the stone.
“On your life, swear in this holy place, swear to me that you have spoken the truth, or I will claim—”
“You cannot speak those words!” he thundered.
“I will claim you as my Sacrifice!”
“FOOL!”
Infinite light struck her. Blinded by a terrifying radiance, she was propelled forward. Pulled by the bones of her ribcage, she was flung at such an angle her back might break. Cataclysm paralyzed her. It rang in her ears like ten thousand silver bells, and she could not draw breath to scream. Nothing but sensation sizzled across her skin, shaking the root of each hair follicle on her body.
It hurt like damnation, and she wished for death. Her veins would fry and tattoo the surface of her skin like disease. Solidified by a hallowed light, pristine as diamonds, set by the sun, her lungs would petrify before they exploded into the atmosphere, rupturing her rib bones.
Density collided into her. All her weight, sensation, and light ceased, as if she had been hurled beneath the waves of a frozen black ocean. She opened her mouth to gasp, but her throat was closed, and her nose clogged from the weight of the night she had been thrust into.