Chapter 8 Elke #2
“Okay, the chaosgotten.” I struggled to pronounce the syllables.
Elke smiled at me, encouragingly, and all at once her face looked soft and sweet, almost pretty.
“We say the chaosgotten are descended from Chaos himself.” I struggled to remember anything else about Chaos, or about the gods in general.
There were seven gods in the pantheon: Gaia, Oceanos, Eros, Erebos, Aether, Chaos, and Nemesis.
They each had different realms of influence, and not a one of them had ever interested me.
Religion was not prominent in the village of Limer.
We had other shit to worry about. Oh, sure, sometimes a traveling preacher came through, and everyone gathered around and listened to his sermons and pledged to Be Better From Now On, but no one ever was.
Limer wasn’t Corcagia, where there was an enormous, lacy cathedral that Calix had described in his letters; and it certainly wasn’t the mainland, where every god in the pantheon save for Chaos and Nemesis had a shrine in every home.
That sort of thing was for other people, not for me. I preferred math.
But Elke answered, “Yes, that is our Father. The Monarch, whose name we do not speak. May His name be silence on our lips. But we are also descended, you know, from the Monarch’s wife. His human wife. The first human woman to be taken.”
A pit in my stomach. I had never read that in any of the books the farmhands had gifted my mother.
Elke clicked her second set of legs. “Some of us take after our Father. But some of us take after our Mother. His Lordship is one of those, I think. Not only in body but in mind. Our Mother’s blood is strong in him.”
“How old is he?”
“The Prince? He is only twenty-six. He is a baby. He thinks he knows more than he knows.” Then Elke looked stricken. “Forgive me. I am only a servant.”
“You don’t have to apologize to me. I’m a servant, too. I clean houses. Or I used to, I guess.” I laughed bitterly.
Elke didn’t. “Please don’t tell him I said that,” she said. “Please.”
“Why would I tell him? What good would it do me to get you in trouble? You’re the only one here being nice to me.” I supposed Hades was being nice enough, but he had kidnapped me and kept hauling me all over the underworld, so it didn’t count.
Then I had an idea. Maybe I could get Elke to be even nicer… especially if I scared her a little bit. “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I’ll keep your secret if you do me a favor.”
Elke drew her head between her shoulders. “What?”
I scrambled off the bed. Elke flinched, presumably thinking I was going for my spear, but I was only picking up my basket of edenica herbs and the flask of water, which, like the spear, no one had bothered to remove.
“Can you please get this to the border between the, what did you call it, the Gestorbunlund, and the human world?”
“The Lümerlund,” Elke said. “We call your world the Lümerlund. The light-world.”
“Okay. Can you get this to the Lümerlund?”
I was thinking about my last trip to the border with Calix. The way he’d said, I’d have to come and get you.
I was hoping against hope, so hard it made me sick, that he would see the basket and know I’d been kidnapped — especially if Josie also noticed I was gone. That Calix would keep his promise and come and get me. That in the meantime, one of them would look after my mother.
Elke hesitated. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Just take it!” I shoved the basket onto her platter with the fish. “Now go! Go, go, go! Hurry!”
“Okay, okay, okay,” Elke said. She scuttled over to the door and opened it. But then she hesitated. She looked back at me. She rolled whatever she wanted to say around in her mouth, and then, very fast, she said, “You know, I have been alive for three hundred years.”
Three hundred years! Her human face looked no older than forty!
“I am young, though not as young as His Lordship,” Elke went on, still speaking quickly. “In my time, I have been ordered to serve food to six tributes.”
Tributes. That meant kidnapped human girls. Sacrifices.
My heart quailed, but I refused to let my body follow suit. I squared my shoulders and regarded Elke head-on.
If she noticed my fear or my resolve, Elke didn’t remark upon it. She continued, “And not a one of them ever used the correct name for the Gestorbunlund.” She smiled thinly. “Let alone took the effort to pronounce it correctly.”
I didn’t know what to say. So what?
Elke waited for me to respond. When I didn’t, she left.
There was nothing to do now but wait, and to hope to the gods that Elke put my basket at the border and Calix found it. I began to pace. I hefted the spear, but there was no one to stab. I opened one of the books, but I couldn’t focus.
I was too hungry.
I kept thinking about Hades. His wide blue eyes.
His strange sadness. His bedrock bellow, roaring at the Vizeking, She’s not my pet.
Watch your mouth. I thought of my basket.
Of Calix. My mother. Josie. The fact that I was here right now and Josie wasn’t.
Because I was the one who had been captured by Hades.
Hades. His black jagged hair, his muscular hands, his voice when he said I wish I could have talked to my father —
No matter what I did, my thoughts circled back to him.
What was he going to do to me? Why was I here?
It had to be the fact that I was already thinking about him — because he’d kidnapped me, and for no other reason — that I knew as soon as the door handle turned again that it was him this time and not Elke. I could sense the difference just by the way the handle turned under the weight of his palm.
I picked up my spear.
Hades entered, holding my basket and frowning.
Traitor, I thought at Elke.
“What is this?” Hades demanded.
“It’s edenica herbs and water.”
“I know that. But why did you give them to Elke? You know she won’t go aboveground. No one ever does if they can avoid it.”
No, I had not known that. My face flushed with embarrassment.
“Well, someone has to get them to the Lümerlund. They’re to keep my mother alive.
I risked everything to gather those.” And the risk didn’t exactly pay off, did it, I thought bitterly.
“Not that you monsters would know anything about loving someone so much you’d put yourself in danger. ”
Hades’s face did absolutely nothing. “You think the half-cup of water you gathered last night is the one thing standing between your mother and death?”
My throat convulsed of its own accord. I could have stabbed him. “I’ve kept her alive so far, haven’t I?”
“I don’t know. Have you?”
“Yes.”
He was rotating the flask between his hands. “By yourself?”
“No,” I bit out. “Josie helps. But I’m trying. It’s something that I’m trying, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Hades said. “Absolutely.”
I’d been prepared to bite back at his sarcasm, but my response dried up in my mouth. Because there was no sarcasm. There was nothing in his voice but honesty. He sounded like he believed me. He was acting like he thought that what I was doing mattered.
I found myself sitting down hard on the bed. The strength had gone out of my legs.
Hades frowned. “What?”
I wasn’t about to tell him this, but I’d just realized that I had never really thought that what I was doing mattered.
Because in my heart of hearts I knew, as Hades had just said, that I was not really standing between my mother and death.
Someday soon, she was going to die. And if she did — when she did — then what would have ever been the fucking point?
Then Hades added, “That’s what I’m doing too, you know. Trying.”
“Trying to do what?” I sniped. “Kidnap innocent women? Drown them in your big spooky lake?”
Hades’s body locked up so fast I thought he was going to hit me. I raised the spear in one fluid motion. For a long heartbeat, we were at a standoff: My spear aimed at his stomach, his black gaze locked on its point.
He had shared some softness with me before, I thought uneasily. Something vulnerable, the bit about his father, his cryptic remark that he’d had no choice. But it was gone now at my words about the lake, sealed behind some impenetrable wall. Only the dark, unknowable underworld Prince remained.
He said, “Put that down. Stop embarrassing yourself.”
“Take one more step and you’ll see how embarrassing I can be.”
He ran his hands over his face. His eyes flicked down to my body. My cheeks started to get hot until he said, “Just eat something.”
“I’m not eating any of your underworld food. I’ll starve first.”
“You sure will. You look like you’re starving already. How much were you eating back in that run-down village?”
“Enough,” I lied. And, challenging him: “What do you know about my village? Were you watching us?”
Hades said darkly, “If we’d been watching you this whole time, one of your women would have gone missing eleven months ago.”
Yeah, and it would’ve been Josie. “Why didn’t you kidnap one of us earlier?”
Hades worked his jaw. “I don’t know.”
“How can you not know? You’re the Prince.”
“If it’s any consolation,” he said — mimicking my voice when I’d told him about my father — “I’m working on finding out.”
His words reminded me of Calix’s when I’d shown Calix my reservoir plan. The Body is working on it, Calix had said. “Someone’s always fucking working on something,” I said bitterly. “No one’s ever doing anything, though.”
“I did do something,” Hades said. “I brought you here.”
“Fat lot of good that’s doing you.”
Hades stared at me, a muscle in his jaw working.
“You have a lot of nerve,” he said at last. “In case you’ve forgotten, you’re in my world now.
A world of darkness and chaos and death.
Some of us have jaws that could bite your head clean off.
I would suggest you not talk to this world’s Prince” — he said the word heavily, dangerously — “like you think you’re some kind of goddess. ”
“I would suggest you get off your high horse and tell me what the fuck I’m doing here,” I snarled.
Hades’s jaw clenched tighter. “Is there any reasoning with you?”
“No.”
Hades rolled his eyes to the ceiling, as if praying. Then he said, “Look, I am going to tell you. The Vizeking was right about that, at least. But first, I need to know you won’t escape from me, and that means you need to eat our food.”
I laughed. “Yeah right! No thanks!”
As if I hadn’t spoken, he drew from his pocket a single fat, bloodred fruit.
I averted my eyes from it quickly, clenching my teeth, but it was too late. My stomach grumbled.
Hades snorted a little under his breath. “It won’t kill you,” he said. He was stepping across the carpet toward me, his footsteps nearly soundless. Holding the plump fruit out to me. I could sense the weight of it in his hand. I could smell it, thick and tangy. It made me breathless.
I lowered the spear and reached for it.
And quickly pulled my hand back. I dropped the spear and pushed past him to the bed. It was the only place to sit down since I’d broken the chair, and I needed to sit on my hands to control myself. “No.”
“You think starving to death will save your mother?”
The bastard. “If I eat it, I’ll never be able to return to her.
” I risked a glance up at him. He had followed me to the bed.
He hadn’t put the fruit away. He was standing over me now, holding the fruit out almost desperately.
It was so close it nearly touched my lips.
I could smell it. A bare faint sound like a moan escaped my throat.
Hades’s hand quivered on the fruit’s flesh.
I would have clapped my hand over my mouth, but that would have meant releasing my hands, and I was so afraid that if I let my hands go I would seize the fruit and gobble it down. I wouldn’t be able to help myself.
“Come on, human-who-thinks-she’s-a-goddess,” Hades rasped out. He cleared his throat. “You’d rather starve to death than have to stay here?”
Yes, I almost bit out.
But then I thought about actually going home.
Living out the rest of my days in the dust-ravaged landscape that surrounded Limer, while Calix and Josie and everyone else left me. While my mother coughed blood onto our shitty scarred floors.
Of course I didn’t want to go home. I just didn’t want my mother to die. I had an obligation. If there were a way to fulfill my obligation without going back, then —
I tried to squash that cruel, dangerous thought, but it was too late.
Because what if — and I wasn’t going to do this, but what if — what if Hades or his servant, Elke, agreed to bring the water and the edenica herbs to the border?
Along with… along with a message? A message that let Calix and Josie know that I’d been kidnapped and wouldn’t be returning, and asking them to look after my mother for me?
Surely Calix would do it. He was my oldest, dearest friend.
(An ugly, doubtful voice at the back of my mind whispered, Are you sure?)
I stomped on it, but it was too late. My mind scrambled around frantically for another option. Josie, then. Josie would look after my mother. Plus, she wouldn’t have to worry about being kidnapped anymore. She wouldn’t have to go to Corcagia. She could stay in the village.
But I knew she wanted to go to Corcagia.
Would I really do that to her? Steal her from her beautiful future at the nursing college in the filigreed capitol city? Just so I wouldn’t have to go home?
Yes. Yes, I would. The knowledge was like a knife in my heart, that I would be so cruel. But like a knife, it was also undeniable.
But there was still the whole matter of what the underworld Prince planned to do to me.
I answered him: “You mean, would I rather leave than stay here and be your plaything? Yes.”
Hades rolled his eyes. “Trust me. If I wanted a plaything I wouldn’t have picked you. You’re a human and you never shut up.”
“Go get a new one, then!”
“Listen. You should be glad I have plans for you. Those plans will keep you alive for three days before you’re sacrificed. If you eat something and don’t starve to death first.”
“Oh, goody,” I said bitterly. “Three days.”
“It’s better than the alternative.”
My anger surged again. But this wasn’t getting us anywhere. I was starving and terrified, but I needed knowledge. “Maybe I would be glad if I knew what, exactly, your plans were.” Although I seriously doubted it. “Come on, Prince. The Vizeking said to edify me. So edify me.”
Again, his body’s locking-up. I hated it. He was a monster, but he was so human-looking. A weak part of me longed to touch the outline of his body, knowing it would soften if I did. But I sat on my hands and stared him down.
And won.
“Fine,” he said. He thrust the pomegranate into his pocket — a small mercy, though I almost keened when it disappeared — and pulled me off the bed. “You are one stubborn, impossible creature, you know that?”
“I do know that,” I admitted.
“Come and see my world, then,” he said, and: “Just remembered that you asked for this.”