Chapter 12 Gestörbunlund, Chaosgötten, Lümerlund
Gestorbunlund, Chaosgotten, Lümerlund
Iforced him to lead me back and forth between the graveyard, the reservoir, and the library. Over and over and over again.
It was awful.
Eventually I couldn’t stand it anymore. Not only were my bare feet killing me from walking on the hard, uneven ground, but my stomach was hot and sick at the sight of all the dead and dying godlings. There were so many of them that I had started thinking of the tunnels as the catacombs.
I had to stop. I collapsed against one of the bejeweled walls, rubbing my feet and breathing hard.
Hades, apparently as fresh as the day he was born, the bastard, crossed his arms and looked at me.
“I thought you walked all the time up in the Lümerlund,” he said.
“Back and forth, back and forth, to steal our herbs.”
“Yeah, but then I had shoes. And the — the slope. This ground slopes.”
Alarm flickered in Hades’s eyes. He crouched down in one smooth motion and grabbed my foot.
“Ow!”
“Calm down,” he snapped, “I’m barely touching you.” This was true. He had only lightly encircled my ankle with his fingers. Gods, his hands were enormous. And his skin was so warm against my chill, damp flesh.
I tried to shake him off, but he was relentless. “You’re bleeding,” he said accusingly.
“We’ve probably walked miles on these fucking rocks, and I’m barefoot. What did you expect?”
“I didn’t expect you to just suffer without saying anything, that’s for sure.”
“That,” I said with hauteur, “is because you don’t know me at all.”
“And who would want to, with a personality like that.”
“Oh, please. This from the creature whose only friend is his maidservant.”
Hades ran his thumb along the bottom of my foot. I shivered.
“Sit down,” he said.
“I beg your pardon.”
“Sit down.” He hopped up and, without warning, wrapped his arms around me. Just as he had aboveground, in the sun, on the strange magical grass. When he’d kidnapped me.
I tried to get away but he pulled me to the floor, piling me unceremoniously on top of his lap.
I squawked. But he had already pretzeled me up and was inspecting the bottom of my foot.
“For Monarch’s sake, hold still, woman. I’ve got to get these little rocks out of your foot, or you’ll be useless. ”
“I don’t have little rocks in my — ow!”
Hades held up the minuscule shard of stone that had been embedded in the callused part of my heel and grinned.
“That’s not a rock,” I muttered. “That’s barely a splinter. I get worse than that scrubbing the Stammerers’ floors.”
“Hold still before I pin you to the floor,” Hades said.
I thought about Hades pinning me to the floor. I held still.
Hades ran his fingers over the sole of my foot again. Light as a cobweb. I suppressed a shiver.
“Do you like that?” he whispered.
“It tickles,” I whispered back. “Shut up.”
“I think you like it.”
“Should we just be sitting in the middle of the road like this?”
“Would you prefer to go back to the bedroom with me?”
“I’d rather walk on rocks.”
“Looks like that’s your other option.” Oh-so-gently, he prized another minuscule bit of rock out of my flesh. He used the fingernails of his index finger and thumb. My breath kicked out of me.
By the time he had stripped both of my feet, I was practically trembling, and my feet were flecked lightly with blood. Hades licked his thumb and cleaned the blood off. He was focused so hard on me, his expression looked almost studious.
His right thumb lingered on the ball of my foot.
He flicked his gaze up to me and pressed.
I practically felt my eyes roll back in my head. “Stop,” I gritted out.
“It doesn’t feel good?”
Now it was my turn to sit in sullen silence rather than tell him the truth. But I was not about to sit in the middle of the road while the Prince of Darkness gave me a fucking foot massage. “The longer you spend playing with my feet, the closer I get to starving to death. Can we get a move on?”
“You know there’s a knot in your foot muscle the size of a human fist.”
“That sounds like a me problem, not a you problem. Can I walk now?”
He scoffed. “I’m not letting you walk.” He hoisted himself to his feet and swung me into a bridal carry. Gods, this was so humiliating. “Tell me where we’re going.”
“I can —”
“I told you,” he snapped. “While you’re doing this work, I will do as you say.”
“But that obedience doesn’t extend to putting me down when I ask you to.”
“And letting you hurt yourself? No. Now tell me where to go.”
“I’m a grown woman, I can take c—”
“No. I can’t let anything happen to you. I need you.” Sweat on my skin in the cold. “To build the pipeline.”
“Yeah, yeah, you and your gods-damned pipeline. I need it too, you know.”
“This will go faster if you’re not walking,” Hades pointed out. “You’re slow.”
Slow and weak and human, he meant. “All right. Go to the graveyard first.”
For the next six hours I ordered Hades, like my own personal carriage, to carry me back and forth, again between the graveyard, the reservoir, and the library.
We added in the bank and the bedchamber and the mushroom farms, too — more data points.
He refused to go to the throne room and the Lake, though. So much for obeying my every whim.
We already knew that the catacombs moved; what I was trying to figure out was whether the destinations moved or stayed put.
Hades, when I explained this to him, squinched up his mouth with curiosity.
Which would have been unremarkable except that it resembled his expression in the library, and that made me wonder what he might look like when he was alone.
Reading, for example, instead of criticizing me or dragging me around like a sack of meat.
I caught myself wondering if he read like I did — he’d mentioned books back in his room — and if he could read for hours, too, and then come suddenly to consciousness, disappointed at being back in the world.
If he could feel his own smooth face from the inside like I could, all the worries erased from it for a brief and shining time.
I didn’t care, but I had to admit that Hades had the face of a man who had a lot of worries.
I wasn’t doing this for him. The reservoir, the mapping. But if it was going to erase some of that concern and exhaustion from Hades’s regrettably handsome face… and make him look young and light, like had for just a moment, when I’d agreed to help… well, that wasn’t a reason not to do it, was it?
We took every route imaginable. I used the Prince’s pace length as a measurement.
I had gotten a roll of parchment and a charcoal from the library, and I mapped our paths as we went.
It was difficult to do in three dimensions.
But after four laps, I came to the conclusion that I was correct.
The catacombs moved, but the destinations didn’t.
“I suspect we built the rooms ourselves,” Hades said. He’d been carrying me for a long time now and sounded — not out of breath, exactly, but hazy. His hands kept flexing on my thighs.
“Do you want to put me down?” I did not want to be put down. I liked being carried. Only because it was a respite for my feet, of course.
“No. I’m fine. I’m… thinking about the rooms.” He sounded flustered, like he’d been thinking about something else.
He went on hastily, “They are not of the Monarch, I suppose. So they do not behave as gifts of the Monarch do.” After another pause, he admitted, “That was clever of you to figure out, Persephone.”
I tried not to feel too smug. But that old warmth was flushing me again. I tried to distract myself. I said, “It’s strange, how gifts of the Monarch do behave. The moving catacombs, the upside-down waterfall. It’s like he wants you to be confused.”
“I don’t know what He wants. He is not like us. And disorder is natural to Him.”
We were standing at the entrance to the graveyard.
Or, more accurately, Hades was standing.
I was still in his arms. My shoulder blades and the soft parts of my knees had grown bruised from being held, but I still had to admit that I didn’t want him to put me down.
I allowed myself to press a little closer to his warm chest.
The husks rustled. The spiderwebs high above drifted silently.
I asked Hades, still speaking softly — it seemed like the thing to do in the graveyard — “Why did you get so weird earlier, when I came in here?”
He startled. “I didn’t get weird.”
“Yes, you did. You were staring at me.”
I felt rather than saw him roll his eyes. “Maybe I was struck dumb by how beautiful you were.”
“No, come on, I’m serious.” I scoffed.
He was quiet a second. Then he asked, “Why do you do that?”
“Why do I do what?”
“You’re always insisting you’re not pretty or smart enough. Or comparing yourself to this Josie character. Why do you hate yourself so much?”
“What?”
But he did not flinch from my tone, and he did not apologize. He waited.
I spluttered. How dare he? I acted that way because it was true.
I wasn’t as pretty as Josie, wasn’t smart enough to make Limer any better, wasn’t even talented enough to save my mother from death.
I finally scrambled down from his arms, ignoring the pain as my feet hit the earth.
“Big words coming from you,” I snapped. “Why do you hate yourself so much?”
But Hades was far from fazed, the infuriating son of a bitch. “That’s easy. It’s because everyone else here hates me.”
“No, they don’t! They love you! Elke’s obsessed with you. Everyone else we’ve passed has practically worshiped you. The only person I’ve seen who hasn’t liked you is the Vizeking.”
Hades worked his jaw. He stared at the graveyard. Then he said with his customary bitterness, “You haven’t met my father.”
That shut even me up.
We stood side-by-side, gazing out at the papery husks, the spiderwebs, the honeycomb crevices with corpses tucked away in the shadows. Beside me, Hades’s body was rigid. Unforgiving.
I was losing count of the number of times he’d made me feel a way I didn’t expect to feel.
And this time I felt… sorry.
That hadn’t been fair of me. Yes, Hades had kidnapped me, and he was holding me here against my will, starving and under threat of being fed to a wild god — but he had not made my mother sick.
He had not made my family poor. He hadn’t made it so I couldn’t go to college.
He hadn’t made Josie beautiful and freckled and strawberry-blond.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured finally. It was hard to get the words out, but I managed it. “You’re right, Prince. I wouldn’t know what it’s like. My dad died when I was young, and my mom is… like this now. But before those things happened… they did love me.”
“You’ve made that clear,” Hades said. “I’m glad for you. I’m glad they had some sense.”
“I wish your father did.”
He laughed a little. It was not a kind laugh. “You think your evil kidnapper deserves love?”
“Yes. I think everyone deserves to be loved by their father.”
Hades resolutely did not blink. His eyes were shining. “It’s not his fault. My father is… very much of the Monarch.”
“But it’s not fair for him to think less of you just because you look and act human.”
“No, that isn’t what I mean.” His voice was stiff.
The words Although that’s true, too went unsaid.
“What I mean is, I think my father… like the Monarch, like many of our people… they don’t have human bodies, and they also don’t have human hearts.
I’m not saying that lack is a bad thing, or a fault.
We would say that the opposite is true, that it’s bad to feel too much, to be too sentimental.
And then, on the other hand, you have people like me and Elke.
It would be said of us that we do have human hearts.
Sometimes, we can’t help being sentimental. But my father… he can always help it.”
We were quiet.
Every muscle in my body screamed to reach out to him. To touch him on the arm, to try offering him, even, a tentative hug. But I did not. I did not touch him at all. He was right: He was my evil kidnapper, and he was not entitled to my mercy.
I still couldn’t help feeling bad for him, though.
Perhaps that was my human heart.
“You respected our customs,” he said suddenly. “That’s why I was staring at you in the graveyard before. I had told you to be respectful of the dead, and you were.”
“Yeah, because I’m not a fucking nightmare.”
“That’s up for debate,” Hades deadpanned. “But I was previously under the impression that such behavior was not, er, common from the tributes.”
“Maybe that’s because you kidnap them and so they don’t owe you shit.” But what he’d said made me think of Elke. “Elke said something like that, too. She was surprised that I could pronounce some of your words.” I struggled to remember them properly. “Gestorbunlund, chaosgotten, Lümerlund.”
Hades sucked in his breath.
The sound went straight to the heat between my legs. I felt my throat seize mid-swallow.
For a long time, neither of us moved.
I don’t know what possessed me to whisper again, even softer: “Gestorbunlund, chaosgotten, Lümerlund.”
“Stop,” Hades begged suddenly, huskily. “Please.”
We stood side-by-side at the edge of the graveyard. My vision had gone hazy with desire. How fucking mortifying. But the thought that I could make a prince make that sound, just by pronouncing some words in his language…
His body, beside mine, was as still and hard and hot as metal in a forge. Somehow I knew instinctively that if I touched him he would melt.
The spider-husks rustled. Our bodies didn’t move. Our arms remained a quarter-inch apart, not a hair further, no closer. Heat filled the scant space between our bodies. I was so acutely aware of that space, I could have marked it on a ruler.
After a long time, he cleared his throat and rasped, “Are you done with your map?”
I had forgotten about the map. I was still clutching it in my hands. This felt insane to me. “Yes,” I answered, my voice barely above a whisper.
He bowed his head. The motion shifted his body toward me the barest amount. “I will return you to work, then, goddess.”
That stupid fucking nickname almost made me sway into him. But I controlled myself. He was my kidnapper. He was starving me. He’d kill me if I didn’t do what he wanted. I had no excuse for being such an idiot.
Except that the way he’d inhaled when I’d spoken those words in his language made me feel, somehow, like I had kidnapped him.
“Take me back to the bedchamber,” I said. I cleared my throat. “To work.”
He bowed his head. He shifted away entirely, and cold air rushed in to fill the space where he had been. I rubbed my arms.
He did not pick me up this time. This time, we both walked.