Chapter 11
His dreams were full of terrible things. Memories of a time long ago when he had been far weaker and less confident in who he was. And when he woke, shivering with a cold sweat, he was certain that all of his fears had come to life.
She wasn’t beside him. Jessamine. He would have felt her warmth draped across his chest where she usually slept. For a heartbeat, it crushed him to think that all of this had been in his head. That he hadn’t saved her and she was still with his brother, enduring the torment he knew all too well.
But then he smelled her scent lingering on his skin.
He felt the phantom touch of her hand on his chest. She had been here.
He’d saved her. Elric repeated the words over and over again in his head, rolling them like sharp stones softened by the waves of relief.
He’d gotten her away from his brother, at least for the time being.
He’d kept his promise to the one person who actually mattered.
Jessamine. Nightmare. His gravesinger who had brought him back from the dead.
He hated how Ajax still lived in his head.
He hadn’t for such a long time. Because once the gods were dead, he buried all these memories so deep that he nearly forgot they existed.
But now, Elric could hear his brother’s voice once again, a cruel lesson whispered from the past: Don’t get too attached to mortals. They are far too easy to break.
Where was she?
Elric turned to look through the loft and realized she had opened the hatch that would have been used for throwing hay out onto the grounds beyond.
It was a simple mechanism to do so. All she had to do was attach a cord to a pulley on the ceiling, pull, and then tie it off.
She was sitting in front of it with her arms wrapped around her legs, a black mark already forming beneath her left eye and that sheer dress hiding nothing of her figure.
She looked like a ghost in the stories mortals told. A man who woke in a barn at night to find an undead woman who haunted his dreams. If this were a story, he’d be drawn to her just like he was now. A magnet that pulled him in her direction.
He should have let her be. Clearly, she was thinking. Her chin was on her knees and she barely blinked as she stared out at the sea beyond. And yet some part of him couldn’t stop itself.
Like a moth to a flame, he would always go to her.
He got up and slowly shuffled over to her side. Rather than sit down beside her, he decided they had been parted for far too long. So instead, he sat behind her, spread his legs around her own, and then wrapped his arms around her. Considering the thinness of her dress, he assumed she was cold.
“I’ll share my warmth if you share your thoughts,” he murmured as she sat up enough for him to rest his chin on her shoulder.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“I figured as much.” Elric eased his hand down her arm, intertwining their fingers and drawing her hand up to his mouth. “Still thinking about what happened?”
“As much as you took, there is a lot to think about. I’m still stuck believing that this is the end for all of us. That there’s nothing I can do to change what has been done, and surely that’s just not right. We can still beat him.”
He recalled all the moments he had thought the same thing when he was a young god.
Ajax had always encouraged people to try to overthrow him.
Elric thought it was because he enjoyed what came next.
There was a part of Ajax who always wanted someone to fight.
An enemy had to exist, and if there wasn’t one, then Ajax would create one for himself.
He had to hate to make himself feel powerful.
Or safe. Or whatever it was going through that twisted head.
He tried to be supportive. “I don’t know if there’s a way to beat him now, but I will try with you for as long as you desire to do so.”
“I don’t want to just try. I want to win.” She shook her head. “I want my revenge.”
“I know, nightmare. I would give it to you if I knew how.”
He didn’t know the words to give her confidence against the gods.
Most knew fighting them was folly, but he truly believed she was one of the few who could do this.
Few alive knew much about the gods, and Elric acknowledged that he was the one who knew the most. But even when he was living with these other gods, he had never thought about overthrowing them.
He was the weakest of them. The only one who had been made centuries after the rest of them, and if he wasn’t careful, they would trap him in that realm of nothingness and never allow him to return. That was what they told him.
Tightening his arms around her, he promised, “I will do everything I can to help you. Together, we will figure out a way to stop what he has begun, and we will bring this realm back to what it should have been. With you on the throne of your own kingdom and this one begging for your mercy.”
She leaned back against his chest and lifted a hand to point off into the distance. “Right. Then what would you make of that?”
He followed her pointed finger to a strange light across the sea.
He hadn’t realized that the kingdom of Orena wrapped around them, but now he could see that they were on the bottom of a half-moon shape.
The castle was way out there in the distance, about as far away as they could get from Ajax.
The building was lit up by a ball of bright blue lightning that crackled around it.
“Oh. That,” he muttered. “Yet another spell Ajax is using to get his will done. But I don’t have the faintest clue what that could be.”
He had seen a lot of spellcraft in his days.
Witchcraft more than any, of course, but he had seen what the priestesses were capable of.
He hated their blood magic more than most. At least the people who worshipped the God King were more likely to self-flagellate than they were to create beings made out of sinew and flesh.
“You don’t know what it could be?” Jessamine asked, and then shook her head. “That’s worrisome.”
“Everything is worrisome when it comes to him. I suppose we could try to be in his head. What could Ajax want?”
“He wants another goddess at his side. A queen. That’s what he told me, at least, and I don’t see any reason why he should lie to the woman he was torturing.”
Jessamine lifted both of their hands and rubbed at a spot on her chest. He wondered what she meant when she said there was something inside of her. She’d been muttering that when she had her panicking moment, but he hadn’t sensed any other goddess or god that had taken residence in her body.
He prodded at their connection again, hoping to find that warm light that was always like a tether between them.
Perhaps even hoping that it had been building itself back up the longer they were together.
But there was still nothing there. Just a blank space where he had always been able to feel her before.
That was concerning, too. But at the very least, he could hold her a little tighter and say, “You do not have any foreign goddess inside of you, Jessamine. I would feel it. I would know if I was in the presence of another like myself. You still feel like you always did, just… without a connection that should be there still.”
“Does that mean I’m not a gravesinger anymore? Is that what he took from me?”
He stilled. The fear that moved through his body was hard to think through. Did it mean that? He didn’t think anyone, god or not, could remove the birthright of a gravesinger. They were born with a unique ability to call upon a god such as him whenever they wished. Surely Ajax couldn’t do that.
“I don’t know,” he murmured. “All I know is that if I wanted to find you in my realm beyond, it would be infinitely difficult to do so.”
“Can you ask them?”
“Who?” His brow furrowed in confusion.
She looked over her shoulder at him, all dark eyes that were too big for her head and concern on her features. “The other gravesingers. Could you go into that realm and ask them if I am still one of them?”
Yes. He could.
He could go into his realm and learn what had happened to her, but he didn’t know if the other gravesingers would even talk to him. They hated him in life, and even more so in death. Not to mention time had worn away at who they had once been.
“They are not people anymore,” he replied. “They are the impressions of what they once were. Conversations with them are near impossible. They only know the deepest of emotions that cannot be wiped away with the passage of time. Hate. Fear. Guilt.”
“And yet, they helped me. I remember speaking with them before. They guided me when I needed them most, and I…” She seemed to hesitate for a moment. He could feel her entire body shaking. “I need to know, Elric. I have to know if he stripped away the last thing that was mine.”
“You are so much more than just a gravesinger.” But that wasn’t what she wanted to hear from him, apparently.
He could feel her stiffening in his arms, as though the words were an insult.
“I have nothing left, Elric. I started this journey losing my kingdom, my crown, and my mother. Then you came into my life and you gifted me witchcraft. A magic that I had never thought I would ever have. And I was grateful for it. Because in doing so, you made me something new again. You gave me hope. Something I could cling to that was far beyond just ruling people. I could be more than that. I could have a people and a home and a coven where I belonged.”
His heart broke at her words. Because he knew what was coming next.
“Without being a gravesinger, what am I? I’m not a witch.
I’m not a princess. I’m just Jessamine. A woman who doesn’t know who she is or what her calling is, yet again.
Every time I think I’m finding my footing, the world rips the rug out from under me, and I’m sent tumbling into the madness of not knowing what’s going to happen next.
” She leaned forward and put her chin back on her knees.
“I guess I just don’t know where all this leaves me, and I’m afraid it leaves me alone. Again.”
“You will always have me.”
“You are a god who has a coven to tend to. Especially with the God King returning. Mortals are going to welcome the gods back with open arms, because we have mourned their loss for two hundred years. Soon enough, you will be too busy for the one person who cannot worship you.”
He didn’t know how to fix this. He didn’t know how to soothe her.
So instead, he just sat with her through the hardship.
When enough time had passed that her breathing had evened out from ragged pants, he whispered against her skin, “I have dreamt of you for hundreds of years. I know you don’t believe it now, but it is the truth.
I have always wanted to find a partner who wore her rage like armor, and yet somehow found ways to be gentle.
You are a blessing and a curse, Jessamine Harmsworth, because I would give up everything I am just to spend our last days together in the light. ”
“I would never ask you to give up your godhood.”
“I know you wouldn’t. But you would never have to ask if I knew doing so would make you happy.”
They fell silent again, watching the electrical storm growing around the castle. It wasn’t spreading around this kingdom, though. It was stretching out to sea.
Soon enough, they would have to talk about the very real risk that the storm posed. Clearly, Ajax had more plans for Inverholm. Or worse, these were Leon’s plans, and neither of them knew how that man’s mind worked.
He waited for her to bring it up, though. Because right now, he had her in his arms, and that was all that mattered.
“We have to go back to the coven,” she said. “With that spell heading toward our home, we need to return to our kingdom and regroup with Sybil and the others.”
“That would likely be wise.”
“Will they be able to sense that something is wrong with me?”
“Nothing is wrong with you,” he insisted. “I would feel it, Jessamine. There is nothing inside of you, no change in who you are or what your magic can do. This is just the lingering feeling of Ajax being in your mind. I promise you, my darling, my love, that you are going to be just fine.”
But those haunted eyes turned to look back at him, and he knew she didn’t believe him. He didn’t know how to help other than reassurance.
“You’re all right,” he said again.
She nodded, but that darkness remained in her eyes.
The door to the house beyond opened, and the old woman walked out with a lantern held above her head.
She didn’t look back toward the barn, where she had let two young, wounded people rest. Instead, she, too, stared at the churning waves illuminated by electricity.
Her pale nightgown whipped around her body, clinging to her skin as a wind blew up and banged the door behind her.
The world was bathed in the bluish light of the lightning that never stopped crackling. And they all remained frozen, terrified at what that storm might mean and what it was going to do to the kingdom it barreled toward.
“We have to keep everyone safe,” Jessamine murmured.
He agreed. He just didn’t know if they could.