The Escape
K aid’s headless and limbless torso lay before me in a warm pool of blood. I was too numb to move, to cry, to feel. I was hollow. Kaid was dead. My husband was dead.
We’d just promised our wedding vows in the eyes of Elskere.
In three days, we were to flee Szent for the sea and sail south.
He’d just been alive, a living, breathing man of impossible beauty with a voice so deep it rattled my chest. But now?
Now he was nothing. They had carved him into pieces like cattle, forever silencing his voice, and that thought ripped a hole in my soul. I wouldn’t survive this. No wife could.
I registered movement beside me, and to my shock, Hreinasta’s vessel slipped through the blood and placed a slender palm on my shoulder.
Her tanned skin was smooth and unblemished, the expensive lotions and oils keeping her vessels gorgeous until she shed them.
I gagged at the scent of her hands. The fragrance she wore was floral and delicate, and mixed with the stench of death, they made my stomach roil.
“To defile an acolyte of mine, especially my chosen vessel, is an offense that cannot go unpunished,” she crooned, and I hated her. I despised her voice, loathed her beauty, abhorred her softness.
“He did not defile me,” I spat. “He made me whole.”
Hreinasta tsked disapprovingly. “This is why I don’t dwell among mankind, choosing to inhabit the bodies of my priestesses instead.
Men cannot be trusted. They are vulgar, disgusting things.
Fickle and cruel and driven by their baser needs.
I cannot allow my primordial body to be tarnished, which is why this body serves me now… as will yours.”
“What?” I balked at her words, flinging myself backward so fast that Kaid’s blood splattered my face.
Surely, I’d misheard her. I was no longer pure in Hreinasta’s eyes.
A man had taken me, but it had been my choice.
I’d given Kaid my love, my body, and my trust willingly, and while I’d never felt so whole as when I was in his arms, the goddess only saw my disobedience.
“You are my chosen vessel,” she said. “And your beauty is unrivaled. Yes, I demand purity and righteousness from my devotees, but my spirit does not reside in you yet, therefore your sin was against your own soul, not mine. I claimed you as my next host when you were but ten cycles of age. If I were to recant that decree, I would have to admit that a man entered my sacred temple and violated my priestess. That will not do. The trespasser has been brought to justice, and we shall proceed with the transference as planned.”
I couldn’t have heard her right, but as I scanned the sanctuary, I suddenly understood the scene.
No trial, no priestesses, no city magistrates.
Varas was absent, despite it being his servant’s execution.
Only Hreinasta and Valka bore witness to his death, along with the few soldiers War trusted with his secrets.
No witnesses to this treachery. No pure acolytes to observe my sin.
Hreinasta wanted my beauty so fiercely, to save her own image with such intensity, that she murdered my husband in the dead of night and planned to take me as her vessel.
No one would be the wiser. Only I would know, but my consciousness would fall dormant for the coming decades once she possessed me, and her current host would remember nothing when her spirit left her. No one would ever learn the truth.
My body went ice cold, and bile burned my throat. That couldn’t be happening. I wouldn’t let it.
“Come, come, acolyte,” she said. “It is a great honor to be chosen as my vessel. Think of the glory, the prestige, the pride. This thief was nothing, a rat to be put down. He wanted to destroy you, but I will elevate you to grandeur.”
“I would rather die than allow you to inhabit my body,” I growled.
“But I’ll make sure you don’t.” She turned to Valka, and my stomach dropped at their silent exchange.
For a second, their eyes remained locked together, and then War strode to the holy fires.
He dipped a torch into the flames, then aimed for Kaid’s torso.
With a horrifying sickness, I understood.
He meant to burn Kaid’s chest, and rage consumed me.
The soldiers were gone, having carried his limbs and head away into the night.
Both gods stood at my back, the path to the door unobstructed, and my legs were moving before my brain had time to process my decision.
With a speed I didn’t think myself capable of, I launched myself off the floor and raced for my husband’s bloody torso.
I scooped his remains up in one graceful movement, and then I was running for the exit.
I half expected Valka to shove his blade through my spine as Hreinasta screamed for my apprehension, but the blow never came.
War might revel in executions dealt in secrecy, but it seemed he wasn’t a lapdog to be ordered after a girl.
I heard Hreinasta’s feet slapping the tile as she sprinted after me, but I knew she couldn’t catch me.
In her primordial form, she would have captured me before I made it two steps, but her human vessel was older than I was, accustomed to the comforts of a worshiped and served woman.
Kaid’s training had forged me into a warrior in my own way, and clutching his disfigured body and wearing his blood-stained clothes, I disappeared into the night, never looking back.