Chapter 1 #2
Uma nodded with one last helpless look at Elloven before clambering down.
“What? What did you see?” Elloven’s heart throbbed hard enough to constrict her throat, and she almost choked trying to swallow.
She didn’t ask how he’d found Uma, because meeting her had probably been part of his vision, but how had he slipped past the guards?
He looked nothing like anyone there. Taven, with his long, dark hair and even darker eyes, taller than the Guardians on high.
Ears that came to the subtlest point, instead of rounding at the top.
But it wouldn’t be the first time he’d slithered through spaces unwelcome and unseen.
“After nearly a decade, and a trail of bodies to your name, this is how you greet me? Your first words, to me?” He had the audacity to look hurt.
Elloven didn’t have the endurance for his bruised feelings.
The clash of past and present was too disorienting on the heels of the bloodbath she’d caused.
But if he knew Fabrien and his friends were dead, then he’d known before it had happened, and how.
He’d known what Fabrien and the others had done to her, for years.
“What would you have me say, Taven? It took you seven whole years to decide I needed help.”
He seemed to consider his words, eyes turned away. “Your husband is dead.”
“I’m aware.”
“Because you killed him.”
She shrugged, a gesture in dire opposition to the vortex of unrest within, but the suddenness of his unexpected arrival kept most of her words bottled.
Taven had always been very serious, even when they were children. “All these years... the rumors of his malice spread all the way to us in Riverchapel... so why wait so long? Seven years, Ellie, you could have been home so bloody long ago.”
“You’re the prophet.” Elloven crossed her arms in protest to the urgency in his eyes.
He’d always set the course, and she’d always followed.
Not anymore. She was no longer that girl.
If she’d been stronger, found her fight sooner, she never would have been.
“And if you saw what I’d do, then you already know what happens next. ”
“What I’ve seen, Ellie, is we need to leave this cursed place.” A deep, uneven line rutted deep between his brows.
“I appreciate you clarifying what is painfully obvious already, but why should I go with you?” He’d always parceled just enough information, one of the many ways he used authority over her, but she no longer hung on his every word, or lived for his praise.
If he wanted her to leave with him, he would tell her why or she’d find her own way, as she’d intended all along.
He shifted the door onto his shoulder. “Can we talk about this from the road? When there aren’t dozens of men looking for the late lord’s wife so they can cart her up the hill in triumph and burn her?”
“Is that what you saw? Me burning?”
“Ellie, please. I know you’re surprised to see me, that you’re hurt I didn’t come sooner, but none of that matters now. I have a carriage. Provisions. We can make it if we go together.”
So that was the fate he’d seen. Her burning on the hill. He was far too scared to be lying.
Elloven approached slowly. Her plan had always been thin.
Her resources were meager. Laughable, really.
When she made it out—if she made it out—her journey would take weeks on foot, though she was more likely to be apprehended before she even left the town border.
The thought of being home soon, and safe, was impossibly hard to set aside, no matter how she felt about him. “Tell me, and I’ll consider it.”
“Consider...” Taven gaped at her like a disappointed father.
Censure traveled across his dark eyes. The cold familiarity was a dizzying trip back in time.
“What is there to consider, Elloven? Your attendant told me you have no gold of your own. It won’t be hard for the Quinlanden Guard to find a petite redhead on foot. ”
Taven was dangling the only realistic path to freedom, but there’d be a cost. He’d deny it, but she already knew what he wanted.
But the sooner she made it back to Nightwood, the sooner she’d get the information she needed to find her people, and slip away in the darkness to begin a new life, alone, one she had chosen.
And Taven, for all his faults, had never hurt her the way the others had.
But that isn’t entirely true, is it?
“What I saw is your demise, unless you leave before dawn breaks. And it was neither swift nor fair.” A resounding hiss pealed through the air.
More screams echoed. Taven followed the fresh development, eyes becoming orbs.
“They’ve set the bloody trees on fire, Elloven—we don’t have the luxury of debating this! ”
It seemed awfully counterintuitive for Quinlandens to set the trees, of all things, on fire, but grief elicited strange behavior. She would know. “I’m waiting for things to settle. You’ve not seen what they do to cowards who try to escape their punishment.”
“Oh, but I have,” he said smugly. “If you make it to Riverchapel before they do, they cannot drag you from sanctuary. Not even their sycophants would help them cross that line. Have you thought of that?”
The night lit up in orange flames. She started to count each one, as she counted all things, but the stench of burning wood grounded her. With the world scorching around them, they had a convenient scapegoat. Poor Lady Elloven was caught in the chaos. Guardians rest her soul.
She heard the first howl of her name. Then again, until it became a chorus.
A chant.
“FIND LADY ELLOVEN! BURN THE WITCH!”
“Guardians on high, have they whipped the intelligence from your pretty little head?” Taven thrust both hands toward the smoky air. “What more convincing do you require?”
Elloven had accepted that capture was the most likely outcome of her choice to kill five noblemen, but she’d been trading agonies her entire life, and each time had been worse than the last. The intelligence might not have been “whipped from her pretty little head,” but her energy for dealing with coercive, destructive men sure had.
It was also the idea that Taven had won, again.
Showing up at the very last minute. Offering her what she didn’t have time to do for herself before she had to run.
“They” always won. Always. Could she not have had this one victory?
Could she not, for once, have rescued herself?
And if not that, if her fate was to face justice for her crime, at least it would’ve been a fate she’d chosen.
Taven had surely seen the years go by in his visions as well, and had allowed it, all of it. He’d watched other men break her down, so that when he was ready to bring her home, there’d be nothing left of her to fight him.
But what he’d never, ever see is the truth of what those years had done to her.
What those years had carved her into.
The truth of who she was now.
She was shocked he recognized the wraith standing before him at all, and she nearly delighted in that inevitable moment of clarity, but she had no intention of being anywhere near him when it happened.
Elloven answered by pushing past him and charging into yet another unknown.
The Azure Haunt was even livelier than usual.
Jesstin Skylark, eyes half rolled back as one of his women worked him with her mouth, was delighted with the bustle, because every depravity landed right into his coffers.
At nineteen, two years into his venture as a proprietor, he’d already made a man’s fortune.
He’d be one of the wealthiest men in the realm by thirty.
Gold might not be the currency of serenity, as his sister liked to say, but Jesstin had no designs on peace, only the satisfaction of having more than anyone could ever take from him.
“Slower,” he grunted to the woman, still thinking about the gossip that had filtered through his walls that evening.
The youngest Quinlanden son, the lord’s spare heir, was dead.
Murdered was the word, by his own wife, who had fled before they could apprehend her.
If Lady Elloven had fled, there was only one place she’d return.
He was only eleven or twelve when she’d been carted off to become the Quinlanden bride.
He barely remembered her and had only known her at all because she was Gennady’s older sister.
She probably didn’t remember him either, but they’d always be connected, for reasons she could never know, and her name on the lips of his drunken patrons had brought his self-loathing screaming to the forefront.
She was a witch, they said, just like her mother, who could see into the souls of all men. Unlike her mother, would she see Jesstin for the murderer he was? Would she kill him, too, as she’d purportedly killed her dilettante husband and his friends?
The woman between his legs paused, eyes tilted up. “Is this not pleasing?”
Jesstin frowned downward. Horrifying. Had anyone observing noted it?
If so, they’d never say, not to him. They’d whisper about it over dice.
“Try that...” He snapped his fingers, his thoughts jumbled with competing problems. He shifted his bare ass on the broad velvet chair, cognizant of the many eyes turned their way.
Part of being a proprietor was being seen, but that wasn’t why he struggled to maintain his desire.
He was used to being watched from his raised dais.
It was part of the show. He rarely finished, but his reasons for that were no one’s business. “That thing we charge extra for.”
Her eyes lit up, and she returned with renewed fervor.
Elloven Quinlanden. Hawthorne, when she’d left home. Word was that nocturnal freak, the stable hand, had traveled north to save her. Jesstin knew next to nothing about the man, but Gennady hadn’t trusted Taven, and Jesstin had trusted Gennady’s judgment, at least back then.
“What a lie,” Gennady said, goading. “You didn’t believe me when it counted.”