Named After the Old Gods #3
Her brows pinch with worry. “If what worked?”
Another sigh. This one, somehow decades older. “Your marriage, of course.”
The final wrapping comes undone and Asvald busies himself with cleaning the rest of the ceremony.
She could stay and try pressing him further, but his stony exterior gives Euphemia the distinct impression he is not so easily broken.
Besides, there is already another way to find the answers she seeks.
Before he can stop her, Euphemia lifts her skirts into her hands and runs.
She half-expects him to come barreling after her, and she knows she’ll not be able to outrun him. Yet, one glance over her shoulder tells her she is free. He is not her captor. The lies are. And Euphemia is determined to uncover them.
Euphemia bursts through the double doors. Without a candle to light her way, darkness descends. Panic swells in her chest. She does not yet know these twisting turns. She could become lost.
But then she sees it. A flicker of candlelight blinking down the hallway to her left.
Certain it belongs to Kelda, she runs after it.
Heedless, at first.
But as she draws nearer, the swishing of her skirts echoing against the sparse corridor around her, Euphemia slows. Follows quietly, peering around the corners like a curious mouse.
She watches Kelda disappear up a stone, spiral staircase.
Fear and anticipation war inside her.
What reason could they have for the groom missing his own wedding? Perhaps he’s hideous, scarred or maimed by the war? Or maybe his birth was unkind to him, the way Atia’s had been to her?
From the bottom of the stairs, Euphemia glances up. The glow from Kelda’s flame is gone.
As she ascends into pitch blackness, hands feeling the cold stone walls for balance, Euphemia realizes she doesn’t know a single person who’s ever mentioned knowing the baron.
No one who’s seen him, described any visual characteristics—glaring or otherwise.
Her husband becomes a monstruous, gargantuan creature in her mind’s eye, and part of her wants desperately to turn around. Accept the secrecy of him and vow to never uncover it.
The stronger part of her simply cannot resist.
As Euphemia climbs into the oblivion of the stairwell, dizziness takes hold.
Without a single spark of light, she is left disoriented. The stairs wind around her tightly. Discernment between up and down obscures, becoming moving concepts rather than fixed points of stability.
The ground tips.
The ceiling contorts.
The weight of her body slowly leans until she fears she is falling.
Euphemia digs her nails into the limestone for purchase.
She drags her way up the tower like a feral fox that’s ingested the farmer’s poison and refuses to die.
She passes only one tiny sliver of a window, a thread of moonlight filtering in and helping her reacclimate briefly.
But then she is ascending into the madness again.
Struggling to decipher if she is upright or sideways.
Fighting every shadow for the next step.
Gripping each gain by the throat and claiming it as her own bloody victory.
Up ahead, a glimmer of light emerges, a pinprick in the dark.
Euphemia clambers toward it as if she is underwater, about to lose her breath, and it is the water’s surface above.
Kelda hovers beside it, the flames flickering in one hand as she fumbles with something in the other.
As Euphemia reaches the top of the cramped landing, she can see it’s a ring of keys.
Her gaze drifts to the door before her.
Kelda barely lifts her gaze. “You are not meant to be here.”
Her harsh tone reverberates through the stones, and Euphemia looks around, as if watching it echo.
Despite the way her chest heaves, Euphemia feels victorious in her climb. She will not let this woman spook her away now. “I have every right to be here. It is my home now.”
Though she had expected Kelda to protest, the woman merely shrugs. With her full attention on the key ring, her search for the proper one intensifies.
“Where is it? Where is it?”
Euphemia looks from the keys to the heavy oak door with iron brackets, willing to see beyond it.
The door does not yield. And the longer she stares, the sicklier it appears.
The dim glow of candlelight illuminates strange markings scratched into the doorframe.
Euphemia’s righteous heart clenches and she has to look away.
“Is he in there?” she asks, focusing her attention back on Kelda.
“Aye.” Kelda practically growls the word. Judging by how fiercely she flips through the keys, Euphemia has no doubt that the woman would be tearing the wrong ones from their ring and chucking them down the stairwell if she could.
For a moment, Euphemia almost offers to help. But what good would her untrained eyes do anyway? She does not know these keys yet. Has not felt the shape of them in her hands thousands of times the way Kelda has.
And then, with an exclamation of triumph, Kelda finds it.
Presses it into the lock.
Euphemia forgets all the secrecy surrounding him. She doesn’t even notice the way Kelda’s hands are trembling. All she is focused on is the cold sensation that washes over her.
This is it.
The moment she’s been waiting for.
Preparing for.
Dreading and anticipating.
On the other side of this door, she’ll meet her husband for the first time. And she knows what will be expected of her then to secure their union. An act of flesh and blood so beautiful, it can only be shared between man and wife without becoming sin.
Euphemia swallows the lump forming in her throat.
This is a rite of passage.