Nobody's Goddess (22 page)

I clenched my jaw. “I can play this game all night.”

“As can I.”

I backed away from his encroaching fingers, not caring if that put me closer to one of the specters and his extended blade.

“I could think of a way to word it,” I said, not bothering to pretend any longer, “so that I would
win
.”

“And win you would,” said the lord. He stood upright and made a slight wave of his fingers. The nearest specter grabbed me and pulled me out from behind my small sanctuary behind the headboard, the blade gone from his hand and both hands gripping tightly on each of my arms.

“But you would also lose.”

The rest of the specters lowered their blades toward my mother and I screamed.

Don’t look before love. What if I agreed to the Returning and then he simply vanished at the unmasking? If Ingrith wasn’t crazy, no one would even remember.

No. It was too late for that. The lord knew I wasn’t able to Return to him. And besides, what if he was needed to save my mother? There had to be a way to word it. To win the choice that was owed to me but to save my mother at the same time. Could the specters still respond to those little hand gestures if I commanded the lord to slice off his own fingers? Had they already been ordered to rush to my mother and kill her if I so much as dared? Would it end there? Would they go to the village and slaughter Father and Elfriede, Alvilda, the Tailors, and Nissa? And Jurij? Would it end with my own death or would they drop me in the commune, forcing me to live with the endless trail of blood my choice had wrought? Would the lord’s death be worth it, when with his death, I’d lose all control over the one who held command over the specters?

You sound like a bloodthirsty monster. No different from the men in your dream.

I didn’t have to kill the lord to come out on top. The specters gave me some hope. They seemed different when I gave my orders. They obeyed him, but in that brief moment, they at least appeared confused. That could prove to be my opening, if I could just figure out how to take advantage of it. But before I could risk my mother’s safety, I would have to practice, to push and pull with inconsequential orders and figure out how I could stop the specters from acting, even as I prevented the lord from noticing what I was doing. But he noticed every order. He anticipated it. He must have spent all this time since he met me planning for my refusal, even as I lay ignorant in my bed beyond the woods. If the stories were to be believed, he could have spent a millennia preparing for my refused Returning.

The lord of our village. He who never stepped beyond the woods surrounding his castle. A lord whose birth and parents no one could remember. There were those whispers that he was proof of the tale—that men who couldn’t find their goddesses among the village women would live forever until they did. For if no one remembered when he was born, was it possible that he was older than everyone who lived?

I shuddered to think of an old, wrinkled, spotted man taunting me behind that black veil. To unmask him upon a Returning might be more chilling than seeing him now hidden from view.

My mind swam with faded, unreal memories of the village that was and was not my own.

You said you would help them. And then you left them.

I shook my head. It wasn’t real. My hands reached out for a phantom sheath at my waist. But even if it had been a dream, it lingered with me all these months later.

Because even if I’d seen that lord’s face and not this one’s, they seemed more and more alike the better I came to know him.

What if that was him in his youth?

An immortal man, whom I visited in the past in my dreams? Ridiculous, but my mind swarmed with questions. There had always been something eerie about our village lord. He was a man most of the village could hardly believe existed, but for the small but steady supply of food and other essentials the boys and men delivered to his castle—which, conveniently, had been stopped now that I had moved in. Until I performed the Returning, the lord’s servants would go out into the village and bring home the necessary wares directly. No one—no woman, no man, no child—could set foot in the castle.

The villagers wouldn’t object to dealing with the mute servants more often, especially since I heard nothing of the lord demanding his coppers back from what he paid for the Returning preparations. I’d seen the specters all my life. A hint of a white back turning around the corner here. A glimpse of the black carriage in front of the tavern there. There were actual monsters roaming about the village, and I was off fighting lambs.

Who were these servants? Why didn’t they speak? Why were they unmasked? They couldn’t be married. Or perhaps they had been or at least had been Returned to, but their goddesses lived elsewhere.

The women who lay beyond the cavern pool. A pool that was a path to the past.

Did it matter? I wasn’t leaving the castle, that much I knew.

My mind grew tired with all of the thinking. For there was the question, too, of how much my friends and family knew about my mother. How much the entire village knew. Was I alone left in the dark, or did only a few of them know the truth of the matter? Did those closest to me know, and was that why they all seemed so anxious I perform my Returning? Had I broken my father’s heart all over again by delaying his meeting with his one true sunlight? Did he truly believe I would experience the Returning with the lord without knowing what it was I put at risk—or that I could even do so once I had known all that was at stake?

That was the worst of it. Now that I knew, at least a part of me thought that it would be wise to give up the fight. But my heart would simply never be up to Returning to the lord. Even if all the will had gone out of me. I was cursed by the gift of choice.

What I would give to be Elfriede, whose heart shifted so freely from distaste to love after the initial shock of the confession. What I would give to be Elfriede, just to be with the one I loved.

But that was fine. I could live without love. I’d accepted that by now. I wasn’t sure I could live without freedom.

***

Yet another day passed. I’d lost count.

At first, I filled my days with thoughts of my dilemma and ways to escape my trap. It made the time pass quickly, but it produced no results. Each idea ended with the lord’s gruesome death, followed immediately by the equally horrific deaths of those I loved.

I began to resent the idea that my mother was alive after all, that she had not died from illness, and that the specters had stopped their blades a mere hair’s breadth from touching her. And I hated myself for that. Especially since if it wasn’t her, it would surely have been another loved one.

My mind went numb after a while.

I didn’t see much of the lord. We dined together in the dining hall for breakfast, lunch, and dinner—at his orders. He tried to ask me about myself, about my thoughts on the castle, but he’d get frustrated at my silence and storm out. Eventually, he resigned himself to the same silence in which I had found refuge. We ate together, neither one of us saying a word.

I was given free reign of the castle, except I wasn’t allowed to set foot on the third floor. The top of the second staircase was guarded by five specters anytime I thought myself alone and able to sneak up the stairs. Morning or night, they just stood there, staring above my head, their legs slightly parted and their hands clutched behind their backs. They moved only when I attempted to climb under their legs or fit between them—then all of a sudden they were fast as hares, blocking my path. At last, I gave up. The obstructed entryway meant I couldn’t visit my mother, whose prison was the only place I could possibly wish to go in the dank and dreary castle. This made me even angrier and more eager not to please. I shut myself away in my room between meals.

When the snows came and blocked even the view of the village from my room’s window, it felt fitting. I was trapped in a place from which I could reach no one I loved.

And even that dream world never came back to me. Without the blade, without the pool, I’d never know if I’d seen a vision of the past.

I saw the specters often. They brought me tea between meals and built a fire. At first they also brought things I assumed were meant to amuse me: old books, art supplies, and embroidery. All things to which I had never taken and had no desire to practice still. My mind was numb enough without drudgery. Several weeks into the snows, the servants saw to my fire, but they no longer brought me anything.

There were dresses in the chest at the foot of my bed. At first the specters would choose one—a different one each day—and lay it on my mattress. My hands dared to touch them and found them finer than anything I had seen on any woman, but rough and cold to the touch—and far too heavy. They also immediately brought to mind images of Master and Mistress Tailor, whom I assumed would have made them, as they were the only true tailors in the village. And thoughts of the Tailors brought up thoughts of Jurij. I wouldn’t wear them.

Eventually, the specters delivered a strange package to my room that contained the clothing I’d left behind at home. I sorted through the pile, my heart nearly stopping when I came across the dress with the fine embroidery flowers on the back. I fingered it, familiar with the dress but the needlework new to me. It was the torn dress I’d worn that day I fell into the pool. She’d fixed it at some point, and I hadn’t even noticed. It was clearly Elfriede’s handiwork, done to mask the ripped material. The rips down the dress like the cracks of a whip. My finger stopped at a single crooked thread that Elfriede had failed to cover up.

This dress was first stitched by Avery. And that dream was no dream at all.

I burned with the stupid idea that this was more proof I’d met the lord in the past. In a past so long ago no one else even remembered it.

Not that it mattered. I wasn’t allowed to leave the castle.

As soon as I slipped into the dress, the specters swooped into the room and took the dress I’d worn to the castle from the floor. I nearly screamed upon their sudden entrance.

The dress was given back to me later the same day, washed and folded.

For some reason, it felt like I had lost in a game I hadn’t intended to play.

***

When I woke up one morning, a surge of warmth hit my face. I lay in bed for a moment, picturing myself having risen from a nap on the hilltop where I’d often picnicked with Jurij. But I couldn’t feel grass and dirt beneath my fingers, only cold silken plush.

I remembered where I was. My eyes opened reluctantly.

A sunbeam trickled onto my bed from the window. It actually warmed me, and I felt a stirring in my heart. Cautiously, I sat up and then took the few steps over to the window. I peered out and my heart soared, if but for a brief moment. The snow had melted. A gentle haze permeated the horizon, but I could still make out the village below. Perhaps spring had finally come.

Before I could be summoned for breakfast, I dressed, this time in the worn-down dress that I often wore when I’d been carving. It had been cleaned before it was presented to me and was cleaned every time I wore it since, but I still imagined it carried the scent of sawdust.

I bypassed the untouched vanity and the white hairbrush I knew would be lying out for me. Although I didn’t brush my hair myself, the specters had started brushing it for me before meals. All the better reason to leave before they got there. Perhaps I would find a knife with which to chop it all off and leave them with nothing to make pretty.

Gently, I pushed the door open a crack. I sucked in my abdomen and squeezed through, quietly pushing the door shut behind me. No one was in the hallway, but I stood still for a moment anyway to see if anyone stirred. I knew from the “tour” that the lord’s chambers were located on the floor above mine, but I wouldn’t put it past the specters to be on guard. But no one came.

I slipped across the hallway to the staircase and took one step down at a time, cautiously peering through the banister for signs of the specters. There was no one.

I came upon the grand entryway and my heart skipped a beat. This was where I’d had my first encounter with the lord, more than a year prior. I could picture myself now, bathed in a moonbeam, following it to its source.

A sunbeam had replaced that moonbeam. The rays of dawn were peeking through the cracks in the door that led to the inner courtyard. I shuffled quietly over to it and peered through the space in the door as I had the first night I’d foolishly ventured to the castle. A garden. When I’d been shown the place on the “tour,” it was but a drab collection of stone and branches. Now, almost overnight, the sun had breathed life into the place.

Feeling suffocated inside, I grabbed hold of both handles on the wide double door and pulled. I stood still for a moment and closed my eyes. They couldn’t adjust to the brightness, and I felt blind, but the light that seeped in through my closed eyelids was enough to make my heart race and my mind come to life.