“No matter. They are gone. They cannot help.” The lord held a hand out to silence me before I could inquire further. He leaned his veiled face into his other palm. Neither of us spoke. Then he straightened in his throne. “Four months they have been ill?”
“About that, yes.” I dropped my hand from my shawl and let my arms hang limply at my sides. Even without seeing his eyes, I felt them boring into me. I didn’t know how very much I’d hate the attention. “They got ill the day after I first came here.”
The lord jumped out of his throne so quickly I almost fell backward to the ground as my feet scrambled to give him ample room to pace. He walked to his bookstand and flung the heavy tome open, flipping through pages as if his life depended on it. Maybe my mother’s actually did.
Can he read through his veil?
As if hearing my thoughts, the lord sighed and slammed the book shut with a grunt of frustration, sending dust into the air. “You will have to leave!”
I took a step back before I could even think. “Pardon?”
“Leave. Now.” He gestured toward the door and flicked his fingers, summoning four specters from behind me. They held their arms out, leading me toward the door.
My head spun from one specter to the next, to the pacing lord before the throne. “What about my mother?”
The lord slowed his pace, but he didn’t stop moving. He waved a hand absently at me. “I will do what I can, of course. She will live to perform our Returning.”
If his first statement offered me a bit of comfort, his second was a kick to the stomach. “What do you mean? Is she going to die of this after that?”
The lord stopped and sighed, quite audibly. He positioned both hands on his hips. “I cannot tell you. I do not know.”
“But you know something, obviously.”
The lord took a few steps forward, closing the distance between us. “Olivière,” he said, grabbing one of my hands. He squeezed it and brought it up between our chests. “I will do what I can. Please worry instead about preparing yourself for my Returning.”
I ripped my hand out from his grip. “Your Returning? How can you speak to me about a Returning when my mother might be dead tomorrow?”
The lord leaned forward, trying to reach for me. I took a step back. “Olivière, the timing of your mother’s illness is unfortunate, but—”
“The timing?”
“If you knew how long I waited. If you knew how hard this is for me, to accept your love.”
“Accept my love?” I crossed my arms tight against my chest, all timidity forgotten. “What love? I don’t even know you.”
“A fact that could be remedied if only you would accept my invitation more often.”
“And what do you mean, how hard it is for you? Do you think I want to be the lord’s goddess?” I threw my hands in the air at him. “That I have any interest in this black void of a man who stays locked up inside this monstrosity of a castle, ignoring the needs of his people, a heartless monster who doesn’t care if they’re dying?”
The lord straightened his shoulders and clenched his hands into fists. “A heartless monster?”
“I was wondering what it meant. But now I know. You think nothing of your people.”
“And whose fault is that?” His tone was so accusatory, I flinched. He started pacing again before his throne, back and forth, back and forth. “I cannot leave this castle, Olivière! I do not know one person in this village from the next. I blink and they die. I die and they would not know—they could not imagine the depth of the pain I feel.”
I sighed heavily. He was making no sense. Leave it to me to wind up with the recluse with little grip on his sanity. “Don’t talk to me about a Returning until my mother’s health improves.”
The lord stiffened, and I realized, far more clearly than I had the first time we’d met, that my words had power over him.
I decided to test it. I pointed above the throne. “And give me that sword.”
I’d had to ask for the scabbard, too. And he gave them to me. Without a word. Thrusting them at me like he couldn’t wait to be rid of them. Or of me.
The scabbard rested now around my waist. I hoped I wore it right; we’d used our sashes to hold our stick blades. I held the sword out in front of me like a violet torch that lit my way down the path that ran between the castle and my home.
I was stupid to think he could do anything. I bit the inside of my cheek. That he would be helpful at all.
I wouldn’t have been comfortable with a simpering sycophant, true. That was part of the reason why I couldn’t bear to see him again at first. The idea of a man weak at the knees and lost without me made me almost as ill as seeing Jurij acting just that way with Elfriede. Even if it might have been different if Jurij acted that way with me.
But this man wasn’t at all sane. He was, impossibly, rude to his own goddess. He babbled on about things that made no sense. Cared about things that weren’t anywhere near as important as my mother’s illness.