She must have caught the regret tainting his declaration. “Was it worth it? Drinking the Waters?”
“No.” She made to ask another question, then closed her mouth abruptly. “Say or ask it, Imogen. No use in hiding your desire to do so.”
She hesitated before forging ahead. “When did you become Cededa the Butcher?”
His insides froze at the question. He expected it, had always expected it from the moment she crossed the bridge and begged his help. Who wouldn’t want to know how someone came by such a grotesque title?
He dropped his gaze to the Senet board, moved his king through her defense wall and crushed her army in the game. When he looked up once more, he caught her eyeing him warily.
“After I led soldiers into Mir and destroyed yet another rebellion. I made a lesson of the city.” His voice was soft, toneless. “We left none alive.”
Imogen fisted her hands in her skirts. He heard the gasped trapped in her throat. She swallowed hard. “The women?” she whispered. “Children?”
He shook his head. “None left alive,” he repeated. “It took us three days. The canals and the fountains, even the river ran red with blood.” Only Tineroth’s screaming for his return had ever drowned out the screams of the dying that still rang in his mind.
Imogen lunged away from him, knocking the table with her knee hard enough to make the Senet board and spill the game pieces onto the floor. He watched, unmoving, as she scooted back on her haunches, desperate to put space between them.
The Butcher. He’d given her the truth, if not the answer she probably wanted. Not a hyperbolic title risen from the dramatic retellings of a popular fable, but a name earned and deserved. A part of him withered away at the sight of her scuttling back from him, revulsion twisting her features. He knew what she saw—the monster of legend, the reason why each of his images, except the catafalque, had been destroyed, why his people had finally revolted and why his greatest sorcerers had wrenched Tineroth from her anchor to the world and cast her into oblivion, and him along with her.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Feeling as if she’d suffocate, Imogen lurched to her feet and bolted from the room. The palace walls and cloisters warped in her blurred vision, and she careened against a set of pilasters, nearly tumbling down the stairs in her headlong rush to escape.
As if it heard her distress, the sentient mist appeared, spilling onto stairs, sliding under her feet and rising to encompass her in a cool cloud of faint light.
“Please, I have to get out,” she implored her ghostly escort.
She cried out as the floor fell away, and she was lifted by invisible hands. They carried her to the doors and outside, setting her down gently. Imogen barely choked out a “Thank you” before collapsing on the palace steps. Tears followed; great, wrenching sobs that grew in strength until she screamed her anguish into her skirts.
Her screams turned to moans. She had bedded a monster. Called him beautiful and taken his seed into her body. The thought made her stomach heave, and she hunched over her knees, dry-retching until her ribs ached and her throat burned.
The sculptor who’d carved the effigy had known The Undying King far more than the woman who now shared his bed. Imogen wiped her cheeks on her sleeve. He hadn’t told her anything she shouldn’t have already guessed. He’d been named The Butcher. Only her willful blindness had made her shy away from delving too deeply into how he’d inherited such a title.
The quiet, reserved man who skillfully and lovingly introduced her to the intimacy between man and woman and who generously offered a means by which she might live a fruitful life didn’t seem the type who’d spend three days slaughtering innocents. An image of the marble effigy on the catafalque flashed in her mind’s eye. The cruelty, the calculating malice—etched deep in frozen marble. That man, however, oh yes. That man would commit such atrocities and laugh as he did so.
Her tears slowed and finally dried, leaving her eyes nearly swollen shut. A dry breeze fluttered her skirts and stirred the overgrown weeds that spilled over the steps on which she sat. Behind her, the eroded hulk of one of Tineroth’s many nameless buildings cast its long shadow over her and the cracked street. The memory of Niamh’s words sounded in her mind like a dirge.
“His people once called him Cededa the Fair, then Cededa the Butcher, and then they called him no more.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Still seated as she left him, Cededa shoved the Senet board off the bed. “Yielded and conquered.” Like all things in this interminable existence, it was a hollow triumph.
The mist that had carried Imogen outside the palace seeped into the chamber and stopped in front of Cededa. He watched as it converged and thickened, melding into the spectral form of a woman dressed in the gown of a Mir aristocrat.
Her voice was a zephyr’s breeze through trees, a shifting of many voices that spoke as one. “What did you tell the girl?”
He rose from his place at the table. “I told her of Mir.”
The wraith’s shape changed, twisting in on itself in an agitated spiral. “She will hate you now, and she will leave.”
Cededa’s short huff of laughter held no humor. “She’s free to go if she wishes. She has no interest in the Waters and none who’ll believe her if she tells their tale. My debt to her mother will be repaid if she leaves of her own choosing.”
“She can redeem you.”
He smiled. “I’m beyond redemption, Gruah. You know that.” He cocked his head. “When did you stop hating me?”
A ripple passed through the ghostly shape. “When you began to grieve for us, Cededa. The king you are now should have been the king to rule us then.”
