Page 31 of Queen to the Sunless Court (Brides of Myth #2)

The Darkest Night

Calliste

“You’re useless. No good. The bane of my life.”

In a hair-raising moment, she instantly recognized the voice and her surroundings, long forgotten and buried in the deepest recess of her memory.

I know this place. Gods, no.

The whitewashed walls of a small kitchen with a fireplace were hauntingly familiar, as was the large oaken threshold leading to the adjacent room, from which carried an angry, slurred voice: “Do you understand how useless you are? Do you ?!”

The lone woman sitting at the table flinched, trying to make herself smaller as she hurriedly swallowed the leftovers from her husband’s dinner.

“Come over here!”

Outside, a rowdy party of revelers whooped and cackled—it was one of the late summer festivals and the drunken laughs and shouts continued well into the night.

It’s that night. Why am I seeing it?

“I said, come here!”

The woman rose, trembling, and her gaze fell on the knife on the table.

She stared at it in abstraction before reaching out to slip it behind her belt, concealing it with the edge of her robe.

She then crossed the threshold into the dining room, where her husband usually spent his evenings sipping wine and leafing through his ledgers.

Today was no different. The fire roared high in the tall fireplace, the stone walls arching into an alcove, yet it somehow failed to warm his pitiless features.

He sat in his usual worn chair by the hearth, his ledger on the small stool beside him.

He enjoyed summing up his accounts at the end of the day, watching his wealth grow.

He prided himself on being precise and economical—when he was sober.

But most of the time, he wasn’t.

During their marriage, she often had to drag him out of the gutter.

Through his drunken rants, she learned that his drinking was why he hadn’t been able to find a wife—and that he had discovered Xanthippe’s misuse of Temple donations and had threatened to inform the city council.

This was why Xanthippe had invited him to dinners.

Perhaps if they had a child, things would be different. In the beginning, when they were both hopeful, he drank less.

When he discovered she was barren, he took her to Mount Hellecon to fix her, only to return when the healers said there was no cure.

Since then, his disappointment was like venom, poisoning each day. When it turned into frustration, he drank more and she had to endure endless days of scorching contempt.

And then came flares of anger, accompanied by insults. He’d shake her, roar in her face. Slaps were becoming frequent. When he grew bored, he’d finish his wine before riding his horse to a friend on the other side of the docks.

I don’t want to see it again. Is this a dream? Why can’t I wake up?

“There you are,” the husband drawled. “Explain to me why I should keep you under my roof if you continue to fail me.”

His wife remained silent, recognizing his volatile mood.

“Nothing? I expected the usual, ‘I’ll try harder—’”

“I don’t think there’s much I can do,” his wife said, exasperated. “It is what it is.”

Calliste held her breath, anticipating what was about to happen. Please, stop it from happening. Stop it from happening.

“What did you say?” The chair rasped on the stone floor.

Smack. Smack .

Hurried, angry breathing.

A growl. “A new answer. Unfortunately wrong.” The man’s voice cracked, anger seeping through like lava.

Her cheeks stinging from the slaps, his wife looked up, her gaze frosted with hatred, as nothing else lived in her heart by then. It was one of those moments when a grain of sand tips the scale.

It had been building over all those days—more than a thousand of them.

She was tired of humiliation and exhausted from living with him.

She knew the cost of the words she was about to say, having screamed them in her mind for so long, but she said them anyway: coldly, clearly, in her polished accent which always unnerved her husband, because his own was never as good.

“I cannot help it. You took a chance with me and now blame me for being a bad investment. I’ve done everything I could for you and yet you’ve brought nothing but misery into my life. ”

He towered over her, his face twisted in an enraged, stunned expression she had never seen before.

Because she had never said it aloud... until that night.

It had been too many days of working herself to the bone to please a man who believed it was a privilege for her to do so.

And so she rose to her feet, trembling with fear yet somehow unstoppable.

“I’m glad I’m barren, because you repulse me.

It’s fortunate we can’t have a child, as I wouldn’t want to bring one into this misery, with a father who can’t stay away from wine and whom I have to drag from a gutter every other day.

” Her breath was shaky, but her voice was hoarse with the anger that only comes from those most desperate, those who have nothing left to lose.

“If I’m no good, divorce me. Because I swear to all the gods, I’ve been wanting to leave you for a long time. ”

He stepped forward, glaring at her with eyes that would haunt her for years.

She’d never thought her defiance could trigger such a blaze of his anger.

When he raised his hand to strike her again, she quickly drew the knife from behind her back, holding it defensively and slicing through the air, catching his open palm with the blade, and then she stood trembling, her stomach knotted with fear.

He hissed, eyes wide with disbelief. “You dared. I took you away from that stinking temple and gave you everything. This is how you pay me back?” He shoved her hard, smashing her against the wall and knocking the breath out of her.

She slid down against the wall and dropped to her knees, wheezing, making it easy for him to send her to the floor with a careless kick.

The flagstones were cold and hard. She wanted to get to her feet, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t even draw a breath, her forehead pressed into the floor.

He kicked the knife away from her reach. “Leave me?” he slurred, his voice a strange, jarring sound, like worn metal rasping against stone. “Leave me?”

From the floor, he seemed like a furious giant. Her hair was in her face, but she could see he held something in his hand, glowing red, an extension of his anger. A fire poker.

“I found you and saved you.” His voice prickled over her skin like frost. “But it seems I need to mark you to remind you who you belong to.”

The rest was a blur of agony. He straddled her, his weight pinning her to the floor and ensuring she couldn’t move, pushed her hair aside to expose her back, and branded her for the first time, then the second, then the third.

She writhed in pain, screaming, her nose filled with the stench of burning hair and scorched skin.

When he released her, she could barely breathe. The cold floor under her stomach offered no relief to her burning back, and she was powerless to stop the pain.

He walked away and shoved the poker back into the fire, his back turned to her, cursing at his still-bleeding hand.

Darkness swirled in her mind. She was ready to beg him for help, for anything to stop the agony on her back when a strange, unknown energy surged in her mind: odd yet calming, rising within her in an unstoppable jet, enveloping her and isolating her from the pain, as if her back wasn’t half-burned.

She rose, only half-conscious of her actions, as if she were floating through water, everything slow and blurry.

He didn’t look back, not expecting her to move.

Now, she was ablaze, her thoughts were aflame. The torch was the closest thing she had to hand. She tore it from the sconce and lunged at him.

By the time he realized what was happening, she was already behind him, swinging the torch at his head and watching its slow, burning trajectory streaking with fire before it struck him in the side of the face, sparks flying.

He roared, just as she had moments earlier, his hands moving there by instinct.

Still eerily unaffected by the pain, she watched him for a second before striking again, this time aiming low at his knee.

He yelped as his knee gave way, crashing into the stone.

She retreated two steps, tossed the torch at the chair, which burst into flames at once, and then charged at him, aiming to make him lose his balance, and pushed him straight into the fireplace.

When his clothes caught fire, a primal horror shrieked in her mind. For an unimaginably long, suffocated second, she froze, and then fled from the dining room, slamming the heavy door shut and bolting it against his helpless screams—drowned out by the laughter of the revelers next door.

The strange, soothing power that had shielded her from the pain ebbed away. Agony crept in, its sharp edges causing her to stumble and then crawl to the side door leading to the small stable, where her husband’s horse was tied, still reined and saddled, ready for his usual evening ride.

Her husband had stopped screaming.

Gods, what have I done?

The stench of smoke grew stronger. She sobbed as she mounted the horse, and urged it down the street toward the nearest city gates.

Behind her, her prison finally burned.