Page 27 of Wild Reverence

XIX

A Bride for Below

MATILDA

I had forgotten how beautiful the mortal realm was.

Thirteen years I had spent dwelling in the sky, but when the western trade wind delivered Enva and me to the upper moors, I felt as if I had been there only yesterday.

I studied the hills, the wild blooming Helenium, the rust-tinged bracken, the small trickling creeks, the distant woods with their golden leaves.

The ground, dappled from morning rainfall, rolled beneath our feet, and the sky felt vast above us, promising another storm by night.

The scene was idyllic, like something from a ballad, until I began to look closer.

I had forgotten how fragile and transparent this world was, hiding nothing. If there was war, drought, blight, strife, floods, it reflected those woes. If there was peace, abundance, it likewise made that evident, holding no secrets from the ones who wandered upon it.

Enva walked down the hill first, harp gleaming on her back.

She followed the gouges in the ground, the wind tangling her long dark hair.

I watched her for a moment, my chest constricting, uneasy.

We were not far from an Underling doorway, and yet the longer we tarried here, the more opportunities there would be for things to go awry.

Dacre was waiting for us, far below our feet, and he would be quick to doubt me if we were late.

The last time I saw him, I had been running from him in the corridors, ignoring his commands, a child ruled by fear. But I would return to him a goddess, delivering his bride.

“Look,” Enva said, drawing me down to the vale where she had knelt in the grass.

I saw what had arrested her attention. A scattering of bones, with red flowers blooming from a small rib cage. A human child had died here, most likely carried by an eithral, or dragged by one of the hounds. After studying the clawlike furrows in the earth, I suspected a hound.

“Do we have time?” Enva asked, but she was already untethering the harp from her shoulders.

I would never deny myself the chance to hear her play, to hear her sing.

“Yes,” I said, settling in the grass nearby as she began to strum over the bones.

She was the Skyward goddess of music, and in my father’s hall, her songs had often been jubilant, powerful, cascading melodies.

They stirred our blood; they made us dance and remember the old stories, the mist-laden myths from which we had emerged.

They were so moving we exchanged the songs as currency.

But in the mortal realm, Enva’s music was much different.

It was sorrowful, full of yearning. It chased human hearts and their pain; it also filled the cavities that Death inspired.

This is how the troubled relationship between Enva and Dacre had started.

Dacre had heard of her prowess and wanted her for his wife, breaking with all tradition. Never had an Underling and Skyward exchanged wedding vows. Never had a Skyward lived in the under realm, save for me.

Enva, however, had refused him.

He chose to unleash his hounds and his eithrals into the mortal world, which had at that time settled into a decade of much-needed peace following Adria’s ascension.

The unjust mortal deaths caused by Dacre’s recklessness had angered Enva.

Eventually, she could take no more death and had agreed to leave Skyward to become Dacre’s bride on four conditions: The first?

He must cease terrorizing humans and causing bloodshed with his pets.

The second? He had to forgive the black-market dealings and make no further attempts to recover the six scales that Zenia and Phelyra had once bartered Skyward.

The third? Enva would be allowed to play her harp and sing whenever she desired.

And lastly, I would be the one to escort her to the under realm.

Dacre had agreed, which shocked me.

For years, he had been blood-bent upon those lost scales, keen to have them returned. All of us knew Warin possessed one, but no one knew that I did. The owners of the other four scales were still a mystery.

I also could not foresee Dacre keeping his eithrals shackled in the shadows, or his hounds in their dens.

I could hardly fathom he would let me return without punishment.

But I wanted to believe that this might be the beginning of a new era for divines, in which peace between the two clans could be maintained.

Maybe this was Adria’s doing, as if she had at last come into the height of her magic, thirteen years after becoming a goddess.

Had we not speculated what she would do to our world when we brought her into it?

There had been something else lurking beneath her tranquil magic, something I had seen and recognized the day my life fell apart.

Enva finished strumming on her harp, the last note fading in the wind. She had not played for long—just a sad, bone-aching song for the dead child’s soul—and I helped her rise.

“Are you anxious to return and see your mother’s clan again?” she asked as we walked side by side, heading toward where the door lay, hidden in a hillside.

“No,” I lied. I did not want her to worry on my behalf. To think there was a hint of fear, still lurking in my blood after all these years. “The better question is whether you are anxious. You will be the first Skyward to live below.”

Enva was quiet, her face flushed.

“No,” she answered at last. “Although I will miss seeing the stars.”

We walked a little farther, crossing one of the meandering creeks. I could not offer her reassurance; I knew she would miss the sky. Now that I had tasted its expanse, I realized how the earth might feel like a prison until she grew accustomed to the weight of stone.

Shale blew past us, perhaps in disapproval, perhaps in farewell.

It was hard to know with him, and my cloak billowed, its draws tugging on my neck.

The cloak was a parting gift from my father; it had been his for many years—an enchanted, sentient weaving.

When the wool was vermillion, bright and proud as mortal blood, its wearer was visible, drawing the eyes and attention of gods and mortals alike.

But the wool could shift to a dusky lavender, and then its wearer would become invisible.

This was how my father had moved, unseen, all those moments when he met up with my mother. How he had kept them hidden. The cloak had shielded them and their short-lived affair, and now it shielded me.

When Thile had handed it to me, I took it as his way of blessing my departure, as well as saying, Do not die below.

“We are almost there,” I said, pausing to draw a strip of cloth from one of my moonstone pockets. “Are you certain you want to do this?”

Enva was not looking at me. Her eyes, green as meadow grass, were on the clouds, the patches of blue sky.

“I am ready,” she said at last.

I brought the blindfold around her face, knotting it. Then I took her hand—her fingers were icy—and led her the remainder of the way to where the door hid in the hillside. There was a moment when I wondered if it would still open to me and whether I could still find its latch.

My worries melted when my hand found the lintel with ease, the door handle flaring to life beneath my touch.

I was still Underling; I had not forgotten these old secrets.

Together, Enva and I descended into the shadows.

I kept the blindfold around her eyes, leading her through the corridors.

The well-worn passages were just as I remembered, pleasantly cold and firelit, as was the great hall.

The jewels still burned in the columns, the painted eithrals still graced the walls, the trestle tables still sat in orderly rows, filled by the three courts.

Smoke danced from the hearths, vassals waited with ewers of wine, and the air was spiced, evergreen.

The Underlings rose, silent, when Enva and I appeared.

I walked her down the aisle to the dais, where Dacre sat upon his throne, watching our approach.

Gemstones glittered on every finger, and his crown seemed to breathe with starlit diamonds.

His robes were the color of a midsummer sky, displaying the brawn of his arms, the golden sandals on his feet.

Alva stood to his left, clad in a gray dress, a belt of sapphires cinched at her waist. Her eyes were not on Enva as her brother’s were, but on me, as if curious to discover who I had become while I was gone.

Enva and I reached the footstool. I squeezed her fingers, letting her know we had arrived.

She had trusted me, implicitly. I could have taken her anywhere.

I could have led her to an iron cage and locked her within it or granted her a blow on the fault line, devouring her magic.

Such trust she had given to me, and I could only stand in the light of it, wondering if I was dooming her in this moment. If I was dooming all of us.

Run.

I thought I heard Bade’s voice. A whisper from my past. An echo from my childhood.

Fly.

The temptation to glance behind and look for him made me waver. I had not seen him when we stepped into the hall, but neither had I tried to find him in the sea of faces. He remained my salt-sworn ally, even after all this time.

I had missed him, more than I had thought possible.

“Welcome, Enva of Skyward,” Dacre said, and he could not hide the thrill in his voice. He rose and descended the steps to properly meet her, and I let her go when his shadow rippled over us. “You have pleased me—honored me—by accepting my invitation.”

He removed her blindfold.