Page 91 of Wild Reverence

LXX

A Villa in the Clouds

MATILDA

By mortal reckoning, it had been years since I’d visited Warin’s hall. I had not missed it, not even for a moment.

I stood in the place between two clouds, their foundations bruised from a storm. A long stairwell cut between the thunderheads like a sword, leading to the hall, which was nestled between the frothy cloud tops.

There was no sound but the sad sough of the wind. The air was cold, electric. I remained firmly planted, staring at the distant pillars as if I could make them vanish beneath the intensity of my gaze.

Come, Matilda, Warin called to me.

My resistance was futile. The slippers on my feet forced me to take a step upward. Then another.

It was a long flight of steps, but by the time I reached the top and stood beneath the archway, I could hear the plucking of a lyre.

Again, the slippers forced me into the antechamber, which fed into a greater room, just outside the hall.

I was surprised to see this chamber transformed since the last time I had been here.

Instead of a lush garden, it was a stark workroom.

Mortals sat at long tables, their heads bent upon their tasks.

They were sorting through odd heaps, and I slowed to take a closer look as I walked by.

With deft fingers, they wove together tufts of moss, braided reeds, chains of pebbles.

They were cobbling them together with river mud and dusting them with mica.

I could smell the hot iron of a nearby forge wafting up from a corridor, the pounding of a hammer echoed by thunder.

Two mortal men emerged from that passageway, delivering baskets teeming with iron loops to the worktables.

They spilled them over the scarred wood, the metal still warm from the blacksmith’s fires.

These humans were making river shoes.

The same slippers Warin had once gifted to me. The slippers that had enabled me to travel underwater and scale tower walls. The ones currently on my feet.

One of the women glanced up at me, her face flushed from working, her eyes bloodshot. The moment our gazes met, I felt the air flood out of me.

I recognized her.

She was one of Vincent’s weavers. She had been part of the evacuation to Drake Hall.

Icy sweat beaded my skin as I looked at every mortal face. They were a medley of ages. Some of them were mere children, others in the prime of their lives. Still others were gray and hunched with age, and yet all of them worked tirelessly at their appointed task.

These were the missing people. The ones who had vanished from Drake Hall.

I opened my mouth to speak, eager to reassure them, but Warin’s voice came like a lash in my thoughts.

Matilda!

In his mind, he had waited long enough for my arrival. I tamped down the sour acid that rose in my throat; the shoes pulled me onward like a current, but not before I saw the desperation, the hope, in the mortals’ eyes as they watched me go.

I could free them in one of two ways: convince Warin to release them, or kill Warin and claim his magic as my own. Then I would have the power to break their binds.

Bloodthirst sparked, burning through me like wildfire, as I stepped into the smoke and shadows of Warin’s hall.

He was waiting for me, seated on a chair that was shaped from green branches and thorny vines and small white flowers.

An homage to his natural power when he had first been the god of spring.

His bow was propped against the throne’s side, as well as a quiver full of arrows.

He watched my approach intently, but my attention was stolen by the beautiful woman who was seated beside him, strumming the lyre with a downcast face.

Another Wyndrift mortal, young by mortal years.

As soon as my slippers forced me to halt, five paces away from the dais, the minstrel broke her music mid-song and retreated, her head bowed. But not before her eyes locked with mine, and I saw it again. A shining hope that I had come to bring them home.

“How is your back?” Warin asked, breaking the silence between us. “I hear eithral scales leave scars that never fade on our skin.”

My gaze met his at last. It took everything within me to hide my hatred of him, to keep my expression smooth. If I was going to convince Warin to release the people of Wyndrift he had taken, I needed to be calculated. I could not afford to anger him yet.

“Why call in the loan now?” I asked.

“Is it so difficult to believe that I missed you?”

“Indeed, it is. I can only assume that you have called me here on your ally’s behalf, so that I am gone when he begins to attack the fortress.”

Warin tilted his head to the side, his ashen hair spilling over his shoulder. “That should please you. It expresses that he and I both acknowledge you are an immense threat to our victory, as you have proven yourself to be on the bridge.”

I was quiet, but my heart raced. I did not have my moonstone belt, which put me at a great disadvantage. I had no weapons, no shield. There was no way for me to tell the mortal time, and while it felt like I had only been in Warin’s hall for a brief stint, it could have been a full day to Vincent.

He would wake and discover I was gone.

I could hardly bear to envision it.

My breath stung like a splinter in my throat.

“You cannot keep me here for long,” I reminded him. “Do you remember the terms of this loan?”

“I have thought of it often,” Warin confessed with a sharp smile.

“ I will not hold you longer than the span of a dinner, at which I request you join me when you return the slippers. Although… you have come to me dressed in the most peculiar way. I can also smell him on you.” His lip curled as he scrutinized my body, hidden beneath Vincent’s tunic.

“And it reeks. I will summon a bath for you, as well as one of your old gowns, which I still have, and then—”

“ No. ” My word was like steel, cutting through the air. “You cannot hold me longer than I want to stay. Let us start this meal and fulfill this loan. We both have important places to be.”

Warin’s eyes glittered with a dangerous light. But he rose without further objection, leading me deeper into the hall, where a low-slung table set with a feast for two waited between columns.

We sat on cushions opposite each other. I was not hungry, and I stared at the food laid out between us: roasted pheasant and sliced apples, potatoes with dark green herbs, flatbread drizzled with honey and chopped nuts, small dove breasts staked through with dates and mint leaves, fruit that had been peeled and cut into stars.

“Shall we toast to old times?” Warin asked, pouring me a chalice of nectar.

“What is there to toast to?” I said, accepting the glass. I would not dare drink from it nor eat the food, not after Alva’s attempt to poison me. I would not put the same scheme past Warin.

He took a loud sip, watching me closely. “You have changed, Matilda. There are some moments I look at you and think… I do not know who you are anymore.”

Change to immortals is a frightening thought. Change brings evolution, transformation. Unknown patterns and fate that cannot be predicted.

I knew that Warin was right. I had changed; it felt like I had outgrown old skin. I had let the past version of myself peel away, and what was I left with now?

Twelve stars to my name.

Immense power that I had yet to publicly claim.

A mortal man I loved.

A place on the river I could call home.

“You have also changed,” I said. “The last time I was here, you had two vassals who served you in this hall. Now you have more than I can count.”

“Ah yes. I was wondering when you would bring them up.”

“What could you possibly need them for? You are creating so many river slippers that you will make their power obsolete.” But then it struck me, a white-hot flash of realization.

Warin needed thousands of river shoes because he planned to shod an army with them.

Grimald’s troops. They could not reach Wyndrift by bridge, so they would arrive by magic.

By riverbed, to scale the walls as I had done.

“They are happy here,” Warin said, interrupting my thoughts. “Think of the immense honor I have granted these mortals, how they can spin magic with their humble hands now.”

“Yes, but their lord did not give them to you,” I said in a careful tone. “How did you gather so many of them?”

“He did give them to me, in a sense.”

“How so?” Speak plainly, I wanted to demand. I wanted to lunge across the table and take him by the throat. I did no such thing, but I coldly stared at him as he ate.

“The toll, of course.”

The toll.

Acid surged through me again. Nausea made my stomach boil and I swallowed it down, down, down, but my thoughts circled, darkly, as I remembered the toll Warin had asked of Vincent.

First fruits. Money. Third borns.

These people were those third borns that Warin had wanted.

When they had pleaded sanctuary beneath Hugh’s roof, it had created a loophole that Warin could exploit.

Vincent had refused to surrender them, but Hugh—as their immediate protector who was responsible for their well-being—had agreed.

The threads came together as I realized that was how Warin must have snatched them away.

“What did you promise Hugh Delavoy in exchange for his betrayal of them?” I asked.

“Betrayal? Listen to you, Matilda! You sound just as mortal as those vassals. In fact, you are worse. And I am weary of such talk.” He tossed down a bone and moved on to a dove breast, tearing into it with his teeth.

“What did you promise Hugh Delavoy?” I said again in a sharper cadence.

Warin regarded me with heavy-lidded eyes.

Juice dribbled down his chin. “I told him he would find favor with me no matter the outcome of this battle. And that he could use my bridge as he needed for transport in the decades to come. I would not require any tolls from him should he pay the tithe Vincent owed me.”

The crime Hugh had committed was immense. I could not think of a worse sin.

My hands went icy with rage.

“You are upset,” Warin said with a cluck of his tongue.

“You think of these mortals as yours now? Since you have spread your legs for their lord and let him dominate you?” He waited for my reaction with a cruel smile.

He was hungry for my wrath, daring me to strike him.

When I was silent, he went on. “Let me ease your mind, then. These vassals now live in the beauty of my hall, free from the sickness and famine and political upheaval that plagues the mortal realm. Damn you, Matilda, for painting me as some brute.” He cut into the pheasant with a golden knife, and then cocked an eyebrow at me.

Calmer, he said, “Why aren’t you eating?

This was part of your loan term, was it not? ”

“I told you that you could not keep me here, in your hall, longer than the span of a dinner,” I replied. “I said nothing of sharing that meal with you.”

Warin chuckled, but I could tell his frustration was mounting.

“See, my sweet. This is what you do. You cast yourself as meek and submissive, as if you are some poor little herald, carrying other gods’ words from here to there, hardly worthy of notice or attention.

You ran from me on the bridge, as if you were too weak to fight me, and yet you nearly tore through my organs with the eithral you commanded.

” He ate a piece of pheasant, pulling it from the tip of the knife with his teeth.

“There is nothing weak about you. Not when you know how to twist situations to your advantage. To willingly deceive.”

“There is no deception here, Warin.”

“Oh, but there is. You’ve been deceiving me, deceiving us all, since the moment you first breathed.”

“I do not know—”

“Yes, you do.” He spun the knife along his knuckles, a seemingly mindless action, and leaned closer. “The six new stars in the sky. This magic of yours. The one that lets you raise people from the dead. Who did you steal it from? How long have you possessed it?”

Ichor rushed through me as if I had been cut. It felt like my power was draining from me, spilling over the floor.

He knew.

He knew what I could do, and I realized it as if I had been held underwater, the fight bleeding out of my limbs. Warin had no intention of letting me leave this hall alive.

“Where did you hear this?” I asked, but my voice flared hoarse.

“Mortals talk when under duress,” he replied. “I know you brought back Vincent’s brother after he was slain on the bridge. Who else have you resurrected? How did you do it? Can you rouse a dead divine? Tell me, Matilda. Tell me your secrets, and I will let the vassals go.”

He presented me with an impossible choice.

I could not bear to leave Vincent’s people behind, shackled by Warin’s magic. But nor could I tell him my secrets. If he knew the intricacies of my soul-bearing, he would kill me. The only thing staying his hand was his ignorance of how my magic could be wielded.

And if I gave up this knowledge in exchange for mortals, Warin would know where my fault line lay. He would know to strike my heart first when he attempted to end me, and I needed him to doubt.

“Let me ask you again, Matilda,” Warin crooned, as if he knew he had me pinned. “How do you bring the souls back to our realm? How do you get to the wasteland?”

I rose from the table.

This dinner had concluded; the loan had been paid.

“You may wonder, but I shall never tell you,” I said, pleased when his haughtiness faded. When his face went slack with shock, and then mottled with rage.

“You are certain?” he cried. “This is what you have decided? To leave these mortals behind?”

“Yes. Goodbye, Warin.”

I turned and strode from the hall. With each step I took, the river slippers grew looser around my feet.

When I reached the old garden, the workroom where Vincent’s people still labored, I wanted to pause. I wanted to whisper reassurances to them. Hold on just a little while longer . And yet I could not risk it. I sensed Warin was following me, his bow in hand.

I could not use words, but I met their gazes. Whatever they saw in my eyes was enough.

They returned to their tasks, hope rekindled. I knew where they were now. I would not leave them here.

I will kill him.

That vow was binding as salt as I descended the villa stairs, down to the thunderheads and their flicker of lightning. Where the trade winds blew.

I left a trail of moss, pebbles, reeds, and iron in my wake.