Nobody's Goddess (Never Veil #1)(15)

Nissa walked a few paces, then stopped and turned around. She stared at me quizzically with her large, brown eyes. “Aren’t you coming?”

I shooed her onward. “Not just yet. I’ll be there soon. Go on.”

Nissa shrugged and skipped forward through the foliage, humming a tune as she went. I watched her until she blended into the trees and vanished from sight.

Vanished. Right in front of me.

I walked over to the broken branch Nissa had discarded and picked it up, turning the wood in my fingers. It’d been so long since I’d been the one to clutch Elgar. But there were monsters ahead; there were monsters behind.



***



When the queen and her retainers were brave enough, they’d chase monsters into the blackest pits. The cavern off the main path in the woods held countless monsters and endless secrets, and the queen, who lost her retainers one by one, had never explored all its vast depths.

She’d tried to crown another generation of queen and retainers after her, to keep up the adventures, but good retainers were hard to find when they kept falling in love with goddesses one after the other. Nissa, in any case, just wanted to be her friends’ equal, and although they battled monsters, she’d never called herself queen.

The queen was gone. It wasn’t the same anymore. I swished the stick in front of me, not even bothering to pretend it was a blade, and certainly not screaming a battle cry.

This is stupid. I got bored and tossed the stick to the side. Because I’d had the wonderful idea of taking the stick instead of one of the candles the kids left by the entrance to light their way, I was marching forward in total darkness. But my eyes adjusted, and after all those years of playing as a child, and then watching after Nissa and Luuk and their friends, by now I knew the path well enough to navigate it in the dark.

If only there was somewhere I could go. But what was there, beyond the mountains, beyond the thick air that covered the edges of the land in mist? Nothing. There was no place for me to run and hide.

Nowhere but the “secret” cavern. The cold, dark, neglected cavern. Perfect for me.



***



I found a stalagmite on which to lean my back and sat down on the floor of the cavern, hugging my knees against my chest. My mind was blissfully blank for a time, for how long, I didn’t know. I shut my eyes and listened to the drip, drip, drop of some distant source of water that fell from the cavern ceiling and the dangling stalactites. I laughed quietly. We could never say those words as kids. We just called them “ground spears” and “ceiling spears.”

“Hey.”

I nearly tipped over. My palms shot out to steady me as my eyes flew open.

Jurij stood over me, his man-mask on, a lit candlestick in one hand. He slipped down beside me, carefully resting the candle atop a rock.

“Hey,” came my brilliant reply. No “How did you find me?” “Why did you bother looking for me?” “Am I wanted for killing some quarry workers?” or “Don’t you have a Returning to get to?” or “Tell me you won’t die today!”

I went back to hugging my knees.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Jurij hugged his knees and looked up, where traces of his flickering candle caused shadows to dance on the ceiling. “I’d forgotten. I haven’t been here in a while.” Jurij stretched his arms and then his legs. “Luuk tells me you take him and his friends here on occasion, though.”

The corner of my mouth twitched. “Probably not the safest thing to do, considering they could get hurt in here.” I thought of Nissa, playing alone.

Jurij shrugged. “You and me had a lot of fun here.”

I smiled, despite myself. “If by ‘a lot of fun,’ you mean I let you hold the candle while I did all of the sword-swinging, then yeah.”

Jurij laughed. “Hey, the queen once told me that carrying a candle is an important job on any quest to the secret cavern. What was it? The candlelight keeps the monsters at bay?”

I pointed at the flickering shadows on the cavern ceiling. “That’s what I told you, but the candle actually made the monsters come out in the first place.”

“I wasn’t stupid, Noll. I knew that. I just let you believe otherwise.”

I always thought I was ever so clever. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Jurij let his man-mask scan the dancing shadows on the ceiling. “I liked being told what to do.”

“It got you ready for life with a goddess, I guess.” That was low.

Jurij didn’t seem hurt so much as amused by my statement. “Always so much hatred for goddesses. You won’t feel the same when your man finds you.” He laid a hand on my knee.

I tore my leg out of reach. “Oh, please, not you, too.”

Jurij’s arm was left awkwardly reaching toward me without anything to touch. He pulled it back and ran it through the top of his dark curls. “Sorry. What happened with Ingrith?”

So that was why he was here. Everyone thought I’d killed her, and Jurij knew right where to find me. “She’s dead.”

Jurij’s man-mask bobbed up and down. “I know. She vanished after causing another earthquake. Luckily the men in the quarry were just leaving to get ready for my Returning and no one else was hurt, but they had no reason to believe Ingrith knew that. They ran to her cottage, but all they found were her clothes in the field. They figured she might have had a heart attack from the shock.”