Nobody's Goddess (Never Veil #1)(18)

Only it wasn’t Jurij.

There was a black leather glove resting on my shoulder, a bare and ghastly arm wrapped across my chest. In the violet light, I could see the pallor of the skin, an odd, creamy, soft rose, washed pale with white. One of the specters? The lord’s servants? No, not that pale.

We’d come to the surface, but I couldn’t breathe. My eyes drifted closed, and open again, my vision blurry. The black glove, the pale arm became a dark hand, a tan sleeve. Jurij.

Jurij kicked us toward the shore. My eyes closed, and opened. The black glove, the pale arm.

A hard smack against my back. “Do not fight the reflex,” said an unfamiliar voice. Water spilled out of my guts. “You must purge yourself of the water.”

My eyes shut again as the water spilled out once more. As I struggled to keep them open, I tried to focus on the shoreline, and the tiny yellow flicker of candlelight I saw there. But the violet water stained my eyelashes and blurred my vision. Then I noticed the dark hand, the tan sleeve. My head twisted slightly to search for the wooden face.

“Close your eyes!” screamed Jurij.

Jurij grabbed the back of my head by the hair and shoved my head under water with a strength I didn’t know his thin arms possessed.

“Close. Your. Eyes!” I struggled to breathe and started kicking and thrashing. For a moment, I thought Jurij meant to kill me, perhaps for another excuse to comfort my sister.

And then I knew what had happened. I nodded as hard as I could under the water, shut my eyes tight, and I felt Jurij’s grip on my hair relax. He gently pulled me up, and I felt us reach the shore. He rolled me over onto my back. Perhaps not willing to trust me when it came to his life, I felt one of his hands clamp firmly over my eyelids.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Olivière. You could have died.” The other voice was faded now, the strange glove and arm no longer in sight.

“Yes.” I almost choked on another mouthful of water. But I’ll never really be all right again.

“Keep them closed,” said Jurij.

I nodded. I would never—not on purpose. Not even after we’d fought. I loved him.

Jurij decided to trust me. He lifted his hand from my face and helped me sit up, pounding on my back until I coughed up the last of the water that had tried to swallow me from the inside out. The scent of wet leather. So sickening.

I wiped my arm over my mouth to clean up the last of the spittle. My eyes were clamped so tightly shut I was afraid I would never be able to open them again.

“I’m going to go get my mask,” said Jurij quietly. “It’s floating on the pool’s surface a few paces from here. Keep your eyes closed.” Jurij’s voice seemed wary.

I wouldn’t risk your life, Jurij. Not like Elfriede would.

I heard him enter the water. Jurij was a natural swimmer, which I knew well from the times he and the other boys went swimming in the pond near the livestock fields, and this pool was even smaller in size. It was only complete idiots like me who could turn the thing into a death trap.

“You can open your eyes now.”

I tentatively opened first one eye and then the other. Jurij stood above me in his man mask, looking wet, otherworldly, and beautiful in the deep purple glow. I embraced him, squeezing him more tightly than I thought possible, and he wrapped me in his arms, tapping my back lightly before pulling away.

I let the moment go.

I faced the source of candlelight. The candlestick was perched on a rock, with no one at all around it. “Where’s the other man?”

“What other man?” asked Jurij.

“The other man.” I turned my head this way and that, searching desperately for the stranger. “The pale one. Wearing leather.”

Jurij squeezed my shoulder. “It’s just you and me here.”

“But—”

Jurij heaved a weary sigh. I supposed he’d had enough of dealing with me and my delusions, on what was the greatest day of his life. “Noll. We’re both wet. It’s cold. We need to get ready. It was already late when I came in here.” He stood and walked over to the candlestick, picking it up and starting back down the way we came.

I stood, but I hesitated. The candlelight was shrinking before me. I looked once more at the pool. The violet glow still illuminated the surface of the water, although it was subdued and fading. Amongst the stalactites, the ceiling seemed to sparkle, like violet stars in the blue moonlight.

“Noll?” Jurij’s voice echoed off the ceiling, almost like he was stuck there somewhere above me. “Are you coming?”

I shook my head to clear it of all its fantasies. There were no stars masquerading as violet lights in the ceiling. There were no laughing children deep in the cavern. No pale man calling me by my full name.

And no true love at all in the heart of the man I loved most.



In the Great Hall, all was quiet.

The two figures that drew everyone’s attention held hands and stared into each other’s eyes—or in Jurij’s case, the black holes in his mask. Over his features was the Returning mask, only it wasn’t wet and sopping, so I guessed perhaps he borrowed his father’s. Not that his father had yet had a chance to use it himself, but he kept it on hand “just in case” the impossible suddenly happened. Jurij’s new attire, red and bright and stunning, was a tad too large for him, so I guessed that was borrowed, too.