Nobody's Goddess (Never Veil #1)(33)

The lord dropped his fingers and gestured around him to the empty room. “Since when does that stop a man from seeing his goddess?”

“It doesn’t. Usually. But you didn’t come to see me, either.”

The lord scoffed. I could hear the sound clearly even through his veil. “You expect me to visit you?”

I blinked. This wasn’t going at all how I expected. “No, I … ” I was quite happy not to have to think about you, I wanted to say. But there was no need to tell him that. A man could crumble at even the slightest hint of harshness from his goddess. “It’s just that … that’s the way it’s normally done. Men visiting their goddesses.”

The lord tossed his head and cradled what must have been his chin with his thumb and forefinger. His face seemed turned a bit sideways, like he wasn’t going to look at me, although I couldn’t be sure. “I cannot leave the castle.” His voice broke a little, and I was almost unsure I’d heard him right.

I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t like I’d wanted him to come anyway. And arranging courtship was hardly the first thing on my mind. “Um, sir, Lordship … ” The lord dropped his hand back to his lap. “My mother is unwell. Women have been ill these past four months, and they started dying this week. I thought … we all thought they’d get better, but now that doesn’t seem to be the case, and … ” I didn’t know what else to say.

The lord tossed his hand in the air with a flourish, gesturing for me to go on. “And?”

I felt something snap in my chest, like the one word from him, the callous tone of his voice, was enough to stomp all hope I’d managed to muster. The hope that had gotten me to accept that carriage ride at last and face the fact that I was somebody’s goddess, and that somebody wasn’t who I wanted.

“And you’re our lord. Isn’t there something you can do?”

The lord drummed his fingers on one of the throne’s armrests. “You have tried all the herbs?”

“Yes!” I regretted the tone of my voice the moment I said it. But it was obvious we’d tried that much, wasn’t it? I tried to soften my voice. “I mean, of course. It seems to help with the pain a bit, but they’re still—that is, my mother now, just her, she still has no strength.”

The lord’s fingers stopped tapping at once. “You say women have died?”

“Yes!” I squeezed my shawl tighter. Wasn’t he listening? Wasn’t he paying attention at all to the people he ruled over? Why, then, do people say he’s always watching?

“There is no typical sign of illness? No rash? No sores?”

“No … ” I bit my lip, thinking about Ingrith and her “healer” man. “I knew a woman, who … well.” I swallowed, struggling to summon my courage to face this man. “She said there was once a family of healers in the village.”

The lord’s head snapped forward slightly. “Healers? I thought they had all been forgotten.”

“They have. That is, if they existed at all in the first place.”

“No matter. They are gone. They cannot help.” The lord held a hand out to silence me before I could inquire further. He leaned his veiled face into his other palm. Neither of us spoke. Then he straightened in his throne. “Four months they have been ill?”

“About that, yes.” I dropped my hand from my shawl and let my arms hang limply at my sides. Even without seeing his eyes, I felt them boring into me. I didn’t know how very much I’d hate the attention. “They got ill the day after I first came here.”

The lord jumped out of his throne so quickly I almost fell backward to the ground as my feet scrambled to give him ample room to pace. He walked to his bookstand and flung the heavy tome open, flipping through pages as if his life depended on it. Maybe my mother’s actually did.

Can he read through his veil?

As if hearing my thoughts, the lord sighed and slammed the book shut with a grunt of frustration, sending dust into the air. “You will have to leave!”

I took a step back before I could even think. “Pardon?”

“Leave. Now.” He gestured toward the door and flicked his fingers, summoning four specters from behind me. They held their arms out, leading me toward the door.

My head spun from one specter to the next, to the pacing lord before the throne. “What about my mother?”

The lord slowed his pace, but he didn’t stop moving. He waved a hand absently at me. “I will do what I can, of course. She will live to perform our Returning.”

If his first statement offered me a bit of comfort, his second was a kick to the stomach. “What do you mean? Is she going to die of this after that?”

The lord stopped and sighed, quite audibly. He positioned both hands on his hips. “I cannot tell you. I do not know.”

“But you know something, obviously.”

The lord took a few steps forward, closing the distance between us. “Olivière,” he said, grabbing one of my hands. He squeezed it and brought it up between our chests. “I will do what I can. Please worry instead about preparing yourself for my Returning.”

I ripped my hand out from his grip. “Your Returning? How can you speak to me about a Returning when my mother might be dead tomorrow?”