Nobody's Goddess (Never Veil #1)(71)

Every muscle ached as I dipped the bucket down with the rope to the well and pulled it back upward.

They all knew. Before they forgot him. They all wanted me to Return to him, to keep him happy because he was their best customer.

Because he kept this village going.



***



A couple of weeks later, I laid on the ground in my shack, telling my thoughts to quiet for once so that I might sleep and enjoy a brief moment of peace from my waking dream.

“Because you bring us water. And scraps. And for the rose.”

A gruff voice. I struggled to open at least one eye, but my eyelids were heavy, and it strained me more than it should have. I blinked to bring the streaming moonlight into focus. A black figure stood in the doorway.

I shot up from my pile of hay on the ground. My heart beat harder, stronger.

And then I recognized Jaron standing before me.

It wasn’t the lord. He was gone, and he’d taken everything I knew with him. My life was gone. I felt the violence of a torment that would not break, even across the jagged surface of my heart.

Jaron must have recognized the feeling in my face, for he was soon crouching before me with both hands extended.

He held a sheathed blade. Does he even know what’s in his hands?

Before I could stop myself, I grabbed it from him, pulling it out of harm’s way and removing the blade by the hilt. It sparkled with a violet glow that felt all too familiar. “Elgar? How … ”

“Don’t know what it is. Maybe a carving tool. Found it in a tree hollow in the woods,” croaked Jaron tersely. “When cutting wood for Alvilda. Years ago. She would not take it.”

Years ago? Of course. I just have to leave it there for him to find, all these countless years later.

I felt a stirring in my heart that wasn’t quite like the pain it had known for the past month. It was mixed with great sorrow for Jaron and the truth of the longing I knew he felt even now for Alvilda.

I sheathed the sword and squeezed Jaron’s shoulder. “Thank you.”

Jaron’s mask bobbed, and he stood up. He left the shack just as quietly as he had entered it.

I pulled out the sword, gripped my hair into a tail behind me, and sliced it off close to my scalp. Now that I was alone, I was free to be myself. There would be nothing about me for anyone to make pretty.



***



I brushed aside the last of the branches that blocked the cavern’s entrance from view. Elgar, my blade, had summoned me here. The sheath hung from my waist, and I rested my hand comfortably over Elgar’s hilt. I couldn’t walk through this life anymore. My parents were gone. My sister and the man I’d loved were lost in each other completely. The lord had vanished, but he left behind a feeling of emptiness in my chest each time I thought of his face—and I hated myself for that. I didn’t want the burden of remembering him. If my heart was empty after I had slain the heartless monster, I would let the blade and the violet glow guide me to where I would stop him from hurting others in the first place.

I was the elf queen—and I was nobody’s goddess.



Elgar proved the key to getting back through the violet sphere, as I’d guessed. This time when I resurfaced, I knew immediately it had worked, even though I had no reason to believe the cavern was any different.

But there was an ax against a nearby rock. As I grabbed it, I noticed Elgar and its sheath were missing from my waist. The memory of the lord taking the blade away with him to the castle surfaced, more real than I had let myself believe it to be all these long, long months.

There’s no going back now. Not without getting the blade back. Somehow I knew this, even though the pool had taken me back once without it. But that was just as well. I had no place to go back to.

When I exited the cave, dripping wet with water, I came face to face with Avery. She looked at me like a piece of animal dung she had stepped in. “I almost went back in to see what was keeping you. Did you fall in that pool?”

“I … ” I studied Avery’s face. “How long was I gone?”

“What are you talking about?” Avery raised an eyebrow. “Just a few minutes. Did you lose consciousness?”

I shook my head.

“What did you do to your hair? Did you lop it off with the ax?”

I fingered my shorn tresses. So that change made it through the journey. To Avery, I’d walked into the cavern with long hair and walked out with short. It might have drawn attention away from the changes to my clothing—not that my dresses looked very different. But my back was missing the terrible sewing job Avery had done long ago. “Yeah … it was getting in the way.”

“If you say so. The men will love that.” Avery shrugged. “And maybe next time save the swim until after you’ve worked up a sweat.”

We worked for hours. I felt almost as if I’d never been gone. As if my home was the dream. This felt so natural, so real. Like I didn’t have anything terrible behind or before me, just the whack, whack, whack of the ax. I wondered how we were going to carry all of the wood back to the village without a wheelbarrow, and whether we’d bring it back to the commune or to a workshop I hadn’t yet seen, but Avery said not to worry about it. Some days she just felled the tree and left the collecting for another day’s labor. She was far enough ahead in her work that the men didn’t care how she paced herself.