Feeling as if she’d suffocate, Imogen lurched to her feet and bolted from the room. The palace walls and cloisters warped in her blurred vision, and she careened against a set of pilasters, nearly tumbling down the stairs in her headlong rush to escape.
As if it heard her distress, the sentient mist appeared, spilling onto stairs, sliding under her feet and rising to encompass her in a cool cloud of faint light.
“Please, I have to get out,” she implored her ghostly escort.
She cried out as the floor fell away, and she was lifted by invisible hands. They carried her to the doors and outside, setting her down gently. Imogen barely choked out a “Thank you” before collapsing on the palace steps. Tears followed; great, wrenching sobs that grew in strength until she screamed her anguish into her skirts.
Her screams turned to moans. She had bedded a monster. Called him beautiful and taken his seed into her body. The thought made her stomach heave, and she hunched over her knees, dry-retching until her ribs ached and her throat burned.
The sculptor who’d carved the effigy had known The Undying King far more than the woman who now shared his bed. Imogen wiped her cheeks on her sleeve. He hadn’t told her anything she shouldn’t have already guessed. He’d been named The Butcher. Only her willful blindness had made her shy away from delving too deeply into how he’d inherited such a title.
The quiet, reserved man who skillfully and lovingly introduced her to the intimacy between man and woman and who generously offered a means by which she might live a fruitful life didn’t seem the type who’d spend three days slaughtering innocents. An image of the marble effigy on the catafalque flashed in her mind’s eye. The cruelty, the calculating malice—etched deep in frozen marble. That man, however, oh yes. That man would commit such atrocities and laugh as he did so.
Her tears slowed and finally dried, leaving her eyes nearly swollen shut. A dry breeze fluttered her skirts and stirred the overgrown weeds that spilled over the steps on which she sat. Behind her, the eroded hulk of one of Tineroth’s many nameless buildings cast its long shadow over her and the cracked street. The memory of Niamh’s words sounded in her mind like a dirge.
“His people once called him Cededa the Fair, then Cededa the Butcher, and then they called him no more.”