Nobody's Lady Read online

  “Friede.” What can I say? I’m sorry? I am. I just …

  “I know you’ve always loved him,” sobbed Elfriede. She rubbed her dripping nose on her sleeve. “You had no right!”

  I threw my hands up in disgust. “I had no right? He was my friend before he was your man! And if I recall correctly, you didn’t really want him at the start!”

  That probably wasn’t the best way to prove my innocence in the matter.

  Elfriede jumped up from the table. “Don’t blame me now for misgivings I entertained briefly as a child! He was my man, not yours!”

  “Yes, was,” I spat. “In case you haven’t noticed, most of the town is in chaos. The past doesn’t matter.” I swallowed a lump forming in my throat. To me, the past was all that mattered, but she would never understand what I meant. “He loves you, too,” I whispered.

  Elfriede sniffled. “I know.” She wiped first one eye and then the other with the heel of her palm. “But I don’t want to share that love with you.”

  I turned away. What right did I have to deny any of it? “You’re right. Once I would have given anything to steal him from you. I never wanted to hurt you. But I was tired of being the only one who felt a complete and utter mess inside. The only one whose feelings never mattered. But I feel fine now. I’m doing all right. Now you can all try dealing with those emotions I lived with for so long. Just leave me out of it.”

  Elfriede slipped past me, her sobs clogged, silent. Behind her trailed Bow, but it wasn’t until Bow barked curtly that Arrow got up and followed. I twisted my body to watch Elfriede drag herself out my doorway and down my porch. She paused to look back at me, rubbing her hand over Bow’s ear. Arrow started homeward without them.

  “You know,” Elfriede said, each word shaky, “I felt sorry for you then. But I don’t think I can ever forgive you.”

  One after the other, she picked up the iron weights of her feet and left. Bow glanced at me but made no noise before following. Perhaps she didn’t find me worthy even of a growl.

  “I don’t think I can ever forgive you.” What a familiar line that was beginning to be. I wondered how many more I would wind up crossing off my ever-shortening list of loved ones. My decision to move to the old crone’s shack was beginning to make more and more sense with each passing hour.

  Still, I felt I should get going. Time to cross off one more.

  The person I used to be wouldn’t have hesitated to cross the cavern threshold. She also wouldn’t have come with a candle in hand.

  Leave the candle. Make your way through darkness. You know the way by heart.

  But I also knew now that there was more to this cavern than I ever would have imagined. Even when I was imagining sticks as swords and monsters flickering on the walls. Even when I fashioned myself an elf queen.

  No, you’re no queen. You’re only the first goddess.

  I shook my head and steadied the candle as I took note of my trembling hand. There were no goddesses anymore. It didn’t matter if I was the first, or even the last. Everything was put right now.

  So why does everything feel so wrong?

  I lifted the candle higher to look for signs of Jurij, even though I was just guessing he came here. Where else is there to go to be alone? Where else is there to go at all?

  I hoped the glowing light hadn’t drawn him into the water. But maybe that was something it did only for me.

  I told myself I’d never set foot in the cavern again. But if Jurij was in there, I had to know.

  I stopped, bringing the candle closer to my chest. I heard the drip, drip, drop of the water trickling up ahead. And just at the edge of darkness, I saw a light. I was expecting that enticing violet glow, the light that always called me whenever I was near. The light that nearly drowned me more than once.

  But the light I saw was red, dim and dark instead of bright.

  I can’t go there. A pain sheared through my chest. I swallowed. It didn’t matter. There was nothing left for me there.

  I blew out the candle and turned, forgetting why I came in the first place, focusing on nothing but getting out and pretending I was never there. My foot found a growth I didn’t remember, and I stumbled.

  “Whoa. I’m sorry.”

  A hand on my thigh and another on my ankle steadied me, the grip gentle but sturdy, enough to keep me from falling over without making it feel like I was caught against my will. I regained my feet, and the hands fell. I looked down, blinking to adjust to the darkness.

  “Jurij?”

  I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t noticed him as I passed.

  “You found me,” he said, a sheepish smile hidden in his voice. The sound of a scratch against a rock sent a shiver up my back, and Jurij’s face alit with warm light. He smiled awkwardly as he placed a lit candle beside him on the ground and displayed the flint between his fingers. “You want me to light yours?”

  I sat down on the ground beside him and slid my candlestick over to him. “Thank you.” I wasn’t even sure why I blew it out in the first place. Like the red glow wouldn’t be able to find me in the darkness. Like that pool ever needed to see me to call my name—or keep me away. I took a deep breath. Enough. Enough of that pool and all that came with it. Remember why you’re here. “You could have said something when I passed by the first time.”

  Jurij guided his flint to the candle’s wick. “I thought maybe you wouldn’t notice I was here. You seemed pretty transfixed by the pool.” He dropped the flint into the sediment to let the flame die out. “I thought maybe you weren’t even here for me.”

  Because I have a habit of jumping in this pool. “Elfriede’s looking for you.”

  “I know.” Jurij set my candlestick down on the ground between us. “Why do you think I’m here?”

  I shrugged and bit my lip to avoid stating the obvious. I didn’t come to commiserate with him, or to encourage him to continue acting like a fool. I came to put an end to his estrangement, so I could get back to my cottage and live in peace. Because even though it was my curse that made Jurij love Elfriede in the first place, it was also my fault he wasn’t blindly in love with her anymore. And even though I once wanted him more than anything, I don’t know what I want now.

  But I knew it wasn’t this. “What’s going on with you two?”

  Jurij hugged his knees to his chest. “What’s going on with anyone these days?” He continued talking to the ground, like it’d make for a better listener than me. “How is a man supposed to know what love is now?”

  I knew the meaning behind his question, and the answer—the real answer—wasn’t simple. But I wasn’t there to discuss a man’s choice to love. I still wasn’t used to the idea that a man could have a choice. Regardless, I was here to set things right again. “You know what love is. You’ve experienced it.”

  “Have I?” Jurij’s eyes met mine for the first time since I’d sat down beside him, and I looked away, unable to drink in the darkness without the flame that once danced there. I couldn’t respond, so he continued. “The new edict has been a blessing in a way.”

  His words brought to mind other voices. “His lordship’s edict has been a real blessing.”

  “You are not welcome here, Olivière.”

  I shook my head. No. No, Jurij wouldn’t be like them. He had real reasons to love his goddess, not like Sindri and an unReturned love, not like Ailill.

  “Yes,” I said, interrupting Jurij before he could finish, “because now we know that those who marry truly love each other.” I nudged Jurij’s upper arm with my own. “And there’s no doubt in my mind that you love Elfriede.”

  “I’m glad one of us has no doubts.” Jurij laced his hands together around his knees.

  “Jurij, I lived with choice in love my whole life.” I took my knees in my arms, just so I could embrace something to stop the wild beating of my heart. “So has every woman. And if you think about it, the fact that Elfriede chose to love you is remarkable. It makes he
r more worthy of your love than many goddesses—women—were of their men’s love.”

  My wandering eyes caught Jurij’s, and my breath caught in my throat. I’d dreamed of days when he would look at me like that, albeit without the slightly drooping eyelid and the scar that ran over it, a reminder of the first time I kissed him. On his wedding day. His wedding to my sister. I coughed and turned away.

  “You chose to love me, Noll.”

  Don’t.

  “And you knew there was no hope.”

  I don’t want to remember.

  “Yet you loved me. You refused the wealthiest, most powerful man in the village because you loved me.”

  Now hold on, it wasn’t just about that.

  “You looked for ways to break the curse. Noll, you broke the curse because you loved me.”

  “Stop!” I was on my feet, not even noticing when or how I got there. “Jurij, just stop.” I held my hands out in front of me as if pushing against a force of air. “Who told you I broke the curse?”

  Jurij gestured around the cavern like he was pointing out imaginary people. “Everyone! Everyone says it was because of you.”

  “It wasn’t me.” I clutched my elbows and stared at the flickering candle at my feet.

  “Sure.” Jurij didn’t sound convinced. “You just happened to be one of the last goddesses to have her man find her, the never-dying, always-watching lord of the village no less, the same lord who now says that all marriages before the break of the curse are invalid, and you have nothing to do with the fact that now every man is as free as a woman to choose who he’ll love.”

  His words bit. Jurij was the last person I expected to be so accusatory. It took a lot to make him angry—to make him feel anything other than love and meekness. “I didn’t say I had nothing to do with it.” I ran a hand up my arm to my shoulder. “But it wasn’t me. It was him.”

  Jurij shifted on the ground, but I didn’t look at him. The drops of distant water punctuated the silence. “Well, I know whatever you did played a large role in it.”

  I said nothing, but I could see Jurij’s feet moving at the edge of the candlelight, his legs getting ready to stand.

  “And I won’t let you tell me it had nothing to do with me.”

  I’m in trouble. I took a step back, ready to flee, but I dug in my heels. You’re here for a reason. “Jurij, that’s rather egotistical. It’s not like you.” He was starting to really get on my nerves. Jurij—on my nerves. He’d never annoyed me quite like this before.

  “How do you know what I’m like? Really? Considering I was obsessed with a woman for years and had no choice in the matter?” His hands clutched both of my shoulders. “Noll, you kissed me. On my wedding day.”

  I knew it would be easy to slide out of his grip, much easier than it might have been with Ailill, but I was frozen, unable to move. I swallowed. I won’t run from it then. I’ll use it. “I used you.” It wasn’t what I meant to say, but some part of me wondered if it was true.

  Jurij didn’t seem hurt or shocked like I’d hoped. If anything, he seemed amused. And I wasn’t sure I liked the feelings his amusement stirred in me. “Used me?”

  “I didn’t like being forced to love the lord. I wanted to make him angry.” It was true. I knew that now. I knew a lot of things now that I was too blind to see back then. Before I grew up.

  “And making him angry would make him stop loving you?” Jurij didn’t believe a word I said. “You are aware that because of the curse we had no choice but to love, so how … ”

  “He didn’t love me. He never did. The curse just forced him to think he did.” It hurt to speak the words aloud. I’d buried them so deeply amidst my peaceful day-to-day existence.

  “That’s what I’ve been saying. We were all forced, Noll. But you weren’t. Not when it came to loving me.” He leaned forward, and I had to make myself take a step back out of his reach. If I’d stayed put, I might have been on the receiving end of another kiss.

  “My feelings for you made my sister unhappy.”

  Jurij took a step forward to close the distance between us. “And her loving me, and me loving her, made you unhappy.”

  I moved back in time with his steps, never letting him close the gap entirely, never letting myself enter his embrace. “I caused that injury to your face by kissing you.”

  “He caused my injury.”

  The tiny blaze of the candles grew dimmer, and the red glow of the distant cavern pool mocked me, warning me to stay away. I retreated into the darkness, knowing the light of day was nearby. “I was selfish, stubborn, focused only on my own desires.”

  “Sounds like just about everyone else in this village, Noll.”

  I kept retreating until my back slammed against the cavern wall. He grabbed my arms again, this time a little firmer, like he didn’t ever want to let me go. I closed my eyes as his face drew nearer to mine. “All right! I loved you!” I said. His grip stiffened, and I opened first one eye and then the other. His face came to a stop near mine, but he was searching my expression, waiting for me to continue. I looked away. “But I don’t now. Not like that.” Confused. We’re both just confused. I peeked up at him, waiting to see if my rejection would cause him the pain Elfriede’s might have, had he still been in love with her.

  Jurij’s fingers unhooked from my arms. He turned and headed back to where we left the candles. Instead of blowing them out or picking them up, he sat back down on the ground beside them. I stood watching him for a moment, confused, still reeling from our almost-kiss. “Jurij?”

  “Go.” He wouldn’t look at me as I approached, and I was certain I’d never before seen the shadow of anger on my Jurij’s face like I did now. Not my Jurij.

  “And leave you here?”

  Jurij blew out a loud, slow breath. “For a while.”

  I placed my hands on my hips. “You’ve been here long enough.”

  “I can’t go home. Not yet.”

  “To your parents’?”

  “She’ll find me at either one’s. Tell me she hasn’t looked for me there already.”

  “There and at my place.”

  Jurij laughed, and I saw something of his old, cheerful self dancing across his eyes, but there was no mistaking the bitterness there. “Of course she would assume I was there.”

  I didn’t think she was that wrong in thinking so now, not after the way his eyes drank in mine just moments before. But I didn’t think Jurij was in the mood to hear that. Not if I hoped to steer him through his confusion back to the right path. Back to Elfriede.

  “It didn’t seem like she’d be back to visit anytime soon.” Or ever.

  Jurij’s grin reached his eyes, and I could have sworn I saw the flame flicker there once more. But no, it was just the reflection of the candles. “Looks like I’ve found a place to stay.”

  So much for convincing him to join the ever-growing list of people who hate me.

  “Let me get this straight. Jurij expects us to pretend we don’t know where he is when Elfriede comes asking, yet somehow we’re not supposed to be panicking that he’s gone missing? Pass me some more nails, would you?” With one hand, Alvilda balanced two planks of wood for a large chest on which she’d asked me to carve a design. I rifled through her sawdust-covered workbench, found a couple of dusty iron nails, and dropped them into her extended hand.

  “I know.” It sounded even more ridiculous when someone else pointed out the flaw in the plan. “But if I don’t let him stay with me, he’ll go back to the cavern.”

  “You’re seventeen, Noll—eighteen in a few months.”

  “Yeah … ” I hadn’t stopped to think about it, but come fall, it’d be a year since I moved into the castle. It felt like a lifetime ago.

  “So you’re a grown woman. And a grown woman has needs. I get that.” Alvilda rolled the nails between her fingers. “Are you a coupling then?”

  “No! No!” I sputtered. “I mean, I know why you migh
t think that, but— No, I don’t, now that I think about it. Why would you say that?”

  “All right, all right. But a man moves in with a woman? What else are people supposed to think?”Alvilda placed one of the nails in her mouth like a piece of chewing straw. She stared me down out of the corner of her eye even as she took a hammer and pounded the first nail into place. “Schounds like … ” Alvilda spat out a breath of air as she grabbed the nail from her mouth. “Sounds like he’s taking you for a fool.” She used her forearm to swat away a stray tendril of dark hair that fell across her face and went back to hammering.

  I sat down on the bench beside Alvilda’s worktable. My fingers drew circles through the sawdust as I stared across the room at the dining table. I still wasn’t used to seeing that table dust-free. Mistress Tailor—no, Mistress Carver, or maybe now that I was on my own with my own profession I could start calling her Siofra—had taken over most of Alvilda’s house and declared it an actual home. “There’s work and there’s home, and some of us need a little help differentiating between the two,” she’d said to me when I first commented on how clean the place looked. “Alvilda can confine her work to the corner. No need to be dragging dust all over where the children are eating and sleeping.”

  And Alvilda had actually complied without putting up much of a fuss, as far as I knew. I noticed it didn’t stop her from letting her work creep just a little bit beyond her “work corner” each and every day. It was why, at Siofra’s insistence, building a workshop nearby was on Alvilda’s to-do list. “Why not use the commune?” Siofra had suggested. “It’s just sitting there, rotting, unused. Tearing down those filthy old shacks would do the village a lot of good.”

  But somehow, Alvilda had become “so busy” wrestling up projects from customers over the past few weeks that she’d barely done more than knock down the first couple of shacks, which I gladly helped with, feeling some of the painful memories fall away with each wall. Alvilda’s lack of attention to the new workspace probably had something to do with the “waste of burning wood for two fires” she kept mumbling about. Not that it was so cold out yet that she’d absolutely need a fire, but she did work late most nights. She’d changed since Siofra moved in. She was gruffer, rougher around the edges. Like she had more annoyances to work out of her system with every swing of her hammer and every twist of a nail than she had back when she’d lived alone.