Page 80 of King of Flesh and Bone

A feverish chill crept over my mending skin, tightening around my skull until my temples throbbed. Had this not happened before? Had I not been snared? What if my wife had escaped me after all? What if this wicked woman had played me for a fool like—

No!

She’d promised.

Had given me her vow!

My wife had come to care for me, had she not? At least some? Had I not tried to please her? Had put my doubt aside and trusted her? But I had trusted before. Had tried so hard to please, and what did I get in return? Betrayal. My child taken from me. A return to loneliness.

I hate you. Hate you so much, not even your brother is powerful enough to change that.

Somehow my legs gave out underneath me, and I sunk to the ground. No, none of this made sense. I just wanted to go home to my little one. My flesh was exhausted, my mind muddled from—

She had not returned…

“I thought you knew,” Yarin said. “After all, you can sense her flesh and bone.”

All I’d sensed for weeks was pain, bought with the assurance that Ada would be safe at the Pale Court. Assurance that she would wait for me. But she was not there. She was…

Where was my wife?

Closing my eyes, I disentangled my mind from the clank of stones shifting on the mountain and the flaps of wings on the breeze above. Instead, I listened to the beating flesh of hearts and theba-boom-ba-boomof their cadence. I searched its undertones for that one out-of-tune beat, that particularity that was my wife’s—

Ba-boom-boom.

An echo.

As though Ada’s heart called to me, my senses steered themselves northeast. Was she in Hemdale? And would that not make sense after—no. Not Hemdale. My mind traveled higher. Higher yet. All the while, my heart sunk deeper into the raging pit that was my stomach. A fortnight, and my wife wasn’t even a furlong closer to the Pale Court. Instead, she’d gone north.

Away from it.

My fingers itched.

Away from me?

My nostrils flared, faster the closer my senses came to her form. Her heart drummed its odd beat, her hand gently stroked around… something. Comfortable warmth encapsulated the skin of her arm, whereas I had boiled in fire for weeks. A smile curved her lips where mine had been charred away hundreds of times. Her chest was lighter than ever before, whereas mine had suffocated in the stench of my burnt flesh.

I sensed everything on her.

Everything but despair.

Everything but heartache.

Everything but the agony of something being amiss or the pulse-quickening dread of prey in hiding. My wife’s body felt lighter than it had since she’d come to the Pale Court, as though she’d unburdened herself of her shame, her guilt… unburdened herself of me. Her happiness overwhelmed my senses. How could she be this happy when she must have known of my dire circumstances? How?

A roar built at the back of my throat, my ribcage not large enough to contain this brutal pain, like a thousand fires burning within me. “Listen to her thoughts. I want to know what she’s thinkingright this moment.”

Yarin peeled his lips over his teeth and sucked in a hiss of air, tilting his head this way and that. “She is far away from here, brother, giving me nothing but fragments.”

“Tell me!”

“She is thinking of going farther north, where fewer people pray to Helfa,” he said, letting me choke on a spike of anger. “Something about a mule. And, um… Elric. It comes into her thoughts often.Elric. Elric.”

Farther. North. Mule.

Elric.

Joah. Oh, where is my beloved Joah?

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