Page 17 of The Thirteenth Child
I nodded, feeling suddenly happier.
I was leaving, but I would return.
“I’ll see you soon, Mama,” I said, tucking my arm through mygodfather’s. The shadowy cloak was the softest thing I’d ever felt, a cut of wool impossibly fine, impeccably smooth. “I…I love you.”
Mama stared at me with watery eyes and bobbed her head once, taking my affection in without response.
“You’ll want to be sure to collect all those coins, Madame,” my godfather told her, adjusting the quilt under his other arm. “After all, you’ve earned each and every one of them.”
Without hesitation or shame, Mama dropped to the ground and began scooping them into her dirty apron. They clinked with more merriment than seemed appropriate for the moment.
“Ready?” my godfather asked me.
I stared at Mama, willing her to look up at me, willing her to say something,anything.But she didn’t, too fixed on her foraging, lest any coin escape her count.
That warm rush of affection I’d felt just moments before began to harden inside my heart. It was tiny, just the size of a kernel for now, but as pointed as a barb.
I nodded. “Ready.”
Tucking me close to the swelling heft of his robes, my godfather, the god of death, snapped his fingers, and we disappeared into thevoid.
Chapter 6
I scrunched my eyes shutagainst the sudden chaos that wrapped around us. The air pushed and pulled with such force I was powerless to do anything but withstand the onslaught. It roared in my ears, a swirling whoosh of so much noise my head couldn’t take it all in, couldn’t discern what the sounds were, what was happening around me. I could only dig my fingers tightly into the sleeve of my godfather’s robe and pray to survive the journey.
But just as quickly as it began, the rushing mayhem stopped, and I nearly fell to my knees, tugged by a whirl of momentum.
The Dreaded End caught me, gripping my elbows as he sought to keep me upright.
“I told you it wouldn’t take any time at all,” he said, amusement coloring his voice.
When I finally dared to open my eyes, straightening from my protective hunch, I gasped. “Where…what is this place?”
We were in the center of a valley, surrounded on three sides by wickedly jagged cuts of stone rising so high they seemed to blendinto the black sky above. There was a bright sheen to the rocks, an almost translucent reflection, like panes of smoked glass.
There was a peculiar quality to the light. Above us was night, around us were dark rocks, yet I could see everything in crystalline detail, as if it were a bright summer day. I’d never known there were so many shades and shapes in the shadows.
But my godfather was almost indiscernible from the landscape, a black smudge on a black background. I could only make out the gleam of his eyes, shining with otherworldly luminescence, when lightning jumped from cloud to cloud overhead. They reminded me of the glowing eyes of cats that would often prowl the barn at night, searching for rodents to pounce upon and eat. The bobbing green lights had terrorized me when I’d been smaller and certain they were the eyes of tiny creeping cauchemars, scurrying about the barn on gnarled tiptoes to sit on my chest and drain the life from me while I slept.
“This is the Between.”
“Between,” I echoed, glancing about the darkened valley. “What exactly are we between?”
His lips raised again in that strange approximation of a smile. “Many things. Here and there.” He gestured from one rocky cliff to the opposite. “Life and death.” He pointed to two other mountain faces, as if these concepts were actual, physical locations. “Your world”—he nodded to the hillside behind me, then tipped his head toward the one behind him—“and mine.”
“That’s…is that where the gods live?” I squinted up at the summit, but low-lying storm clouds cut off any chance of glimpsing the peak.
“Some of them.”
He blinked at me.
I turned slowly, taking in the land around us. There were no trees, no shrubs or bushes or any forms of life beside us. The stark barrenness of it all made my chest ache.
The Gravia was a harsh forest to live in—full of bears larger than our horses, howling packs of wolves, mushrooms and berries and all manner of vegetation most beautiful but saturated with so many poisons that even a bite could kill you.
But here…
There was none of that here. No green growing things, no sparks of life.
