98. Jaw

Had I been in my twenties, living a more pampered life as the wife of a nobleman, he would have caught up to me sooner.

But I had spent ten winters in Eccleston, too poor to keep a horse and walked everywhere I needed to go.

I had spent nearly four seasons here in Tintar, walking up and down stairs every day, traveling on horseback all over the farmlands, eating the hearty but lean diet of fish, vegetables and fruit with nuts and bread.

I was running through the keep and I was running with alacrity, grateful for those muscles in my thighs that I thought made my shape look too round.

I was grateful for those feet I had once thought unfeminine.

And I knew this keep, better than Thrush would know it.

I heard his boots on the stone floors behind me, but the sound was far enough away to know elusion was possible.

He called my name but I kept running, that thing, those fates, alive in my chest and compelling me towards the Shark King’s throne room, that hall of bones.

I did not know why that was my aim, but it was.

Do not slow, said Mother Earth.

He gains on you.

I hurtled through the antechamber where all of Tintar’s peerage had watched me, this time last spring, and my eight companions walk past, shepherded by Zinnia, not knowing our futures or into what we walked.

There were no guards at the white double doors, so tall and wide.

I knew opening them would be perhaps beyond my strength.

Knowing I had strained my back and shoulders, I managed to pry one apart from the other and wedged myself inside the opening, my backside and breasts mashed to me as I wriggled inside, like a fish desperate to flip itself back into water.

Unfortunately, the doors, wooden and swollen with the season’s new humidity, gave a sonorous squawk in protest, announcing my location to any who could hear.

Why was I here? I looked around wildly at the large shark skeletons draped in white sheets in protection from the mural’s paint.

Why did these governing forces guide me to this grotesque museum of Hinnom’s trophies? My true husband’s words came to me.

There is a door behind the shark throne.

Behind the large jaw.

The stairwell to the king’s chambers, I thought, the stairwell to his watchtower, that watchtower that opened up onto that larger section of bluff top and the terrace with its low wall.

I ran past the benches and desks where the lords of Tintar sat, past the two tables and chairs, each seating four on either side of the steps that led up to the throne that sat in the middle of that shark’s jaw that was the size of a house.

I stepped high, lifting my burning legs and teal skirts over the melon-sized teeth.

As Alric had said, there was a black wooden door, hidden behind the brilliant white of the shark bones before it.

Praying it was not locked, I opened it with success just as the doors at the other end of the throne room squawked again, opened by Thrush, calling my name.

Much like the stairwell next to our room, it went upward to a landing on each of the ten levels of the keep, the uppermost being the bluff top on which Hinnom’s watchtower sat.

My legs were on fire after the chase through the keep to the throne room and each stair was like a knife’s stab to the thighs and my rear end, but I kept pounding the steps beneath my feet, trying to put my screaming lungs out of my mind.

I knew I could, if I kept going, run along the bluffs until I reached a path that led to the beaches and perhaps escape him on the shoreline.

Though it seemed a farfetched idea, I reasoned that this had to be what the fates were leading me towards.

No guards were on any landing I passed.

When I heard a noise, I stopped.

Below me, the sound of a door shutting gave me a surge of terror.

I was only three flights above him.

I be here, said the goddess.

Keep going.

And I did.

I could run up seven more stories until I saw the sea, felt the moss and rock beneath my boots and then I could run the bluff to freedom.

Something inside me told me the bluffs were my way out even if I could not yet envision what that escape would look like.

Thrush yelled my name below me and I kept running upwards.

And then I heard speech in my ears, not the voice of my first husband or of my goddess, but of a young man’s, his words full of emotion and determination.

My left hand will deliver them into my grasp and render my love inescapable and my right hand will command them, showing my lover and this whole godsdamned country who I am.

Who could reject the master of the stone drakes?

Why did Gareth Pope’s ghost whisper in my ears as I ran for my life? What does this mean? I asked my goddess.

Do not stop.

Listen, but do not stop.

I reached the top landing in a blur of physical irritation and breathlessness.

Two guards in Tintarian black stood on either side of the watchtower doors, at attention, as I exploded from the stairwell, having heard my graceless approach.

“You cannot be up here—” one said.

Over him, I gasped, “I am Edith Angler, wife of Captain Alric Angler.

Of the Procurers and you will let me pass through those doors.”

The two men looked at each other.

I took that split second and lurched for the handles, wrenching them open, stumbling out into the blinding sunlight of the stone courtyard.

Hand over my eyes, I blinked, adjusting them to the luminous mid-morning after a dimly lit stairwell.