Page 38 of Reap & Sow
Eda pursed her lips. Fairly usual terms, but he’d certainly left things open to interpretation. What did he consider “grievous bodily harm”? Throwing her in a river probably didn’t count.
A small, traitorous part of her itched to tear the parchment in two. To undo this awful day and get her years back. But Eda knew it wouldn’t tear even if she tried. Nor burn or melt or flake apart in water—
“Keep it, if you wish,” Kit said, as though reading her mind, “but don’t bother trying to destroy it or throw it away. It will always find its way back to me.”
“I wouldn’t. I signed it for a reason.”
“So you keep saying.”
Eda bit her cheek. “I thought getting inside the keep might be easy for you. You’re a shape-shifter, so…” She trailed off, unsure if she were giving offense.
“Find me lacking, darling?”
She winced. “No. I just—I never really considered how demons went about fulfilling Pacts. I assumed you were all so powerful that nothing was beyond your ability.”
“That may have been true once. My people have ever been gifted in magicks, but our mastery was once far greater. Over the centuries, we became…lesser.”
“Why? How?”
“No one knows for certain. Many blame you humans for it.”
Eda had heard this theory: The supposition that whatever paltry magic human alchemists might wield came from the Otherworld, bleeding through like sap between bark. An idea denounced by the Faithhood as heretical lunacy, of course, but no less intriguing. “Well, we’re not taking your magic intentionally. That’s unfair!”
Kit studied her face as if she were an interesting painting. “You are peculiar.”
“How so?”
“You watched me rip out a man’s throat and you’re not pissing yourself talking to me, for one.”
She despised how casually he spoke of it, as if it didn’t matter. “Perhaps I’m saving the piss for the next time you pick me up without my permission.” She hadn’t meant to be so crass, but Eda was still annoyed about that death drop from the window.
Kit only grinned.
“I suppose you enjoyed it,” she bit out, “killing those men. Certainly didn’t seem to bother you.”
The grin slipped. “Should I mourn those who would see my destruction?”
“Should you revel in theirs?”
His eyes were hard. “Where I come from, blood falls easy as rain. So perhaps the shedding of it fails to distress me. That does not mean I revel.”
Eda looked away, unwilling to linger on the topic. “Was it true, what you said about the Lordfather? That he was a—”
“It matters not. Fact and belief rarely have much in common. With enough time, everything becomes mere story. Your Faithhood simply rewrote Dominor’s to their liking.”
Eda wondered at that. How much else of human culture was falsely interpreted, tangled up with theirs? The Holy Codex taught that the Lordfather—Dominor, she supposed—knew that humankind would remain base and lawless as animals in the care of his fellow gods and so banished them to the Otherworld. There they became twisted and corrupt: the first demons. She’d never put much stock in it.
Yet to hear her doubts made manifest, to think that the ancient pantheon had always been demons, come from the Otherworld…Eda was shaken by how much sense it made. Moreso than anything she’d read in scriptures. Of course, they would have been worshipped as gods. What was a Pact but a prayer answered? Then the blooming Faithhood swept in like a scourging fire, eradicating the pagans and their gods before crafting a new divine icon from the ashes.
And if the Lordfather was not real, then no omnipotent being held the Shaws in divine judgment.
A trickle of relief burbled through her like a thawing stream, but she felt little better. Eda and her brothers had lured many into Mr. Night’s clutches, and she was rather vexed to realize this still bothered her. Faith evidently had nothing to do with one’s morals. It would be so much easier, she thought, not to have any.
A pop suddenly rent the air. Eda was torn from her ruminations when a small ugly creature materialized in front of her.
She jerked back with a cry.
“Careful, Tripp. You’ll give the woman heart spasms.”
