Broken Lords: Book Two of the Broken Mirrors Duology by A. F. Dery

Author:A. F. Dery [Dery, A. F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: A.F. Dery
Published: 2014-12-08T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Malachi thought he must be in hell. Hell, as he understood the term, was a place of unending darkness and misery, the pit into which souls that the gods had forsaken were cast to endure torment without limit and outside time, and this certainly seemed an apt enough description for what he was experiencing. He felt he could barely breathe for the darkness oppressing him now, that there was simply no room left in his body for air when the suffocating clench of despair had him in its ruthless grip.

And if he was in hell, he couldn’t imagine where his Maggie was. She lay screaming and writhing on the bed in their room while the High Lord’s personal physician examined her with capable hands and a brisk manner. The Mirror- that damned, worthless Mirror!- lay like a corpse across a couch that was pushed against the wall opposite the bed. She had not stirred, to Malachi’s notice, since one of the guards had carried her in.

The journey to the High Lord’s Court had been grueling, but uneventful. The Mirror had looked progressively sicker with each passing day, and there had been no escaping her. She claimed it was too difficult for her to help Margaret from as far away as another carriage, so she had occupied the same one as he and Margaret, affording them no privacy, her increasing sickliness grating on them both.

And then, of course, they had been obliged to bring her along even to meet with the High Lord. There had been one private meeting already, and the High Lord’s ire, even veiled as it was with his typical, almost exaggerated sense of courtesy, had been plain. Malachi had not been looking forward in the least to the next such, inevitable meeting, and the subject of Eladria and his earlier, rash letter about the same had not even arisen yet.

Now those worries were miles from his mind, miles and years and every conceivable measurement of space and time. All there was now was Margaret, screaming like he had never heard a human being scream, then slumping in evident, pale faced exhaustion until the next rush came and took her away to some mysterious nightmare-place that Malachi was incapable of breaching.

He knew that women knew pain, and that babies came with it, but nothing had prepared him for this. His hands shook and sweat dripped down his back. He would have done anything to make it stop, anything short of making Margaret stop, but he was utterly powerless and felt it keenly. He wavered like a madman between wanting to do violence to something and wanting to do violence to himself. If he could have wept and keened with his wife, he would have.

“It’s too early, Edmund, it’s too early,” she was weeping now, clinging to his hand. Her fingers felt clammy and weak.

“It will be all right, Maggie,” he tried to say soothingly, but his voice came out choked.

“It is early,” the physician agreed as he

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