Until the Mountains Fall by Connilyn Cossette

Author:Connilyn Cossette
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biblical Fiction;Christian fiction;FIC042030;FIC042040;FIC027140
ISBN: 9781493418756
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

twenty-four

Malakhi

“A son?” Baz repeated. He gaped at me, slack-jawed. The stick he’d been whittling with his knife dangled loosely in his big palm. “Gidal had a son?”

He looked nearly as stupefied as I had been by the news. Baz had been a part of our family before I’d even been born, and although I knew he held all of us in deep affection, there was something special about Gidal, something otherworldly about his connection to creation and, through it, to Yahweh. Baz had been right when he said it was as if my brother had not been made for this world. The sheen in eyes he quickly averted spoke to just how affected he was by the news.

“He is the very image,” I said, thinking back to the open curiosity in the boy’s gaze, and my chest ached at the reminder that he saw me as a stranger instead of his uncle.

Walking away today when I had so many questions had been nearly impossible. Rivkah was no fool; she could have found a way to return home or to send a message to her family, no matter what Nessa had chosen. Something else had kept her here and driven her to such desperate measures. I’d wanted nothing more than to chase her into that villa and demand answers, demand she tell me why she’d done this, why she’d hidden Amit from us, and what had drained the life from her amber eyes.

If she’d not been so adamant that I not be seen by her master, I would likely have done so. But I would not risk putting her and Amit in more of a precarious situation than they were already in, so I’d stayed in her tiny, sparse chamber until she’d disappeared into the villa before slipping out.

Even as I’d walked away, wrapped in a swirl of anger and surprise and frustration, I could not help but ponder how she’d sat on her bed with shoulders bowed and eyes on the floor and the dispassionate way she’d spoken to me, as if we were barely acquainted. As if we’d not dug in the dirt together as children and played chase around the goats in the fields. As if we’d not squabbled and poked fun and tattled on each other hundreds of times. As if she’d not been married to my brother. As if we were not still legally betrothed.

“What do you plan to do?” Baz asked, startling me from my silent revelation.

“Take them back, of course.” My parents would be beside themselves with joy to hold the child in their arms, regardless of the devastation of discovering he’d been kept from them. And based on my interaction with Amitai on the roof, he would be thrilled to have his daughter back.

“I thought you said she was indentured.”

I ran my fingers through my hair with a snarl, thinking of Rivkah signing her life into another man’s hands. “She is.”

“Then we smuggle them out,” said Baz, as always ready to plow into battle.

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