★ Wattpad Featured: #FreshReads #InHerWords2022
❝You're not taking me to bed. Ever.❞
❝...Who said it had to be on a bed?❞
A disgraced immortal and a legendary folk hero are desperate to locate a blacksmith who can break the enchanted handcuffs that...
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Waxpaper singed Sunkanmi's fingertips, but still she persisted.
Book after book, tome after tome. There were no windows in the Goldsmith's cavern, so she marked the days with meals. Breakfast, supper, dinner. Restless sleep. Then she began it all over again, feverish and breathless.
Xosa worked right alongside her, tireless in his devotion to the task.
With their everlasting freedom hanging in the balance, they would either uncover a magical failsafe among the Goldsmith's manuals or submit themselves to the mortifying debasement of confession.
If you asked them, this was no choice at all.
"Nothing here," Xosa shelved another dashed hope. Steam hissed from the wooden pipes decorating the cavern in swollen black arms.
"Keep looking," Sunkanmi climbed the rolling ladder and hauled another armful of manuals down to their reading table. Candlelight kissed their wrinkled faces and licked their tired eyes.
Breaking the monotony, the Goldsmith served them bowls of pear soup picked fresh from their midnight garden. The white, sun-starved pears smelled strongly of roses and mildly of nightshade, which initially gave Sunkanmi pause. Her hesitation quickly morphed into delirious hunger once she realized how a good cook the Goldsmith was.
That night, as with every night, they ladled the milky stew into their earthenware bowls and Xosa knocked his back with his eyes closed.
"Did you even taste it?" Sunkanmi's spoon hadn't yet broken the steaming surface. Surely the soup burned Xosa's throat on the way down?
"Here, you lout." The Goldsmith poured more pear broth into Xosa's bowl, which Death downed just as fast. "I made extra, knowing your appetite."
Xosa leaped from the clay dining table and made way for the library, leaving Sunkanmi in the dust.
"No time to waste," he mumbled like a man possessed. Somewhere in those books held the key to their release and he refused to die chained to her wrist. Xosa couldn't bear the thought. Even considering it ruined him. Haunted his waking hours.
