Chapter Fourteen

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Secrets breed themselves.

—Caldienan proverb

During storm season in the Harbor District, the tide pounded on the shoreline like a drum. It beat against the rocky sand in an endless rhythm, smelling of salt and fish and rain, ceaseless and inescapable and nearly enough to drive you mad in those first few weeks, before it became part of the background noise.

That’s what Lore’s pulse felt like. An endless drumming in her ears, pushing at her throat. If she looked down, it was probably visible, throbbing against the tender skin of her wrists.

Horse—Claude—looked at her curiously. When his head tipped to the side, the gaping wound on his neck yawned open, the edges gummy with blood and pus. She could see the work of dead, grayish muscles beneath his cut skin, the chipped ends of ivory bone.

“Curious, isn’t it?” Bastian petted the horse’s muzzle. The beast nickered again, and the sound was awful, ragged and wrong. “He should be dead. But it’s like he doesn’t know that, and has refused to acquiesce to it.” The Sun Prince chuckled, though something sharper than amusement glittered in his eyes. “Maybe that’s the true secret to eternal life. Just refusing to die. Much easier than slowly turning yourself to stone.”

Before, Lore’s feelings had always been slightly hurt by the fact that Horse never seemed to hold her in high regard. He mostly ignored her, unless she brought apples. Now she was thankful that the creature didn’t act like he recognized her at all. Horse bent his gory head and flicked a fly off his haunch. The bones in his neck ground together.

This wasn’t how Mortem was supposed to work. Not for a normal channeler, even those who’d been strong enough to raise a body from the dead before they were all executed. Animal lives were less complicated, so they didn’t have to be given specific instructions to go about some semblance of living. Still, corpses were marionettes, only active while the channeler held the strings of their death. A fully independent one like this… it shouldn’t be possible.

But she wasn’t a normal channeler, was she?

Lore squashed the thought with physical force, her teeth digging into the meat of her tongue until she tasted copper.

Bastian pulled an apple from within his coat and offered it to Horse. Claude. The animal sniffed it, then shied away.

“He doesn’t eat,” Bastian said, tossing the apple to one of the stable boys, who bit into it with gusto. “Doesn’t drink, doesn’t eliminate. Doesn’t sleep, I don’t think. But other than that, he appears fully alive.”

Long lashes fluttered over cloudy eyes as Claude blinked.

Lore’s stomach cramped. She looked to Gabe, hoping he didn’t look as panicked as she felt. The Presque Mort seemed to be keeping his shock under wraps, though the skin around his mouth had gone pale. “An interesting specimen,” he said, and sounded almost nonchalant. “Where’d you find him?”

A half heartbeat of silence, Bastian’s lips twisting to the side. “Some guards I’m particularly friendly with found him wandering through the Southwest Ward,” he said finally. “They brought him here because they didn’t know what else to do with him. Must be some kind of rogue magic, don’t you think? Left over from one of those dead minor gods, something elemental. Earth, maybe. That power lingered longer than the others, and Braxtos’s body was found in Auverraine.”

It had been, in a cave in the eastern hill country. Parts of Braxtos were still in there, turned to stone, a rocky effigy in the vague shape of a man that backwoods farmers prayed to sometimes. But the excuse was bullshit. None of the magic of the minor gods was left.

It didn’t matter; Bastian was clearly lying, and he knew that she knew it. It was in the curl of his mouth, the slow blink of his dark-honey eyes. The way he reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind Lore’s ear as she stared at the dead horse she’d raised, face blank.

“Forgive me,” Bastian murmured. “I thought you’d find Claude diverting, but it appears your constitution wasn’t quite as hardy as I thought.”

In his stall, Horse nosed at a pile of hay. It made the skin around his cut neck gape. A gnat landed on an empty artery.

Lore shuddered.

“My apologies if you’ve taken a fright, Eldelore dear.” Bastian shrugged. “I thought you might find it interesting, is all.”

She didn’t speak. He was as good as shouting that he’d caught her, a trap laid at the very beginning of a trail, but Lore couldn’t pull any words up her pulse-pounded throat.

If this had been an assignment for Val, she’d be out in an hour. As soon as someone even hinted they knew she was a mole, she was gone, back to the warehouse on the docks, back to the safety of her mothers.

Safety. She winced. She’d never see that warehouse again. Even if she could get out of the Citadel, she wouldn’t go back to Val and Mari. It hurt too much.

A soft flurry of voices, Gabe’s and Bastian’s both, fluttering around her ears like moths around a candle wick. Genteel apologies that fooled no one, acceptances of such that could be carved from ice. Gabe’s hand on her elbow, leading her away, I think my cousin could do with some rest.

As they approached the entrance to the stables, Lore looked back over her shoulder. Horse stared at her, slashed neck rubbing against the wood of his stall door, grating against dead muscle and bone. Bastian stood next to the undead beast, watching.

He caught Lore’s eye. He smiled.

Gabe sat on the couch, hunched over folded arms. “He knows something.”

“He does.” Lore paced back and forth behind the couch, a fingernail clamped between her teeth. She’d shaken off her shock as Gabe led her through the forest, the gardens, the labyrinthine corridors of the Citadel to their suite. The shock was still there, and the fear, but she’d managed to smother it under a burning layer of fury. “Nothing like confirmation via dead horse.”

Disgust twisted Gabe’s face as he shook his head. “How in all the myriad hells is that horse still… still…”

“Walking?” Cold seized the back of her neck, as if someone had laid their freezing palm on her skin. “Acting like it’s alive?”

“It’s not someone else channeling,” Gabe said. “I’d be able to tell. We’d be able to tell. Wouldn’t we?”

Lore shrugged nervously, still pacing. He was right, as far as she knew—the few times she’d been around one of the Presque Mort when they were channeling Mortem, it’d felt like an uncomfortable pull in her veins, as if her blood had coagulated and her heart hadn’t caught up to the fact. It was hard to miss.

Her teeth broke through her nail, sending a wave of pain shooting up into her gums. She cursed lightly, frowned at the now-jagged nail. “Yes, we’d be able to feel it.”

Gabe’s doublet rasped over the brocade couch as he turned to look at her. “If it’s not anyone actively channeling,” he said slowly, “then it has to be something left over from when you did it.”

“No.” The denial came quick. “Mortem doesn’t work that way. It only—”

“I am well aware of how Mortem works.” He rose from the couch, towering over her even though she stood at least a yard away. There was something different in his tone, his stance. He looked like the Mort who’d cornered her in the alley, prepared for violence if necessary, not the man she’d started counting as something like a friend. “And I’m well aware that the way you use it has no precedent, not since they killed all the necromancers.” His one eye narrowed, fingers curling into a fist to hide the candle inked on his palm. “Even then, nothing dead could stay risen on its own.”

Lore narrowed her eyes to match his. Straightened, found the spine that belonged in the Harbor District, not the Citadel. “If you’re accusing me of something, Gabriel, say it plain. Don’t dance around it like you’re at another one of Bastian’s parties.”

Something about the other man’s name seemed to startle him. Shake him out of the Presque Mort and back into the man. A reminder of a common enemy, a common goal; a reminder that he and Lore couldn’t afford to be on opposite sides.

Gabe ran a weary hand over his face. “I’m not,” he said finally. Snorted. “You seem just as confused about how your magic works as the rest of us.”

“I’m glad that’s comforting to you.” Lore leaned against the wall, tipped her head back. The chandelier hanging in the center of the ceiling was dull with dust. “I find it rather terrifying, myself.”

He made a noise she couldn’t interpret. When she looked away from the chandelier, Gabe was sitting again, elbows on his knees. “That might be our explanation, then,” he said. “I guess this is just… part of it. Part of your power.”

“If it’s any consolation,” she said, sitting down next to him, “I would tell you how it worked if I knew.”

“If you happen to figure it out anytime soon, that would be most excellent.”

“Noted.”

They sat in the gloom for a moment before Lore’s mind circled back to their other problem, the potentially bigger one.

“If Bastian knows who I am,” Lore said, “then why not just tell me? Or kill me? Isn’t that what he’d do if he was really a Kirythean informant?”

Gabe rubbed at his eye patch. “Bastian gets spied on quite a lot. Just because he knows you’re spying doesn’t mean he knows why.”

“His big show of revealing the dead horse makes it seems like he has an idea,” Lore said. “Surely he’s smart enough to make the connection that his father bringing in a necromancer has something to do with the villages. And if it’s Kirythea that’s responsible, it’s not a leap to deduce that said necromancer is likely to expose him.”

“Maybe he’s just really excited about his pet dead horse and hasn’t made all the connections yet.”

“Or maybe he’s not working for Kirythea, no matter how much August and Anton think he is. They have no real reason to suspect him; at least, not one they’ve told us.”

“Anton wouldn’t be so insistent that you investigate Bastian if he didn’t have a good reason.” Gabe propped his elbow on the arm of the couch and his forehead in his hand. “And what other reason would he have? Just because they haven’t shared all the information with us doesn’t mean they don’t have it.”

Clearly, she wouldn’t get anywhere with Gabe. The man had been programmed to march to whatever tune Anton played. Her thoughts turned again to Bastian, to what he’d shared while they danced. My uncle has controlled his life for fourteen years.

With a sigh, Lore pressed the heels of her palms against her brow, rested her elbows on her knees, and changed the subject back to something that didn’t have the potential to become a fight. “How did he even get the horse? I know the story he told us was bullshit.”

“Maybe not,” Gabe said. “Bastian does have friends in the Citadel guard. Some lovers, too. They carted the body away from the Ward to be burned, but someone might’ve told him about it as an idle curiosity. He must’ve been intrigued enough to have them spirit it away, and the other guards just let it happen.”

“Truly stupendous minds in that garrison. Just the best of the best.” She dropped her hands, looked at him. “Should we tell them?”

Them: August and Anton. She didn’t have to spell it out. Silence strung bowstring-tight between her and Gabe, waiting to see who’d slice it.

If she was useless to the Arceneaux brothers as a spy, she’d be kept in a cell until they needed her to raise the dead. And once that was finished, she’d get a one-way ticket to the Burnt Isle mines.

“No,” Gabe said softly, as if he could read the thought in her head. “No, we don’t need to tell them. Not right now.”

“Thank you,” Lore murmured.

He gave one quick, firm nod.

A stack of envelopes sat on the table before the couch, gleaming bright in the gloomy glow of the fire. They’d been pushed beneath the door when she and Gabe reached the suite, and he’d gathered them up, tossed them all here. Lore picked up a stack and idly flipped through the fine paper.

Invitations. Teas, dinners, dances, even a night of card games—Bastian had declared them relevant by inviting them to his masque, and the court followed suit. Just the thought of so many social engagements made Lore’s head pound. “Surely we aren’t expected to attend all of these?”

“All, no. Some, yes.” Gabe continued his moody survey of the banked fire, pointedly not looking at the pile of envelopes. “And all of them aren’t for both of us, you’ll notice.”

“Is that why you’re in such a sparkling mood? Feeling left out?”

Another grunt. “The court is eager to talk with you. You’re a new commodity. Not as many of them want to socialize with a Presque Mort on hiatus.” He grinned, then, tossing it her way with a sarcastic edge. “A fact that I am thankful for, actually. You’ll be begging for holy orders after two teas.”

“Yes, especially since you make holy orders look so appealing.” She flipped through the envelopes, selecting one at random. The handwriting was thin and flourishing, addressed to them both, but only by first names. Lore and Gabe, with a tiny flower drawn after the last e. Her brow furrowed as she opened the flap, trying her best not to tear it. The paper felt more expensive than anything she’d worn before coming to the Citadel.

An invitation to a croquet game. From Alienor. “We should probably attend this one.”

Gabe reached for the invitation; Lore handed it over. His jaw went rigid, but he said nothing, handing it back with the gravitas of a judge handing down a sentencing.

Lore turned the silky paper over and over in her hands and fought between tactfulness and curiosity. Curiosity won. “How did you two… I mean, what…”

“Our parents agreed to the match when we were both barely untied from leading strings.” Gabe’s voice was low and monotone, his answer coming like something rehearsed. He stared at the window across from the couch without really seeing it. “We were childhood friends, as much as two children can be friends with an eventual marriage hanging over their heads. It ended when I was ten, for obvious reasons. That’s all there is to tell.”

A quick sliver of pain—she’d given herself a paper cut on the invitation’s edge. “Is she engaged to someone else now?”

“Not that I know of. Not that it matters.”

It seemed to matter, if the set of his shoulders was any indication. And it made something unpleasant prick in the center of her stomach, that it mattered to her if it mattered to him.

The connection she’d felt between them had faded, no longer a constant feeling of déjà vu. Faded, but not gone. There was still the disconcerting sense that she knew Gabe, that they were something more than tentative allies thrown together mere days ago.

It didn’t mean anything. When she first started spying on other poison runners, Mari had warned her against trusting feelings of quick closeness born from strange situations. The mind looked for connection in such cases, wanting something to cling to.

Lore placed the invitation on top of the table with all the other unopened envelopes. “Well. I hope you know how to play croquet, because I certainly don’t.”

“I’m rather rusty. We didn’t play croquet much at Northreach.”

“No, you were too busy staring dewy-eyed at paintings of Apollius and reading the Tracts until you could recite them in your sleep.”

“Precisely.” Gabe stood in a flurry of motion, stretching his arms over his head. “Are you as tired of this room as I am? I have a deep desire to be elsewhere.”

“Do you have an elsewhere where we won’t run into curious courtiers or ex-fiancées or asshole princes with dead horses?”

“As a matter of fact,” Gabe said, walking toward the door, “I do.”