Chapter Seventeen

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Nothing binds people together better than desperation.

—Eroccan proverb

Gabe was still awake when Lore burst through her bedroom door, though he’d moved out of the dusty study and was now staring into the fireplace with his usual pensive expression. He’d taken off his shirt and piled his bedding in front of the door, and the flame-light played over the muscled planes of his chest.

He whipped around as her door banged open, brows knit. “Lore?”

She cast a look at the clock on the wall—nearly midnight. Hopefully everyone would be either sleeping or involved in other distracting endeavors. “I have to go back to the vaults.”

“You what?”

Lore shoved her feet into her boots and tied a quick knot in the sash of the dressing gown she’d found in the wardrobe. Perfectly tailored, once again, and a pretty blush-pink that she never would’ve chosen for herself. “The body I raised from the dead today—I channeled Mortem with him the same way I did with the horse.”

She didn’t pause as she spoke, rushing to her boots and shoving her feet into them, moving as quickly as she could. Behind her, Gabe stood slowly from the couch. “I don’t understand the problem.”

“The problem,” Lore said, sitting down hard on the ground to tie her laces, “is that he might wake up, just like the horse did.”

Cedric. Gods, had it happened to Cedric, too? They’d burned him after Lore snapped the strings of Mortem animating his corpse; had he been awake for that, his mouth an open maw like the child in the vaults, a scream with no sound?

Lore didn’t realize she was hyperventilating until Gabe’s hand landed on her shoulder, a calming weight. She fought to control her breathing as the shirtless Mort knelt in front of her, brow creased in concern.

“But you have to tell a human corpse what to do, right?” he murmured. “It’s not like an animal; he won’t get up and walk around. We can go in the morning.”

“No.” She shook her head. When her eyes closed, she saw Cedric, his body a horror, his eyes open. “No, I have to try and fix it now, I can’t leave him like that. I can’t.”

Gabe looked at her, his one eye searching both of hers. Then he nodded, once.

Lore made for the door, not giving him time to change his mind. Gabe cursed at her speed, grabbing a shirt and pulling it over his head, hopping on one foot to tie his boots. “Slow down, Lore, it’s not—”

“I have to fix it before August or Anton sees.” She wasn’t sure why. But she knew, with that same deep, primordial sense that told her how to raise the dead, that neither the King nor the Priest should see what her magic could really do. Horse was one thing, humans another.

And even though the body on the slab would never be truly alive again—never truly conscious—the thought of leaving him alone in the dark turned her stomach.

“No one should’ve been in the vaults since you and August and Anton left, other than the Sacred Guard,” Gabe said, nearly toppling over as he tied his second boot. He hadn’t quite managed to pull his shirt all the way down in his attempt to catch up with her, and the hem was caught high on his rib, showing a distracting amount of abdomen. “They aren’t a place you visit casually. If he woke up, no one will have seen.”

Relief flooded her, relief and warmth. There was no guarantee Gabe wouldn’t tell Anton about this eventually, but for now, he was choosing her. She’d take it.

They went to the tiny staircase at the back of the turret, rather than the wide steps toward the front. The coils of the stairs were tight enough to make seeing more than a foot or so in front of you impossible, and Lore kept craning her head to look at Gabe, hands on the railings to keep from falling over. “Will the guard let us by?”

“It changes at midnight, so if we hurry, we can get there while the entrance is unmanned.”

“Good. So we’ll head to—”

Lore was interrupted when her shoulder smacked into something that felt disconcertingly like another human.

“Hmph,” said the other human.

Slowly, she turned around.

Alienor’s father frowned at her.

Standing on lower stairs put him right at eye level with Lore, but Lord Bellegarde still managed to look like he was looming, peering down a straight nose with eyes a near-acidic shade of green, his dark hair caught in an orderly queue at the back of his neck. He smiled, but it was as thin as the rest of him, and did nothing to warm his eyes.

Lore caught hold of herself, dipped into as passable a curtsy as she could muster in a dressing gown. Behind her, Gabe was stiff as a board. “Pardon me, I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

“I take no offense.” Bellegarde inclined his head to her, then his eyes darted to Gabe. If the sight of them both in states of dishevelment and running down the back stairs threw him off, he did a remarkable job of hiding it. “Gabriel Remaut. I never thought I’d see you in court again.”

His voice was cold enough to raise goose bumps. Lore’s brow knit, and she fought the anxious urge to chew a fingernail.

The quick spasm of a grimace across Gabe’s face showed he noticed the chill, but he didn’t react in kind. He nodded smoothly, as if he were in a ballroom rather than half dressed in a servant’s stairway at midnight. “Lord Bellegarde. I must admit, I never thought I’d be back, either.”

“Fourteen years, this past spring.” Alienor’s father clasped his hands behind his back. Despite the late hour and the odd location, he was still dressed in Citadel finery—white shirt with billowing sleeves beneath a doublet of cream silk and cloth-of-gold, breeches to match. Where Gabe and Bastian both wore boots, though, Bellegarde wore small heeled shoes in the same white as his shirt. They were not flattering, but even ridiculous footwear didn’t lessen the gravitas of his presence.

“Fourteen years,” the lord continued, “and only now have we undone all the damage your family caused. The Bellegarde reputation was besmirched along with yours, though you and Alienor had said no wedding vows.”

Lore looked from Bellegarde to Gabriel, fingers tightly wound in the long tie of her dressing gown. Good thing, too, because she felt a strong urge to smack Bellegarde in the mouth.

But Gabriel weathered the low blow with nothing but a flicker of his eye to the floor. “I know,” he said simply, low and earnest. “Please believe me, Severin, I would never have knowingly ensnared Alie in my family’s troubles. I knew nothing of what my father planned with Kirythea.”

Using Bellegarde and his daughter’s given names was a gamble, and one that didn’t pay off—Bellegarde’s eyes went flinty. “And yet you were present in Balgia when the betrayal occurred, when there was no reason for you to have left the court. You can see how such a thing invites ideas of collusion.”

Gabe’s jaw was a straight line of hard-won restraint. “There were extenuating circumstances,” he said stiffly. “I was sent back to Balgia, I didn’t choose to go.”

That didn’t seem to deter Bellegarde. “And when Anton brought you back, you still did nothing to call off the betrothal, leaving it to our house to correct the paperwork—”

“He was ten.” Lore straightened, trapped between the two of them on the stairs, glaring at Bellegarde with every bit of her considerable contempt. “He was a child.”

She stood close enough to smell his aftershave, but Bellegarde looked at her like he’d forgotten she was there. “And now this,” he said with a humorless chuckle, mirroring all that contempt right back. “Leaving the defense of your honor to a country cousin I wasn’t even aware existed. Truly, Gabriel, bravo.”

Lore’s fingers tightened to a fist. Gabe’s hand clapped around it like a shackle. “Is there something you wanted, Severin?” He should’ve sounded angry, but Gabe just sounded tired. “It’s late, and I assume if you were coming up the southeast turret, you had a particular item you wanted to discuss with me. Your seasonal accommodations are no doubt somewhere more fashionable, and I doubt you’d lower yourself to speaking to anyone else relegated to the far corners of the Citadel.”

Lore glanced at Gabe from the corner of her eye, but the monk didn’t look suspicious. It seemed as though it was perfectly in character for Severin Bellegarde to come to one’s room for the sole purpose of an upbraiding at nearly midnight.

Nearly midnight. Bleeding God in a bandage, they had to go.

Bellegarde’s face gave away nothing, but his hand twitched by his side. Lore looked down just as the man crumpled what looked like a small piece of paper into his palm.

“I merely wanted to welcome you back to court, Gabriel.” There was nothing like welcome in Bellegarde’s tone. “You and your… cousin.”

“Rather late for a social call,” Lore said.

But Bellegarde just shrugged. “The hours kept in the Court of the Citadel are not the hours kept outside. And while I wanted to be polite, I admit that calling on you came dead last on my list of daily priorities.”

Gabe heaved a weary sigh. “Thank you for the welcome, my lord. I regret to tell you that my cousin and I are running late—”

“Yes, I gathered when I interrupted your mad sprint down the stairs.” Bellegarde narrowed his eyes at Lore’s dressing gown. “Where might you be going with your cousin half dressed?”

“A party, of course.” Lore answered before Gabe could try, mostly because she saw the panicked look on his face that said he was completely at a loss. “One I don’t plan to return from until at least dawn. Might as well be comfortable.”

Bellegarde raised an eyebrow. “It appears you fit into the court just fine.”

That, apparently, was his goodbye. After an awkward moment of maneuvering, Bellegarde passed them on the stairs, continuing up as Lore and Gabe climbed down. Lore frowned after him. So he was doing something other than trying to find Gabe. That, or the idea of walking all the way to the main floor in their company was not a pleasant one.

The feeling was very mutual.

Right before Bellegarde took a turn of the stairs that would take him out of sight, he looked down at her again. His mouth flattened, and his hand curled into a tighter fist by his side. The hand holding that small piece of paper.

Neither she nor Gabe spoke until they reached the bottom of the servants’ staircase, emerging into the scarlet-carpeted corridor that marked the first floor of the turret, branching off the Citadel’s front hall.

“What a horrible man,” Lore muttered, starting down the corridor with more stomp in her step than before. “What a vicious, small little man.”

“Don’t think too ill of him.”

Lore’s eyebrows shot high.

“Bellegarde has no love for the Presque Mort. He thinks that channeling Mortem is an unforgivable sin, that there must be another solution to the problem and we should wait for Apollius to show us what it is.” Gabe shrugged, following her down the hall at a quick pace with significantly less stomp than her own. “If I’d taken a prison sentence instead of Mort vows, he’d have no problem with me. Or less of one, at least. Honestly, he probably would’ve preferred if I’d just died from my wounds in the first place. Then dissolving my betrothal would’ve been less paperwork.”

Lore’s scowl deepened. “And yet I saw him in the North Sanctuary this morning. Which makes him not only small and vicious, but also a hypocrite. I will continue to think very ill of him, thank you.”

“For all his issues with the Church, he’d never miss prayers,” Gabe said. “That would be an insult to Apollius.” They reached the wide, shallow staircase at the end of the hall and went quickly down, booted feet making little noise on the thick carpet, their voices dropped to just above whispers. “Bellegarde doesn’t like that the Church is separate from the crown, doesn’t like that they’re two different entities instead of one governing body. He thinks the Church should be under the King’s rule, since he’s Apollius’s chosen.”

“A theocrat. Delightful.” Lore rolled her eyes. “I can’t imagine that makes him and Anton the best of friends.”

“They mostly just avoid each other.” Clearly just talking about someone disagreeing with Anton made Gabe uncomfortable; he didn’t look at her, and shifted his shoulders. “Bellegarde and his ilk are few, and more interested in looking like they smelled a fresh pile of shit than actually trying to change anything. Their identity is in being upset; if they actually got what they claim to want, I don’t think they’d know what to do with themselves.”

“Does Alie share his views?” Lore fervently hoped not.

“Not at all.” Gabe shook his head. “Truth be told, I don’t think Alie spends much time pondering religion or politics.”

“What a life to lead,” Lore said wistfully.

They stopped in an atrium that branched off into multiple hallways, chandeliers sparkling overhead, points of light against the shadows cast by the lone lit sconce. Gabe eyed the hallways, seemingly at a loss. “You know how to get to the vaults, right?”

“You mean you don’t?”

“Not everyone gets to go to the vaults, Lore.” The slight irritation in his voice had an edge that was almost anger. “Only the wealthiest, the most privileged.”

“Or those of us conscripted into necromancy.” She didn’t like it when he talked to her like she was part of the things he hated. When he seemed to forget that she wasn’t here of her own will any more than he was.

He glanced at her, sighed.

“Thankfully for your poor, privilege-deprived ass,” Lore said, stepping in front of him, “I have an excellent memory.”

Lore led him through hallways that felt more like warrens, the gilt and opulence that lit them in the daytime grown ominous in shadows. They encountered no one, though they heard voices occasionally, laughter and shouting made shivery and spectral.

At least, they encountered no one until they rounded the last corner. There, right in front of the door to the tiny corridor with the vaults at its end, a bloodcoat stood leaning against the wall, bayonet sharp and shining. He yawned, the sound echoing in so much empty space.

With a muttered curse, Lore backtracked, pressing her spine against an oil painting of some very drunk-looking shepherds. “I thought there was just the Sacred Guard in the tunnel, not one out here.”

“A tactical mind for the ages,” Gabe muttered.

“Make fun of me after you take care of it.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re the muscle and I’m the brains.”

Gabe shot her a look that said he might debate that point, but then peeled off the wall, started soundlessly forward. For such a large man, he moved like fog, keeping to the shadows.

He was nice to watch, she couldn’t deny that. Lore tilted her head for a better angle as Gabe came up behind the bloodcoat. If they taught this kind of stealth up at the Northreach monastery, she could think of a few folks in Val’s crew who might benefit from a stint there.

Gods. She had to stop thinking of Val.

The bloodcoat didn’t notice Gabe until he was on him. One hand over the guard’s mouth, another pressing at a specific spot on the back of his neck. Gabe lowered the guard slowly to the floor, propping him against the wall, careful not to catch anything on the sharp end of his bayonet. “He’ll think he fell asleep,” he murmured. “We have maybe half an hour. Will that be enough?”

“Let’s hope.” Lore tiptoed around the sleeping guard and pushed open the door into the narrow hallway beyond, Gabe following swift and silent.

The hall was lit only by candlelight; darkness lay deep in the corners. A taper burned in every alcove, slashing harsh light across Apollius’s face, making the garnets in His hands glitter.

Briefly, Lore worried that the door to the tunnel would be locked, but it opened soundlessly when she pushed it—she guessed a lock was moot when you had guards. And if Gabe was any indication, only a few people knew how to get to the vaults, anyway.

The short stairs into the tunnel were black as pitch. Lore hesitated on the threshold, remembering the hallway, the Sacred Guard standing at the end. She looked back over her shoulder at Gabe. “The guard… the way this is set up, I don’t think there’s a way to sneak up on him.”

“You’re underestimating my sneaking.”

“Really, Gabe, maybe I should just try to get back here in the morning. I don’t want you to get hurt—”

“Oh, yes, spare all of us that,” a voice said from behind them.

Lore and Gabe froze, eyes wide. The moment right before the trap’s teeth closed on the rabbit’s leg.

“Thank the gods I’m here.” Bastian stepped out of the shadows with a lazy smile on his face. “Otherwise, you’d be shit out of luck.”