Chapter Thirty-Seven

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Curdled love is the most bitter medicine.

—Caldienan proverb

No,” Lore said.

Even Gabe, still stricken with the revelation of her past and Anton’s vision, looked almost proud of her for that. Almost.

“No?” Anton said mildly.

“I won’t do it. I won’t raise them.” Her eyes swung from Anton to Bellegarde to Malcolm, looking for a sign that this would work, that her refusal would mean something. “I won’t raise them, I won’t control them. I won’t do anything for August, or for you.”

Anton sighed. “My dear,” he murmured, “I’m afraid it’s too late for that.”

The sun rising in the window beat heat onto the back of her neck, a burn mirrored by the moon-shaped scar on her palm. “What do you mean?”

The Priest Exalted sighed again, as if this pained him. He raised a brow, a teacher urging along a particularly reluctant student.

But Lore didn’t want his gentle prodding. She wanted fucking answers. “What do you mean, dammit, tell me what—”

“Lore.” Gabe’s voice was hoarse. Still, it made her own vanish.

Bastian lifted his head, staring daggers at the other man.

Gabe didn’t pay him any attention. He looked only at Lore. “Do you remember what happened with Horse? Why we had to go check on the body in the vaults, that night Bastian found us?”

Her brows drew together, unsure what to make of the sudden swerve in conversation. “Of course,” she said slowly. “I raised him, and then he—”

And he stayed raised. She raised him, and he stayed raised, just like the body of the child in the vault.

Anton said that the corpses from the villages were bound together—what happened to one, happened to all of them.

Lore lurched from her seat, the weight of the iron manacles pulling painfully at her shoulders. “I can fix it. I did once before.”

“You can’t this time,” Anton said gently. “It’s hundreds of bodies. Lore—even for you, channeling that much Mortem would be nearly impossible.”

“You have to let me try!” She didn’t want to cry here, not in front of them, but she was so angry and overwhelmed and crying was always hardest to fight off when she was overwhelmed, thinking of the catacombs beneath them, full of screaming corpses who’d been people, just people—

“So this is why you led us down there.” Bastian’s voice, calm and cold and cutting through her panic. His gaze was squared on Gabe. “This is why you came back and helped us. So that Lore would raise the dead, and there’d be no way to undo it.”

Gabe didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. The look on his face proved the accusation true.

Bastian sat back, casual as if the chair and chains were a gilded throne. “Why are we supposed to believe you aren’t working with my father, again? After you just made us start up his undead army?”

“Because August doesn’t control the army,” Anton said. “And if we’re successful, he never will.”

“August wouldn’t be able to control it, anyway,” she said. “He can’t channel Mortem.”

“Not yet,” Anton murmured.

In the distance, bells began to toll. First Day. Somewhere, sunrise prayers were beginning.

Gabe stood still as a statue in his place by the door, face stony, revealing nothing. Lore closed her eyes, turned her head. She didn’t want to look at him, but her eyes kept sliding his way, consistently drawn back into his gravity.

“And what, exactly, made you both decide you couldn’t let this happen?” Bastian asked. “My father has been a tyrant for years. He’s sucked this country dry, let nobles—let you—grow richer while everyone outside the Citadel walls has less and less every year. So you only care when his mind turns to war? When it becomes something that might affect you?”

“August cares nothing for Apollius.” Bellegarde’s expression wasn’t quite a sneer, but it was close. “He would attempt to change his role in history. To take a place that is not his, to try and avoid his own destiny. The Priest Exalted’s vision was clear. August cannot go to war with Kirythea. It would undermine everything.”

It wasn’t an answer, not really, but it gave closure just the same. This wasn’t about protecting Auverraine. This was about power, and about using religion to secure it.

Bastian’s sneer was much more obvious than Bellegarde’s. “None of this changes the fact that I don’t have any magic. I’m not the chosen.”

“It clings to you like ink on paper.” There was a note of reverence in Anton’s voice; he looked at his nephew with a peaceful expression, as if the sight of him soothed some ache in his heart. “Whether you believe it or not, Bastian, you are the one we’ve been waiting for. The one Apollius has blessed. I’m sorry I didn’t realize it from the beginning.”

Bastian twitched against his chair, like he would’ve tried to move away from his uncle if his chains hadn’t prevented it.

Lore’s head hurt. She thought of last night, when they’d stood in that atrium full of poison flowers, of the gold that wreathed his hands.

Bastian’s eyes flickered her way, like he was reliving the same memory. He took a shaky breath, steeled the line of his jaw. “Who knows about this?”

“Everyone, if they believe the Tracts.”

“You know what I mean, old man.” Something poison seethed beneath Bastian’s voice. Something right at the edge of violence.

Anton noticed, eyeing his nephew thoughtfully. “Only your father, and those of us in this room.” His peaceful expression darkened. “It’s another reason August wants you dead. He thinks he can substitute himself as Apollius’s chosen when you’re out of the way.”

“Transubstantiation,” Malcolm murmured quietly. “Overcoming the physical with the spiritual.”

The Priest Exalted nodded. “And once he has Spiritum, he can take Lore’s power and channel them both. Wield life and death like a sword in each hand.”

“You can’t have both.” Lore shook her head. “Mortem and Spiritum cancel each other out.”

“On the contrary,” Anton answered. “One strengthens the presence of the other. They can only be held simultaneously in certain circumstances”—his one seeing eye flickered between Bastian and Lore, unreadable—“but it can be done. On an eclipse, for example.”

Bastian in the catacombs, making her promise not to go to the eclipse ball, all because of a feeling. All of them knowing things they shouldn’t, knowledge slotting into place with no reasoning behind it.

“So it’s been you from the beginning.” Lore’s vision blurred, the iron ring that held her chains becoming a splash of gray against the floor. “You watching me since I came up from the catacombs, you organizing the raid so I would show myself. You bringing me here and planting clues that would lead me to raising the army, all to make the pieces of your vision fall into place. Stringing August along, too, until he decided he wanted a war.”

Anton nodded, smooth and unruffled.

So used to being used, all of them.

“And you?” Tears blurred her vision still; when she looked at Gabe, all she saw was a tall shadow, a shock of red-gold. “Staying with me, being with—being my friend?” She caught herself before she said something else, something more heated. “Was it all an act?”

“Gabriel was as unaware as you were,” Anton said. “When he came to me yesterday and told me your plan, he expected me to stop you. He was very reluctant to let you roam the catacombs.”

Lore dropped her eyes and concentrated very, very hard on the floor between her feet.

“I told him, then, what we needed to happen. What we’d been working toward. Our necromancer raising the dead, and my nephew’s powers being sharpened by yours, so he could step into his rightful place. Now, unfortunately, there is still the matter of the eclipse. Of your Consecration, Lore.”

“My Consecration?”

“Your power over Mortem will reach its height on your twenty-fourth birthday. Which happens to coincide with the eclipse.” Anton crossed his arms. “August plans to kill you both and take your power at the ball.”

“But how would he do that?” She directed her question to the floor; her head felt too heavy to lift. “Steal our power?”

The Priest Exalted’s scarred face was nearly pitying. “Killing you at the moment of totality, when the moon fully covers the sun. When the powers of life and death can be wielded together.” His eye glinted. “When chosen vessels are made manifest.”

“No.” Bastian and Gabe said it at the same time, their voices harmonizing against the marble walls. Lore’s head came up; the two men looked at each other with naked hatred, all that complicated feeling finally alchemized into something blade-sharp.

“He won’t kill Lore.” Gabe tore his gaze away from Bastian to look at Anton instead. “You said—”

“Peace, son.” Calm words, but Anton’s voice snapped. Gabe flinched. “Lore will be perfectly safe.”

“It still seems like the best course of action would be to hide her until the eclipse is over.” Gabe stepped up, a determined tilt to his chin; he expected another reason to flinch, and wanted to keep it from happening this time. He said nothing about Bastian’s safety. “Keep her here, or send her to her mothers.”

Mari and Val. Calling them her mothers, even now that he knew her true origins, felt like some kind of absolution.

But Anton shook his head before Gabe finished speaking. “It won’t work. We need things to continue as if we have no idea what August is planning, to keep him from getting suspicious.”

“So we go to this damn ball as if nothing has happened,” Bastian said, looking at Lore, “and we trust that you’ll keep my father from killing us and starting a war.”

Skepticism ran deep furrows in the words.

“You,” Anton murmured, “have no idea of all the things I’ve stopped your father from doing, Bastian. All the things I’ve shielded you from.”

It was enough to break his gaze away from Lore’s. The Sun Prince looked, for the first time since she’d met him, completely at a loss.

“Now then.” Anton turned to Gabe, as if the matter was concluded. “The ball is in two days. I suggest you all get plenty of rest before then, as it’s bound to be a long night. Lore, you stay in your rooms. Gabriel will take you there and keep guard.”

Keep her prisoner. Make sure she didn’t escape. Lore wished she had the energy to attempt it anyway, but she didn’t. The last few days had reached inside her and clawed everything out.

“Bastian,” Anton said, turning back around. “I think it best if you stay here.”

A bark of harsh laughter. “There it is.” Bastian sat back in his chair, shook his wrists so his chains clanked. “So I’m a prisoner now?”

“Think of it as being a guest,” Anton said.

Bastian didn’t respond, but his eyes glittered a cold, violent promise.

“I will keep you safe, nephew,” Anton murmured, almost reverently. “Everything will be revealed in time.”

Lore didn’t know what that meant. It looked like Bastian didn’t, either. She let Gabe unlock her chains, let him lead her silently to the door.

When she looked back, day had fully broken in the window behind Bastian, casting his features in shadow, limning their edges gold. It illuminated him like rays around a sun, like a halo.