Chapter Thirty-Nine

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

To hold both darkness and light—to hold everything the world is made of—should be the burden of only one god. All powers will come into My hand, and then the world will know the hour of My return.

—The Book of Holy Law, Tract 856 (green text, spoken directly by Apollius to Gerard Arceneaux)

Twenty minutes later and ten until eight, Gabe opened the door again, just as Lore was dragging a comb through her hair. “Give me a second,” she said, twisting it into a messy braid and winding it around her head. The bag had held a handful of jet hairpins; she stuck them in the braid to hold it in place and only stabbed her scalp once.

He didn’t say anything, didn’t relax his pose. Gabe’s shoulders nearly took up the width of the doorframe, solid and straight. He’d evened out whatever apprehension had made them crooked before. A harsh sound; his throat clearing. “You look…”

She looked good, and she knew it. The gown fit perfectly, as if it’d been made for her, and the lack of ornamentation or jewelry suited it just fine. Lore resisted the urge to twirl. She’d done it a couple times before he opened the door, but as satisfying as the swirl of skirts had been, it felt somewhat morbid, what with an impending doom ritual. Instead, she ignored Gabe, nodded at her reflection in the spotted mirror, and approached the door. “Let’s get this over with.”

But he didn’t move. Gabe blocked the door, looking down at her with an expression that seemed to hover somewhere between determination and pain. She met his gaze, tried to keep her own expression from saying anything at all.

“I’m going to keep you safe,” he murmured. “You can trust that.”

“I can’t trust anything,” she said lightly, and there was no waver in it; she wouldn’t give him wavering. Lore nodded to the door. “We’re going to be late.”

He stood there a moment longer, looking for words and not finding them. Finally, Gabe turned and offered her his elbow, the same way he’d done when they were newly arrived and dressed like foxgloves, headed to Bastian’s masquerade with no idea what to expect.

They walked into the hall. They were silent.

In a twist of dark irony, the eclipse ball was taking place in the same atrium that Bastian and Lore had crossed through on their way to the catacombs. A long table stood at one end of the glass room, nearly covered by the leaves of poisonous flowers, though the plants stood far enough away so as not to be a danger to the wine fountain burbling in the table’s center. Silver chairs were placed next to the gleaming windows, clustered for ease of gossip. A string band was stationed in the corner, playing a lively song for the spinning dancers in the center of the floor. There were far more guests than Lore had expected, enough to make the large atrium feel crowded.

She recognized Cecelia in the corner, though she didn’t appear to have any poison tea at this particular party. Next to her, Dani, along with another blond woman who had to be her sister. Amelia, Lore remembered. The blond woman’s eyes tracked to Lore as soon as she entered the room, then darted away, but Dani didn’t avert her gaze even when Lore met it.

It hurt more than it should, to know that she’d been working for Anton from the beginning, that all her overtures of companionship had an ulterior motive. Unfair of Lore to judge for that, all things considered, but the hurt remained as she tore her eyes from the other woman. Briefly, she wondered if Alie was in on it, too, if all the tentative friendships she’d made here were predicated on eventual betrayal, an even shakier foundation than she’d assumed.

Lore made herself stop thinking of that. She didn’t have the time or the energy for it now.

August’s throne wasn’t helping the crowding issue. It wasn’t the huge one from downstairs—instead, a travel throne stood on a wooden dais at the front end of the atrium, wrought in woven strands of gold and silver. At the top, a sun and moon hovered over each other, held up by threads of precious metals so thin they were nearly invisible.

The Sainted King himself looked oddly stoic for a party. Stoic, and even worse than the last time Lore had seen him—his face gaunt, his eyes set back in darkened hollows, the skin beneath them bruised. He watched Gabe escort Lore inside but didn’t acknowledge them, his face drawn in thought.

He appeared to be the only major player here so far. There were no Presque Mort, no Anton, no Bellegarde, though Alie was among the spinning dancers. This seemed like any other party, and the normalcy made Lore’s dread go from a slink through her middle to a slow spiral in her chest.

Lore looked for Bastian, hoping he was here even if his captors weren’t. She didn’t see him. Nerves made her hand twitch—Gabe tightened his elbow around it, as good as a vise.

“You make a good jailer,” she murmured from the side of her mouth.

Something in him collapsed, just by a fraction, the steel in his frame buckling. “Lore, please—”

“Finally!”

On the floor, Alie broke away from her dance partner—Brigitte, who tipped Lore a wave before heading toward the wine table—and nearly ran to them, grinning widely. “I was wondering when you’d get here! The dancing is almost over!”

Even with the way Anton’s reveals had twisted everything, having Alie close still felt like a comfort. “I thought it didn’t start until eight?” Lore asked.

“The dinner starts at eight,” Alie corrected. “Or a bit after, I guess—I think the idea is to time it with the point of total eclipse.”

The reminder of totality—of what August planned to do when the moon covered the sun and dipped the world in darkness—made the dread in Lore’s gut go from a slow spiral to a sharp knot.

Alie fanned herself with her hand, drying the glowy sheen of sweat on her brow. “Why August is so adamant about making his select few guests eat in the dark, I have no idea.”

A select few guests. So those August thought were on his side, who either wouldn’t interfere with the ritual or, like Bellegarde, planned to betray their King and stop it.

Lore wasn’t sure which faction unsettled her more, really.

The band struck up again, this time at a slower pace—a waltz. “The last dance of the night.” Alie swallowed, then firmed her chin and looked up at Gabe, who’d been silent since she approached. “Would you dance with me, Gabe?”

He flinched; Lore felt it, her hand still imprisoned in the crook of his arm. “I’m afraid I…”

“He’d love to,” came a voice from behind them, low and familiar.

Bastian, thank the gods.

The Sun Prince looked none the worse for wear, other than a clinging tiredness around his golden-brown eyes. His clothing was dark and unadorned, a match for Lore’s gown, his only ornament the golden circlet on his head, this one devoid of garnets. He wore a smile, but his face was pale beneath it. The smile went bladed as he clapped a hand on Gabe’s shoulder, a little too hard to be companionable. “Duke Remaut is never one to leave ladies waiting.”

Something dark slithered over Gabe’s face, but he nodded. “I’d love to, Alie.”

It sounded genuine, even. Lore thought it probably was, despite everything.

His elbow unbent; her hand was free. Bastian took it immediately, his callused fingers closing around hers like a door against a cold night.

Alie pulled Gabe toward the dance floor; he looked back over his shoulder, brows drawn low over one blue eye, one leather patch. “Careful,” he murmured.

Neither Bastian nor Lore responded. Gabe melted into the crowd after Alie.

The music struck, and Bastian turned her into the dance, leading as effortlessly as he had the night of his masquerade. The smile had disappeared from his face the moment he no longer had to hold it for Alie’s benefit. “We have to run.”

She’d expected it. What she hadn’t expected was the swoop it put into her middle, the feeling of vertigo that the thought of running away brought her. Leaving would be as futile as trying to catch the ocean in your hands. Not just physically, but spiritually, like something anchored her here.

“We can’t,” she murmured. “As much as I don’t want to trust him, Anton is our only—”

“You don’t understand, Lore.” There was something desperate in Bastian’s tone, something that told her he felt the same pull to this night as she did and was desperately fighting against it. “It happened again. Another village.”

Only Bastian’s hand on her waist kept her from tripping over her hem. Lore’s fingers went cold. “When?”

“Last night.” He kept her close, spoke in her ear—to anyone watching, they’d look two minutes away from sneaking off to a secluded corner, but their faces were twin masks of fear. “A few of the Presque Mort went to collect the bodies—Anton put Malcolm in charge.”

Another village. She thought of her uncomfortable sleep, dark dreams she could only recall fragments of.

Lore shook her head, banishing the half-formed speculations. “Where is Anton, then?”

“I don’t know.” Bastian led her through a spin. “Preparing to stop August, I guess. It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to let my uncle be the only thing that stands between you and death. I can get you money. Food. Get you on a ship—”

“I can’t leave Dellaire. Mortem won’t let me.”

“Damn this.” He hissed it through his teeth, his grip on her waist so tight it almost hurt. “Damn this. Fine. I can find a place for you in the city—”

“Bastian.” She shook her head again, her nose grazing his neck. They didn’t have to stand this close, but it was a comfort, and neither of them moved away. “They’d just find me. You know that.”

Her road ended here, in the Citadel. Either dead from August’s ritual, or kept in a gilded cage, a tool to aid in controlling a mad and dying King. Lore knew it. Gabe knew it. Bastian did, too. Of the three of them, he was the most likely to try to change the unchangeable, the one most predisposed to thinking he could shift the world to suit him. But even Bastian had to realize it was pointless this time. Lore was caught.

But just because she was caught didn’t have to mean all of them were.

“I can’t leave,” Lore repeated, a murmur against his ear. “But you can.”

For the first time, Bastian stuttered in their dance; other courtiers swirled around them as if she and the Sun Prince were rocks in a stream, but he and Lore just stood still, her hands on his shoulders, his on her waist, his eyes boring down into hers.

“And leave you.” Gruff, not quite angry, but more than halfway there. “Leave you here.”

“Anton said he’d stop the ritual.” A thin defense, but it was all she had.

“Say he does. Then what?” People were starting to stare; Bastian swept her up into the dance again, the tight line of his jaw a stark contrast to fluid movement. “I leave, and you just stay a prisoner in the Citadel? You hope August doesn’t try to kill you again, that Anton doesn’t find a way to use you like a weapon? Those two will never come to any kind of peace, and you will always be in the middle of it.”

“Notice all of that has to do with me, not you.”

“Dammit, Lore, do you not get it?” He spun her with greater force than necessary, cinched his arm around her waist and jerked her close. “I told you in the catacombs. We’re in this together, somehow, you and me and Remaut, too, even though I fucking hate that. I can’t just abandon you here, even if I wanted to. Even if it’d save my hide.”

“If?” Half a laugh bubbled in her throat, but when it came out, it was indistinguishable from the beginning of a sob. “Abandoning me would absolutely save your hide.”

“And yet.” The dance ended; they stood motionless, still locked together. “You’re stuck with me. Whatever comes next.”

Whatever comes next.

She looked up. The sun was low in the sky.

Movement at the front of the atrium, behind August’s throne. Severin Bellegarde slipped through a small door, dressed just as dourly as usual. He stepped to the side, not attracting attention, and waited next to the potted poison flowers with his hands clasped behind his back.

August stood from his throne, as if Bellegarde’s entrance had been a sign. He raised his hands, the picture of a benevolent ruler. “Thank you for joining us,” he said, in tones clearly meant as a dismissal. “Tomorrow will mark the beginning of a triumphant new era for Auverraine. I can feel it.” He smiled. “Even the darkness can be wielded to strengthen the light.”

Polite applause from the gathered crowd. Then the courtiers gave their goodbyes, filtering out of the atrium in a bright parade. A few cast curious looks over their shoulders, eyeing those who remained, but none of them seemed to think it was anything strange. Lore resisted the urge to scream at them, to see if someone would turn and help, if they would notice something bad was happening and be inspired to stop it. But none of them would. The Sainted King had spoken, and his word was better than law.

Once they’d gone, only about twenty people were left. Lore recognized Bellegarde, Alie, and a few of the Presque Mort, who must’ve shown up at some point while she was arguing with Bastian. Not all of them. Some had been sent with Malcolm to inspect the village that had been wiped out yesterday. She couldn’t help wondering what metrics Anton had used to decide who would stay and who would go.

Dani and Amelia stood near the wine fountain with a handful of people Lore took to be their family. Any trace of friendship that had been on Dani’s face at that tea with Alie was gone; only the calculation was in place. She’d played her part admirably, sending Lore along to the next station in Anton’s bizarre plan.

Where was Anton?

August stood in front of his silver-and-gold throne, hands still upheld, rubies winking on his fingers. Silence blanketed the room. Lore wanted to curl into herself—none of the gathered courtiers were staring at her, all these coconspirators of either the Sainted King or the Priest Exalted, but they were aware of her. It made her head hurt, her stomach unsteady, eerily similar to the comedown after channeling too much Mortem.

A presence at her back. Gabe. He didn’t touch her, but his hand hovered over his dagger, and Bastian’s arm still looped over her hips. The three of them standing close, drawn together again.

August’s eyes narrowed at them, but only momentarily. Then his chin tilted up, addressing the sky through the window rather than his gathered faithful. “If you’re here,” he said, “you know the cusp on which we stand. Violence, yes, but for a purpose, and with an end—a war we are sure to win. For the glory of Auverraine. For the glory of Apollius, the Bleeding God. To pave the way for His return and make the world new, a rebirth from the ashes of the old.”

“May He return,” rose voices from around the room, among the scattered poison flowers. “May He return in blood and fire and His wounds be healed.”

It echoed the call and response of First Day prayers, shaded sinister.

Next to her father, Alie’s brow creased, confusion marring her slightly amused expression. At least she hadn’t been in on it. At least Lore had one friend.

Bastian’s arm lay heavy across her waist. Two friends.

And though Gabe had given them up to Anton, he still stood at her back. Maybe Lore had more people than she thought.

Cold comfort, while staring down a King who wanted her dead. While the man who was supposed to stop him was still nowhere to be seen.

August continued. “An eclipse is a time of great power, when the light and the dark join together. When the world becomes a portal of change, and things can be set on new paths.” His dark eyes shone as he leveled them at his son. “The world is off balance, since Apollius disappeared. Things do not always turn out as they are meant to be. And when that happens, it is up to us to change it.”

“Where the fuck is Anton?” Bastian hissed from the side of his mouth, the question directed at Gabe behind him. “This isn’t the time to start running late.”

“He’s coming.” But Gabe sounded just as scared as Bastian did. Lore’s palms slicked with cold sweat.

Across the atrium, Alie’s deep-green eyes flickered between August and her rapt father and Lore, trying to fit together the pieces of an unlikely puzzle. Worry carved lines in her brow; then determination smoothed them.

She made a tiny motion forward, as if to join Lore and Bastian and Gabe in the center of the room; Bellegarde’s hand shot out, closed tightly around her wrist, fish-belly-white against copper-brown. Alie was too far away to hear, but Lore saw the tiny sound of pain steal from her mouth.

Gabe did, too. He stiffened, the lines of his body straining toward Alie, caught in between.

August ignored them all. An unsound smile lit his pale face, head still tipped toward the heavens. “In a god’s hands, a curse can become a gift. In a god’s hands—one god, the true god—darkness and light can come together. Every power can come together, housed in one holy body. One god, one crown. One empire that spans the world, heals all its ills and puts it back to rights.”

As he spoke, more Presque Mort filed into the room, their dark clothes and scarred bodies scattering through poisonous blooms. They said nothing, just lined the edges of the atrium, blank-faced as soldiers sent to a battle’s front. The Priest Exalted was still nowhere to be seen.

Finally, August lowered his head, facing the small crowd instead of the sky. His expression was one of deep peace, deep fulfillment, someone seeing a plan come to fruition after years of careful coordination. Subtly, he nodded.

The Presque Mort moved, quick and silent. Bastian realized it first, turning with his teeth bared, a knife he’d hidden in his boot suddenly in his hand and catching a wicked gleam. Gabe took a moment longer, confusion writ large across his features—but when one of the Presque Mort put a rough hand on his shoulder, he spun, gripping his own dagger, though he didn’t draw it yet.

Lore had no weapon, but when the Presque Mort grabbed her, she struggled anyway, lashing out with her feet, clawing with her nails. It was useless, but she tried.

Anton had deserted them. He wasn’t here to stop the ritual.

Maybe he’d never planned on it in the first place. Maybe he’d only pretended, as a way to keep them docile, keep them from running. A gentle touch on the rabbit’s neck before you broke it.

She caught a glimpse of Gabe’s face. He hadn’t quite been able to make himself draw his dagger on his fellows. Through his snarl, he looked lost, stricken.

Across the room, Bellegarde held on to Alie’s hand, tight enough to leave a mark. The slighter woman had no chance of getting away, but still she strained forward, panic on her face. “Gabe!”

Something about his name in Alie’s mouth shook Gabe from his stasis. With an anguished sound, he finally drew his knife, slashed at one of the Presque Mort. They were on him in an instant, overwhelming him, hauling him away. He gave a wordless shout, one that almost resolved into Alie’s name but never quite made it there. A sickening thunk as a fist crashed into his temple; he slumped to the ground.

Someone grabbed Lore’s braid, fallen from its jet pins, and jerked it backward. She snarled, but the Presque Mort’s arms closed around her, kept her confined. It took two to do the same to Bastian; the Sun Prince thrashed, shouting curses that echoed through the slowly darkening atrium. One of the monks struck out with a dagger; the sharp edge sliced through Bastian’s eyebrow, sheeting blood and shocking him into enough stillness to be subdued, arms twisted behind his back.

The shadow of the moon moved closer to the low-hanging sun.

The Presque Mort who held Lore steered her toward August’s throne. The Sainted King stood motionless and aloof, hands behind his back. Another Presque Mort—the one from the leak, walking almost normally on a prosthetic foot—approached the dais and handed the King a dagger, cast in silver and scrolled over with gold. It matched his throne, a marriage of night and day, sun and moon.

“It was always meant to be this way,” he said quietly, pitched so only Lore and Bastian could hear. “Mortem and Spiritum, bound together, held by the same person. The age of many gods is past; now, there’s only room for one.”

“So you decided it should be you?” Lore’s voice was harsh, made hoarse by the way the Presque Mort held on to her hair, her neck stretched forward like an offering. She had to strain to see August, fingering his fine knife.

“Apollius decided it should be someone in our family.” August shrugged. “He chose incorrectly, when deciding on the specific person, but that can be easily remedied. When we are one—when I become His avatar, His vessel—He will understand.”

The Presque Mort hauled Bastian up on the platform as he spat and cursed, twisting in their grip like a cat. His flailing fists had connected with more than one of them—the Mort who held his arms had a rapidly blackening eye, and a bruise bloomed on another’s cheek as his hand tangled in Bastian’s hair and wrenched his head back, just like Lore’s. Bastian squinted through the blood from his head wound, chest heaving, teeth bared.

August sighed as he looked at his son, always the disappointed father.

In return, Bastian laughed, quick and sharp. “How fitting,” he snarled. “You always did have to do things as ostentatiously as possible.”

The King shook his head. A streak of sorrow crossed his face, quick and bright as a passing comment, made more terrible for how genuine it was. “It never could’ve been you,” he murmured. “No matter what Anton’s vision said.”

“Because I’m not pious enough?” There was no chance of escape; still, Bastian fought against the Mort holding him, muscles straining. “Would it be me if I’d killed my own people and farmed their bodies for an army?”

“I didn’t kill them, Bastian.” The sorrow on August’s face turned cold. “That’s one sin you can’t lay at my feet.”

His eyes turned to Lore, slow and deliberate.

Her throat closed. Her mind did, too, shuttering itself against some impossible realization. Mortem couldn’t do something like that. Mortem couldn’t kill an entire village and leave the bodies perfectly intact. No mere channeler could do such a thing.

No mere channeler.

“Now.” August raised his knife as the room slid closer and closer to darkness, closer and closer to the eclipse’s totality. “Let’s begin.”

Lore expected the knife to flash down to Bastian’s exposed throat; the way he thrashed made it clear he did, too. But the Presque Mort holding the Sun Prince didn’t pull his head back farther to make his neck an easier target. Instead he and the other monk wrestled one arm out from behind Bastian’s back, thrust it forward to present his palm to his father.

The scarred lines of half a sun gleamed red in the fading light.

The Presque Mort holding Lore did the same—twisted her hand out from behind her, the hand the Night Sisters had burned the moon into eleven years ago today. Lore tried to curl it into a fist, but the monk forced her fingers backward, almost to the breaking point.

It was quick. August carved Bastian’s hand first, fast and brutal, blood rushing from his son’s palm to patter on the floor, joining what still leaked from his head wound. Then Lore; she gritted her teeth against a scream as the dagger point dug into her flesh, sheared through life and heart lines to add to an old scar.

Half a sun, arcing up from the points of her crescent moon. She knew without looking that Bastian’s palm would match, a moon sliced beneath his sun, their two scars fit into one symbol. Life and death, light and dark.

Through the atrium window above, the sky slipped into totality, two celestial bodies momentarily mirroring their new scars before the moon covered the sun.

Dropping the bloody knife, August took their cut hands and pushed them together before him, palm-to-palm, wound-to-wound.

Lore felt like she’d been struck by lightning. Power arced from where her hand pressed against Bastian’s, shooting down every limb, a magnification of what she’d felt when he pulled the strands of Mortem from her in the catacombs. Life, a rush of blood, a torrent of clean air in labored lungs.

And Bastian felt the opposite. She saw it, and felt it, too, the connection she’d sensed all along made manifest as a bridge between them. Cold and stillness, emptying, traveling through him in a storm of death. Opposites, brought together, strengthening each other.

August’s mouth opened. He made a high, mad sound, not a laugh or a cry but something more animal than either. In the darkness of totality, the angles of his face were stark as a skull.

He dropped Lore and Bastian’s hands. Both of them slumped, consciousness hard to hold. Lore’s body felt like it was pulled in opposite directions, like it would shake itself apart at the seams. Dark and light and life and death, things that shouldn’t live in the same space, both held in her now.

“That’s quite enough.”

Anton. Finally.

The Priest Exalted stood at the other end of the atrium, wearing his white robe and the gleaming pendant. It swung as he walked, slowly, up the center of the floor.

August impassively watched his brother approach, toying with his knife. A smear of blood marred his doublet. “You finally deign to show up,” he said, hiding his wariness behind a haughty tone. “It’s your turn, now. Their powers are bound together, but only a priest of Apollius can strike the last blow and redirect the magic into the proper vessel.” The curve of his smile gleamed as merciless as his blade. “I know you’ve longed for this moment, when your power is needed instead of mine.”

Anton gave his brother a gentle, almost pitying smile. “And you know I cannot put our earthly desires over those of Apollius.”

Every courtier August had invited, everyone he’d thought was on his side, watched the Priest Exalted walk slowly toward him without raising a finger. The Presque Mort holding Lore and Bastian backed away as Anton came forward, bringing them off the throne’s dais and down to the floor. Lore’s knees buckled, so they dragged her. Bastian stepped in a pool of his own blood, tracking it in boot prints across the floor. Behind them, Gabe was still unconscious, sprawled against the wall in a boneless heap.

“But he isn’t worthy.” To August’s credit, he didn’t sound afraid. His voice remained clear and ringing, even as his illness-dulled eyes went wary. “We’ve discussed this, Anton. The boy cannot be the chosen, there has to have been some mistake. He isn’t ready, and time grows short.”

Anton climbed the stairs to stand before his brother. “But he will be,” he said. “He can be, with the proper training. The leadership he needs.”

“But he cannot hold this power.” Even now, when things were so clearly going sideways, August looked stronger than he had, the promise of magic invigorating his sickened body. He stood straight, his head tipped upward to gaze at the eclipse-darkened sky, as if he could see Apollius Himself somewhere in it. “It would be too much for him.”

They were of a height, the King and the Priest, near-perfect mirrors, differences marked only by their clothing and the scarred half of Anton’s face. So when Anton stared at him, their gazes were perfectly level. “Then someone else will have to guide him. To show him the way.”

“I can be that leadership.” For a moment, a sly smile tugged at August’s mouth; the sense of an opening, a way he could still spin this how he wanted. “I’m his father.”

“But you never acted like it,” Anton said.

When Anton plunged his own knife into August’s side, he barely had to lift his hand to do it.