The Hemlock Queen, page 29
“You’d better get used to it,” Gabe said darkly, with no trace of a joke at all.
Shaking out her hands, Lore moved forward again, the Mortem awareness growing until she could nearly hear it, a soft not-sound like the hush of the tide against the shore. Lore wasn’t sure how much of it was the magic in the stone and how much of it was the magic within her.
When she touched the wall, the force of it nearly threw her head back, a curl of cold seeping through her hands and down through her core. Her breath hissed between her teeth, and vaguely, she was aware of Gabe, moving forward as if he could help her. But he left her alone. There was nothing he could do.
The lock on the secret room was basically the same as the lock in the catacombs where the bodies from the villages had been hidden. A knot with a trip mechanism, a puzzle box that would straighten when solved and outline the door. This one used quite a bit more Mortem than the one in the catacombs. The prophecy must really pack a punch if it was more closely guarded than an army of the undead.
A few moments more and Lore untangled the puzzle, the Mortem within her pushing out through her hands to turn over the knot within the wall. The rock around it was brittle, but not terribly so. She found herself very thankful for that, when she thought of the miles of dirt and Church above their heads.
Lore dropped her hands as the lock unraveled, turned up her palms to inspect the gray stars there. Strands of Mortem still clung to her, like they had in the catacombs. For a moment, that set panic into her middle, but then Lore took a breath, centered herself. Pulled a little bit at that shining length of gold that lay alongside her darkness, the sun to its moon.
Spiritum shone around her fingers, a pale-gold glitter that lasted only a heartbeat and then was gone, leaving only the gray starbursts. They looked slightly larger than before, climbing nearly to her first knuckle.
She turned, jerked a thumb at the door, now clearly outlined. “All done.”
Malcolm and Alie moved forward eagerly, pushing open the door with the groan of unused hinges and rubbing stone. Gabe entered more warily, torch still burning in his hand.
With another steeling breath, Lore followed.
For a ritualistically sealed room holding a very volatile prophecy, it wasn’t much to look at. Stone walls, stone floors, though not damp like the corridor outside. Lore supposed rats and other vermin weren’t an issue, what with the Mortem-locked door. One sconce on the wall, illuminated by Gabe’s torch; he touched the flame to its wick and it went up immediately, a tall spike of fire.
The weirdly steady light from the sconce cleared shadows from the corners of the small room, finally lighting up the prophecy itself. A stone lectern stood in the center of the room, holding a single scroll beneath a glass dome. The dome was similar to the ones lining the tables in the library, but without a door in the top—the glass was a tomb, and the paper within was never meant to leave it again. A reliquary, holy and untouchable.
Malcolm was already standing over the glass, nearly vibrating with anticipation, ready to read as soon as he had enough light. Alie stood a bit behind him, not hovering like he did but still close enough to see, worrying at her bottom lip.
Lore didn’t approach the glass-protected prophecy at all. She’d look at it, eventually, but the prospect of it sent dread swirling through her, a cold storm of it rising through her chest and making her throat feel too narrow.
Gabe set his torch into an iron ring on the wall, crossed his arms. “Well?”
“It’s long.” Malcolm frowned. “And there’s something at the bottom I can’t read, that doesn’t look like written language at all. Just swirls and lines.”
Silence. They all waited.
Malcolm cleared his throat, then read aloud in a clear, unwavering voice. “Two things must occur for Apollius to return within His chosen vessel, and two things must be prevented. The things that must occur: The unfaithful King must be dethroned, and the daughter of the dark must be brought to the chosen, just before his ascension.”
Things that had already happened. Apollius was here.
“The things that must be prevented,” Malcolm continued. “The dark’s daughter must not linger past fulfilling her purpose. And the…” He trailed off, brow furrowed, leaning in closer as if to make sure he was reading it right. “The war must not be allowed, for no one faithful to Him is an enemy, and our task is to make a Holy Kingdom that spans the earth.”
“Sounds like an Empire to me,” Alie muttered darkly.
“Also sounds like we’ve fucked up most of this prophecy already,” Lore added.
Waving a hand at both of them for quiet, Malcolm kept reading. “If these requirements are not met in full, the power of the Fount will find new vessels. One for each It lost—for Nyxara, for Apollius, for Caeliar and Braxtos and Lereal and Hestraon. The cycle will continue anew, and it will spell woe for the world.”
Six gods. Four people in this room. Bastian, waiting in the Citadel, trying to hold on to himself.
Malcolm leaned back, frowning, then looked silently to Gabe.
“So we aren’t just dealing with two gods,” Gabe said. “We’re dealing with Them all.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The world is not eternal.
—Carved on a seawall in Myrosh
It was wildly inappropriate, but the first thing Lore felt was relief, her suspicions proven correct. She and Bastian weren’t alone.
The next thing she felt, far more appropriately, was terror.
She looked at Gabe again, trying to gauge his reaction. But Gabe wasn’t looking at the floor with that furrow across his forehead that said he was deep in thought. Instead he was looking at the sconce on the wall, with its steady, nearly flickerless flame.
“So what do we do with that?” Alie, as usual, taking the information in stride and moving forward. “As Lore noted, most of these parameters have been fucked up already, but that didn’t stop Apollius from possessing His vessel.”
“But neither did all the predictions come true,” Malcolm said. “No one has prevented a war. In fact, I’d say one is far closer than it was before, after that explosion.”
Alie’s brows drew together, her expression going distant. Lore wondered if she’d been back to speak to Caius, to see if she could get unequivocal proof that Kirythea was behind the attack that day. If she had, she hadn’t shared it with Lore.
“And if the other gods taking vessels manifests the same way Nyxara and Apollius have for Lore and Bastian, I’d think it’d be obvious,” Malcolm continued. “They’d be exhibiting elemental powers by now…”
He stopped, silence like a stopper in his throat. His eyes went to his hands, then to Gabe. “The plants,” he murmured. “In the library.”
Slowly, his eyes still on the flame, Gabe nodded.
“Shit.” Malcolm stared at his hands a moment more, then rubbed one over his shorn head. “Shit on the Citadel Wall.”
Still standing by the prophecy, Alie’s green eyes were so wide that the whites showed all around her irises. None of them had to spell out what Malcolm had just realized, the truth running through them clear and sharp as a bayonet end.
“Can you hear Him?” Alie breathed. “Braxtos?”
Malcolm shook his head, his candle-inked palm pressed to his temple, like he was listening very closely to the space between his ears. “Haven’t heard anything, nothing like a voice.” His eyes swung to Lore. “When did it start, for you?”
“I’ve heard Her a couple times in the last year,” she said, “but I didn’t know what it was—who it was—until She told me.”
Was that true, though? Had she not known? Who else could it be, speaking in her head, calling to her from the death she could braid and shape and bend? Lore was practiced at avoiding things she’d rather not think about, and she’d employed those skills to their fullest.
“It’s gotten worse since Bastian and I started channeling together,” she continued, quieter. “After we set the bodies to rest in the catacombs. After we healed the fields.”
Malcolm nodded slowly, something like hope seeping over his features. “So I just don’t use it. Whatever I did with the plants—”
“Earth magic,” Gabe murmured, apparently not wanting anything to be kept vague.
Another nod from Malcolm, this one stilted. “I just won’t do it again,” he said, weakly triumphant. “I’ll just… just keep an eye on it, make sure it doesn’t happen, and then He can’t get into my head.”
The pronoun staggered out of him, like he didn’t want to say it. Didn’t want to acknowledge who exactly he was talking about.
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” Gabe said. His eye was still watching that flame, a sinuous tongue of light dancing against the backdrop of the stone wall. “It can’t be. If a god wants you, They’ll have you.”
“I don’t fucking accept that!”
In all the time she’d known Malcolm, Lore had never heard him shout. He wasn’t a quiet man, but he was a measured one, able to keep his moods pleasant and even regardless of the circumstances.
This circumstance, apparently, was the one to break him. Malcolm’s eyes were bright with furious tears, his hands clenched to fists by his sides, as if he could keep any magic from leaving them by keeping them closed. He advanced on Gabe as he spoke, the Priest Exalted having become the receptacle of his anger since the actual culprit wasn’t there to receive it. Since the actual culprit was a god, and the Fount that gave Him power.
“It makes no scientific or spiritual sense,” Malcolm continued, all but spitting the words. “There is no magic left in the world. Lore took all the Mortem; Spiritum isn’t available to anyone who isn’t Bastian. If the gods are returning now, it’s in the wrong way, and we have to fix it!”
“We’re still going to try,” Alie murmured. She looked at her hands, long, delicate fingers splayed wide. With a deep, hitching breath, she twitched one of them.
A gust of a breeze filtered through the dark room, feathering Lore’s hair. Of course. Of course.
“We’re still going to try,” Alie repeated, closing her hands. “If you haven’t heard Braxtos, Malcolm, and I haven’t heard Lereal, that means there’s still time.”
Alie hadn’t mentioned anything about feeling magic, but she’d kept herself apart for almost the whole of summer progress. Maybe this was why.
Two elemental gods down. Two to go.
Malcolm’s eyes were glassy, swinging from Alie back to Gabe. “I don’t want a god in my head.”
Gabe finally turned away from the flame on the wall. It leapt upward, as if protesting, painting lurid light across the stone. “I don’t, either,” he said, so quiet it was nearly a whisper. “But trying not to use the power doesn’t seem to have slowed Him down at all.”
Three out of four.
Lore swallowed down the dry, thorny lump rising in her throat, scouring, bitter guilt. Of course the leftover gods would take over her friends, people close to her, just like the elemental gods had been close to Nyxara. Another sacrifice she’d unwittingly made.
“How long?” she asked Gabe.
He sighed, his muscled shoulders slumping. “Couple weeks. Since we started working on your mental barrier, after you told me about the dreams.” A hoarse bark of not-laughter. “Fat lot of help that did.”
The thorny thing in her throat got larger. Every breath was a saw, the pressure of not crying pushing at the back of her eyes as if it’d shove them right out of their sockets. She’d gone soft. The dam on her tears had been torn down.
“It isn’t like you, though,” Gabe continued. He refused to look at the sconce again, but apparently didn’t want to look at any of them, either, fixing his gaze instead on the floor. “Where you hear a solid voice, have… conversations.” He said the word like it repulsed him. “The elemental gods were never as powerful as Apollius and Nyxara. It’s more like having ideas that aren’t my own. Impulses.”
His eye flashed to Lore, then. One burning look.
“Hestraon was the most powerful elemental god, though.” Gabe spoke clipped and sure, as if reciting academic facts with no attachment to him. “If Alie and Malcolm aren’t feeling those… those impulses yet, maybe they won’t at all. Maybe the other gods are too weak.”
“That’s Braxtos and Hestraon and Lereal, then.” Alie sounded the surest of them all, no trace of a waver in her voice, though the hand she’d used to manipulate the air still trembled a bit. “That leaves Caeliar.” She trilled a high, half-mad laugh. “Anyone see someone floating by the harbor recently?”
“We can’t just leave this.” Lore crossed her arms tight over her chest. “We can’t just sit by and let it happen.”
Everything was already broken because she was still alive. Still here, a wrench in the prophecy, allowing the ascension of Them all rather than the ascension of one.
Guilt knocked on her ribs like doors, slipping in and making a permanent home.
Gabe seemed to have the same thought she did. His mouth firmed to a hard line. “We don’t know who will get Caeliar’s power.”
“So far we’ve been lucky, relatively,” Malcolm said. “We’re all on the same side. Who knows if that pattern will hold?”
It made her think of moon shadows and Bastian’s tense shoulders, when they’d first arrived in Courdigne and she made him admit what was happening. We’re on the same side, aren’t we?
They were. But that side wasn’t winning.
“It has to be someone in the Citadel,” she said. “Every other god has been someone close to me. People who have relationships to me like Nyxara had with the other gods.” Lore laughed, hoarse and thin. “At least, I assume so, since there are barely any fucking myths still around for us to read.”
Gabe nodded. “So we keep an eye on the other courtiers. Anyone you’ve spent time with.”
“And then what?”
He had no answer. None of them did.
Alie’s fingers tapped a nervous rhythm on her forearm as she stared at the prophecy, like she could make the words change shape and become answers instead. “We should talk to Anton.”
Two pairs and one lone eye swinging to her, all wide.
She shrugged. “He’s the one who heard this prophecy, right?” Her hand cut to the glass like it held a spider instead of paper. “Maybe he remembers more than he wrote down.”
“I agree. We need all the answers we can get.” Even if they made no difference. Lore tried not to think of that. All the answers in the world meant nothing if there was no loophole to get them out of this.
“He’s mad,” Malcolm said. “Extremely mad, madder than when he was the Priest Exalted.”
“Having a rosebush grown through you will do that,” Gabe growled.
“And has he said anything lucid since, Your Holiness?” Venom in Malcolm’s tone. “I know you’ve been speaking to him regularly. What wisdom has he imparted? Or has he just raved?”
Gabe didn’t respond, but the flame behind him climbed higher.
“I don’t see what other choice we have,” Alie said, frosty. The room seemed to go colder, like winter wind pushed at its edges, but maybe that was Lore’s imagination. “Who else are we supposed to ask?”
Malcolm threw up his hands. “The man doesn’t have enough mind left to tell us anything useful, and even if he did, how would we know he isn’t lying?”
“We wouldn’t.” Lore tapped her temple with a rueful half smile. “But the goddess in my head probably would.”
“And you’re willing to trust Her?” Gabe’s voice was a low rumble.
“I don’t have much choice, do I?” Lore replied.
“A theme appears,” Malcolm muttered darkly. “Fine. We’ll talk to the mad priest.”
The plan was made as they walked back through the damp stone hallways beneath the Church, as they made their way back up the narrow, rarely used stairs with Gabe’s un-guttering torch lighting their way.
At midnight, when the sun was gone and Nyxara was loudest in Lore’s head, she and Gabe would sneak out to the Presque Mort’s garden, to the greenhouse where Anton’s ravaged body was rooted. They’d hear what the priest had to say, measure it against Nyxara, and tomorrow morning, the four of them would meet in the confessional room to extract what sense from it they could.
“What about Bastian?” Even as she asked, Lore knew what the answer would be. What it’d have to be. “Shouldn’t he be involved? Apollius is weak at night, he could come with us and get some answers.”
She brought up the rear of their procession, and thus saw the other three exchange furtive looks. They weren’t even trying to be subtle. “That isn’t a good idea,” said Malcolm, the unofficial spokesman. “Not if he’s as far gone as you say.”
All of them had a god’s influence, now, and Lore wanted to call them hypocrites. But Malcolm was right. Bastian was the furthest gone. Still. “It’s different at night—”
“No.” Gabe’s answer was a cudgel, beating out any further questioning. Even as he said it, though, he wilted.
The thought of Bastian shackled to Apollius seemed to weigh on him as heavily as it did on her.
He looked at Lore, worry in his eye. “Is he… I mean, how bad…”
She wanted to reassure him. Didn’t want to infect him with the same endless dread she felt every time she thought of Apollius forcing Bastian out of his own body. But ignorance wouldn’t help anything.
“Bad,” she murmured.
Gabe pulled in a shaky breath.
A few strides ahead, Alie’s lips pressed together, her eyes finding the floor before flickering up again. Lore wondered if she was thinking of her father, of what Apollius had done in Bastian’s body.
Maybe she wasn’t quite as cold to Severin’s fate as she wanted to appear. Even though he wasn’t her father, even though he’d been cruel, he’d still been part of her life for twenty-four years. Those knots were hard to untangle.
Gods, Lore’s birth mother had only been in her life for thirteen years, none of them pleasant, and she still didn’t know how to navigate that maze. Her mind kept dredging up images of the Night Priestess—Lilia, her name was Lilia—in the stone garden under the moon, begging her to run. Telling her that she could throw a rose into the well to signal for help. Was she waiting down there? Checking the packed dirt floor every day, waiting for a crumpled bloom?
