An Embroidery of Souls, page 33
I stand. Straighten my shoulders. Lift my chin.
And face the queen.
Good, fierce, brave. Strong, capable, wonderful.
Courageous.
My mother and Lukas believed in me, and now, finally, I do too. I’m all those things and more, and I’m going to finish what Lukas and I started.
“Touching.” The queen’s words drip with false charm, but her gun doesn’t waver, pointed directly at me. “He really did love you. Such a pity things had to end this way.”
I meet her eyes, a heated amber. Earlier she looked beautiful, but now she just appears wild, almost animalistic. Blood stains her gown, a reddish brown against the gold, and her hair fans messily around her face.
“As if you care.” My voice is quiet, the edge lethal.
“Ah, but that’s the thing—I do. Perhaps with him I could’ve controlled you. Alas, I can see you’ll be just as stubborn as your mother. Useless to me now.” She gestures to the floor in front of her. “Kneel. I’ll make it quick.”
The queen is everything Cora said she was, sadistic and cruel. She wants me to see my death coming, just like she enjoyed watching me sob over Lukas. My pain is her pleasure.
I approach her slowly, my steps purposeful. I don’t have a knife up my sleeve, nor any weapons save for my will, my words, and my sewing tools. They’ll have to be enough, and I’m strangely calm as I kneel before the queen, cold seeping into me from the marble.
Her gun clicks. “Any last words?”
Here goes nothing.
I meet the queen’s burning eyes. The cool barrel of the gun presses into my forehead, but I don’t let that stop me from saying what I need to.
“You know, your sister told me all about you.”
It’s fleeting, a mere ripple in the queen’s careful poise, but it’s there. “And why would I care what my sister has to say about me?”
“Because you love her,” I say, and I know it’s true. Even eroded, the queen’s soul contains a single vein of burgundy love, buried beneath everything else, but it’s still there, strong and vibrant. I just hope it’s enough. “All your life you’ve used people instead of loving them, but not Cora, not Sofia. You felt something for her. Something true.”
The queen stills. She puts on an icy façade, but she’s affected by my words, I can tell. She wouldn’t be this quiet if she weren’t.
“Whatever she thinks about me, I don’t care.”
She says it all prim, but I don’t believe her. Not when I’m still alive. She wants to know more.
So I give it to her.
“I met with her not long ago, and she told me the truth, shared your story. The whole time she was touching her Serpensa marking, a thread tattoo made of her grief for you. Over what you became.”
The queen chuckles, but it’s brittle, and the gun begins to tremble. “Then she’s a fool, grieving someone who didn’t exist. Our relationship was never real. She was in my way, an obstacle to destroy. I earned her trust, let her think we were close, but I was just biding my time until I could overthrow her.”
“Perhaps,” I agree, “but you loved her too. You wouldn’t have let her live otherwise. Not with the risk she poses to your throne. I heard Cora’s story, see your soul. You cared for her then, and a part of you still does.”
The gun dips an inch, but the queen doesn’t seem to notice. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not,” I insist, my gaze still locked on hers. “Everything I’ve said is true.”
The pistol lowers another fraction, and the queen is pale when she asks, voice thin, “What did Sofia say about me?”
This is it. Everything inside me tenses, and I clench my fists to keep from trembling when I say, voice steady, “That against her better judgment, she loves you. Even after the fire, the murders, everything, she still cares for you. A complicated, pained sort of love, but it’s there.”
Shock dampens the queen’s reflexes, and I take full advantage of it. I lift my arm and smack the gun from her hand.
“No!” the queen screams. “You—”
Her voice muffles as I tackle her middle, sending us both sprawling across the floor.
It’s not a fair fight. I’m not large, but neither is the queen, and I have years of careful tutelage behind me, while it’s clear she has no formal training. She thrashes and claws, even bites my arm, but it’s fruitless. One punch to her gunshot wound and she screams, hands scrabbling for her chest. I rip her arms up while she’s distracted by the pain, then pin them with my knees. The queen howls anew when I sit on her torso, right on her injury, and though she writhes, I’ve positioned myself well. She could break free, maybe, if she knew how.
But she doesn’t.
“You bitch!” she hisses. “My sievech will be up in a minute, and I’ll order it to rip away your soul, then—”
“You’re going to do no such thing,” I tell her, summoning all that artificial primness she used on me earlier, “because you’re going to be dead.”
The queen’s face drains of color when I remove her thread portrait from my pocket, along with my seam ripper and tweezers.
“You’re going to pay for what you did,” I whisper as I dip a corner of the portrait into her blood. “For killing Lukas,” I say as I press the portrait to my hip, where the bullet grazed me. “For hurting me.” My blood soaks into the portrait. “All the harm you caused my mother and Johann.” I lift my seam ripper to that golden thread. “And for all the people you killed, the souls you reaped.”
I carefully slice the first couple of knots of her life, then select my tweezers and begin to delicately unravel the rest. The queen watches in mute horror as I unwind her life—the one piece of her soul not damaged or eroded but strong. She grows weaker as I go, her breathing faint, until soon there are only a few stitches of gold left. I pause then and meet her eyes.
“Most people leave their soul behind when they die. A fading mark, shifting from this plane to the afterlife, where they’ll remain forevermore.” My voice is low. Grave. “But you damaged yours with all your evil acts, and now you’ll pay the ultimate price. Because unlike everyone else’s, your soul won’t slip into the afterlife, but into nothing. No part of you will remain. Not a single mark.” I lean closer, so the last thing she sees is me, and only me. “Everything you did was for nothing, and now you’ll be nothing too.”
Then I unravel those final stitches, and the queen—the Unseen Death—slips away, swallowed into an abyss even the afterlife can’t touch.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Jade
There’s one cardinal rule in thread speaking: To give, first you must take. Well, now I’ve taken the queen’s life, and I intend to give it to Lukas.
It won’t work if Lukas is fully, truly dead. Even thread speakers can’t restore life to a corpse, and in the rare instance a life thread is transferred, it’s usually to someone who’s gravely ill, not deceased.
I have no idea if this’ll bring Lukas back. His golden thread has completely faded, but our bond emits a faint pulse, my own vitality tethering him to this realm. Just a little bit longer, Lukas, I think as I stand and approach him.
He looks so delicate, pale too, carefully laid out on the ground, haloed in a pool of his own blood. It soaks into my pants as I kneel at his side and kiss his brow. “I’m not giving up on you yet.”
Then I remove his soul from my pocket, the one I stitched for him on Gebreine. It’s complete, but not active or alive. Not without a piece from us both, and I dip my hand into the wound at his chest, then brush it against one of my many scrapes.
The second I add our blood to his portrait, it comes to life. The colors glow with untamed vivaciousness, while the metallic ones glimmer. Everything’s bright and heady, save for his life thread, which has faded to gray.
My grip on his portrait is gentle as I carefully slice through the life thread, all the while holding him tight through our bond. I imagine each of our best moments together as I do, a collage of memories surging through me. The day we met, and not long after, when Lukas arrived at my door and I pointed a gun at his face. Lukas cradling me to his chest after we discovered the soulless body, carrying me to the city gates. The way my heart stammered when I stitched his wounds, and the way it soared when he brought me onto the Plamara’s moonlit deck, thousands of stars above us. The heat of his body as we shared that small bed, his unwavering belief in me on board the Xiomara, our first kiss in the forest, the flower crown and Gebreine, the look in his eyes as I bound our souls together…
All of it races through me and down the bond, as if to say See, you can’t give up, not on us, not on life.
By the time all the gray has been removed, I’m well and truly crying, my shoulders heaving. And though I’ve never been religious, I pray to the old gods—to any god who’ll listen. Please, if you can hear me, help me save him.
It takes me three tries to thread my needle, my hands are shaking so badly, and the trembling doesn’t abate as I rip open Lukas’s shirt. The bullet just barely missed our soul bond, passed straight through Lukas and out his back, which is fortunate, in a sense. Now I don’t have to fish it out, but I do sop up some of the blood around the wound, then lower my needle to Lukas’s chest. There isn’t time for a patch; a tattoo directly into his skin will have to do.
I take a breath, an effort to calm myself, because I can’t stitch if I can’t be still. When that doesn’t work, frustrated tears prickle my eyes and anxiety surges anew. What if I can’t do this? What if I’m too slow? What if I mess this up? What if—
I cut my thoughts off, slamming the door on those old patterns, then take another breath and urge myself to relax. It helps some, and while my trembling doesn’t cease, a memory of my mother surfaces. Of all those times she brought me shortbread, pulled me into her arms, then rocked me as she sang. How truly safe and calm I felt in her embrace.
My mother’s not here, but I’ll always have her song, and I know what I need to do. I call forth the lyrics and let them wash through me, soothing the panic and stilling my tremors as I lower my needle and begin to sew.
From the meadows to the mountains, from the valleys to the sea,
My love for you is endless, eclipses everything for me.
As the sun glides cross the sky, and day fades into night,
You are always in my mind, shining, burning, bright.
And I wish that I could hold you, I wish that you were mine,
But should that never come to pass, I wish for you to find
Happiness for yourself, even if it’s not with me,
A love that goes from meadows to mountains, from valleys to the sea.
I sing it, over and over, a balm on my bruised heart, sewing as I go. The thread heats to an even brighter gold with each knot I stitch, spiraling through my soul embroidered onto his chest. His new life, his vitality, mingling with my courage and kindness, my strength and ferocity—all those traits he saw before I ever did. And gradually, as I work, a change comes over him.
A flush returns to his cheeks.
Warmth suffuses his skin.
His wound slowly closes.
His eyes begin to flutter.
And finally, as I lay down the last stitch, his heart beats anew.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Jade
I can kill a man with nothing more than a needle, thread, and a lock of his hair.
My skills allow me to stitch love, embroider away death, and unspool memories. Even the most wonderful gifts aren’t out of my grasp. Beauty. Courage. Happiness. I can bestow them as I choose, or steal them away as I see fit.
And now, even more wonderful, I can get through tea with the queen—probably anyone, actually—without my hands shaking.
In a strange slipping of her mask, Cora sits not on her throne of rusting weapons but on the floor, just across from me. As it turns out, the day of Lukas’s execution, she was captured by the queen, who’d learned of our plans from a mole she’d planted in the Serpensas. By then she knew the tracker couldn’t find me, so she sent him after Cora, hoping to disrupt our efforts. We found Cora shortly after the battle, locked in the pit. She was pissed she didn’t get to help stop her sister, but I think a part of her was also relieved she didn’t have to kill her.
Two weeks have since passed, and until this morning, I assumed Cora had returned to her underworld ways. Needless to say, I was surprised when her letter arrived at the apartment earlier today, requesting our aid. For once, I volunteered to go. My mother and I have been tending to Johann, who was discovered after the battle locked in one of the queen’s parlors, and I didn’t want her to leave him. After he was forced to make all those sieveche, he’ll need a lot of love, help, and time to heal, and he does best when my mother’s with him.
Besides, I’m strangely happy to see Cora, and I stare at her tattoo, that two-headed serpent of ebony thread—the reason she called me here.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I ask.
She glances at her forearm, expression unreadable before something inside her softens. “I am. I got this so I’d never forget Celese’s monstrous acts, nor what I had to do. But now…” She swallows. “Celese is dead, and I can move on.”
I glance at the chambers surrounding us. Last time I was here, they were an odd clash of decadence and odiousness, but now they’re just bare. Cora’s throne is all that remains.
“Is that why you cleared everything out?”
“It is.” Cora studies her empty surroundings, as if seeing them for the first time, while I lift my seam ripper and slice the first couple of threads on her arm. “I’ve grown tired of this city. I only stayed because I knew that one day I’d have to do something about Celese, but now that she’s gone, there’s nothing keeping me here.”
I select my tweezers and begin the slow, delicate process of unspooling thread from her flesh. If it were a simpler procedure, I could easily cut through the fiber, but Cora requested that I return it to her soul. She didn’t want it gone permanently, but instead wished to restore her grief so it could evolve naturally. Normally, an operation like that wouldn’t work—you can’t stitch new traits into souls, only skin—but since this grief originated within Cora, I promised to try.
I don’t lift my eyes as I respond. “Where will you go?”
“Here, there. Everywhere.” When I glance up, there’s a spark in her hazel eyes. “I’m done being the underqueen, but sea queen has a nice ring to it, don’t you think? Why govern Mérecal when I can rule an entire ocean?”
If I couldn’t see Cora’s soul, her words might terrify me, but the truth is written in that rainbow aura. Cora Ramos isn’t necessarily a good person, but neither is she evil, which is perhaps why I chuckle. “What, like a pirate?”
“Exactly like a pirate,” she says as I return my focus to her arm. “But instead of one boat, I’ll have an entire fleet.”
I imagine Cora at her ship’s helm, wind tousling her hair, no worthy adversaries save for—maybe—the ocean.
And that’s a big maybe.
My lips twitch. “And where do you plan on getting this fleet?”
Her answer is quick. “There’s a man operating out of Kabrück, Richard Beck, who owns a shipping empire. Twelve boats, all of which he uses to transport goods and”—she pauses for emphasis—“blitz. It’s a dangerous drug, one he tried to introduce to Sallenda three years ago, but I burned his ship in the harbor. It sent quite the message.”
I remember that. Cora’s signature snake had been carved into the pier, furthering her reputation as a tyrant, when really she’d been protecting the city. And like that, another fissure splits her mask.
“So you burned one of his ships, and now you’re going to steal the rest?” I ask.
Cora’s grin is downright serpentine. “Of course. Now that I’ve set my mind to it, Beck doesn’t stand a chance.”
I privately agree, and Cora shares more as I unravel her tattoo. Apparently she purchased a ship of her own—the Corazón—to begin her travels. She sent for my mother today, because she leaves tomorrow with no intention of returning anytime soon.
“It sounds like you have big plans,” I say as I finish my task. “Congratulations.” I lift the thread, which I carefully spooled as I went. “If you give me a lock of your hair, I’ll bring this home and stitch it back into your soul tonight. I can even bring you the portrait before you set off tomorrow, if you’d like.”
Cora studies me a moment, gaze assessing in a way that makes my skin prickle. “Actually, I have a better idea. Come with me, tomorrow, on the Corazón.”
The air whooshes from my lungs. Lukas and I haven’t gotten a lot of time together these past two weeks. I’ve been helping my mother and Johann, while he’s been getting his family settled in the home they purchased with the funds I gifted Emma. In the moments we’ve stolen, though, we’ve talked about leaving Sallenda. Packing our belongings, stepping onto a ship, and seeing the world. Not because we have to, or because people will lose their souls if we don’t, but because we want to.
But those desires never felt possible. Like an eventually sort of thing that would fade as the years passed. Now Cora’s offering me the chance to turn that eventually into a right now opportunity.
“Wh-what? I mean—what?” I stumble over my words but don’t let that stop me. “And be a pirate? Be your thread speaker?”
As terrifying as her offer is, it’s also thrilling, but not if I have to do Cora’s dirty work. Now that Celese has fallen, things are changing around Mérecal, starting with the queen—or lack thereof.
Fortunately, when Celese died, so did all the sieveche along with her. Johann was able to confirm she was the only one he ever tethered them to, and so that problem was remedied with her passing. The trouble with Mérecal’s government, however, hasn’t been fixed with quite the same speed, though efforts are being made.
