Then he turned back. The clericlight welcomed him and left Seth in the shadows.
The nearest gate through Keswick's walls was a twenty-minute walk to the south. It was the same one Syntal had tried to escape through earlier that day, and most likely where Isaic expected him to go.
Instead he turned north. He'd learned many of the city streets during his months here, especially the ones that led along the route he was taking now. He kept his hood low and stuck to the alleys, slinking through the dark until he came to Majesta. Kai had supplied him well and allowed him his spear; there was nothing he needed to take here. But he couldn't leave without visiting one more time.
Majesta's hallways never truly quieted, no matter the time of day; the lateness of the hour only subdued the chaos, transforming it from a raging rapids to a babbling river. He did his best to avoid the half-dozen or so Kesprey and their assistants bustling through the halls, but one of them stopped dead in her tracks, gawping in recognition. He put his finger to his lips and hurried past.
When he reached Lyseira's room, it was empty. He wondered briefly if she had gone to comfort Helix or Angbar; if maybe she had spent the night at Syntal's chanter school to try to salve the wounds he'd inflicted. If so, he would leave it be. He had ruined things for her; he could hardly blame her for moving so quickly to pick up the pieces. But he had one more place to check.
His own quarters were even more spare than Lyseira's, truly little more than a glorified storage closet. He had protested even being assigned a room, but she had overruled him, insisting he needed a place to meditate if nothing else. Now he found her slumped against its back wall, Ethaniel's History spilled haphazardly in front of her, her staff glowing with gentle clericlight from her sagging hand.
The sight seized him, triggering a storm of complex emotions in his chest he could neither weather nor assess. He would never be able to repay his debts to her; wasn't even worthy to try. He crept to her, knelt, and gave her one rough kiss on her forehead, hoping through the maelstrom of fear and guilt that it would be enough. Then he turned to leave. He had just set his hand on the door when her voice arrested him.
"Where are you going?"
He had come here to tell her he was leaving, but now he found his courage eroding. He faced her. "I don't know. The King told me to leave. I'm doing as he said."
"But where?"
He shook his head. "I haven't decided."
"It's the dead of winter. You'll freeze on the road." She set History aside and made her feet, her eyes like pools of shadow in the dim room.
"I won't." She knew him better than that.
"Maybe. But . . ." He could have left while she wrestled for the words, and maybe he should've. But he owed her everything he was, and by extension, he owed her these moments.
"This is wrong," she finally said. "You only did what the King would've done—what he would've had to do. She was a monster, Seth. She melted them."
He said nothing. Hearing his crimes defended somehow left him powerless.
"I had nightmares about it every night, on the trip back. I see them every night. And not just them, but their families, their children . . . the people here. The Kesprey. Her own students. Over and over again. Always with the same stupid, curséd reason. 'I had to.' She didn't."
Fury commingled with disgust in her voice. It was as passionate as any of her public speeches, but delivered only to him.
"She was only getting worse. More and more dangerous. She had to be stopped. If it hadn't been you, it might've been me."
Little surprised him anymore, but her admission made his eyes widen.
"I thought about it on the trip back. After every nightmare . . . sometimes in the nightmares. I was going to wait for the King. I think I was hoping he would order me to do it, that I would be able to push off some of the guilt that way. But if it had happened my way, she would've escaped. She'd be out there right now. You were the only one willing to do what had to be done."
Maybe she thought she could absolve him. Petition Akir on his behalf, wipe the blood from his hands. She didn't understand that this was only his latest act of betrayal.
She took a step forward, into the light from the hallway, and he saw the tears standing in her eyes. "Stay," she said. "I'll talk to the King. He owes me a dozen times over. There has to be a way."
He considered it briefly, or tried to. He couldn't actually envision the possibilities she claimed. A King's pardon would only let him walk the streets; it would do nothing for the corrosion in his soul. And he didn't want his sins to stain her any more than they already had. She deserved better than to be dragged down by his failures.
But he could explain none of these things. So instead he said, "I'm sorry. Goodbye," and left her.
He returned to Royal District and made his way out the southern gate on foot, then spent the next couple hours traversing the smattering of little huts and villages that clung to Keswick's hull. Then even those dropped away and the winter night sprawled before him; fluttering snow, furtive as drifts of mist, shrouded his path. For nearly anyone else, walking alone into the frozen dark would have meant certain death. Perhaps it would for him, as well.
The sky splayed out above him—a blanket of icy stars illuminating his path. It dwarfed him, transformed his tiny human concerns into the wonderings of a gnat. It wasn't frightening. He welcomed, even craved, the insignificance it brought him.
He also welcomed the cold; let it gnaw at his thoughts until they froze into silence, let it steal into his flesh until his muscles forgot what they were doing. Keswick fell away behind him, its lights slowly diminishing. He set a brisk pace, or thought he did. Without companions, he had no real way to gauge his speed, and his only companion now was the Ley River—rumbling gently in the darkness to his left, starlight flitting like fireflies across its sluggish waves.
When dawn came bleeding over the eastern hills, he spared a glance behind him and saw the same expanse of snow that lay before him. Keswick had vanished, swallowed by that endless white. Again, only the whisper of the river told him he hadn't strayed into the wilderness. Even without the road to guide him, the river would take him to a town where he could decide what to do next.
He met no travelers on the road. The wind had erased even the sleigh tracks from the recent grain delivery to Bitterfork. Here, he wasn't a traitor to his beliefs or his sister; he wasn't a hero or a failure or a murderer. He simply was.
He receded into himself as the Teachings instructed, felt his cold and hunger and thirst drift to arm's length. His pace quickened. The sun drifted higher, its color melting to a hazy green by midday. Somehow it felt right that Stormsign should see him off; this omen, too, he welcomed.
He walked all through that first day, as he had that first night, without pause. He didn't do it to prove anything to himself—he simply craved the numbness that exertion brought him. As the weird green sun settled in toward the Scar, though, his body reawakened. The aches of his muscles came knocking; his stomach rumbled like a prisoner pounding on a dungeon door. He strove to ignore them, but he recognized the signs. Even the greatest Preserver couldn't permanently untether himself from his own flesh.
As dark stole over the plain once more, he cleared the snow from beneath a tree and worked to set a fire. As the heat thawed him, his body's needs ignited one by one: hunger, thirst, exhaustion. He opened his bedroll and pulled out his sourdough bread and a tin cup for melting snow. But as he addressed his physical needs, his mind, too, thawed. Another failure, one he hadn't acknowledged before, bloomed like a poisonous flower in his mind.
He was here because he had murdered Syntal, a lifelong companion if not exactly a friend. He had killed her in an effort to prevent another cataclysm like the one that had created the Waste—or, at least, to put an end to her appetite for murder.
But the truth was that so long as the art of chanting existed, anyone could gain that appetite. Anyone could become the next Syntal—or even the next Revenia. He'd known this a
ll along, but he'd told himself Syntal presented a unique risk; that her repeated negligence and callousness qualified her for the most extreme of consequences. And perhaps it had.
But he should have destroyed the sixth wardbook instead.
Yes, anyone could become the next Syntal. But their capacity for ruin would be limited to the powers that had been unleashed thus far. Without the sixth wardbook to guide the way, the seventh wardbook would have remained a secret, its Seal intact. No chanter would be able to do any greater harm than Syntal already had. The damage would, at least, be limited.
Seth hadn't really believed the stag's warnings in Ordlan Green; they had struck him as hyperbole, fuel for some secret agenda. But even if the worst of the stag's dire warnings came true, even if all life on Or'agaard ended because the Pulse never became unsealed, was that truly worse than a future where dozens of chanters had mastered the power to annihilate entire kingdoms on a whim?
In killing Syntal, he had stomped out a dropped candle, putting it out before its flames could spread. But in leaving the sixth wardbook, he had turned his back on a bonfire.
You've always hated me.
Had she been right? Had his hatred, his rush to judgment, cost him the opportunity to do the only thing that would have truly made a difference?
Another failure, heavier than all the rest. Not only had he thrown away everything—all his friends, his reputation, his chance at finding a new home—but he had sacrificed his true goal by doing so.
He stared into the flames, aghast. His legacy of sins seemed to have no end. But he knew one way to stop it.
He pulled a knife and set it to his wrist. If no one would give him the punishment he deserved, he would administer it himself.
It'll be fast. One long cut, then I lie down and let the snow take me. The darkness would close in as his heat bled away. The failures would stop. He would sin no more. When they found him, perhaps Helix and Harth and Angbar would know justice. It was the right thing to do, as right as what he'd done to Syntal.
But in the end, he was too much a failure even for that.
20
i. Lyseira
"They're ready for you," Elthur said. She already knew, though: from her vantage at the sixth-story window she could see the crowd sprawling below, filling the Majesta square. From this height the people milled like a churning sea, no individual face significant.
She had sent out a summons yesterday, the day after Seth left, because she wanted to defend him publicly—and more than that, she needed to condemn what Syntal had done. The other chanters—not just Harth and Ben, but all of them, even the ones who hadn't joined the school yet—had to know the Kesprey would not tolerate massacres. The chanters had a responsibility for their powers, and the Kesprey, by extension, a responsibility to see that they abided by them. She didn't want violence between the groups. But it was unfair that the one person who had been willing to police the chanters' extremes should be exiled for it, and she intended to issue a warning the entire city would hear.
Looking at the crowd now, though—the largest she had seen since that day at Isaic's execution—her resolve trembled. She had no doubt of her message; its truth resonated in every bone in her body. Her hesitation came from the prospect of delivering it from the temple steps as if she spoke for the entire church—or, now that the populace had already heard her do it once, for God.
"Is this right?" she murmured.
"To speak to your flock?" Elthur said from behind her as she peered out the window. "Yes, of course it is."
"They're not my flock," she returned—though from here they certainly appeared like it. This is what the Fatherlord sees, she thought. This is how he's always looked down on them. "They're individual people, with their own minds. Their own consciences. I want them to think for themselves—I want them to agree with me because they see the wisdom of my words, not because they're awestruck or feel they have to."
"I know you do," Elthur said, with real admiration. "I've seen it again and again—we all have. I spent a lifetime in a church that never ascribed anyone the right of independent thought, yet you insist on it. It's what drew me to your words. It's how I knew you spoke in earnest."
She turned to face him. His face was hard and weathered, with a thin wreath of greying hair around his temples, but his eyes held compassion. "I just . . . I've spoken for God once now. I don't want them thinking I do it every time."
"Then tell them," he urged her. "You're right to be worried, but there's no limit to how many times you can tell them. And you have such important things to say. They're hungry to hear from you, Lyseira. We all are."
He was thirty winters her senior. His words humbled her.
"But why?" As hard as she tried not to, it felt like following in the Fatherlord's footsteps was inevitable—and the further she got from where she started, the higher the temple balcony she looked out from, the harder it became to make sure people were listening for the right reasons.
"Because we hear wisdom in your words," he said. "Because you speak truth, no matter how painful. Because you have a way of taking what is in our hearts and bringing it into our minds."
He had been a lifesaver, in the early days after the riots: one of her first converts from the old Church. As a bishop in the Order of Judgment he'd commanded deep respect, and he'd leveraged it in her favor, going from temple to temple delivering her message. He had spared both sides days of bloodshed, and provided a shock of support to the early Kespran church that had helped it survive its infancy.
Now he reminded her of the father she didn't have.
"I know you question your own authority," he continued, "and I understand why. But you should know that we don't. When a leader is brilliant and passionate"—he smiled—"that's what tends to happen. I know you want everyone to think for themselves. So do I.
"But at some point you'll need to accept that many people simply trust you. It's not an accident, nor is it some curse you have to break. It's a result of your continued honesty and perseverance. It's a gift—one you have to handle with great care, maybe, but a gift all the same. Be aware of what it is. Use it responsibly.
"But don't spurn it. Akir gave it to you for a reason."
She drew a shuddering breath. "Don't let me become him," she whispered. "Promise it." She had forced the same oath from Seth, just after the riots—but he was gone now.
"I swear."
"All right." She gave him a quick hug. "Thank you, Elthur. For everything."
She steadied herself, and went downstairs to speak to her flock.
ii. Angbar
"I heard she melted their faces off."
"The skin. Melted the skin from their bones."
A cluck of the tongue. "There were children there. Little ones."
"I know. We were supposed to be there to feed them. What could she have been thinking?"
"She wasn't thinking. She was a monster, that's all."
"Even Mother Lyseira didn't say she was a monster."
"Maybe not, but she did say she had to be stopped. Seth did the right thing."
"The King . . . you don't think he really would've let her go unpunished?"
"I don't know. He likes those chanters, I've heard. Maybe he doesn't mind having people around who can melt faces, as long as they're the right faces."
"Scary thought. Doesn't he realize if they can melt one face, they can melt his?"
"Maybe this'll help to wake him up."
"Maybe. But still . . . that Syntal was barely more than a girl herself. Do you really think she knew―"
"She murdered a hundred people, girl or not. That's a monster. That's what it means to be a monster."
Angbar slammed his tin cup to the table, sloshing water onto his papers, and shot to his feet. A few others in the temple mess hall looked at him, eyes wide, as he stalked to the next table. "She wasn't a monster," he spat.
The two young women there—one dark, one pale, both Winterwheat converts whose names Angbar hadn't
yet learned—recoiled.
"I . . ." the Bahiri one stammered. "We didn't mean . . ."
"She was just a girl. Like you. Just a girl. She didn't always think things through, but she was a good person, God damn it. A good person!" His voice cracked, transforming his defenses to whining, and for once he didn't care. He was too angry, too hurt. He didn't even know if he believed what he was saying.
The pale girl's deference faded. She met his eyes. "She killed a hundred people!"
"Yes, right, a hundred people at Twosides and another four thousand at the Winterwheat field, right? Or if that number's not high enough, we'll make up another one!"
"You're saying it didn't happen?"
He seethed. His heart quivered in his chest, his breaths threatening to short out. "Yes, it happened. I was there. She killed them. But it was a score of soldiers, all right? Not women and children." She was defending herself, he wanted to say. It was a perfect lie, a tidy bow on the story, but it was a lie. He couldn't bring himself to say it, and he hated himself for it—it was another way he had failed her. "She thought she was defending herself," he said instead, and that was true. "She wasn't some hardened soldier. She hadn't seen a hundred battlefields. She didn't know they were no threat to her. The cleric gave them an order to attack and they started marching. What would you have done?" The accusation came out in a strangled cry. "Huh? What? With a score of soldiers marching at you? She overreacted, but she didn't know. No one trained her on what to do."
"She had Vanished," the pale girl said—because Lyseira had said it, this afternoon, in front of the entire assembled Kespran Church in an effort to excuse her brother's casual murder. "Mother Lyseira herself said she didn't feel threatened."
"Well, Syntal did!" he raged. "And Seth killed her without a trial, without looking at everything—what he did was as bad as what she did!"
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