by Devin Madson
“All right, all right, I’ll come!” I hated how my heart soared at the thought of going back, of having no choice but to return to Malice. Saving her life was the right thing to do, after all. “Kimiko? Kimiko! I’ll come! Get me out of here.”
I seized her trembling hand, her skin like burning coals. “Kimiko?”
She didn’t answer, so far gone in her agony that she could not hear me, could not understand.
I tried to pull her up, but she just whimpered, eyes rolling back into her head. I could call for the guards; I could have her taken away to be looked at by a physician—she was Katashi’s twin after all—but no matter what they did, she would still die if I stayed here.
She stiffened as I lifted her off the stones, her small hands splaying into rigid stars. Straining to hold her, I set my shoulder against the wall. All abilities were triggered by emotion—pain had been Avarice’s, because pain had started it all, but deep and wretched sadness had created our original Fader.
And so, you leave me lingering, a shade of wretched fear. Ere long I’ll feel the sadness, it my wont to disappear.
Malice’s favourite poem. “Sadness,” I said and looked around the cell of cold stone, a sad sight for sure, but it had to be the soul-draining kind that made you want to be invisible. The sort that made you want to die.
I had been willing to die rather than go back to Malice, but it was not his disappointment that had withered my soul.
Kin had forgiven me for all the terrible things I had confessed to him, had trusted me, had liked me, had become the closest thing to a friend I had ever had, and yet I had let him down. I had failed at being the man I had wanted to be. The man he had thought me.
Taking Kimiko’s hand, I fed that emotion into her. She grew misty around the edges, and a faint tingling like icy water crept up my arm. I had never faded before, but I had seen it done, so holding her hand tightly, I stepped into the wall. The stones seemed hardly to exist, offering no resistance beyond a prickling pain like dipping a cold foot into a hot bath. One step, two, a third, and I breathed the air of a short passage choked with dust and the stink of a guttering torch. The bars of an empty cell were like bared teeth in the shadows.
Kimiko slid limp from my arms. “Don’t die,” I said, pressing a hand to her throat, then her cheek. “Don’t die because of me.”
All too well could I imagine Malice laughing.
With a sharp cry, Kimiko’s eyes flew open and her confused gaze hunted my face in an effort of recollection.
“Who would have thought you could look so concerned,” she said at last, each breath quick and sharp. “Almost I believe you have a heart after all.”
“Don’t get too fond of me. I have a stipulation to going any farther in your company.”
Letting go a shaky sigh, she turned her head away. “Wonderful. What is it?”
“I won’t leave here without the Hian Crown.”
She ran a trembling hand across her eyes. “Fuck you,” she said on a laugh. “Fuck you. Did you just think of the cruellest thing you could ask me to do? Betraying my brother?”
“As he betrayed you? No. I serve Emperor Kin and this really is the kindest thing I could ask of you to help his cause.”
Her laughter died upon a vista of horrifying possibilities, of which the worst wasn’t even the order to slit her own twin’s throat.
“I take it all back,” she said. “You are a monster.”
After all these years, it ought not to have hurt, but it stung to be called so when I had made the best of the choices before me.
She struggled to her feet and almost overbalanced, but when I held out a hand to steady her, she slapped it away with a snarl. “I don’t need your help. Give me your word this is all you will ask of me.”
“You have my word.”
“And I wish I could trust it.”
“If you didn’t feel you could trust it, then why ask for it?”
Flinging a disgusted look my way, Lady Kimiko strode toward the door at the far end of the passage, only to spin on her heel and return.
“Forgotten something?”
“Yes.” Gripping the front of my robe, she pushed me into the bars of the nearby cell. A tingle washed up my back and over my head, then I was staring at the bars from the other side as she withdrew her hand. “Sit. Stay,” she said. “Good boy.” And she was gone.
A little laugh ghosted past my lips as I sank onto the stone floor of a cell that was almost exactly the same as the one I had escaped from. Hopefully, she would be quick enough that the guards did not find me missing and come searching for me. Too restless to lie down, I began to pace.
How much of this had Malice guessed would happen? How much had he planned? Had he known I wanted to return to him enough that I would not let Kimiko die to prevent it? Or had he only hoped? It had always been me with the clever plans and the masterful ploys, yet here I was dancing to every step he had laid before me.
I could go back. It would be so easy. So simple. Together, Malice and I could achieve anything—everything—we wanted, could already have done so had I not run from what I had once been so sure was my destiny. But all Empaths had been deemed traitors once and with good reason.
My hands clenched and unclenched, and I could not stop them any more than I could stop pacing. Kimiko would take me back. She had to. And if I refused to go, she would die, only for another Vice to take her place. But if I went back…
Kisia would burn.
By the time Kimiko returned, I had worked myself into an agitation I could not calm. Pacing and crushing my fingers together had made no difference, leaving me struggling to swallow down every thought of the god I’d wanted to be. Only the memory of Kin’s sad look, of his deep and burning disappointment, had so far managed to keep me sane.
Prove to me the empire needs no gods.
“Here.” She thrust a velvet-wrapped bundle into my arms, its contents clinking. I could feel the spikes and trailing chains of the imperial crown, but I opened it just enough to peer in and be sure. If she had somehow managed to steal me a fake, it was a damn good fake.
“Happy?” she said. “Can we go now?”
Kimiko stood before the wall and held out her hand. I stared at it. I couldn’t go back. Too many people would suffer if I did, and I still had enough command over myself to know it was wrong. Such control would not survive his barrage for long.
“Well?” She shook her hand at me. “You gave me your word.”
I had; there was only one way out of this now. I took her hand.
A mark was nothing more than a parcel of oneself injected into the flesh—a supreme act of dominance, and I could not fight the pleasurable shiver that thrilled through me as I found the piece of Malice living inside her and bled myself into it. His marks had always been built on his thirst for companionship, but as strong as that was, it was nothing to my hunger for mastery. For control.
You are mine and you will do as I command.
Kimiko ripped her hand from mine. “What did you do?”
“I marked you.”
“You—” She stared at her hand, then at me, her thick brows colliding in such fury it thundered through me, but it was nothing to the belief filling my veins like a drug. I am better than you. I am an Empath. You must do as I command. I could crush her heart with a single thought.
“I had to,” I said, fighting for sanity, fighting to swallow the rising god. “I had to do it or you would have—This is better for both of us.”
Her fist smashed into my face, and through a burst of pain and light, I staggered back into darkness.
Chapter 6
Endymion
The night stared back at me, full of souls, but Darius was not one of them. He felt distant, his existence slippery beneath my Empathy as though he was not entirely there, and I gnawed one jagged fingernail.
We had stopped at a crossroads, Avarice halting the wagon and Malice disappearing beneath the drooping branches of a great willow tree. It shif
ted in the breeze, its thin, blade-like leaves shaking—otherworldly in the moonlight.
Gathered at the side of the track, the Vices were as restless as their animals. I leant back against the old signpost and watched them, each man throwing swift glances at their silent leader.
“We need to keep moving,” Ire growled, holding his black stallion’s reins tight as it backed, snorting. “I don’t like waiting in the dark.”
“Scared?” Conceit jeered.
Ire spat on the ground. “Terrified.”
Parsimony sat at the side of the road with his horse’s rein looped around his wrist. “Who says she’s even coming back?”
“She’s marked, Pars,” Ire said. “She has to obey.”
“Doesn’t mean she has to live. I wouldn’t trust such a mission to a minnow. What’s so special about Lord Laroth anyway?”
Ire stared at Parsimony, but the man just stared back. With a jerk of his head, Ire indicated Avarice sitting on a rock farther along the track, his large hands stroking the velvet cheek of Conceit’s horse. “Go ask if you don’t know.”
Silence fell again, but only in the solid world. Leaching into every head, my Empathy heard their whispers, jumbled together like the rustling leaves.
I’d like to see him ask. Avarice bites anyone who talks about the Monster.
I wonder if they’re really brothers.
That Endymion is one of them too. Never thought I’d see someone that freaked me out more than the Master.
It’s those eyes.
Those eyes.
And his hands are always cold.
I had considered begging Katashi to let me stay, had considered telling him the truth, had considered even making myself known to Hana or just walking away altogether, but I could not shake the memory of Darius’s pain. Or the gratitude he had felt as I sucked out his life. He had survived, though right down in the depths of his soul, he hadn’t wanted to. I wanted to help him, to protect him, to do all I could to atone for the foolishness that had seen me walk into Koi Castle as Malice’s pawn.
I got to my feet and brushed myself down. A few wary eyes turned my way, but no one stopped me crossing the moonlit track to the enormous willow tree.
“What do you want, Endymion?” Malice asked as I parted the curtain of hanging leaves. He had constructed a makeshift Errant board out of sticks and stones, and he sat before it, two fingers pressed to his temple.
“Your Vices are worried,” I said. “They don’t think Kimiko is going to make it out of the castle alive.”
Malice moved a piece.
“And you want to know whether I think she will, yes? How sweet of you to worry for the brother you don’t even know.”
“I’m not the only one who’s worried.”
He looked up, slashes of moonlight cutting across his face. “You can feel me, can you?”
“Yes.”
“Am I tasty?”
“You’re afraid.”
His fear deepened, but he forced a rictus of a smile. “What do you want, Endymion?”
To protect him. To save him from you.
“Let me go back. Katashi might listen to me.”
“If you go back, you’d be dead, yes? You think Katashi would spare you because you played at bows and arrows together once? Do you think he would spare you because you helped him? Or because you are his cousin? No. Katashi Otako is ruthless at his core. He wants Darius dead, but he wants you dead too. And me. And all of my Vices, because he doesn’t like power he cannot control.”
“So you sent Kimiko because he wouldn’t kill her.”
Malice laughed, a high-pitched and manic sound that shocked some birds into hurried flight overhead. On the road, a horse snorted. “For someone who can read thoughts and emotions, you are hopelessly naive, Endymion. He sold her to me already for what he wanted most; you think he would hesitate to kill her now?”
“He didn’t want to do that. It broke his heart.”
“And yet he still chose to do it. You read a man’s soul and make excuses for his conduct, but it doesn’t work like that. That he knows it’s wrong makes his willingness to proceed far more horrifying, yes?”
He had not flinched, had not hesitated. And once it was done, he had made no attempt to get her back.
“If he wants us dead, why not execute you with Darius?” I said.
“Because for all his assurance, he is afraid of what I can do. What we can do. And, by the gods, he should be, because if he so much as touches Darius, he will be sorry.”
Anger sounded in his voice, but it was a dreadful grief I felt, a life forever without Darius too terrible to contemplate.
“You love him.”
Malice looked back down at his Errant game. “Yes,” he said simply. “I love him.”
Shadows caressed his face as he gazed at nothing, his mind no longer seeming to be present. His features relaxed into a real smile.
“I know what you did to him,” I said, the words a fearful whisper.
Malice brought his gaze back. “Oh yes? And how about what he did to me?”
The night was empty but for this man. Could Darius really have done anything deserving such a look of hurt?
“Oh, you think poor Darius is a victim?” Malice said, perhaps seeing my shock. “You saw his memory, yes? Of the night he tried to leave me. Tell me, do you think I knew? Do you think I knew which side of his chest held his heart?”
“Did you?”
“I am asking you that question, yes?”
Our eyes locked. I knew him to be the mastermind behind every moment of suffering in Darius’s heart. He had orchestrated his downfall, had played me false, but now he had planted a seed of doubt. Darius’s soul owned places even I could not go.
“You didn’t want him to leave you,” I said. “You wanted to hurt him.”
“Yes. And he deserved it.”
“He didn’t deserve it.”
Malice sighed. “It’s that beautiful face of his,” he said. “It’s so perfect, yes? No one wants to believe ill of him. He is like a shrine doll: every feature perfectly in proportion, ethereal, divine, and yet somehow never entirely present. Our father didn’t understand him. No one understands him except me. He is not what you think. He is never what people think, never what they expect.”
The corners of his lips trembled. As the true spider of the Laroth crest, Malice had always lived up to his name, but now he was somewhere else, someone else, his expression more rueful than angry.
For many minutes, I let him stare through me, through time itself, until I could no longer hold back my troubled thoughts. Darius’s soul felt no closer. No more solid.
“He could die.”
“He could. We are not immortal. Not even you are proof against sheer force of numbers nor accident nor old age. Did you know that our father died insane? He went mad not long after Emperor Lan died. Some say his heart was broken, yes? It was common knowledge he was in love with your mother, and she died along with the rest of your family. And then the great Nyraek Laroth turned on his own men. Day by day, he grew increasingly strange, until he died, friendless and alone and raving in a puddle of piss.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I said, the picture he drew so unlike the man I remembered.
Malice spread his hands. “Why do I tell you these things indeed,” he said. “Perhaps I just want to frighten you, yes? Or perhaps I am going soft and I want you to understand that we are strongest together. Allies. Brothers. Or perhaps I would rather think of anything but the chance Darius won’t make it out of that castle alive.”
Approaching hoofbeats emerged from the night, breaking the peace in our little hollow. A distant lantern flickered through the willow fronds, and Malice rose, stones scattering into the grass as he kicked his improvised board.
On the track, the Vices had gathered to watch the riders approach, their black horses almost indistinguishable from the night.
“Spite,” someone called as the riders slowed. “What ne
ws?”
Hooves kicked up dirt as they reined in, the flanks of their horses heaving. “Nothing,” Spite said, addressing Malice. “I’m sorry, Master, but there is no sign of them and no news from the castle.”
“Of course there isn’t,” one of the others said. “You think Otako would shout about it if Lord Laroth escaped?”
“No, but he would shout about it if he was dead.”
Malice’s fingers shook infinitesimally against the dark silk of his robe. “Still inside the castle?”
“It seems that way, Master.”
“I see. Conceit? Folly?”
“Yes, Master?” they replied in unison.
“Find a way inside. Don’t let them take his head.”
“Yes, Master.”
Low conversation broke out as the two Vices readied their mounts, but Malice had already turned away. “Wait,” I said, striding after him. “What if we went together, you and I. We could do what Darius and I did. We could—”
“No,” he snapped, spinning back.
“Why not?”
Fear fluttered beneath his façade, and his smile slipped. “Because it would not work, yes?” he said, hitching the smile back in place. “Even you cannot kill a whole castle. We must move on before Katashi’s scouts find us.”
“His scouts? You think he’s hunting for us?”
“Stop asking questions and get on the wagon, yes?”
Leaving me behind, he picked his way across the uneven ground to where his wagon waited. It stood beside a rocky ditch that might have been a stream, before the hot, interminable summer drank it dry.
“Go on, move it.” Avarice pushed past, shunting me with his shoulder. “You’re with us.”
The others were mounting. Conceit and Folly were shrinking into the distance, and as Spite extinguished his lantern, the night consumed us too.
“Be quick,” Hope said, passing me. “I don’t think the Master will be forgiving tonight.”
Malice had disappeared into the wagon, closing its door on the night. Lantern light seeped beneath it, stretching its fingers toward the step where Hope took up his vigil. Avarice sat on the box, the reins already gathered. “Kumre,” he said, clicking his tongue the moment I climbed onto the running board. “Kumre.”