But that doesn’t mean I can’t win free of the dead man. My father never figured out how, but he told me to follow in his footsteps. Maybe there’s a way out of this. If there is, I’ll find it.
This, I silently vow.
“If you can manage to control yourself, you can get up and move about as normal,” the dead man says. “You can do whatever you want, and I won’t stop you. As long as you don’t try to harm anyone else, or destroy anything significant, let’s say.”
“So burning down the palace is out of the question?” I murmur behind closed lids. He’ll expect me to put up a show of resisting, at least at first.
“Most definitely. Splinter as many chairs as you like, as long as no one is nearby.”
These chairs probably took some craftsperson days to make. The fact that the dead man doesn’t seem to care about them makes me care all the more. I would be like a spoiled child throwing a tantrum.
“I’ll just stay here,” I say, without opening my eyes. I need these people—the dead man, the royals—to forget about me, to leave me alone for as long as possible. I need to figure out what footsteps my father meant, find my mother, and flee this place—flee Kineas. Where I’ll go after that, I have no idea. Especially not if Skyllea is no longer an option. But I’ll figure that out later.
I prefer the blight to Kineas, frankly.
“About that,” the dead man says, almost reluctantly. “There are those eager to see you up and around as the crown prince’s newly betrothed and now one of the most powerful bloodlines in the polis. You need to heal from this process, so you have some time to rest, but you can’t hide for long.”
I do open my eyes at that, and I feel my face split into a horrible grin. “Of course, my social engagements, where I’ll be made to dance for the amusement of others. My father’s death must not be enough to excuse me. Whatever shall I do to make amends?” My voice has taken on a shrill, broken note. “How long?” I ask. “Until the wedding.”
He hesitates. “One month. That’s part of the rush.”
One month until I’m bound to yet another monster. Except this one will be worse than the one sitting next to me. More tears leak from the corners of my eyes. “Just leave me alone.”
“I can do that, but only if you promise not to act out.”
“What am I, a child?”
“Sometimes you behave like one.”
For a moment, rage blinds me, but then it occurs to me that he might be testing me. I take a long breath out through my nose, my jaw locked. I grate out the words, “I promise.”
“Thank you,” the shade says. There’s a heavy silence, and I wonder if he’s going to speak again. I want him to go. But then I hear him say, “I meant what I said earlier, at the ball. We each have something the other wants. If—”
“Get,” I enunciate slowly, “out.”
The dead man vanishes without another word. Maybe he’s telling the truth, but in the moment I can’t care. He as good as led my father to the executioner’s block. Even if he can help me, I spit on his help. I’ll find my own way.
The way to be free of him.
I can’t let him realize what I’m up to, of course, and so I’ll need to do a better job of pretending to cooperate. And soon, I’ll try discovering some answers for myself, starting where my father told me to follow in his footsteps.
For now, I roll over in bed and weep until exhaustion takes me.
* * *
At some point, lying in bed, I feel arms come around me. I almost think I’m dreaming the sensation, but all my dreams have been nightmares. This is too nice. For a moment in the darkness, I think it’s my mother, comforting me like she used to, but the skin is too firm and as smooth as silk, where my mother’s had been yielding and rough. And then I smell the perfume, and I recognize the voice near my ear.
“You don’t have to say anything. Anything at all,” Lydea whispers. “But I know what you’re feeling. And I’m here for you.”
I don’t respond, and I soon fall back asleep in the sweet circle of those red-streaked arms, stained in her mother’s blood. When I next awake, the princess is gone.
But she was real. As real as she has ever been, and I won’t forget it.
* * *
No one else visits me. Not Penelope, not Japha, and not—I shudder even to think—my betrothed. I sleep fitfully, but never for long. I’m tired, bone deep, but as soon as I close my eyes, I see my father fall to the ground, and I feel blood and fire wash over my skin, leaving behind the burn of these sigils.
The bloodline itself doesn’t hurt after a while. It swirls in my head like a braided river, beckoning me to follow its sinuous lines, to make a path of its sigils, to weave their glowing strands into a tapestry magnificent or terrible.
But not all hurts affect the flesh. Some reach the spirit.
My father is gone, nearly as soon as I got him back. It’s almost worse this way—not only a fresh pain, but a reopening of every deep cut his absence inflicted upon me as a child, which I’ve tried so hard to bandage over the years.
But the thought of my mother always keeps me from falling. I try to stay strong for her, to see her safe at home and supported. There’s still hope for my mother, and even for myself, much more distant. It’s that hope that reaches out and lifts me up.
I’m not allowed to see my mother, no matter how many times I ask, and so I refuse to leave my bed until I feel ready. It doesn’t hurt that I truly need the time to heal and regain my strength.
No more than a week after I’ve received my bloodline, no more than a week during which I cry all the tears I have inside me and heal all the wounds I can heal, I finally get up.
I have three weeks. Three weeks to either enjoy the last of my life as I know it, or three weeks to find an alternative to my fate.
And there’s an alternative I haven’t yet considered. I don’t want to, but it’s there, another path branching. Except this one is much darker.
The apartment has been emptied of all but my meager belongings and the furniture. Drifting around, I feel a little like a ghost here without my father or the others. It seems my aunt, now without her daughter or her husband, has moved out, leaving the whole place to me alone. I have a hunch where she’s gone, but I have more important things to investigate and I don’t really care.
I can’t celebrate my solitude, besides. I won’t be left alone here for long. Either I’ll be forced to marry Kineas and join him in his quarters, or I’ll escape from Thanopolis … or I’ll be dead.
14
I assume I’ll meet resistance trying to go to my father’s office, either from the dead man or any number of people who might be overly curious about the whereabouts of the late Silvean Ballacra’s daughter and Crown Prince Kineas’s new betrothed. But everyone seems content to let my guardian keep track of me. It’s the one benefit to being warded, I suppose, and the dead man doesn’t seem to have any objection as I steal out of my palace apartments in the early morning and venture down the long, blossom-entwined marble corridors. It’s peaceful at this hour, a breath of morning dew and the perfume of flowers in the air. It perturbs me that I’m already growing used to the ridiculous wealth surrounding me.
At my destination I finally meet some resistance, but only in the form of the vine-carved wooden door. It doesn’t seem to be locked, at least not with any physical mechanism. My father opened it with sigils.
I have thousands of sigils as my disposal now, thanks to my bloodline, but I don’t know how to use them properly. My father never got the chance to teach me like he promised, and now he never will. I hate the sight of them. Their true meanings come to me in flashes of inspiration or murderous rage—a glowing path of them opening in my mind, guiding me to wondrous or horrible possibilities. And yet, something as mundane as opening a door seems beyond my reach at the moment. Or at least nothing comes to mind, no magical way forward, as I consider the door.
Maybe if I simply try to move the door …
At the
thought, the jamb explodes inward in a shower of splinters, whipping the door on its hinges to crash violently against the inner wall.
I glance around in shock. “Oops.”
The dead man shoots me an exasperated look as he appears next to me. The only other people nearby are across the gardens that sprawl before my father’s office. I quickly duck into the ruined doorway to avoid their notice.
I leave the dead man outside. He doesn’t try to follow me, only looks mildly amused as I try to close the door in his face; it hangs crookedly now and doesn’t latch. And yet this I can do. I simply move all the wood back into place … except with more delicacy this time. When I’m finished, it looks as if I never touched it.
After I’m standing inside, safely alone—though never truly alone with the dead man lurking who knows where—I don’t know where to begin. I light a lamp near the door with a wave of my fingers, tracing the less familiar sigil in the air. Other lamps follow its lead, one by one, around the office. Ignite is a sigil I’ve only just learned from Japha. My father never trusted me with it as a child—perhaps with good reason.
I step carefully over piles of books and papers on the floor that my father already managed to displace since I organized the space for him before he died.
I have to blink the sting from my eyes as I imagine him leaning against his desk, tired but smiling at me. He was just here, in this spot, and now it seems so impossible and wrong that he isn’t. That he’s simply gone.
I cannot get lost in crying again. To distract myself, I move to study the piece of paper tacked to the wall, the one he seemed to indicate was important last time I was here with him. I stare at the sigil: a strange crisscross formed of thick, red lines, as if it’s been drawn in blood by the tip of a finger. I still have no clue what it means. Maybe one of the many books scattered around could tell me, if only I could read better.
You might just have to follow in my footsteps.
Follow your eye.
My father knew I couldn’t read well, sigils or otherwise. Maybe he left me more of a map to follow.
And maybe he drew that map on my skin, with his blood. He contributed new sigils to the bloodline as he gave me his life—his magical footsteps, in a sense.
I just have to use my eyes to find the path. He left me a starting point on the scrap of paper tacked to the wall. I look at the first place on my skin to occur to me, raising my right hand. And in the center of my palm, as if my father knew I would look there first, is the exact sigil on the wall. The only problem: It’s surrounded by other sigils, just like every other sigil on my body aside from the lone one on my cheek. If this is a map, a pathway, I have no idea where to go from here. But I can’t help the burst of hope that tears through me, and I grin like an idiot.
Then I realize I am an idiot, and drop both my hand and my grin. The dead man can’t read my mind as far as I can tell, but he is incredibly adept at reading my body language. For reasons I don’t want to consider, the thought brings warmth to my cheeks.
He doesn’t reappear to ask what I’m up to. Maybe he’s uninterested in my rifling, or he has no understanding of sigils as a shade, only an ability to sense oncoming blood magic of the potentially destructive sort. But that doesn’t mean he’s not watching. I pick up a book and pretend to leaf through it while my thoughts spin. At least the pages have pictures.
Follow your eye.
Perhaps I’m right about the map being on my body. And yet I can’t guess the path from my hand, so maybe he meant to help me out with clues in the room. I lean against the wall in front of the tacked-up paper, facing the office from behind his desk. It’s not too hard to bend my head toward the book while surreptitiously shooting glances up through my lashes.
There, indented in the back of his wooden desk chair, I find it. My father must have used his magic to put a sigil so lightly and perfectly there, so the dead man wouldn’t notice or grow suspicious. This one has more sinuous lines like waves. I’m fairly certain I’ve seen it above the sigil in the center of my palm, but I don’t yet want to check to make sure. If the pattern holds, I imagine I might find another one from the perspective of the chair. Shifting as if uncomfortable, I sidle over to the desk to sit down and scoot over a sheaf of papers before setting the open book in front of me.
Underneath the stack of papers is another sigil, sunken into the wood of the desk, this one like an angular hourglass. To get a view from the desktop, I’ll have to look up. I wait a few moments, flip through a few more pages of the book, and then sigh as if I’m frustrated, stretching my arms overhead and tilting my face toward the ceiling.
This sigil has been pressed into the carved wooden clouds. It’s directly over the one on the desk, so there isn’t anywhere else I can look from there. I drop my hands into my lap and pick at my nails as if bored, studying my palm.
Those same four sigils in the room weave a diagonal line from the center of my palm onto the inside of my pointer finger, where a few more sigils continue until ending at my last knuckle, like they do on all my fingers.
Perhaps here is my path. Before I can try to trace it, either in the air or only in my mind, the dead man appears, making me jump and sit up straight in the chair like a child caught breaking the rules.
“Sorry to intrude, but I must,” he says, before I can try to come up with an excuse for what I’m doing in here.
My guardian doesn’t seem to want one. He merely waits, dark, silent, and strange.
“Were you going to say something, or just skulk around like a ghost?”
“Are you all right?” His voice is curiously soft.
And that makes me furious. “Don’t act like you care.”
“I do care,” he says, as if somewhat surprised himself. As I hold his gaze, something in his guard seems to drop. To leave a tentative opening.
I remember the odd ways he’s helped me, even as he’s held me back. The moments of wonder when I truly seem to see him. This is one of those moments. I should use it. “Why do you care?”
“Because it’s my duty.” He hesitates. “And despite your rough demeanor, you’re kind to those you care about, and right now you have no one else looking out for you but me. Maybe Japha, but they can’t do much. Also…” He purses his lips. “You hate this place as much as I do, so it makes me more inclined to empathy.”
The words almost sound like an accident.
I gape at him over the desk. “You hate this place?”
He folds his arms and looks away. “I didn’t say that.”
“You did, too. What the hell, Ivrilos?”
He blinks down at me. “You called me by name.”
“Because maybe for once you sounded like a person and not like a corpse,” I say quickly, trying to mask my embarrassment. “But an absurd person,” I add. “How can you hate it here when you do all you do to uphold it? After what you just did to my father?”
“I have to.”
“What’s making you? I mean, I have you keeping me in line. What’s keeping you here?”
Who do you answer to? I almost add, though I don’t want to press my luck.
He doesn’t respond, but his expression cracks open even more, revealing something raw and weary. Hope flares in me. Perhaps I’m not wrong to try to reach out to him—truly, and not just as a ruse. To treat him as more than a dead man. Maybe I can convince him to break his shadowy hold over me, no scheming required.
“You could just … let me go?” I suggest softly. “Please, Ivrilos?”
His face doesn’t so much harden as go deathly still—the openness shuttered—and I know I’ve made a mistake.
“I can’t,” he says firmly. “I told you, I need you.”
“Why?” I nearly cry. “For what?”
“I can’t say.”
Of course that’s his reply. “Because you know I won’t like it when you tell me?” I guess.
His silence is answer enough. I collapse back in the chair.
The shade suddenly appears rig
ht next to me, crouching on my side of the desk, his eyes level with mine. His dark gaze swallows me.
“I’ll continue to help you however I can,” he says, his voice low. “Especially with him.” He glances off to the side, eyes narrowing, as if he can see Kineas through the many walls of the palace.
It nearly makes me smile, despite myself. “But you won’t let me kill him?”
He sighs. “No, I won’t.”
Fine. “Then I hope you like standing over top of Kineas, because you’ll be doing a lot more of it if you don’t want me to try killing him. It’s not the absolute worst arrangement in the world,” I add, leaning my head back. “At least you have nice eyes.”
Ivrilos’s smile—brief, barely there, but wholly genuine—is rather nice, too.
Then he frowns. “Unfortunately, now that you’re up and about, you’re expected at your lesson. That was what I came here to tell you.”
I sit up in a rush. “Dear goddess, more lessons in what?”
“Sigils.”
I nearly burst out laughing—I actually need to know more about sigils at this exact moment.
“Do please make a more subtle entrance than this.” He casts a wry glance at the door I blasted open.
It surprises me to realize he can be funny … for a dead man. That doesn’t mean I want him out of my life any less.
“And please don’t try to kill your tutor,” he adds. “I’m asking nicely.”
“Who’s my tutor?”
But the shade has vanished, leaving me to discover that on my own.
Bastard.
15
“You must always strive to improve, push your boundaries, and hopefully reach beyond the knowledge of your bloodline so that you may add to it when you pass it on. Being able to read and write sigils is the bare minimum.” With this, Captain Marklos looks at me.
I stand in a sunny courtyard lined in marble colonnades and troughs of water, a lush garden at the far end and a patio with a massive table coated in sand for practicing sigil-writing, and all at once I determine that magic lessons are the worst of the lot. It’s not the subject so much as the instructor. Still, I need these lessons.
In the Ravenous Dark Page 14