“So I heard,” my father said, grimly.
Surely everyone had, by now. My companion had been only barely aware enough to garble some frantic, meaningless words at the cluster of Sidnee who met us at the entrance to the Pales, clutch at one shocked woman’s shoulder, and then keel over.
I glanced down at my sleeve. A smear of his purple blood still stained it.
“There was one other thing,” I said. “He told me that he was thirteenth in line for the Stone Crown. If Atecco has fallen and there are no other survivors, then that would mean…”
A choked, wordless sound echoed through the room. My mother’s fingertips were pressed to her lips, dismay wrought over her face. It was the sort of innocent dismay that looked like it belonged to a small child.
“All alone…” she whispered, so quietly that it seemed as if she didn’t mean to speak aloud, but before she could say more my father hushed her and wrapped her hand in his. He looked down at their intertwined hands, thinking.
“Keep close watch on the survivors and tell me as soon as any of them awaken,” he said. “Especially him. I will speak to them immediately. I do not wish to imagine what they have already endured.”
I was exhausted. After leaving my parents, I’d begun to head towards my room only for Siobhan to stop me.
“Surely you wouldn’t be so foolish as to think you’re done.”
“Siobhan, I just finished fishing a dozen bodies out of the swamps.”
“You also spat in the face of your vows less than…” She squinted up at one of the timepieces. “…Four hours ago. The Wall is more than well attended now, considering recent events. But all of that guard overstaffing does mean that weapon cleanings have been neglected.”
Any other Commander, and perhaps I might have argued. But Siobhan? It would be like talking to stone. And as I loosed an exasperated sigh and went on my way to the armories, I couldn’t help but glance down at my marked-up forearm and note the patches of remaining clean skin. If I had to choose, I would take cleaning duty over another X.
So, I mustered the last of my energy and dragged myself back to the Blades’ Heart, located deep within the Pales, so far into the darkness that it felt like you had to walk through the night sky to get there.
The House of Obsidian was built entirely within the cliffs of the Pales, hallways burrowing into an endless expanse of glassy black stone. Twinkling silver lights were carved into the walls, adorning the ceilings in scattered illumination. Nestled within our cliffs were entire structures all on their own, everything from homes to shops to government buildings. Individually designed, yes, but all carved from the same stone — all connected to the same heart.
When I was a child, and still the Teirness, I used to visit other houses on diplomatic visits with my parents. I had marveled at the freestanding buildings, towering statehouses and ornate palaces, all of which were clearly great sources of pride. But to me, they had all seemed so vulnerable, like paper sculptures left to stand in the rain. They were just… out there, beneath the sky and rain and wind? So separate from each other? It was unthinkable to me, then. When I was young and afraid at night, I used to press my palm to the wall and I’d swear I could feel the heartbeats of a thousand other people, the heartbeats of all the Sidnee who lived within these walls, and the heartbeat of the Pales themselves. When I did the same in my rooms in those other Houses, I felt nothing but cold brick.
That night, all I could think of were those paper palaces. The House of Stone was one of the places I’d visited all those years ago. And now those lonely buildings were left to crumble.
It was nearly midnight once I finished cleaning, but I couldn’t imagine going back to my chambers and lying there alone in the darkness. Instead, the tavern welcomed me back with open arms, despite the trouble I had caused there earlier that day. My favorite wine was presented wordlessly, the air hot as an embrace, the music roaring, a stranger waiting with a gaze held a little too long.
That was one of the many things I loved about the House of Obsidian: we were among the largest of the Fey Houses, and that meant there was always another stranger. Whatever I could not lose in a drink, I could lose in sloppy kisses against the wall, and then the door, and then my bed. If it was dark enough, I would not have to see whatever stares they would give the X’s up my arms. If I was drunk enough, I would not care either way. Not if it meant that I was the furthest I could possibly be from “alone.”
But that night, there was something chasing me that I couldn’t lose in another’s breath. I had one drink, then two, then four, enough to make touch inviting. And yet, I found myself staggering away from the pub without a partner. I didn’t know, exactly, where I intended to go. I surprised myself when I stumbled past my own chamber door, and instead, kept going down, deeper into the Pales.
The healing quarters were always staffed, but it was so late that even these areas were quiet, devoid of footsteps. My own, even in drunkenness, were silent — a gift of decades of Blade training. I rounded a corner and slipped through a slightly-ajar door, and there before me was the copper-haired Stoneheld man.
He looked like a painting. He was utterly still, eyes closed, dark lashes falling over fair cheeks. I had barely seen his face before. It had been covered in blood and contorted in pain. Now, it was so clean and smooth he seemed as if he had been crafted out of porcelain.
That serenity stood in dark, stark contrast to the rest of him. No wonder there had been so much blood. His body had been torn apart.
Blankets of black silk were folded down neatly across his hips, leaving his abdomen exposed. The sight of it had me drawing in a sharp breath through my teeth. Violet-stained bandages wrapped his ribs, and within those bandages, herbs and flowers and healing spells had been tucked between the folds. Sidnee healers had likely spent the whole day and much of the night casting spells and whispering prayers to Mathira and her sisters. Many of them, by the looks of it.
I just stared at him. Self-consciousness fell over me. I wasn’t sure why I had come here.
Stupid. This had been a stupid idea.
I was about to turn away when I heard a sound — a groan.
I turned around again. The Stoneheld’s eyelids fluttered, just barely. One hand moved towards his abdomen.
“Don’t.” I crossed the room in two long steps, quickly enough to catch his hand. “Don’t touch it. You are hurt.”
His head rolled, eyes opened barely enough to peer at me. They were a mossy green — a color unseen among the Sidnee.
He yanked his hand away from my grasp with surprising force, letting out a wordless grunt as he pushed himself to his elbows. His neck was craned, looking down at his decimated wounds.
“Stop,” I said again, when he tried to touch his dressings. “It is to help you.”
But when I reached for him again, he shook his head and pulled away.
“I need to see,” he choked out, his voice barely more than a wheeze. And when he drew back two of the bandages and violet blood began to bubble over, he just watched it spread, even though I uttered a curse and looked around for a healer, more gauze, something — anything — to stop the sudden influx of blood.
“It was real,” he said, barely louder than a whisper.
There was something in his voice that made me stop. His gaze flicked to me, raw and angry.
“Yes,” I whispered, and the word stung.
“How…how many left?”
“Nineteen, including you.”
A wince shuddered across his face. The blood was now rolling over the pale valleys of his abdomen, blooming over the sheets. I cursed.
“Stop moving.” I pressed the bandages back down over his wounds. Surely it was agonizing, but he didn’t react.
“You’re safe here,” I said, and his stare darkened, as if I had said something appalling.
“Safe?” His voice was a serrated blade.
“Don’t talk,” I said, but he had already fallen back against the headboard, as if all of
his strength had left him at once.
“It sounded like rain,” he murmured, and all at once his fury turned to utter, bleak sadness.
I did not know what he meant. He seemed as if he barely did, either. But that sadness just grabbed me and would not let go. I did not think. My hand covered his.
“It’s going to be alright,” I whispered, and by the time his gaze flicked back to me, it was empty and impassive.
He shook his head, barely a movement.
“It is not,” he murmured.
But by the time the words left his lips, consciousness slipped away.
I shouldn’t have been there. In fact, some might have considered it downright dangerous, for someone like me — someone rejected by the gods — to be in a holy place of healing.
But I looked at this man, and all I could think of was my visit to House of Stone all those years ago. All of those little houses, separated in the rain. Nothing sadder, than to be so alone. And alone forever, now.
And so, I stayed, my hand over his, until my lashes fluttered closed. And when sometime late into the night my eyes snapped open, my heart pounding with a panic, I reached through the dark until my palm met the cool solace of stone. I held it there, and I imagined that I was connected to them all: the warm flesh of the Stoneheld man against one hand, and against the other, a hundred thousand other people, and the Pales themselves.
Chapter Eight
Max
It was late by the time I returned to Zeryth. His guards waved me in. I hated their nonchalance. It meant they had been expecting me. It meant that Zeryth knew I would come back.
When the door opened, Zeryth was lounging at a desk in the library, looking dramatically unsurprised to see me.
“Maxantarius. What a surprise.” He smiled and gave me a face of overwrought confusion. “Did the end of our last conversation not sit well with you?”
“Moth Rethem,” I said. “He’s a new recruit. In Commander Charl’s division. I want him on mine.”
“A new recruit? But why—”
“Will he be with me or not?”
Zeryth shrugged. “Fine. I doubt Charl cares much either way.” Then he cast me a sidelong stare. “I take it then that this means you have officially accepted the title I’ve so graciously offered you, General Farlione.”
It made my skin prickle, to hear myself referred to that way. And that prickling intensified to outright crawling as I heard myself answer, “Yes. I accept.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Zeryth said cheerfully. I was already leaving.
Halfway down the hallway, I stopped short. Nura rounded a corner in front of me, and the two of us stared at each other in silence.
For a moment, I was struck by the bizarre realization that the last time I had seen Nura here, in this house, everything about our lives had been different. My family had been alive. And I had loved Nura, had trusted her implicitly. Now, that thought seemed like a cruel joke. Here, we were both surrounded by everything that war and Reshaye had taken from us. And we only stood here because of her.
“The great mystery solved,” I said. “So all of this, and it was just for a coup.”
Something flickered in her expression. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“It is? Because from where I stand, it looks like you’re prepared to kill thousands of people for — what? A crown? This is what Tisaanah’s life is for?”
“You say that as if I’m not giving her everything she’s ever wanted.”
I let out a breathless scoff. To think there was a time that I admired that quality in her, her ability to peel away emotion, her ability to be ruthless. She had always been a better soldier than I was. It just took me ten fucking years to realize how much it had cost her.
“I don’t understand you, Nura,” I said, turning away. “I don’t understand how you can be in this house and say that with a straight face.”
I didn’t wait for a response. I was already halfway down the hallway when Nura called out, “Max. Did you tell Zeryth you’d lead?”
I paused. Didn’t turn back. My silence was enough.
“It’ll be worth it,” she said. “I promise.”
I almost laughed. As if Nura’s promises were worth anything, anymore.
At least the first time I sold my soul to the Orders, I was too young and stupid to know that I was just driving a dagger into my own gut.
This time, I felt every inch of the blade.
Tisaanah and I slept in one of the outposts that night. I had meant it when I told Tisaanah I couldn’t stay in that house. Even now, curled up with Tisaanah in a little cot in a cold outpost on the edge of the grounds, I could still feel it looming over me. It was the smell that really did it, I think. The minute we had landed, I knew before I opened my eyes that we were here. That scent of pine and iron yanked me ten years into the past in seconds. And now it tethered me there.
I stared at the ceiling, watching moonlight fall over rafters. Tisaanah slept, though it was light and fitful. Her limbs intertwined with mine like roots clinging to the earth.
One sentence kept floating through my mind:
Tomorrow I will leave to go fight Zeryth Aldris’s war.
It was a ridiculous sentence, reflecting a horrifying, distorted reality.
Ruefully, I thought of the man I was five years ago. The man who barely managed to make it out of Seveseed dens alive, who was in the process of creating a garden to surround a cabin in the middle of nowhere. And he would sit there, unmoving, like a rock letting the water rush by him.
I wasn’t sure if I pitied that man or envied him. He had been nothing if not certain. He was certain that there was nothing in the world worth saving. He was certain that even if there was, there was nothing he could contribute to such a cause, anyway. And above all, he had been certain that he would never, ever, under any circumstances, find himself on a battlefield ever again.
I missed certainty.
But then…
My awareness returned to Tisaanah’s weight against my chest. The warmth of her breath on the underside of my chin. The strand of hair that kept tickling my nose.
But then, I thought, there is this.
It was sometime past midnight when I carefully, pushed back the rough blanket. I extracted myself from Tisaanah’s arms, shoved my bare feet into unlaced boots, and rose.
It was so cold outside that when I slipped through the outpost door, my teeth started chattering. Ascended above, I had forgotten how chilly the nights could get so far north at this time of year. I hadn’t bothered to grab a jacket, but I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my trousers and tread down the pathway leading to the main house. There weren’t many people around now, activity dulled to an eerie quiet.
It was a long walk back to the house. I didn’t go to the front gates. Instead I went around back, cutting through the clearing where Brayan used to run me through drills until I could barely lift a sword, then tracing down paths where Atraclius and I once raced. I glanced to the tree line, and through the darkness could make out the entrance of the path that would lead to Kira’s shed.
The door was small, tucked beneath one of the balconies, unassuming compared to the grandeur of the main entryways. I slid my fingers along the inside of the doorframe. My instincts still knew exactly where it was — the notch that, if you pushed just the right way, would jostle the loose lock enough to turn the handle. Atraclius had been the one to discover it. It remained our secret, among my siblings and I. We all, now and then, needed a way to sneak back into the house undetected. Even Brayan.
I slipped through.
It was so silent. Anyone staying here would be in the upper levels, leaving these hallways still and dim beneath the quiet glow of sconces on the walls. I paced through, climbing one narrow set of stairs, then two, until the small servants’ passages opened up to the main atrium. And then I stopped.
I couldn’t move.
Double doors stood before me. Through them would be the ballroom, and
the grand staircase, and the hallways that led to my old bedroom and those of my family. Where they had lived, and where they had died. Where I had killed them.
Eight painted pairs of eyes gazed at me from beside the door — an old family portrait. It was a small one, more of a sketch than a finished piece, but my mother had always been fond of it, hence why she found a place for it here. My whole family stared back at me, rendered in loose, organic brushstrokes. My parents, my father with a smile in his eyes and my mother deep in thought. Kira, only ten years old, looking as if she had much more important things to do. Variaslus, who seemed to be trying very hard to seem elegant, and then the twins, one grinning and the other frowning. Atraclius, so comically stern that anyone who knew him would see that he was actually making fun of the whole thing. Brayan, noble and serious. And me, eighteen, vaguely disgruntled, with no idea how fucking lucky I was.
It was suddenly difficult to breathe. It had been so long since I had seen their faces in anything but dreams.
“It is strange, to be here after so many years.”
The voice came from behind me. My blood went cold.
A familiar voice. With no accent.
I turned. Moonlight fell over Tisaanah’s face as she stepped towards the painting. But the movements, clumsy and lurching, were not Tisaanah’s.
I closed my eyes, every muscle suddenly tight.
“Get out,” I ground out. The words were visceral, deep — the only truth I could choke out. There was nothing more terrible than seeing Tisaanah’s face like this, with everything that made her her stripped away. But here, with my family’s ghosts bearing down on us, my revulsion was so intense that I could barely breathe.
She stepped forward again, hand outstretched. “You are angry.”
I jerked away. “Don’t touch me.”
Reshaye pulled back, cold curiosity behind Tisaanah’s eyes. “And after so many years you still dream of the dead. Even though they made you weak.” Curiosity hardened into hurt. “You had no one but me. And still, you dreamed of the dead.”
Children of Fallen Gods (The War of Lost Hearts Book 2) Page 6