Children of Fallen Gods (The War of Lost Hearts Book 2)

by Carissa Broadbent

  Like the tall grass against my hands. Forward. Backward. Again.

  {You asked me once what I missed. Then, I did not understand what you meant. I did not understand what it was to miss.}

  The swaying of the grass began to lurch more sporadically, like the fragment of memory was degrading. The tips against my palm. Back. Again. Back. Again.

  {But now I see. To miss is to mourn. And I know that I mourn. But the greatest tragedy of it is that I cannot remember why. I just know that once I was whole, and now I am a collection of missing pieces.}

  The plains dissolved. I felt Reshaye’s pain, dull and aching, spread through my bones.

  {Sometimes, though, I catch the edge of it, like a snag at the end of a fraying thread. I think that I remember the sun.}

  The comforting heat of the sun fell over my face, sweat dotting my cheeks.

  {Perhaps I once knew the smell of rain.}

  As quickly as it had come, the sun was replaced by a steamy rush of rain, the damp scent of earth rising.

  {Once, I may have even known the touch of another soul.}

  The rain was gone. The sensation was replaced by only one other, the feeling of a hand in mine, the warmth of skin, the throb of a pulse.

  {But even these things are a shadow of a shadow. Perhaps they are not my memories. Perhaps they belong to another.}

  The warm touch was gone. Suddenly there was pain. A flash of white, white, white. A fragment of golden hair. A glance of mossy green.

  And someone watching. Someone calling. Someone searching. And I had felt Reshaye recoil from terrible memories, but above all, this — this tenderness — is the thing that scared it most.

  Why? I asked. I didn’t understand. Why do you fear the thing you want most?

  {My fear is not the fear of danger.}

  Then what?

  {Perhaps I am too far from what I once was.} Its voice was quiet. Childlike. {Perhaps I do not wish to be found.}

  I felt a breath, a name I could not understand, a hand reaching. I felt it closer than ever, so close it raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

  I turned, and—

  —And then I woke.

  Something warm and wet was dripping down the side of my face. Blood? Everything hurt. I could see nothing. I heard voices, but the words ran together. It took concentrated effort to orient myself. My thoughts were sludge.

  I tried to touch my wound, only to find that my shoulders ached because my arms were wrenched out to either side, my wrists bound. Blindfolded. I was blindfolded. I felt Reshaye lingering, half-dazed, in the back of my mind.

  My memories came back to me in pieces. The old woman and her granddaughter. My visit. The soup. The hands on my throat. And—

  I would do anything for them. Anything.

  They had poisoned me. They had given me up.

  The realization slid into me like a knife, and betrayal spilled through me. Reshaye clung to it.

  {After everything that you have done for them? After everything that you have given for them? They betrayed us.}

  No. I had to choke back my own hurt, my own anger. No, that isn’t what’s important now.

  But Reshaye unraveled everything I tried so hard to conceal.

  {You can not lie to me,} it whispered.

  There were people here. How many? I reached out a tendril of my mind into the air around me, feeling for a thought, a presence. But my magic had gone eerily silent, like a wall separated it from the world around me, dampening it to a numb ringing inside my skull.

  Had I been dosed with Chryxalis? This felt… different than that, like my magic had been chained rather than smothered. Even Reshaye seemed so far away, as if something had shoved it deep beneath the surface and trapped it there.

  I tried to lift my head. My muscles were not cooperative.

  The voices stopped.

  “She’s awake,” a man’s voice said.

  “There’s no need to be afraid of her,” a woman replied. The voice was low and smooth, sounding as if it belonged to someone in her sixties. “She’s harmless now.”

  “I’m not afraid of her. I’m just… curious.”

  Footsteps, slowly approaching.

  “From what I had heard about her, I was expecting—”

  “What? A demon?”

  “She just looks so harmless.”

  “That harmless little thing has killed hundreds of your men,” the woman replied, and despite everything, that word closed its teeth around me — hundreds. Had I taken that many lives? Surely, no. Not when I had tried so hard not to. But then again, it adds up, doesn’t it? Battles on top of battles on top of battles, and even those miraculously small death tolls rise and rise.

  I pushed the thought away.

  “I would appreciate it,” I said, “if you could remove this from my face. Please.”

  My voice was raspy.

  Seconds passed. Then the blindfold was yanked away.

  I squinted.

  It wasn’t especially bright in here, but compared to the unyielding black of the blindfold, the light was blinding. It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust. I might have expected to see myself in a dungeon, chained up in some rat-infested basement. But this place was clean, with walls made out of polished stone, lit by delicate gold lanterns. A blue sky peered through several long, gold-adorned windows near the ceiling. The floor was made out of ceramic tile — beautifully crafted, though several long cracks ran though some of them.

  At first I wasn’t sure what this place was — maybe it wasn’t a prison at all. But then my eyes settled on the door, directly across the room from me. It was iron, heavily bolted.

  It was a prison, then. A fine prison. But a prison, nonetheless.

  And then my eyes traveled back, to the two people who stood before me. First, a man, who appeared to be in his fifties, tall with a neat grey beard and finely crafted clothes. And then, a woman who was a bit older than him, grey-and-gold hair spilling over her shoulders, regarding me with a curious, critical stare. She wore a dress of deep emerald, but my eyes immediately landed on the sigil at her breast.

  A sun. The symbol of the Order of Daybreak.

  “Do you know who I am?” the man asked.

  I eyed him, piecing together my thoughts. “You are Atrick Aviness.”

  It was a guess. But I guessed right.

  He inclined his chin. “You have been making things very difficult for me,” he said.

  He was very soft-spoken, almost gentle, and he still looked at me as though I was more of a curiosity than an enemy. Strange, to see him now as a person, after thinking of him for so long as a monolithic force, inseparable from his armies.

  “Likewise,” I said, and smiled. Beneath the smile, I cursed my lack of magic. I had not had to do this sort of performance in quite some time. It would be easier if I could feel his thoughts, his preferences — test what sort of mask I should wear.

  My gaze flicked to the woman, who was watching me carefully.

  “And you?” I asked.

  “Irene. One name is enough for you.” She cocked her head. “You are quite an interesting little thing, aren’t you? We met, you may recall. At the Orders’ ball last year. Very briefly. The Orders were quite entranced by you. It seems that little has changed. I remember then thinking that you just seemed so desperate.” A small smile. “Desperation does drive people to do dangerous things. What did Aldris promise you? And what did you trade away?”

  Too much, a voice in the back of my mind whispered. Far too much.

  “I have no stake in Zeryth’s crown,” I said. “It does not matter to me who sits on Ara’s throne.”

  There was a reason I was still alive. What was it?

  “There is something you need,” I said. “I can help you get it.”

  “How quickly, she offers herself up to turncoat. But I think that’s an empty promise, isn’t it? I know Zeryth and Nura, and I know they would have eliminated the possibility of your disloyalty. If I were to move your bin
dings, would I find your Blood Pact scar? But no… it’s not you that we need.”

  Uncertainty rose to dread.

  Reshaye slithered through my thoughts. It was slow, sluggish. Gods, what was that? I pressed my back against the stone wall. Stone — I could Wield stone, with Reshaye’s help, but only with its help.

  I did not want to break Irene’s stare. But I chanced a turn of my head, at my arms splayed out over the stone wall. Just a glance, and nearly gasped.

  Stratagrams had been marked onto my skin. Three on each arm.

  Were those… tattooed?

  I had seen that before, on a Valtain slave girl. I remembered telling Max about that once, long ago, before we were even friends. They were probably meant to cripple her magic, he had said, a wrinkle of disdain over his nose. Imagine tying a cow’s head to its tail.

  Can you break that? I whispered to Reshaye, and it hissed frustration, pressing up against the shackles that bound our magic. Even reaching towards them was difficult. It was weak.

  {Not yet. Not yet.}

  Irene chuckled. My shock must have shown on my face.

  “You’ve earned yourself a reputation worthy of extreme precautions, Tisaanah.”

  “Then why am I still alive?” I said. “What is it that you want?”

  “It would be a waste to let you die.”

  She turned away and began to walk to the door.

  “I destroyed one of the most powerful houses in Threll,” I called after her. “Ahzeen Mikov thought he could control me, too. That was a mistake. I’m a much more valuable friend than enemy.”

  She paused and looked over her shoulder. “Like I said, it’s not you that we need.”

  She stepped through the door, but Aviness remained, staring at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read.

  “My niece was fourteen years old,” he said. “You’re serving a man who murdered a child.”

  I said nothing.

  He was right, of course — he was right and I knew it. But I had also spent these last months covered in the blood spilled by his soldiers, protecting cities from his armies, cradling corpses left by his weapons.

  “I’m glad it will be over soon,” he muttered, as if to himself, and turned away. The door slammed, and I was left there alone.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Max

  The man was already bleeding. The guards that had dragged him back had been rough doing it, so his gangly arms were torn and his shirt wet with blood. He did not wear a uniform, but there was not a doubt in my mind that he was affiliated with one of our enemy houses. It was just a matter of which one.

  He sat there, face to the ground, at the center of the small, dimly-lit room. It was the middle of the day, but you’d never know it, down here. These were the dungeons below Korvius, crafted of windowless grey stone. I paced along the outskirts of the room, so angry that magic was already sparking at my fingertips. Still, my steps were long and slow. Tare was here, too, sitting silently across the table from our prisoner, and Sammerin. And in the corner, lingering in the shadows, Nura watched in silence.

  “He asked you a question,” I said.

  “I wasn’t doing anything. I told Aldris’s soldiers already.”

  I glanced at Tare, who silently shook his head, and my knuckles went white.

  “You were running away from the refugee dwellings,” Nura said. “You tried to kill one of our soldiers.”

  I pressed the necklace to the table. The man’s gaze flicked down to it.

  “How did you get this?”

  “I found it.”

  I looked to Tare. He shook his head.

  My anger surged. The flames in the lanterns burned brighter, all at once, casting garish shadows across the prisoner’s face.

  We didn’t have time for this.

  “Bullshit,” Nura muttered. She crossed the room in three graceful strides, and suddenly, her knife was buried in the man’s hand, pinning it to the wooden table.

  He let out a strangled shriek.

  “We have warned you,” she hissed, “not to lie to us.”

  The room began to darken. Nura’s magic was always insidious, so slow you didn’t realize it was tightening around you until you were halfway gone. But I could feel the fear pumping into the room like smoke, my already accelerated heartbeat running faster, my magic running hotter, my rage and fear growing more and more intense.

  I blinked, and I could see Tisaanah’s throat opened, her face bloody and lifeless.

  That was the thing. Tisaanah had made herself into a legend. But her throat was still just as tender, her skull as delicate, her skin as fragile. She was still so easy to kill.

  “Enough with the games,” I snarled. “Tell me where Tisaanah Vytezic is.”

  The prisoner didn’t speak. He looked only at Nura, at his hand, his breaths coming in ragged gasps. Nura’s magic was heavy in the air now, the room so dark that it was hard to see, fear thick like honey.

  “Tell me what you did with her,” I demanded.

  Sammerin lifted a finger, and the prisoner’s whole body lurched, his other palm jerking up and pressing flat on the table, held there. Another flick of Sammerin’s hand, and the man’s face was forced towards me.

  “Give me an answer.” I didn’t have to think. Fire was at my fingertips, cutting red across Nura’s unnatural shadows.

  “I just handed her off,” he said. “I didn’t— I didn’t hurt her. I just passed her along, I didn’t—”

  Tare looked to us and nodded.

  Finally. A fucking truth.

  “Handed her off to who?” Sammerin said.

  “I can’t— I can’t—” the man wept. His eyes were round, and wet with tears, and kept darting around the room. Nura didn’t let up. Ascended knew what he was seeing in her shadows.

  “You can,” I spat. “Tell me where they took her.”

  “I can’t—”

  I didn’t think. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t think about anything but all the time Tisaanah didn’t have.

  My second eyelids opened.

  All at once, the room was blindingly bright. Magic roared through me, my body unraveling into flames, heat searing the air.

  Sammerin dropped his hold as his hand went up to shield his face from the light or the heat or both. Nura staggered back, her eyes wide, so shocked she lost her grip on her magic. Not that it mattered. The prisoner no longer needed manufactured fear.

  “Ascended, Max,” she gasped. It was the first time she had seen me this way.

  “Tell me where she is,” I demanded, and I could barely hear my own voice over the rush in my ears.

  And I must have looked terrifying, because words now fell from the prisoner’s lips like loosened bowels.

  “The Palace. The Palace. The Palace. Aviness took her, he wanted her in the Palace. She’s there. She’s there. But she’s already dead. He’s going to kill her, she’s already—”

  My eyelids snapped closed, thrusting me back into a body of flesh and blood.

  “She’s already dead,” the prisoner was weeping. “She’s already gone. She’s already—”

  And I was already out the door.

  I was halfway down the hallway, reaching into my pockets for Stratagram ink. Distantly, I heard the dungeon door slam shut, and footsteps behind me.

  “Max— what did you just—”

  Nura’s voice was fractured, and then she let out a breath through her teeth and composed herself. Maybe in another scenario it might have been satisfying to see Nura shaken.

  Not now. Not when I had far more urgent things to worry about.

  I withdrew a crumpled piece of parchment from my pocket and unfolded it with shaking hands.

  She’s already dead. She’s already gone.

  Sammerin’s footsteps joined us, and Tare’s, following silently.

  “I’ll gather the troops,” Nura said.

  “No time,” I ground out.

  “If we take only the Wielders, we can use Stratagrams. We’l
l move fast.”

  My pen was out, ink dripping, but I paused. I struggled to force my thoughts into coherence.

  Sammerin voiced what I was too panicked to put into words. “That cuts down our forces by what, half? Less? We were already too outmatched to take the Capital. That’s exactly what Aviness wants us to do.”

  He was right. And somewhere beneath it all, I realized it was odd that Nura, of all people, was overlooking that.

  “We need Tisaanah back,” she said. “If we recover her, we’ll have Reshaye. And we have—”

  Her gaze flicked to me, and her voice trailed off — as if, at the same time, we both realized the echo in her words. We have you, she had said to me in Sarlazai. We have you.

  And look at how that had ended.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not about to throw my soldiers at Aviness’s feet.”

  “Then what exactly do you expect—”

  “I’ll go alone. I can get her back.”

  “It’s not enough to get her back, Max. We need to end this. And it doesn’t matter how good either of you are, you can’t do that alone.”

  Can’t, she said, but I wondered if she meant won’t.

  I didn’t have time to sit here and wonder about it. The prisoner’s words were still ringing in my ears, and Nura’s visions still burning my eyes, and Tisaanah didn’t have time for any of this.

  “Do not bring them,” I said. “I can move faster alone. And I’ll be back soon.”

  Nura was shaking her head. But my gaze flicked towards Sammerin, who was giving me a resigned, grim stare that, unfortunately, I had seen many times before.

  “Good luck,” he said, and I knew what he really meant was, Try not to be too much of an idiot. Then his expression hardened, and he added, “Bring her back.”

  “I will,” I said.

  Maybe Nura tried to say something more. I wouldn’t know. I was gone.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Tisaanah

  I was awoken by hands grabbing me and dragging me upright. I didn’t remember falling asleep. My mind was so addled that by the time consciousness returned to me, I had already been hoisted onto a table, chains replaced with bindings around my upper arms. Had this table been here before? I didn’t know — perhaps I had been moved into an entirely different room and hadn’t known. Had it been so bright in here? So white?