This time I do lean into it. “We don’t have to figure it all out tonight,” I say, then press one light kiss on to his palm. “It’s been a long day. We should rest.”
I hear the words, sensible, practical, coming from my mouth and want to bite them back. I don’t want to rest. I want to spend all night exploring this, whatever it is. But I know it’s a bad idea. Right now we need to think about the Sleeping Prince, and my mother, and whatever it is that Twylla’s mother wants from her, and how we all fit into it. I need to find out why Twylla lied to me.
And I need to be sure of him. That he won’t push me away again.
“There will be time,” I say, hoping I’m right.
His eyes search mine, worry pulling the corners of them tight. Then, slowly, he leans forward and kisses my cheek, the touch of his lips so hot I half think I’ll be branded by them. “Goodnight, Errin Vastel.” He is so close his breath kisses my mouth. “But … I’ve made my choice. And it’s you. Us, if you want it.”
I want so much to sink my fingers into his hair, to pull his face to mine. To touch, to taste. But I step away from him. “Goodnight, Silas Kolby. I’ll see you in the morning.”
I can feel him watching me as I walk back. “No,” he calls as I go to pull one of the curtains. “Next one. I’m four away. If you change your mind.”
I smile at him and enter my room.
Though I wasn’t gone long, when I return, Twylla’s in her bed, seemingly still fully dressed, save her boots, the nightgown ignored. She has the covers piled over her, and she’s facing the wall, the torches in their sconces still lit. I light the candle from one of them then extinguish them.
“I’m not asleep,” she says, startling me. She turns over and props herself up on an elbow.
“All right,” I say, sitting on my bed and pulling one of the blankets over my shoulders.
“I’m sorry. It must have seemed so rude, to have walked away from you in the Great Hall. I just … I have a lot to tell you, it seems. I suppose we should begin with why I lied?” she says, and I nod. “It’s a long story. But to begin, you should know that Dimia was the name of the girl the Bringer used to wake the Sleeping Prince.”
I inhale sharply. So that’s why it sounded familiar. I remember then, the men who came through Almwyk asking if we’d seen a girl and a young man. She was Dimia, with the Bringer.
Twylla continues. “He took her from the castle in Lormere. She was a servant there. I heard the Bringer when he came for her. I heard the music he played to lure her.” She lapses into silence, her brow furrowed. Then she takes a deep breath. “Dimia was the first name that came to me once I got to Scarron. I was escorted part of the way there by her brother, Taul. Merek had dispatched him and some others to try and find her. And I didn’t want to be Twylla any more. I was done with her, and her life – lives – so when Javik asked my name, I said it without thinking. I’d already coloured my hair so I could leave Lormere unnoticed, and it seemed fitting: new hair, new name. New life.” She pauses and I feel as though I’m missing huge parts of this tale: Daunen Embodied was desperately important to Lormere. Surely they wouldn’t let her walk away from it?
As if she’s read my thoughts, she continues. “I left, if not at Merek’s desire, then with his understanding. I had to go and he respected that. He helped me. It was his money that paid for my cottage, and that we were going to use to rescue your mother.”
“Weren’t you betrothed to him?”
“I was.” Twylla hangs her head. “I knew your brother,” she says. Her voice has changed. “When I saw you on my doorstep, I thought at first he’d sent you. Then when you said you sought a Lormerian named Dimia, I knew that he hadn’t.”
“Why would he send me to you?”
She pauses. “I was betrothed to Merek, but I had a brief … relationship with Lief.”
“Relationship? With Lief?”
She nods. “He was assigned to guard me and we became close. It’s why I left the castle.”
“What happened?”
“It didn’t work out as I’d hoped.”
“He hurt you?” I say quietly.
She pulls the strangest expression, looking as though she might fly apart, but at the last moment she pulls herself together and meets my eye, her gaze defiant.
“I thought you were him, you know. When you knocked. You have the same knock. Isn’t that strange, to think something like that is a family trait. But of course it would be. I’ll bet one or even both of your parents knocked in the same way.”
Now it all makes sense: why she looked so hopeful and yet so scared when she answered her front door, why she looked so sad at my father’s grave. But it doesn’t explain why she’d want to help me.
“Were you disappointed?”
She takes a deep breath, looking down at her hands. “My heart was. My head wasn’t. Most days I’m at war with myself. My head wins, usually. And for that I’m glad.”
“I’m sorry,” I say finally, because I don’t know what else to offer.
“You’re not responsible for it,” she says evenly, though her gaze drops. “He spoke about you. And your mother. Told me about your farm. And your father.”
It makes me want to cry, imagining Lief miles away, confiding in this strange girl about us.
“Why did you offer to help us? If you and he … If it didn’t end well, why would you help us?”
“I’m not glad he’s dead,” she says, ignoring my question. “No matter what happened. I don’t want you to think that.”
She closes her eyes, as though praying, and I watch her in the thin light from the candle. She has an oval face, a neat chin. Her cheeks are freckled, and the corners of her mouth turn down slightly, making her look pensive, even when her face is relaxed. The more I look at her, the more I think she’s pretty, which surprises me because I didn’t notice it first. Lirys is obviously beautiful; all my life I’ve been used to how people react to her, how they smile automatically on seeing her, as though her beauty is a treat to them. Twylla’s beauty is the kind that sneaks up on you. I wonder if Lief thought the same.
“What do you see?” she says suddenly, and my face reddens. She looks at me, fixing me with green eyes, darker in this light. “Tell me, when you look at me, what do you see?”
“A girl,” I say, and she smiles. “What should I see?”
“You look like him,” she says. “Before you said a word to me I knew you were his sister. Same eyes, same shape to your face. You have the same smile. You’re very like him too.” She pauses, then sits back, curling her legs beneath her. “I know you want to know what happened. And I will tell you all of it. I promise. But not tonight.”
I nod. “Twylla,” I say hesitantly, testing this new name for her. “When he lived on the farm, Lief was… He never thought about anything but the farm. When we lost it, he was heartbroken. So if he behaved badly, then…” I trail off. “What I mean is, when Lief cared, he really cared. He was all or nothing. So I think he must have really liked you, for a while at least.”
Her expression clouds over, her mouth pursing. “No, Errin,” she says deliberately. “He didn’t.”
Her eyelids flutter shut again and I take a deep breath. I don’t want to know any more; I don’t want her to say anything that might make me think too badly of him. “Did – do you have brothers, or sisters?”
“Both. Twin brothers, older than me. A younger sister, but she died.”
“I’m sorry.”
“As am I.”
We’re quiet for a moment. And then I speak. “I think the worst thing is the way you lose part of yourself.” I roll on to my back and stare up at the dark, speckled roof. “There’s so much that only Lief knew about me. So many memories that we shared – mostly of things we shouldn’t have been doing – but now I’m the last one who remembers them. Times we woke in the night and stol
e honeycomb from the jars in the kitchen. Times we used to jump into the hay on the farm. No one will ever know me like that again. And what if I forget things? What happens then?”
I turn to look at her, in time to see her wipe her face.
“I’m sorry,” I say again.
She shakes her head. “No, it’s a nice way to think.” She pauses. “I suppose we should try to sleep now,” she says. “Tomorrow is going to be interesting, I suspect.” She stares into the distance, then turns abruptly, facing the wall once more.
I clamber off the bed to wash my face. Then I pull off my boots and change into the nightgown, happy to have clean clothes, before blowing out the candle. I can hear her crying softly.
Lying in the dark, I think of Silas, a few caves away. He knew her name was Twylla. And he expected her to come through Almwyk, was waiting there for her. Was that because of Lief? Did he expect her to come there because of him, or merely because it’s the main border town between the two countries?
Then I have a horrible thought: is that why he befriended me? To get to her?
I sit up in bed, staring into the darkness. Twylla has fallen silent. I’ll ask him tomorrow, I tell myself. And even if that was the reason, does it matter?
No, I decide as I lie back down, it doesn’t. It alters nothing between us.
After a few moments I hear another muffled sob and I clench my fist in the blankets. I feel terribly guilty for whatever it was my brother did to her. Sometimes I don’t think I knew Lief at all.
I’m woken by the sound of footsteps pounding past our room. I can hear voices, too loud for the night, and though I can’t make out the words, I can hear the shrill pitch, the panic, in them. I sit up, turning to Twylla.
“What’s happening?” she asks, rubbing her eyes, and I shake my head, my heart racing.
There is a grating, rumbling sound above us, echoing down through the rock.
“What’s that?” she gasps.
I throw my covers back, reaching for my breeches and forcing my feet into my boots. “Get up,” I say. “Something’s wrong.”
As she pulls on her boots, Silas throws the curtain open. He looks from me to Twylla and then back. “We’re under attack,” he says. “I don’t know if they saw us coming back here, or if they figured it out, but they’re trying to force the main doors.”
“What do we do?”
“You both need to find Amara. She arrived an hour ago. She’s in the ossuary. Listen to her. Then meet me in the hall; I’ll wait there for you. We may need to evacuate, so be ready.”
I look at Twylla, pale and determined in the light from the hallway. “We’ll see you in the hall.”
“Silas!” someone calls from outside the room.
He turns towards the voice, then back to us, speaking quickly. “When you leave here, turn right and place your left hand on the wall to your left. Keep your hand on it and follow it. You’ll know it when you see it. Don’t take your hand off the wall until you do.”
Then he’s gone, leaving Twylla and me staring at each other.
Outside our room, everyone is running in the opposite direction from the one Silas told us to follow. Staying close together, we place our left hands on the wall and begin to walk. Alchemists and their partners, people of all ages and sexes run past us, some armed, some holding children, all ignoring us. Above us there is another boom, and I see a trail of dust fall from the ceiling.
“Hurry,” Twylla says from behind me. Without taking our hands from the wall we start to run. The ground begins to slope gently, then more steeply, the turns becoming sharper, the path narrower. The grating sounds far away now; I can hear nothing but our breathing and the occasional drip. As the air gets colder, the sconces are spread further apart, leaving patches of shadow. Each one makes my heart skip. Eventually we come to a door – not a curtain but a door, made of dark, grainy wood. Burned into it are two circles, one overlapping the other. In the centre is a small silver crescent moon.
“This must be it,” Twylla says, taking a deep breath as she pushes it open and enters. I follow her, pulling the door closed behind me.
And then I stop. And stare.
I’d expected another small cave, possibly a meeting hall of sorts. But the chamber I’ve walked into is the size of a cathedral, the ceiling a hundred feet above me and studded with white, glittering stalactites, twice my height, pointing down like a thousand swords over my head. The walls, though, are studded with bones. Hundreds, possibly thousands of skulls stare out of the walls at me, stacked neatly on top of one another. Some of them have symbols on them, the symbols for salt, for fire, for air etched in gold on their foreheads.
More bones, perhaps from arms and legs, are arranged into intricate patterns, hearts, circles and stars, embedded in the walls. On the far left wall a rose has been constructed from a group of pelvises; on the right a chalice is made from ribs.
Above my head a chandelier made out of human bones hangs from the impossibly high ceiling: skulls clutched in whole, clenched skeletal fists, candles inside the eye sockets, lighting the room and simultaneously casting eerie shadows. Long, sturdy leg bones make up the joints between the skulls and hands. Entire spinal columns weave in and out, holding the structure together, and below them, small bones hold up strings of tiny ones, threaded like beads.
It’s beautiful and macabre and I shiver. An underground temple. And a crypt, all at once.
I know, without being told, that every single bone in here belonged to an alchemist. And I know that this temple, this ossuary, was built long before the Conclave hid down here; perhaps is the reason it is underground. This is the work of centuries, young bones and old bones all combined to make this place. It’s awful but beautiful, and every time I feel disgust rising, appreciation beats it down as I spot some new, impossible pattern.
I wonder whom the marked graves in the graveyard belong to, but the answer comes to me immediately. Silas said the alchemists married non-alchemists. They can’t be part of this place, but their place in the alchemic world is marked, subtly, on their graves.
Down near the altar, Twylla has disappeared behind a screen, and I can hear voices. I follow the sound, walking down an aisle lined with pews. I touch each one as I pass. None of them is the same; all different woods, different sizes. Some are heavily carved and decorated with the symbols of the old Gods, Holly and Oak. Some are simple and plain. All of them are worn, grooved where generations of bottoms have warmed them and worshipped on them; where people have sat and looked up at their ancestors.
The altar is the only space not adorned with bones. Instead a large metal sculpture – two discs, one made of gold, one silver – is mounted above it. The silver disc overlaps the gold, making a crescent, and it reminds me of the moon. The altar is laid with flowers and burning candles. The air smells of incense, and something else, not a scent, precisely, but a weight, a presence. The bones. I can feel them, as surely as if a thousand alchemists were here with me, spying on me.
I find them in an alcove, hidden behind a carved wooden screen. Twylla sits stiffly, facing a large woman dressed entirely in black, like the Sisters, though with none of their eerie elegance. She must be the Sin Eater, Amara. Her eyelids are heavy, giving them the look of being hooded, her face round and waxen in contrast to her daughter’s obvious anger. I can see no resemblance between them.
“I thought you worked alone,” Twylla says as I take a seat beside her. The Sin Eater looks at me and I nod in greeting, feeling oddly relieved when she inclines her head to me, before looking back at Twylla. “I never thought you’d be friendly with nuns.”
“Nuns,” Amara scoffs. “They’re a reformed resurrectionist cult, and no matter what else I tell you, don’t forget this mess is partly their fault, too. We’ve all played our part.”
“I don’t understand. What are they to do with us – you?”
Her mo
ther gives her a long look. “They are the Sisters of Næht. I am the Sin Eater, High Priestess of Næht.”
Chills run through me as she says the words; it sounds as though a hundred woman have spoken them.
“But she doesn’t exist, does she?” Twylla says. “For all your talk of Næht and Dæg, they’re not real. They never were.”
Amara stares at her daughter, who meets her gaze evenly.
“Actually, they were,” I say, my voice too loud in the reverent atmosphere. Amara turns and nods at me to continue, betraying no surprise at my knowing. “Their real names were Aurek and Aurelia.”
“Aurek and Aurelia?” Twylla asks. “The Sleeping Prince and his sister?”
“You know the story?” I ask, and she nods.
Then she turns to her mother. “I know all of them. I can read now.” She sounds both proud and defiant, and painfully young. “Go on,” she says to me.
“Well, the House of Belmis changed it all. Manipulated it to support their rise to power. They renamed Aurek and Aurelia Dæg and Næht to fit their purpose. Eventually they changed from siblings to lovers too.”
“Gods, imagine waking and discovering all of this. That your life has become a legend, and a much embroidered one at that.”
“You would pity him?” Amara stares at her daughter.
“No.” Twylla’s voice is icy. “He’s a murderer. Nothing excuses what he’s done. That’s why I plan to fight him. Lormere has had its fill of corrupt royals.”
“I wondered what it would take to remove the scales from your eyes,” the Sin Eater says softly.
Twylla’s lips curl into a snarl. “If, instead of merely wondering, you’d seen fit to tell me what I was walking into, I might have been better able to cope. Instead I swallowed every lie they fed me until it tore me apart.”
Sin Eater's Daughter 2 - The Sleeping Prince Page 25