What We Devour

by Linsey Miller

  They were, for the most part, amenable to helping once they heard about the Door and the council’s plans.

  The rest of the peers in Mori fled, leaving the city in a rush of carriages and soldiers and leaving the palace a mess. Servants had been left behind, and soldiers didn’t know where their peers had gone. I ran as fast as my aching legs would let me to find Alistair. Hana found me first.

  “He did something,” she whispered, pulling me through the crowded halls toward the wing where he lived. “It went wrong.”

  That was one drawback I hadn’t foreseen—wrought doing what they’d always dreamed of once their bindings were gone. Alistair was on the floor of a room blanketed in dust, two worn rabbits made of soft wool before him. The only marks in the dust were his footsteps and the lines where he’d raked his hands across the stone. I stayed in the doorway.

  “Alistair?”

  “It didn’t work,” he said, voice hoarse.

  The two beds in the room were for children.

  “Your sisters are dead.” I stepped forward slowly and touched his back. “I’m sorry. I don’t think any wrought could bring them back.”

  Bowed over his knees, hands pressed into his eyes, face nearly to the floor, he cried. Blood dripped between his fingers. “Nothing’s enough. Nothing is ever enough.”

  I sat beside him and stroked his hair. He fell against my shoulder. Tears and blood pooled in the nook of my collar, and after a while, he shuddered and mopped up the mess with his sleeve. I shushed his apology.

  “How many people did you kill this time?” he asked.

  “Thirteen,” I said. “Only the ones who controlled the bindings.”

  He laughed low and rough.

  “You know, we’re the same now.” I touched the scar over his heart. It was still pink and stained, but his flesh had rejected the ink. “We are not bound.”

  He cupped my face with one hand. “I dreamed, in those first few days, of opening you up like I might the Door, and I always woke up worrying about what monsters of yours I’d unleashed.”

  “You didn’t unleash anything,” I said and kissed his cheek. “My monsters were already here.”

  The peerage and the council had been here for far too long.

  It took four hours to gather everyone we needed. Safia slept through most of the four hours, her eyes still bloodshot and heavy when we finally met. Free of her bindings, she had tried to heal too many people her contract had forced her to turn away, and Hana had been frantic between Alistair and her. Only Basil hadn’t overextended themself.

  “We’ll be doing enough of that soon enough,” they said, pacing the length of the room I’d chosen.

  It wasn’t as big as the courtroom, which was so large it felt imposing, but all the older wrought and soldiers could fit. I’d pinned a map of Cynlira to the long table, and Carlow marked everything we had found from the councilors’ records so far. Mack sat on a chair next to Basil, reading over Will’s notes on Felhollow.

  We waited, our soft conversations barely filling the room. People began to filter in, ones I didn’t know and some I recognized from the palace grounds. Hana led a group of soldiers I’d only seen in passing. Many were older, grizzled by age and the Sundered Crown’s rule. They knew what they were doing far more than I did.

  And many had watched me kill more people in the last week than they’d ever seen killed at all.

  “Lorena.” Carlow nodded to me and pulled a pair of red glasses from her coat. “These are for you.”

  “What?” I took them and studied the lenses under the light. They looked as if oil slid through water beneath the glass. “Did he say why?”

  She shrugged. “I’m only the messenger.”

  Once the room was full and the two hours up, I put on the glasses. They were heavy on my face, a bloody badge better than any brooch Alistair could give me, and stood. The crowd quieted and shifted. Odd shadows too pale to be wrights moved between them and vanished when I peeked over the lenses. One breezed past a curtain, ruffling it. The Door was weak.

  And the Vile were waiting.

  “The Door will be open in ten days,” I said and waited for the exclamations and grumbling to die down. “Unless you all want to feed a tenth of the population to it and then who knows how many after that, it’s inevitable. We must prepare for the worst.”

  One of the soldiers—I’d never learned ranks, but this one wore the black coat of the Wyrslaine personal army with enough of the color-coded stripes on their sleeves to be a captain surely—crossed their arms over their chest. “Where is His Excellency?”

  “He believes he can shut the Door,” I said. It wasn’t a lie. He did. He was down there, poring over options now that his binding was gone. Mori had plenty of corpses to use as locks now. “Maybe he’s right, but I think it would be safer to not depend on hope. However, we can’t save Cynlira alone.”

  “The council and the peers today,” he said, glancing from me to Carlow. “You have unbound the noblewrought and His Excellency, and you are trusting the armies bound to each peer for decades to follow you after such a display? To turn away from the people they have been trained their whole lives to obey? To abandon their livelihoods when that money is needed most? And all for a girl who came out of nowhere and killed half the council and court?”

  One of the others, coat the brown and green of a house I didn’t know, nodded. I grasped the table before me.

  “The council was going to abandon us all to the Vile after they opened the Door and use their hired armies—all of you—as fodder. Your homes, your families, and your friends meant nothing to them,” I said. “The Vile might be the ones to kill us, but it was the council that served us up.”

  “And if the Door doesn’t open and our employers find out, there will be retribution,” said another soldier, this one in the pale blue of one of the coastal families. “They’ll hang us for even considering it.”

  “I’m not asking you to kill them—”

  “Gods know you’ve done that already,” muttered someone.

  “—but I am asking you to consider what you would do if your employer asked you to abandon your hometown to the Vile and protect them instead,” I said and raised my head. “Ten days. That’s all the time we have to get the majority of Cynlira to somewhere safe. Now, you can all try to drag me before the court for treason, or you can listen to us explain where the safest places from the Vile are and how to make sure our people aren’t all dead and devoured in ten days.”

  “How do you know what places are safe?” the older Wyrslaine soldier asked.

  “The council had it all planned out,” I said. “Their plan was to let everyone else fight the Vile while they were safe in their havens, and once the Vile were worn out and the peerage dead, they were going to emerge victorious.”

  Mack snorted. “Not that they were going to tell anyone that they’d opened the Door on purpose. Willoughby Chase figured you’d all work for them once your hometowns were gone.”

  “We would have nothing else to fight more,” said the Wyrslaine guard, grinding their teeth. “Show me.”

  Every other soldier in the room deferred to them. I showed them the map and pointed out the havens. They were near major cities, utterly useless for rebuilding given their lack of land, but they’d wells and enough food and weapons stockpiled. I’d flagged roads, wells, and farmlands too.

  “I’ve seen this before,” said the soldier in green. “Pierce was looking into land there and took some people to fortify the area.”

  Pierce Burnwell was one of the many councilors we’d arrested with Will and Julian.

  “So you got the council to commit treason so you could legally have access to all this?” said the Wyrslaine guard. They chuckled. “Could’ve just had us seize it all.”

  “Too slow,” I said. “The journals and ledgers were hidden or coded, and I g
ot them all to show me outright where most of this was when I agreed to help them. They were depending on all of you to do as you were told since they would’ve paid you.”

  “Too much like something they would have done?” they asked, blue eyes narrowed at me. Their wrinkles deepened as they smiled. “Some would’ve done as they were told—it’s hard to disobey the people who’ve held your life in their hands for years—but at least now they won’t have to find out if they would’ve.”

  I adjusted my red glasses and nodded. “Knowing the worst part of yourself isn’t for everyone.”

  “True,” they said softly and turned back to the map. “The Vile can’t cross consecrated ground, can they?”

  “That’s what all the stories say,” said a servant. “Port Altiver’s good. It’s built over a graveyard.”

  “My partner’s family lives there,” said the Wyrslaine guard. “I’ll get in touch.”

  Carlow flagged it. “That’s not enough.”

  Her voice was still raspy and hoarse from her attempt to break her curse.

  “It’s more than we would’ve had,” I said and glanced at her.

  The air to her left was a haze, as if she’d a vilewright. I stared, and the shade shifted behind her. It was too tall, too thin, and too substantial to be a vilewright. I shuddered.

  “What do we need to do?” someone asked.

  “We need to make sure that the people without have wrought and soldiers to keep them as safe as they can be,” I said, sliding through the crowd to point out areas. There were flickers, blurs, as if there weren’t vilewrights but something else lurking in the world that not even these glasses could let me see. “And I bet folks know their areas better than we do. Any places where Noble walked or ministers worshiped the gods should work. A lot of the local ones aren’t on maps, but they’ll know where those areas are.

  “We’ll need to send out instructions to the soldiers and wrought in the areas to let them know what’s happening,” I said. “Anyone who can should start doing that now. The sooner people know, the better. After that, we need to get the supplies spread out. Carlow, Basil—can you help?”

  “I can get messages to anyone instantly so long as I have time to rest, I think,” said Basil.

  “When the Door opens, the peerage will die almost immediately,” I said. “We should warn some people about that too. Every town’s got a council. They should be able to lead so long as we provide them with fair warning, supplies, and protection.”

  “How do you know the peerage will die?” asked the soldier in green.

  The Wyrslaine soldier glanced at me and elbowed him. “Not your concern. Get some paper, and we’ll start drafting warnings.”

  Everyone in the room deferred to them and got to work.

  “Don’t worry,” Hana whispered, leaning down to my ear. “Roth’s been around longer than most, and they trained half the people in Cynlira, even if they’re serving others. Folks will listen to them.”

  Good. I didn’t want them to obey me out of fear or lead them into this new world. People would need a leader, and it couldn’t be me.

  Carlow cleared her throat. “I’ll be more helpful with repairs and construction once we know where we need to be.”

  I glanced at her and froze. To her left was Creek’s ghost, but he wasn’t right. Vines held his rotting corpse together, and his skin sloughed off like dandelion fluff. Beneath it was nothing, only a vast dark where stars glittered gold and white like broken teeth.

  I pulled the red glasses off, and his ghost, looking as Creek always had in life, was there. I put them on. Creek cocked his head to the side.

  “Lorena?” Basil said, nudging me. “What’s wrong?”

  Creek’s eyes, blue and cursed in life, were the same Vile red as Carlow’s now.

  “Nothing. Sorry.” I pushed the glasses to the top of my head. A vine of shadow curled around Carlow’s throat. She didn’t seem to notice. “I think the Door is messing with me.”

  “Then open it.” Creek’s ghost smiled. “What’s opening the Door compared to what you’ve done?”

  “Oh yes,” said Basil, sighing. “It won’t let me sleep of late.”

  “It’s angry we’re not scared of it,” Carlow said, her voice no longer a rough rasp and the cuts of her bindings nothing more than white scars. “No reason to fear the inevitable.”

  I took off the glasses and whispered, “Was it inevitable?”

  But Creek’s ghost was gone.

  Forty-One

  The next few days were full of planning. Basil, Mack, Safia, and Carlow joined me, each of us avoiding Alistair. Not that he would’ve noticed; he was holed up with the Door, desperate to understand it now that his binding didn’t restrict his vilewright, and he sacrificed one of Will’s companions to it with a smile. The only one of us he spoke to was Hana, and that was only when he needed a sacrifice.

  He did notice the unrest caused by killing the courtiers in charge of the bindings. The surviving courtiers could ruin my plans if they looked too hard at the recent movements of their soldiers and people. However, they were concerned about Alistair attempting to take over their holdings.

  Most had retreated to their lands in preparation for a war that wouldn’t come.

  “Wrought can’t last longer without food,” I said, scratching through one of the notes from Safia. “We can sacrifice our feeling of hunger but not our actual hunger, and the contract leaves us tired. I could never do it longer than five days.”

  “Gods,” muttered Safia. “At some point, we need to discuss your childhood.”

  “Do we?” I asked.

  My life spent worried about money and where my next meal would come from was finally paying off, and I’d taken to poring over the ledgers detailing the food stored away by the Crown in case of tragedy at all hours. Alistair had at least left his mother’s last decrees alone. There was enough in the stores for all of Mori. The city would be fine so long as we could shelter everyone.

  Today, five days away from the opening of the Door, we were fortifying the buildings of Formet district. Every single part of it was consecrated, and before we’d started, only one-fifth of the city would’ve fit in it.

  Basil groaned. “Have you ever had sea foam candy? I’d do anything for that right now.”

  “With the pecans!” someone shouted from around the corner. “Can we make some?”

  “Later,” I shouted back. “Focus.”

  The freed noblewrought had coalesced around the palace. Many had been working in Mori already, most as healers for the city’s populace but several as builders in charge of keeping everything standing. Those noblewrought bound to Order like Carlow and Basil, though, had been trained well in how to make the city more accessible and useful for Cynlira. Free of their bindings, they could do whatever work they pleased now, even if it didn’t pay. I’d helped one refortify the Wallows’ buildings against flooding this morning. The rest had started constructing barriers around the safe havens. One was focusing on cold cellars, wells, and water pumps.

  “Don’t go too high,” said Carlow, face covered by a book so old the cover was hand-stitched and the pages parchment. “Once you hit three floors, the consecrated earth has to be in the floors of the higher levels. The farther you get from it, the less power it has.”

  I didn’t wear my red glasses around her. Most of the time, Creek’s ghost, uninjured, trailed after her. Sometimes, though, I saw Creek’s corpse staring back at me from her cursed eyes.

  I didn’t sleep. The courtiers and councilors were always there in my dreams, waiting for me in the dark.

  “Noted,” said Basil. “It would take longer to build with stories, regardless. We don’t have time for that.”

  Safia nodded. “It’s better to keep it a single story. We can make bunks, but hoists will be hard to construct quickly and stories harder to heat co
me winter. Definitely no stairs. Too hard to traverse.”

  “Good point,” Basil said. “Single stories are easier to map too. We can lay tactile pavers to make sure people know the way in.”

  “This is better than nothing,” I said, still focused on the ledgers before me.

  Carlow exhaled loudly. “We can’t protect everyone.”

  We couldn’t, not with the safe havens, but I could with all I had left.

  “Is that why you’re not telling the noble houses?” Basil asked. “You think they’ll do the same thing as the council?”

  “I think their involvement in our planning is irrelevant,” I said. “But yes, I imagine they would do the same as the council.”

  “They have churches and graveyards, private plots of land none of us are allowed to even look at,” said Carlow.

  I glanced at the inked-out spots on the large map Basil had pinned to the wall of our old lab. “Yes, we should use those places too.”

  “Will they let us?” Basil asked.

  I rolled my lips together, the lie stuck in my mouth. They wouldn’t have, but their opinions wouldn’t matter. Many were anxious, fleeing to their holdings to escape Alistair and ready their armies. Carlow glanced up.

  “What they want doesn’t matter,” I said. “Have you heard from out west? Any more wrought running around?”

  “Two,” said Basil, smiling. “Both noblewrought.”

  A dozen or so who’d been in hiding, living quiet lives outside Mori, had come forward to help the soldiers and wrought stationed in their towns once the messages reached the smaller towns. For so long, Cynlira’s common enemy to unite us had been each other. Vile were an easier target.

  There were no other vilewrought. At least none that had come forward yet.