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Her tone was light, but she couldn’t disguise the ache in it.
“He didn’t,” he said softly. “I was able to keep Him… contained… most of the day, but there were times He came forward enough to showcase His displeasure at being locked up.” He gestured grandly to the overturned table, the dirt strewn from the broken potted palm. “Pity about the houseplants. That one had just gotten a new leaf.”
“I’m sure it will recover.” Lore almost said something about calling in Malcolm to fix it, then clamped her teeth around the words. Bastian might be getting better at keeping Apollius subdued inside his head—if wrecking his room could be called subdued—but the god was still present, and she shouldn’t mention the other elemental gods awakening, taking vessels of their own.
Wise, Nyxara murmured. He grew to regret inviting the rest of Us into power.
The words felt like the introduction to a larger story. But the goddess didn’t continue.
There was a wine bottle on the bedside table, miraculously still intact. No glass, but Bastian’s lips wore telltale purple stains, harsh as bruises against his sickbed pallor. Doing the same things she did, trying to force his body into dreamless sleep.
Bastian saw her looking. “Overindulgence,” he said with a weak laugh. “That’s a sin, isn’t it? Maybe I should go confess to Gabe.”
He said the other man’s name like he could use it to draw him here. Like he wanted an excuse to feel it on his tongue. They only made a whole with three parts, and one was always missing.
Lore gingerly sat down on the bed next to him; he scooted over to make room, though not so much that they weren’t touching. She didn’t mention Gabe. “Are you dreaming, now?”
His hand lifted, rubbed tiredly over his face again. “Just once,” he answered. “But it was a long time coming. I’d had flashes of strange dreams every time we channeled together, but I didn’t have a coherent one until after the explosion.” His tired eyes flicked away. “I was in and out, that day. It was mostly Him, but I was there, still.”
You are a wonder. She remembered that whisper, right before she lost consciousness.
Bastian shivered, and she couldn’t tell if it was a residual chill from his daylong fight or a memory. “That dream was terrible enough that I didn’t want to have another one.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Tentatively, Bastian’s hand crept into hers.
It pained her to see this man tentative. To see him reduced, his presence made thin by trying to keep hold of his mind when something so powerful was trying to take it over.
And the gesture reminded her of what Apollius said right before He killed Bellegarde. I love My wife. Anton and those who followed him clearly didn’t want Lore—Nyxara—as part of the equation, here, but it seemed Apollius did.
So how much of this love Bastian professed for her was his own, and how much of it was the god’s? How much of the love she returned belonged to her, for him or for Gabe?
You are wholly your own, Nyxara said. An echo, something the goddess had told Lore at the Mortem leak. But I cannot speak for him.
Lore bit the inside of her cheek, hard.
Bastian looked out the window at the near-dark. “I should get up,” he said, though his voice was thin and brittle and exhausted. “Don’t want to waste my few entirely lucid hours.” But even as he tried to shift out of bed, he grimaced, his face going paler, making the scratches against his temple stand out in sharp relief.
“No.” Her hand on his shoulder, pushing him back. An echo of before, her forcing him to take care of himself, not to run his body or his mind ragged. “Take some time to actually rest. There isn’t much you can do at night, anyway.”
“I’m the Sainted King.” He gave her a tired grin. “I can do whatever I please.”
“Not looking like deep-fried death, you can’t.” She pushed back his sweaty hair. “I try not to play into your constant vanity, but it’s probably not a good idea for anyone to see you like this.”
He deflated at that, with a sigh and a roll of his eyes. “I suppose not. Don’t want to show them how the mighty have fallen.”
The idea of anyone seeing him so diminished made dread curl around her stomach, especially after the conversations she’d overheard in the hall. Everything was so precarious, poised on a shatterpoint. There was nothing solid to cling to, and no one could know their weaknesses.
Bastian’s hand came to her cheek again, and Lore leaned into his touch despite herself. “Will you stay?”
“Can’t.” She covered his hand with her own, brought it down to her lap. “I have… things to take care of.”
He didn’t ask what things. He wanted to ask, and knew she couldn’t tell, because it had something to do with the god in his head, waiting behind his thoughts while the sun waited behind the horizon.
Bastian nodded, just once, then leaned back into his pillows. “Good luck, then.”
Lore nodded back, feeling that infernal prickling at her eyes again. She stood quickly, before the prickling could become something liquid. “Go back to sleep.”
“I’ll try.” But his eyes were already going unfocused, his blinks drawn out.
