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Lore left before she could start crying again.
Hours later, minutes before midnight, Lore slipped out the door of the apartment.
She expected a guard outside the door, but there was no one in the dark hallway, not Alexis or any other monk. Lore had been armed with a story about attending a party, about the King staying abed because he felt poorly, but apparently she didn’t need it.
Well, gift horses and mouths and all that. The fewer people who saw her slipping out, the better. Gabe had probably given an order to keep them away for the night.
The halls were dark and deserted as Lore made her way through them, just as she’d anticipated. Midnight in the Citadel was reserved for parties and trysts, and such things typically took place in one’s own chambers rather than out in the walkways. The few couples and groups she did pass were too preoccupied to notice her weaving through the shadows. It made her think of going to the catacombs again, how Bastian had pretended to kiss her so the bloodcoat patrolling the halls wouldn’t think anything of it.
That’d been him. Bastian and Bastian alone, his lips feathering against hers, a moment where their pretend kiss could’ve become real, when he’d wanted it to.
Gods, wasn’t that the last thing she should be worried about. Once they got Apollius out of his head—and Nyxara out of hers—then they could wade through which feelings were their own and which were planted there, what they wanted weighed against what the gods did. All three of them.
Not that simple, Nyxara said.
Shut up, Lore replied.
Down the gilded corridors, through the rooms full of art and opulence. Less full than they had been, though Bastian’s attempts at leveling the huge wealth gaps had tapered off the more Apollius dug into his brain. Lore scowled as she walked by an icon of the god Himself, His hands dripping garnets. It shouldn’t surprise her that the god of life and the day and every-fucking-thing didn’t give a shit about people dying in poverty. This was the god who’d spoken to Gerard Arceneaux about obedience and punishment, but never mentioned taking care of the people around you.
Her mood was undeniably sour as she finally pushed through the double doors into the southern green. The Presque Mort on guard just nodded at her, barely looking her direction. Gabe must’ve told them to expect her; Lore assumed she was probably the only person traipsing through the Citadel in a full-length black cloak in the dead of summer.
Odd that Gabe would order away the guard at her and Bastian’s apartment and not here, though.
Lore didn’t waste much time thinking on it. She turned right, hurrying over the dusk-dewed grass to the iron fence around the Presque Mort’s garden. It was unlocked, and she slipped quietly through the gate, her cloak fluttering behind her.
The moon was full and bright, casting diffuse shadows over the ground. The heat and lack of rain meant that no new flowers had thrived, so most of the garden was still made of burnt husks from the night of the ritual. They spiked into the night air like accusing fingers, oddly sinister in the silvery light.
Her own shadow joined theirs as Lore followed the twisting paths to the greenhouse in the corner. As she passed the well, she kept her eyes straight ahead, refusing to look at it. It was covered, thankfully, the Presque Mort having moved the lid with its small statue of Apollius back into place after discovering that there was no Mortem left to leak. Malcolm said there was a minor eclipse this afternoon; she wondered if any of them had come out here to check.
She pressed her palms against her thighs, hiding the dark-gray star in the center. She hadn’t let any Mortem seep out of her since that day, when she broke the stone roses, sent them to dust. Lore didn’t necessarily want to think about what it meant that she was so good at containing death’s power. That it wasn’t even a thought in her mind, most days, as if she was made for this.
In her head, Nyxara kept Her silence.
The stone banks of flowers were streaked with ash and soot, thick with the scent of burning even though the fire was long past. Finally, the greenhouse loomed ahead. A single flickering light shone through the glass walls.
Lore pulled down her hood and stepped inside.
The greenhouse was as full as it had been the last time she was here. Pots of browning herbs, spindly decorative trees too malnourished to flower. Detritus piled up to distract from what waited behind them.
The twigs from the trees picked at her arms as Lore made her way back to that flickering light. It illuminated the space more than it should, stretching farther than was natural.
The power of fire. Hestraon in Gabe’s head, not as strongly as Nyxara was in hers or Apollius in Bastian’s, but there.
The Priest Exalted was a pillar of shadow in the back of the greenhouse, leaning against the glass wall dressed in Presque Mort black. His eye patch faced her, and he didn’t turn her way to show his whole eye as she approached, all his attention fixed on the pitiful creature rooted into the ground.
It’d gotten worse. The roses blooming through Anton were thriving, a gruesome contrast with the rest of the garden. The bloom in the scarred orbital of his left eye had a new bud, brushing up against the runneled skin of his burnt forehead. Thorns had torn through his arms, dried blood in their wake, and more were visible just beneath the skin, pressing outward, ready to rip through at the slightest movement.
“And here comes the goddess.” His voice sounded shredded, as if the thorns in his arms were waiting in his throat, too. “Two out of six, coming to visit. To what do I owe the pleasure?” An awful, tearing laugh, ripping out of his ravaged throat. “Six broken, battered cups, when there should only be one. The cycle has begun, now. You can’t give back what you’ve taken, not while He is here. Godhood adapts.”
“That seems to be our answer.” Gabe’s voice was harsh. He still didn’t look at her. “There’s no way to reverse this.”
“Oh, now you want to reverse it?” Anton snarled. His mouth was twisted at one side, hooked through by a thorny stem. Blood and saliva dripped to the floor every time he spoke. “I knew this was what would become of you, Gabriel Remaut, son of a traitor. I tried to save you, making you holy, bringing you to a place where you’d never know power other than that of death. And this is how you repay me? Repay Him? Fitting that you’d become the avatar of the most traitorous god, after the Buried Goddess Herself.” His one eye rolled in Lore’s direction. “Not so buried anymore, is She?”
Nerves tingled at the back of Lore’s neck. “What do you mean?”
Anton smiled, or as close as he could get. “Why don’t you go find out?”
“This is useless,” Gabe said. His voice belied the statement, though. This was painful, and he wanted it done.
