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Lore pressed her forearm against her mouth until she was sure the pained sound in her throat wouldn’t make it past her teeth.
The door to the northern green opened soundlessly. There was a guard here, something Lore found herself absurdly thankful for, even though it could throw a wrench in her plans. She wore a cloak, the hood tugged up over her head, but her departure didn’t seem to catch the guard’s interest. Two courtiers were kissing next to a bush by the door, and all his attention was on them.
Quickly, she made her way over the cobblestone paths, into the manicured forest. It reminded her of the one in her mind, the one in Nyxara’s memories, and she tried to think of anything else as she hurried through it, to the Church wall and the storm drain.
Lore wondered if the goddess had seen everything that had just happened with Bastian, or if She’d somehow turned Herself away completely. She hadn’t felt Nyxara in her mind the whole time, so she could only assume the goddess at least tried. You can come back, she said into the darkness of her head. It’s done.
It never is, Nyxara replied. Even if you never see him again, it will never feel done.
Well, wasn’t that comforting.
The Buried Goddess said nothing about the plan Lore was currently executing, getting the fuck out of Auverraine in the hope her absence would lessen the gods’ hold, but Lore could feel Her relief. This was the right path, then. This was the way to fix it.
As much as it could be fixed.
Because, in the end, all Lore was doing was running away. She was good at that, both physically and mentally, simply ignoring anything unpleasant, removing herself from it as much as possible. Yes, maybe the gods would lose their footholds in her friends’ minds when Lore was gone, the same way her presence had awoken Bastian’s power, but Apollius wouldn’t be beaten. He’d simply be postponed, put off. He’d chosen Bastian as His heir, as His vessel, and if that plan was disrupted, maybe things would return to normal. Apollius would go back to wherever He’d waited for Bastian, and the world would right itself, for a while. Maybe even longer than Lore would live, taking the goddess with her, giving Nyxara Her second death.
But Apollius would come back. Someday, He would come back, choose a new vessel from the Arceneaux line, and then He wouldn’t even have Nyxara to try to temper Him. Just Himself, and a world at His mercy, and no one with His wife in their head to try to stop Him.
Any input from You on all this would be grand, Lore snapped at Nyxara as she barreled through the trees.
I have nothing to add, Nyxara replied. You summed it up rather succinctly.
Lore made a frustrated sound.
The grate over the drain was locked, and unlike Bastian, Lore didn’t carry a lockpick in her boot, or anywhere else, seeing as she didn’t even have boots anymore. But Mortem lived in iron—she stretched out her hands and twisted the threads, warping the metal until it fell from the drain with a clang. Cursing, Lore glanced around, but it didn’t appear anyone was close enough to hear.
She glanced down at her hands. Her palms were nearly covered in corpse-gray, the dead color expanded from her time watching Nyxara’s memories, and it was starting to inch up her fingers. Very attractive.
The water was just as disgusting as always; Lore sighed as she jumped down into it, holding her bag above her head in a futile attempt to keep some clean clothes. She slogged to the other end, climbed up onto the ledge—much more difficult on your own, without a Prince or a monk to help you out—and channeled the Mortem in the grate again, twisting it off its hinges and sending it splashing into the water below.
When she climbed out of the culvert, shaking her skirt in a vain attempt to dry it, the street on the other side was nearly deserted. Fine by her. Lore shouldered her bag again and started walking, noticing as she did that parts of the road seemed in much better repair than she remembered. Wooden struts and piles of rock stood in some corners, ongoing construction that had finished for the day. Bastian, doing good things. Trying, still, even as a god who didn’t care slowly took him over.
She swallowed the thorny feeling in her throat.
Tickets for voyages out of the harbor were sold from a derelict booth nearest the north dock, before you got to the abandoned warehouses beyond, one of which was Val and Mari’s headquarters. Lore wasn’t sure whether she should expect someone to be on duty in the middle of the night, so it was a pleasant surprise to see the light on. She kept her hood up as she walked to the open window, and briefly considered trying to alter her voice, but decided that would draw more attention than it would defer. “When’s the soonest ship to Ratharc?”
Good choice, Nyxara murmured in her head. You want to stay far away from the Isles.
The grizzled woman in the window lifted a gray brow, but didn’t look up from the battered novel in her hands. “Who’s asking?”
“Someone who would like to sail to Ratharc,” Lore said through gritted teeth. At least her choice of destination was goddess approved.
The woman closed the novel with a huff, leaned back in her chair. “As of about four hours ago, all commercial ships out of the harbor have been canceled until further notice,” she said, sounding like the fact was a particular pain in her ass. “You want to get to Ratharc, you’ll have to get your own ship, and good luck finding a crew for it. No one wants to sail out with the Kirytheans on the waves like flies on shit.”
“Is that why there are no commercial voyages?” Lore thought she was doing an admirable job of sounding calm, when all her organs seemed to have dropped toward her toes. “Because of the Kirytheans?”
“There’s no commercial voyages because the King in the Citadel said there shouldn’t be.” The woman cracked open her book again, apparently deciding that Lore wouldn’t be a better distraction. “Not sure why I’m still here, to be honest. But until my employer says he ain’t gonna pay me for sitting here without selling tickets, here I will damn well stay. Beats my room at the Foghorn and Fiddle.” And she turned back to her book, Lore dismissed.
Her legs felt like sandbags as Lore trudged away from the ticket booth and out toward the rows of warehouses. Apollius must’ve felt Nyxara’s first death in the catacombs, known what it meant. Known that Lore had found Her body, that Lore was taking Her memories and would learn that getting away might lessen His hold on Bastian. He’d trapped her here.
Going overland, her only possible destination was Caldien, if she wanted to stay out of the Empire. And it’d take weeks to get there, even by carriage, and she’d be so easy to track…
Her body followed a familiar path without her mind telling it to, trudging through streets she knew, the wind off the sea a welcome balm to the humidity in her cloak. She peeled back her hood and let the breeze dry the sweat in her hair. Sweat from Bastian, from everything they’d done. Her eyes blinked closed, and she saw him, naked and heavy-lidded and awe-filled on the end of the bed, fisting his hands in the sheets, gilded silver in moonlight.
She stopped in front of Val and Mari’s warehouse, because where else was she going to go?
The special knock, the one they’d taught her. A moment, and the door opened, but the figure behind it wasn’t one of Lore’s mothers.
