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“I thought we’d all agreed that the consequences were a silly thing Anton made up to scare you.”
Lore gritted her teeth. “That seems to be yet another decision on which you consulted no one else.”
Across the carriage, Malcolm watched them argue like someone might watch a boxing match. He was their official Church escort today, but he’d stayed near-silent on the short ride to the docks. Lore had invited him to ride in the carriage instead of beside it in a rush, not wanting to be alone with Bastian.
Bastian, who was different now that the sun ruled the sky.
As much as she tried to ignore it, tried to leave the realization at the back of her mind, the conclusion was obvious. Anton had warned them of the consequences if she continued to channel—that she would become more like Nyxara. So far, all she’d gotten was the voice in her head.
There’d been no such warning for Bastian, but what if that was because Anton wanted him taken over? The Church desired Apollius’s return. It’d always been depicted as a bodily return, a triumphant emergence from wherever the god had been hiding for five hundred years, but what if it was this instead? A captured body, a shackled mind?
She wanted to tell Gabe. But what if he thought it was a good thing, too? Even if he didn’t, he and Malcolm and Alie already thought Bastian was acting erratically. If she told them that was because Bastian wasn’t Bastian anymore, not all the time, what would that do?
Nothing good.
Malcolm apparently took Lore’s lost stare as a prompt to speak. He sat up, making a slightly irritated face at her before smoothing out his expression. “I agree with Lore. The Kirytheans have seen what you can do. There’s no need for another display today. Besides, there’s nothing Spiritum or Mortem can do with water—you’d need Caeliar’s power for that.”
Bastian glanced at him from a narrowed eye, like he might argue, but then settled into his seat. “We’ll see,” he said simply.
His arm was slung across the back of the carriage seat, his fingers dangling close to Lore’s loose hair. No time for Juliette this morning; he’d dressed quickly and bid her do the same. When he came to her bedroom door, she’d greeted him with the pronouncement that she would not be channeling today. His response had been to smile and shepherd her down to the carriage.
“As I’ve said before,” Bastian said, twitching his fingers to gently tug a lock of her hair, “not using your abilities is bowing to Anton’s fearmongering. You have nothing to fear from magic, Lore.”
He said it like a joke, but a shadow flickered across his eyes.
“Caution isn’t fear,” Malcolm said. “Caution is good.”
Bastian said nothing, but gave him a withering look.
Absently, Lore twisted her engagement ring around her finger.
Bastian picked up her hand, glancing down at the ring he’d put there. A subtle change in his face again; he looked at her like he couldn’t quite believe she’d let him do this. There was a momentary softness in his eyes that seemed out of place as he lightly touched her cheek.
Then that change again, swift as sun slicing through cloud cover. The touch on her cheek became less wondering, more like ownership.
Lore leaned back, just enough to make his hand fall from her face.
Bastian leaned back, too, settling into the corner of the seat, and turned his eyes to the covered window, ignoring her and Malcolm both.
A flicker in her mind, like the brush of captured moth wings against a palm.
Part of Lore wanted to scream, to shout at Malcolm for not noticing that something was desperately wrong here. To push this awful knowledge onto someone else and make them deal with it instead. She glanced at him, a flash of panic spasming across her face.
Malcolm’s brow furrowed.
The carriage came to an abrupt stop. Gull caws echoed in open air, and the light through the gauzy curtains seemed brighter, reflecting off the sea.
“I still won’t do it,” Lore said quietly. “I mean it, Bastian.”
He said nothing.
The door opened. Bastian climbed out, giving a theatrical stretch, smiling to the gathered audience she could hear milling beyond the curtain.
The bloodcoat came around, opened her own door. With a weary sigh, Lore let him help her out.
Malcolm followed, the irritated look he’d given her before melting into concern. “Lore, is everything all right? Did something happen?”
But she didn’t answer him. Didn’t know how to, not in a way that wouldn’t make Bastian either more of a villain or an acceptable sacrifice on the altar of the greater good.
