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Lore was the depository. Lore was the holding cell. Mortem crashed into her, endless waves, a pulsing torrent of black thread. And it coiled into her, and it stayed.
And she stayed alive.
Rushing, rushing, and she didn’t mark the point when the world started to come back into focus, when color began to leach into her vision, when her ears ceased to be filled with soft white noise and instead heard screams, cries, raised voices.
Scared, and hurt, but alive. All of them alive.
Because she’d kept them that way. Stepped out of time and stopped death, held life where it was supposed to be like a hand on a spurting artery.
The cool lap of water, welcome in the heat. A tangle of voices, some familiar. One in particular.
“You,” Bastian murmured in Lore’s ear, “are a wonder.”
It was a nice thing to hear, right before she lost consciousness.
There was no death toll. That was the most important and most unbelievable part. All three of the ships at the ends of the docks had exploded, and there was no death toll. No one on the ships or the docks had died, neither had the commoners gathered beyond the barrier. Many had wounds they should’ve died from, awful scars and blood loss, but everyone was alive.
The second most important and most unbelievable part was how the explosion had happened in the first place.
“It had to be someone in attendance.” Malcolm had a finger hooked thoughtfully over his lips, sitting forward in his chair, one leg jittering up and down in an anxious dance that hadn’t let up once in the half hour they’d all been in Lore’s room. “A courtier, a guard, someone. Those ships were checked and rechecked over and over.”
“Unless someone planted the bomb during the checks,” Gabe rumbled. He stood by the door, his arms crossed, his one eye pointed anywhere but at Lore on the bed. He’d looked at her when he carried her here, drinking in the sight like he wanted to catalog every wound and was almost bereft that there were none to count, nothing to use as a barometer against his worry. But after putting her down, he’d looked away, and hadn’t once looked back.
“No.” Malcolm shook his head. “It can’t be one of ours. Everyone in our ranks or the bloodcoats’ who wanted to get rid of Bastian is in the Burnt Isles.”
“Which is why the Kirytheans are the most obvious culprits,” Alie said. Again. She sat closest to Lore, right next to her pillow, a bandage on her wrist and another at her temple. She’d been at the very end of the dock road when the explosion happened, and her wounds were minor, mostly cuts from flying wood splinters. Still, her hands trembled in her lap.
“Surely they wouldn’t be that stupid,” Malcolm muttered, running a hand down his face. He’d been out of the blast radius and sustained no injuries, but his shirt was dark with someone else’s blood. “There are a million easier ways to assassinate you. At least, one would have assumed there were, before this.”
Before Lore had demonstrated a power over death beyond what anyone could have imagined.
No one had a response to that, least of all Lore. Five pairs of eyes went surreptitiously to her hands, lying flat on the bedding.
She wanted to press them into her sheets, wanted to try to hide what lay on the other side. But Lore turned her hands over, almost unconsciously.
From the center of her palm, a charcoal-gray star spread outward, darkness tracking from the middle and out to her fingers, as if that part of her hand were long dead. It dyed her eclipse scar in mottled colors, almost like a bruise, and it wouldn’t wash off, no matter how she’d scrubbed when she was first brought up here, carried in Gabe’s arms like a dying bride.
Even in that state, her consciousness slipping in and out, she was surprised Bastian allowed such a thing. But she recalled him walking next to them, his shoulder nearly touching Gabe’s, his fingers threaded through hers. The three of them entangled.
Bastian had kept his silence ever since they arrived at the apartments, and he still kept it now. He stood by the window, almost preternaturally still, sunlight seeping through the thin curtain to outline him in gold.
“There’s that old saying about the simplest answer often being the correct one,” Alie said drily. “And the impact of such an attack might outweigh the relative intelligence. They know we’re vulnerable, for all Lore and Bastian’s magic.”
The mention of magic made Gabe’s eye go flinty, his arms tighten across his chest. “Well,” he said. “There’s an option to consider, isn’t there?”
The ships themselves were too obliterated for there to be any quick evidence of what the bombs had been made of, but a handful of debris was on its way to the university up in Farramark, the capital of Caldien, to be tested for gunpowder or other clues. Even now, mere hours after the attack, rumors flew about what could’ve caused it. A Mortem leak (proving that the common citizen had no idea how Mortem actually worked), an act of Apollius (which made Lore feel an unpleasant twist in her gut), a cannon malfunction. Surprisingly few courtiers seemed eager to point the finger at Kirythea. The shadow of war was cold, and they did whatever they could to scramble out from under it.
Besides, the why and how of the attack were much less interesting than the aftermath. Or lack of it, rather.
The consensus of the court, at least for the moment, was that the lack of death was a mark of the Bleeding God’s favor. How that squared with those who thought the attack itself was an act of Apollius, Lore wasn’t sure, but religion always found loopholes. She assumed that the North Sanctuary would be very full come First Day, that a new sense of religious fervor would run through the Citadel like a virus.
A mark of favor. A show of power.
Just like Bastian wanted.
None of them said anything, Gabe’s implication settling slow.
Bastian lifted his eyes from the floor.
