She turned back to the window and took a sip.
“Please, Anaïs.” Mallory dropped onto her knees beside the settee, pleading with her. “You know I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t have to.”
Inhaling sharply, Anaïs glanced at the sky. Dark clouds were rolling over the vineyards. “I knew you would,” she whispered. “From the moment I saw her body.”
“Anaïs—”
“Just as I knew that you shouldn’t have to. Maybe I should have offered to do it from the beginning. But… I’m scared, Mally. It’s unnatural, and dangerous. And… what if it happens again?”
“It won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“We can hardly summon him twice.”
Crossing her arms, Anaïs settled deeper into the cushions, studying Mallory. “Who do you think it was, if not Le Bleu?”
She didn’t want to say it. Saying it out loud would make it too real, too…plausible.
The words came out brittle. “I’m afraid it was Armand who killed her.”
Mallory had hoped for a gasp. Some shock. A whispered,no, surely not Armand.
To her disappointment, Anaïs nodded. “I fear that as well.”
Julie’s body had been taken to the chapel to await the final rites and burial ritual—an initiate of the Seven had been sent for but would not arrive for at least a day, given the distance to the nearest temple. Until then, her body was not to be disturbed.
The chapel stood apart from the house—in a clearing in the western gardens, surrounded by ash trees. A domed roof was covered in moss and debris. Vines clung to the white stone walls. Like so much of the château, it was uncared for, its former beauty rotting with the passage of time.
A pair of oak-and-iron doors faced the château, greeted by a meandering cobblestone path.
Mallory pushed them open and instantly wrinkled her nose. The air inside was musty and stale, full of mildew and decay and death—though someone had tried to perfume over it and the result was so cloyingly false it turned her stomach.
Anaïs peered stoically ahead, her expression resigned.
A splatter of rain started on the path as they slipped inside. The door shut behind them with a resounding thud.
The building was octagonal with a high, vaulted ceiling. The door took up nearly a full wall, and the other seven each boasted a massive stained-glass window depicting one of the seven gods.Straight ahead reigned Eostrig, the glass flourishing with spring flowers and vibrant hues, suggesting that this chapel was built primarily with the happier purpose of weddings in mind. Six benches stood facing an altar, three to each side of an aisle that was littered with dried leaves and puddles that had gathered from a leak in the roof.
Julie’s body had been laid on a plank on top of the altar. The sword had been removed, and her arms rested at her sides, but her blood-soaked clothing would remain untouched until the temple acolyte could cleanse the body.
The rain now drummed down on the roof. Mallory studied the glass portrayal of Solvilde, whose tears were said to bring the rain. But in this depiction, the god of the sea and sky looked merry and aloof, framed by two waves curling over their head.
The shuffle of feet could barely be heard over the gale as Mallory and her sister approached the altar. Holding a lantern aloft, Mallory went to stand at Julie’s left shoulder—Anaïs to her right. A full day had passed since she had been found in the trophy hall. Someone had closed her eyelids, but otherwise the body seemed unchanged.
Too unchanged, Mallory thought. There shouldn’t be any color in her cheeks. There should be some sign of decay—a smell. Evidence of maggots feasting on the flesh. Mallory knew enough about decomposition to recognize it was not normal for a body to appear merely asleep nearly two days after death, as if she were held in some sort of unholy stasis.
Anaïs was even more pale than the corpse between them.
Mallory barely breathed, listening to the pounding of the rain. The hiss of the lantern flame. The wind knocking tree branchesagainst the windows. She reached into a pouch at her hip and pulled out a small hourglass. She set it on the altar above Julie’s head. The sand crystals inside glistened like snow.
“Are you ready?”
A muscle jumped in her sister’s jaw. Mallory worried she would change her mind.
But then Anaïs reached forward, the movement quick and decisive, and wrapped her fingers around Julie’s hand.
Mallory flipped over the timer. Five minutes.
