I ignore his rambles, looking at her prophecy again, hissing breaths through clenched teeth. Though I delight in the idea of putting the beast to rest and ending the plague of this fucking place, his fallen misery is not my priority.
She is.
“Tell me which one of you threaded our fates together,” I demand through a rusty growl.
“Who do you think?” Maars laughs—a wild, twisted sound that consists only of the sharpest notes, bloodied spittle flinging from the wide gaps between his sharpened teeth. “Jakar does like his punishments, and fall in line the others do. Puppets, puppetsburn them all,” he hisses with bitterness.
I turn, looking at the monster nesting by my slain sacrifice.
“You can’t coax a serpent with a warm, fresh meal, then expect it not to appeal.” He brings the half-eaten heart to his nose and draws a deep sniff. “Do you think it was a mereaccidentthat you were there that night? That you nearly put your talon through her chest to make it right?”
My nails dig into the feverish flesh of my palms. “Explain.”
“Shan’t. Can’t.” He flicks a bloody hand toward the sky.“Just that every thread is specifically woven becausehefeeds off the suffering of weeds. It’s why your father’s fall was such a loss. He balanced Jakar’s insanity, but that balance has turned to calamity.Gone.”
So fucking gone.
I feel it in my bones, making them creak and groan from the skewed pressure. Felt it kneeling on my chest like a mountain the moment I was born.
“Take the Bahari High Master, for example—a sample,” Maars continues.
I still.
Listen.
“Calah’s son supports the stones almost as much as the Shulák do; will never know that the Blight he’s wielded into a shield around his city took his mate at the tender age of less than two. Nobody is safe in this place of chafed hate and lost faith. Jakar plays the world in ghastly tunes for his own sick enjoyment, but you already know that,” he says, plucking a vein from the heart and slurping it like a mouse’s tail as he waggles absent brows. “It’s written all over your skin. His win.”
I look away, down toward the crater lake.
“Whyher?”
He makes that humming sound again. Guts squirming, I watch him pluck another vein free, wrapping it around his finger before sucking it off the tip. “You believe you are the catalyst. I can neither confirm nor deny. I have fished for the answer, but all I could pull up was the poor, decapitated head of a once frolicking scripture. Like somebody reached into my bowl and slaughtered the poor soul.”
My heart plummets so fast it feels like the world’s tipping.
Further proof to support my swelling theory. But it’s just that—a theory. It’s certainly not one I’ll ever voice, stashed away in an obsidian vault tucked inside my chest, right next to her precious, glowing seed.
Stuffed away with other things I’ll never think of again.
“Let me give you one more truth I managed to tuck away for this very special day,” he says, and I whip my gaze at him, eyes narrowing. “Since you finally graced me with your presence again.”
“What’s the catch?”
He sets the fleshy remnants of the heart back in the goat’s gaping chest cavity and slurps the blood off his fingers. “In return, you will bear in mind that of which I yearn. Should you ever want to …spendthe swords blow and leave the world behind.”
I frown, wondering when he got so desperate to die.
My insides curdle as he tips his head, his cowl shrugging back to reveal his bald scalp. He threads his entire knobbly hand into his wide-open mouth, then reaches down his throat until he’s almost elbow deep. Hepulls,making choked sounds, and his bloody hand re-emerges, clenched around a long, fleshy ribbon of wiggling, black scripture.
He yanks the squealing prophecy free, then tosses it on the ground by my feet where it hisses slithered words:
It withers into a mangled ball while Maars coughs and sputters, wiping a dribble of black blood from his milky lips.
I replay the words in my head, frowning.
Hinging.
“Did you catch the last line?”
