A current went straight through Seraphina. From the top of her head to the tips of her toes, she felt like she’d been struck by lightning. Idris squeezed her hand, bringing her to the present. Why was she hesitating? She was supposed to be fast, not risk hers and Idris’s life like this.
“You.” The thrall relic sent waves of power through her body. The certainty that she would be obeyed bubbled in her chest, rose in her throat, and spilled through her mouth as she spoke the next words. “You will do as I say. You will not attack anyone unless I tell you to. You will not move unless I command it. You will not speak or make a sound unless I allow it.”
The revenant tilted his head and regarded her just like before. From where she was standing, she couldn’t tell if anything had changed. She took a step forward, releasing Idris’s hand. When he wanted to follow, she motioned for him to stay behind. Deepwithin, she knew the relic had worked. But something wasn’t right. She had to test it.
“Stand up,” she said.
The revenant did not.
“Stand up and walk out of the crate.”
The revenant’s lips curved into a smirk.
Seraphina was confused. He wasn’t obeying her, but he wasn’t attacking either. She could see the black threads that held his skin together. This was the creature that had slaughtered an entire village. He was a vicious beast, she knew it. Why wasn’t he behaving like one?
“Speak,” she tried again.
“What do you want me to say?”
His voice was low and measured. Not a baritone as deep as Rune’s, but grave enough that its vibration crawled under Seraphina’s skin and made her feel untethered. She imagined a hundred gaping graves, all pleading in a single voice for the remains they’d been robbed of.
“How are you not compelled to obey me?” she asked.
“I am, but there’s something stronger keeping me here. I’m afraid I can’t join you outside of my prison.”
Seraphina frowned. She felt Idris by her side and didn’t push him away, judging they were safe for now. She’d known not to hope too hard for this to be easy. What a conundrum it had turned out to be.
“Will you tell me what it is?”
He turned his head to the right, his gaze lifting to where the ceiling joined the wall.
“Lattice,” he said.
She and Idris stepped closer and leaned in just enough to see without breaching the boundary of the crate.
The lattice was a disc of dark wool, roughly the span of an outstretched hand. A circle of twelve bone shards contained ahexagon inside it, which in turn contained a triangle. In the middle, the keybone stood upright from the cloth. This shard was longer than the others, thinner, and honed along both edges to a hard point. It wasn’t perfectly white. It looked like something had stained it. The weaver had used pale-colored thread. Seraphina could spot no kill-stitch.
“I’ve never seen this pattern before,” she said.
“What do we do?” asked Idris.
Seraphina shrugged and looked at the revenant. He was studying her with a little more interest than before. She felt her hackles rise. Not because he was menacing. If she ignored the stitches and the unnatural color of his eyes, glowing in the semi-darkness, he looked like a normal man. What unsettled her was the contradiction between who he was now – wearing clothes, trapped in this crate – and who he’d been out there, unleashed.
“With no kill-stitch, it’s unsafe to remove or attempt to destroy the lattice,” she said. “The purpose of a kill-stitch is so a pattern can be broken in an intended, gradual manner, without destroying it or causing it to backfire. The lack of a kill-stitch is intentional, and I’ve never encountered it in a lattice that isn’t meant to harm…”
Her voice faded toward the end of that sentence. She thought of the Bastion Weave. In his journal, Matteo had said that he’d built it without a kill-stitch. If found and destroyed, how would it backfire? Would it flatten the city it had been made to protect, so the High Harvester would have nothing left to conquer? No. What a despicable thought. Matteo would’ve never done such a thing.
“I could tell you how to deactivate it,” the revenant said.
“What?” both Seraphina and Idris said at the same time. They exchanged a glance.
“You’re not here to free me, though, are you?”
No matter how hard Seraphina tried to read him, she couldn’t. His face was stitched together, and he’d only been wearing it for two years, since his creation. He didn’t inhabit it well enough to show his intentions or emotions – granted he had any.
“No,” she said.
He smiled, displaying two perfect rows of teeth, the incisors slightly lengthened.
