Page 189 of Scars Beneath a Serpent’s Scales

Roremar

The final day of the Revels.

A part of him was grateful. This mess would finally be over. His guards had told him as much last night when they’d given him a bucket of water and soap to wash up with. Apparently they wanted him presentable for…whatever they planned.

Another part of him was surprised Emmeline and Desmond had never come back. He was grateful for that, too, of course—he didn’t have the energy to chase them away again—but from how well he knew them both, it surprised him. Not enough to try to figure it out, though.

His brother’s death had taken all that ambition with it. Now, he’d just been counting down the moments until his punishment was doled out. Nothing would be severe enough, but at least it would be something. It would stop the threat in his bones.

Darcy was the one to retrieve him. He’d almost given up waiting when his old friend appeared at the iron bars, a key in hand.

“Sorry they made it be you, Darcy,” Roremar said as he was dragged to his feet by a second soldier, Calleus.

“Me, too,” Darcy answered.

They pulled him up the stairs into the main halls of the Trade House. A setting sun streamed in the high windows, burning fiery red. Fitting, though the sudden brightness stung his eyes after a week in the dark.

He squinted against it, nearly stumbling over his own feet when Darcy and Calleus dragged him to the nearest staircase. His stomach dropped. He’d expected them to lead him out onto the Promenade to make a show of his execution, but they were taking him upstairs.

The grand moonstone building was empty but for their echoing boots, each counting out a death toll. Dull shouts from the Revels trickled through the locked windows.

“Any hint of what’s to come?” Roremar ground out as they walked him down a long hall on the third floor.

“Haven’t told us,” Darcy said, grabbing Roremar’s arm a little more aggressively.

“Sure it’ll be brutal,” Calleus added.

“Shut your damn mouth, Calleus,” Darcy growled. The intervention left Roremar more than a little surprised. He’d assumed the Lyra Isle Guard had written him off—he’d be better off if he had.

They passed an east facing window, and Roremar slowed, gazing out over the Promenade. The festival he’d always disdained, the children waving streamers and running through the streets, weaving between tents selling everything from candy to jewelry to stained glass wind chimes. Adults lining walkways and balconies, toasting to…

To his downfall, in part.

He forced himself not to think of his own siblings or his mother as he watched. How they were probably shut up in the Academy in mourning rather than enjoying the holiday. They’d probably never celebrate this anniversary again.

His gaze landed on the sculpture in the center of the Promenade, before the Mezzanine and the Trade House. The one erected each year atop a dais—a model of the one the Twelfth Fate, Dryvius, had been executed atop all those centuries ago.

No one really knew what it looked like—the renditions in history books and artwork varied vastly—but every year, Lyra recreated their own for this day. Throughout the Revels, people burned letters before it, things they wanted to send to the grave. Secrets and sins.

It was a useless act, Roremar knew. By lighting those fears, Starsearchers turned them into an offering rather than the cleansing they thought they were. They gave those pieces of their pasts to the Fate of Chaos and Revelry, and Spirits knew what an ancient being born of calamity would do with them.

The monument this year was a monstrous thing sculpted of black clay, the shape of a panther. Sometimes, they chose to model it after the Fate himself, sometimes after a symbol. This year, they opted for one of his pets. The sun beat down as it fell in the sky, unseasonably warm for this late in the year, withering the clay beneath its heated beams.

At the end of the festival, they’d melt it down.

He wouldn’t be there to see it done.

“Come on,” Calleus said, tugging him down the corridor.

Roremar didn’t look back.

They marched him to a room at the end of the hall, the opposite end baring the door with the heavy iron lock he’d noticed the first time he snuck in here with Emmeline.

Fates, thinking about her was torture, but even she fled his mind when he was shoved through an office door and came to a blaring halt.

“Uncle?” he asked.

Aldryn Falliare’s name sat on the desk, the office decorated similarly to his at the Academy with expensive glass-encased artifacts and heavy books lining the shelves curving around the corner behind the desk. The mantle beside them bore crystal sculptures, and even the rug looked lavish.