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His blood—Greythorne blood, Mathuin’s blood—flowed into the inscription of the fountain, turning the chiseled words red and then dripping into the fountain itself.
Rosetta had gathered Kellan into her arms as he shook in shock, staring at the stump where his hand had been. She was whispering comfort to him, drawing spells into his skin, cauterizing the wound, taking away the pain, chanting him into a spelled sleep like she had for me each time I’d left my body behind to walk the Gray.
Better to deprive him of his purpose than his life. That’s what I’d said to Castillion about Zan. And now I’d done just that to Kellan. I’d robbed him of his ability to fight. I’d betrayed him in a most heinous fashion. I’d stolen his noble end and replaced it with a lifetime of difficulty.
I’d also saved his life.
Rosetta looked up at me as the wind kicked up, her hair drifting and dancing around her face like flame.
“Take care of him,” I said.
Magic from Kellan’s blood was everywhere around me, crackling. I pulled it into myself and then, turning to Rosetta and Kellan, pronounced the same spell once uttered at Mathuin.
“Ut salutem!” I cried, pushing the magic toward them in a wave.
To safety.
* * *
I walked the steps to the Stella alone. It was not just the doors that were crimson now; the entire building was bath
ed in the color of blood.
Inside, Arceneaux was praying.
Her dark hair was free and loosely waving down her back, her hands clasped together in ardent passion as she lifted her voice in praise to the goddess in the glass above her. Her arms, now free of their gloves, were laced with the markings of rot.
Zan was suspended between chains running from each wrist to two marble pillars, arms outstretched, a starlike offering to the red-glowing glass Empyrea. Blood was flowing freely from wounds all over his bare torso and arms; Arceneaux knew she had to kill him to set her mistress free, but it appeared she wanted to take her time and enjoy the process.
“O Divine Empyrea,” she sang, “I have done all you asked. I am ready to become thy vessel. I know that my body is weak and human and frail, and that I am unworthy, but take it. Take it and make it thy own.”
Zan groaned and tried to move.
Angrily, Arceneaux abandoned her prayer and stood, placing her decaying hands around his neck. “Silence,” she ordered. “Submit now to the Empyrea’s will.”
I curled my fingers into a fist and walked up behind her.
“Let him go,” I said quietly. Dangerously. I did not have to raise my voice here; the Stella Regina was built to glory in sound.
She dropped her grip just as Zan’s eyes were beginning to roll back into their sockets. He sucked in a gasping breath, on the very precipice of consciousness. She turned to face me, and I was struck by how carefully she had cultivated her own image to match the Empyrea’s as it had been rendered in the Stella’s stained glass: long, dark hair; haunting blue eyes; a distant and disdainful countenance. But despite the trappings she’d donned—the diamond stars pinned to her free-flowing locks, her blazing white robes, the feverish gleam in her eye—she did not actually resemble the Goddess at all.
“I killed your favorite acolytes. And your ‘Celestines.’ And all of your clerics. Let him go, and I won’t kill you.”
“They are in the Empyrea’s arms now,” she said. “May she forgive them for their failures.”
“Do you think she forgave Toris for his failures?”
She stiffened.
“You’ve been failed by all the men in your life, haven’t you? Men who sought to rule you, use you, control you, discard you. Men who valued you only for what they could do with you or take from you. But not Toris. No. I daresay . . . you think he might have been the one person in all of this starsforsaken universe to actually give you purpose.” I was inches away from her now, carefully gauging the twitch in her jaw, the tremor in her fingers, the hitch in her breath. “And I killed him.”
She gave me a withering stare. “You. It’s always you. Ruining everything. Taking what’s mine.”
“What have I ever taken from you?” I asked. “What do you have that I would ever want?”
“You should have been sent away,” she said furiously. “Like the rest of us. You should have been cast aside into the garbage like we were. It should have been you to get passed from man to man so the kidnapper who called himself your father could make a few coins.”
I was so close to Zan now that I smelled his blood, coppery sweet. If I could just get to him. Just touch him. I could give him my vitality. I could make this all end.
