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To Kel’s surprise, the Castelguards immediately released Fausten, who sagged to his knees. Both guards vanished back into the mountain. Jolivet remained a few yards away, as though keeping himself at a remove: a witness, rather than a participant.
Markus reached down to catch hold of his adviser by the front of his cloak, hauling him to his feet. He pulled him close, and over the sound of the sea, the screaming of the gulls, Kel heard him shout in Malgasi: “Miért árultál el? Tudtad, mi fog történni. Tudtad, hony mi leszek—”
Why did you betray me? You knew what would happen. You knew what I would become.
Fausten was shaking his head. “Your medicine,” he cried, answering not in Malgasi but in the language of Castellane. “Only I can make it. If you kill me, your sickness will be worse. You know what is coming, my lord,you know what is coming—”
The King roared with rage. He caught hold of Fausten, wrenching him to his feet. Fausten screamed, over and over—high soundsthat matched the crying of the gulls. Fausten’s feet were bare, Kel saw. They drummed against the wood, leaving bloody streaks behind.
It seemed like forever, but Kel knew it was likely only a few seconds. Fausten struggled as the King, inexorable, stalked to the platform’s edge. Gripping the thrashing man with black-gloved hands, he lifted him as if he weighed no more than a pair of boots and flung him over the guardrail.
Fausten fell, hurtling toward the sea like a bird shot out of the air.
His body hit the waves. There was a soundless splash, and then his head appeared, a dark dot riding the surge of the water. He seemed to be screaming as the sea roiled around him. A black shadow rose up under him and Kel’s stomach surged into his throat. Dark, knobbled green heaved itself through the dark blue; a vast mouth yawned, lined with discolored, knife-sharp teeth. Even from a distance, Kel imagined he could see the thing’s eyes: yellow and rolling as the jaws snapped shut, blood pulsing through razored teeth. A howling scream, a last, helpless thrash, and a great blot of scarlet spread like a stain over the surface of the ocean.
The crocodile vanished with the surge of the waves. Fausten’s head still floated atop the water, the red stump of his throat no longer joined to his body. Then the shadow beneath the water curved back around and the head, too, was pulled down.
Everything seemed distant, as if it were happening at some remove. Kel dug his fingers into the dirt. He could hear nothing now but the wind in the branches of the scrub pine and his own harsh breathing. He watched as the King dusted off his gloved hands and stalked back into the mountain.
He was followed a moment later by Jolivet, who had watched the scene unfold without moving, a silent witness. As Jolivet passed out of view, he looked up, as if alerted by a movement. His eyes met Kel’s. They were chips of ice, chill and dead.
You will be Legate Jolivet,the Ragpicker King had said.And it willbe your task, as it was his, to go to the Orfelinat and select from the frightened children there the next Sword Catcher. The next you. And it will kill a piece of you to do it.
A moment later, Jolivet was gone. There was a deep groaning sound from within the mountain, the rattle of gears and pulleys. The platform began to recede, sliding back into the Hill; in seconds, it was gone, along with any evidence that anything unusual had just happened. As Kel rose to his feet, he saw that even the surface of the sea where Fausten had died was smooth again, an unruffled expanse of blue-green silk.
Kel started back up the path to Marivent. He felt numb, as if he had been dosed with morphea. When he had to stop halfway to the walls to vomit among the rosemary and lavender bushes, he was more surprised than anything else. He had not even realized he felt sick.
He must have seemed normal enough to the guard at the gate, who let him in with a friendly word. He stopped in the courtyard of the Castel Mitat to splash water on his face. His heart was racing as he made his way up to the rooms he shared with Conor.
Conor was there, sitting in the window embrasure. He looked up when Kel came in. There was something about him that seemed different—he was smiling, and there was real relief in it, as if he hadbeen divested of a weight on his shoulders. The last time Kel could remember Conor smiling like that was before he had found out about Prosper Beck.
Kel hated to have to shatter that expression. But Conor needed to know; it was not something he could keep from him. “Con,” he said, his voice rougher than he’d expected, “there’s something I have to tell you. It’s about your father.”
—
It was Second Watch, and there was not enough moonlight to read by; Lin, with a sigh, rose to light the lamps. She had been sitting at her kitchen table all afternoon and into the evening, translating Qasmuna’s book and taking careful notes.
Notinthe original book, of course. She wouldn’t have dared to write in it, and besides, the pages were already loose in the binding, the paper soft with age, almost powdery under her fingertips.
Lamps now glowing, Lin returned to the table and her cold cup ofkarak.There were, of course, still passages she didn’t understand, so she planned to bring the book to the Black Mansion tomorrow; surely among the forgers and thieves Andreyen employed, someone must be able to translate Callatian. She suspected Kel could do it, if it came to that.
There were many passages in the book about how magic was used for healing. The first of them followed what she had learned about Source-Stones: Magicians in the past had been able to use their powers to heal, but were limited by the power they could themselves expend without dying. Those able to store energy in stones were able to do more. When Suleman (the betrayer, the traitor) created stones that could hold limitless energy, the ability to heal became, also, nearly limitless.A man would fall dying on the field of battle,Qasmuna wrote,and the sorcerer-healer would come and raise him up to fight on; even if his wounds could not be healed, he would still fight.
It was a chilling image, and gave Lin pause. She even had to rise to her feet, and make a circuit of her room, before returning to the book. Every powercanbe used for evil, she reminded herself. But she would not do so. She wanted only to heal Mariam. But her stone seemed dead, and had since she had used it to heal Conor. And while she had known that there was a way to put her own power into the stone, to imbue it again with strength, she had not known how to do it.
According to Qasmuna, as Lin read painstakingly on, the issue was one of binding. A Source-Stone needed to be bound to its user via a series of steps. Some seemed simple, while others involved words that, even with her dictionary, Lin could not yet understand. There were also places in the manuscript that Lin found blank—sections, she guessed, where the Word itself had once been written, and had vanished when the Goddess removed it from the world.
Still. There was enough for her to try binding herself to her stone, and why not now? Why wait?
Her eyes fixed on the page in front of her, she took the stone, embedded in its silver setting, in her hand. She laid her hand against her chest—as the book bade her to do, and as she had done instinctively when she healed Prince Conor—and closed her eyes.
Against the darkness of her lids, she imagined the stone as her heart. Imagined it set into her chest like a jewel that was also a living part of her. That pulsed with light in time to her heartbeats.
For a moment, she felt wind in her hair, and smelled the scent of smoke. She saw the top of the tower in Aram, and Suleman, rising to his feet, his stone pulsing at his chest—
Her eyes flew open. Her heart was hammering almost painfully, as if she had run flat-out until she could run no more and must crouch down, gasping for breath.
Her hand ached. She opened it, stared down at the stone in her palm. It was still pale, milky as a blind eye, but was there something moving in it now? A swirl, down in its depths, like the first rise of smoke from a fire…a whisper, in the back of her mind.
