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The Presque Mort hauled Bastian up on the platform as he spat and cursed, twisting in their grip like a cat. His flailing fists had connected with more than one of them—the Mort who held his arms had a rapidly blackening eye, and a bruise bloomed on another’s cheek as his hand tangled in Bastian’s hair and wrenched his head back, just like Lore’s. Bastian squinted through the blood from his head wound, chest heaving, teeth bared.
August sighed as he looked at his son, always the disappointed father.
In return, Bastian laughed, quick and sharp. “How fitting,” he snarled. “You always did have to do things as ostentatiously as possible.”
The King shook his head. A streak of sorrow crossed his face, quick and bright as a passing comment, made more terrible for how genuine it was. “It never could’ve been you,” he murmured. “No matter what Anton’s vision said.”
“Because I’m not pious enough?” There was no chance of escape; still, Bastian fought against the Mort holding him, muscles straining. “Would it be me if I’d killed my own people and farmed their bodies for an army?”
“I didn’t kill them, Bastian.” The sorrow on August’s face turned cold. “That’s one sin you can’t lay at my feet.”
His eyes turned to Lore, slow and deliberate.
Her throat closed. Her mind did, too, shuttering itself against some impossible realization. Mortem couldn’t do something like that. Mortem couldn’t kill an entire village and leave the bodies perfectly intact. No mere channeler could do such a thing.
No mere channeler.
“Now.” August raised his knife as the room slid closer and closer to darkness, closer and closer to the eclipse’s totality. “Let’s begin.”
Lore expected the knife to flash down to Bastian’s exposed throat; the way he thrashed made it clear he did, too. But the Presque Mort holding the Sun Prince didn’t pull his head back farther to make his neck an easier target. Instead he and the other monk wrestled one arm out from behind Bastian’s back, thrust it forward to present his palm to his father.
The scarred lines of half a sun gleamed red in the fading light.
The Presque Mort holding Lore did the same—twisted her hand out from behind her, the hand the Night Sisters had burned the moon into eleven years ago today. Lore tried to curl it into a fist, but the monk forced her fingers backward, almost to the breaking point.
It was quick. August carved Bastian’s hand first, fast and brutal, blood rushing from his son’s palm to patter on the floor, joining what still leaked from his head wound. Then Lore; she gritted her teeth against a scream as the dagger point dug into her flesh, sheared through life and heart lines to add to an old scar.
Half a sun, arcing up from the points of her crescent moon. She knew without looking that Bastian’s palm would match, a moon sliced beneath his sun, their two scars fit into one symbol. Life and death, light and dark.
Through the atrium window above, the sky slipped into totality, two celestial bodies momentarily mirroring their new scars before the moon covered the sun.
Dropping the bloody knife, August took their cut hands and pushed them together before him, palm-to-palm, wound-to-wound.
Lore felt like she’d been struck by lightning. Power arced from where her hand pressed against Bastian’s, shooting down every limb, a magnification of what she’d felt when he pulled the strands of Mortem from her in the catacombs. Life, a rush of blood, a torrent of clean air in labored lungs.
And Bastian felt the opposite. She saw it, and felt it, too, the connection she’d sensed all along made manifest as a bridge between them. Cold and stillness, emptying, traveling through him in a storm of death. Opposites, brought together, strengthening each other.
August’s mouth opened. He made a high, mad sound, not a laugh or a cry but something more animal than either. In the darkness of totality, the angles of his face were stark as a skull.
He dropped Lore and Bastian’s hands. Both of them slumped, consciousness hard to hold. Lore’s body felt like it was pulled in opposite directions, like it would shake itself apart at the seams. Dark and light and life and death, things that shouldn’t live in the same space, both held in her now.
“That’s quite enough.”
Anton. Finally.
The Priest Exalted stood at the other end of the atrium, wearing his white robe and the gleaming pendant. It swung as he walked, slowly, up the center of the floor.
August impassively watched his brother approach, toying with his knife. A smear of blood marred his doublet. “You finally deign to show up,” he said, hiding his wariness behind a haughty tone. “It’s your turn, now. Their powers are bound together, but only a priest of Apollius can strike the last blow and redirect the magic into the proper vessel.” The curve of his smile gleamed as merciless as his blade. “I know you’ve longed for this moment, when your power is needed instead of mine.”
Anton gave his brother a gentle, almost pitying smile. “And you know I cannot put our earthly desires over those of Apollius.”
Every courtier August had invited, everyone he’d thought was on his side, watched the Priest Exalted walk slowly toward him without raising a finger. The Presque Mort holding Lore and Bastian backed away as Anton came forward, bringing them off the throne’s dais and down to the floor. Lore’s knees buckled, so they dragged her. Bastian stepped in a pool of his own blood, tracking it in boot prints across the floor. Behind them, Gabe was still unconscious, sprawled against the wall in a boneless heap.
“But he isn’t worthy.” To August’s credit, he didn’t sound afraid. His voice remained clear and ringing, even as his illness-dulled eyes went wary. “We’ve discussed this, Anton. The boy cannot be the chosen, there has to have been some mistake. He isn’t ready, and time grows short.”
Anton climbed the stairs to stand before his brother. “But he will be,” he said. “He can be, with the proper training. The leadership he needs.”
“But he cannot hold this power.” Even now, when things were so clearly going sideways, August looked stronger than he had, the promise of magic invigorating his sickened body. He stood straight, his head tipped upward to gaze at the eclipse-darkened sky, as if he could see Apollius Himself somewhere in it. “It would be too much for him.”
