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“He doesn’t eat,” Bastian said, tossing the apple to one of the stable boys, who bit into it with gusto. “Doesn’t drink, doesn’t eliminate. Doesn’t sleep, I don’t think. But other than that, he appears fully alive.”
Long lashes fluttered over cloudy eyes as Claude blinked.
Lore’s stomach cramped. She looked to Gabe, hoping he didn’t look as panicked as she felt. The Presque Mort seemed to be keeping his shock under wraps, though the skin around his mouth had gone pale. “An interesting specimen,” he said, and sounded almost nonchalant. “Where’d you find him?”
A half heartbeat of silence, Bastian’s lips twisting to the side. “Some guards I’m particularly friendly with found him wandering through the Southwest Ward,” he said finally. “They brought him here because they didn’t know what else to do with him. Must be some kind of rogue magic, don’t you think? Left over from one of those dead minor gods, something elemental. Earth, maybe. That power lingered longer than the others, and Braxtos’s body was found in Auverraine.”
It had been, in a cave in the eastern hill country. Parts of Braxtos were still in there, turned to stone, a rocky effigy in the vague shape of a man that backwoods farmers prayed to sometimes. But the excuse was bullshit. None of the magic of the minor gods was left.
It didn’t matter; Bastian was clearly lying, and he knew that she knew it. It was in the curl of his mouth, the slow blink of his dark-honey eyes. The way he reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind Lore’s ear as she stared at the dead horse she’d raised, face blank.
“Forgive me,” Bastian murmured. “I thought you’d find Claude diverting, but it appears your constitution wasn’t quite as hardy as I thought.”
In his stall, Horse nosed at a pile of hay. It made the skin around his cut neck gape. A gnat landed on an empty artery.
Lore shuddered.
“My apologies if you’ve taken a fright, Eldelore dear.” Bastian shrugged. “I thought you might find it interesting, is all.”
She didn’t speak. He was as good as shouting that he’d caught her, a trap laid at the very beginning of a trail, but Lore couldn’t pull any words up her pulse-pounded throat.
If this had been an assignment for Val, she’d be out in an hour. As soon as someone even hinted they knew she was a mole, she was gone, back to the warehouse on the docks, back to the safety of her mothers.
Safety. She winced. She’d never see that warehouse again. Even if she could get out of the Citadel, she wouldn’t go back to Val and Mari. It hurt too much.
A soft flurry of voices, Gabe’s and Bastian’s both, fluttering around her ears like moths around a candle wick. Genteel apologies that fooled no one, acceptances of such that could be carved from ice. Gabe’s hand on her elbow, leading her away, I think my cousin could do with some rest.
As they approached the entrance to the stables, Lore looked back over her shoulder. Horse stared at her, slashed neck rubbing against the wood of his stall door, grating against dead muscle and bone. Bastian stood next to the undead beast, watching.
He caught Lore’s eye. He smiled.
Gabe sat on the couch, hunched over folded arms. “He knows something.”
“He does.” Lore paced back and forth behind the couch, a fingernail clamped between her teeth. She’d shaken off her shock as Gabe led her through the forest, the gardens, the labyrinthine corridors of the Citadel to their suite. The shock was still there, and the fear, but she’d managed to smother it under a burning layer of fury. “Nothing like confirmation via dead horse.”
Disgust twisted Gabe’s face as he shook his head. “How in all the myriad hells is that horse still… still…”
“Walking?” Cold seized the back of her neck, as if someone had laid their freezing palm on her skin. “Acting like it’s alive?”
“It’s not someone else channeling,” Gabe said. “I’d be able to tell. We’d be able to tell. Wouldn’t we?”
Lore shrugged nervously, still pacing. He was right, as far as she knew—the few times she’d been around one of the Presque Mort when they were channeling Mortem, it’d felt like an uncomfortable pull in her veins, as if her blood had coagulated and her heart hadn’t caught up to the fact. It was hard to miss.
Her teeth broke through her nail, sending a wave of pain shooting up into her gums. She cursed lightly, frowned at the now-jagged nail. “Yes, we’d be able to feel it.”
Gabe’s doublet rasped over the brocade couch as he turned to look at her. “If it’s not anyone actively channeling,” he said slowly, “then it has to be something left over from when you did it.”
“No.” The denial came quick. “Mortem doesn’t work that way. It only—”
“I am well aware of how Mortem works.” He rose from the couch, towering over her even though she stood at least a yard away. There was something different in his tone, his stance. He looked like the Mort who’d cornered her in the alley, prepared for violence if necessary, not the man she’d started counting as something like a friend. “And I’m well aware that the way you use it has no precedent, not since they killed all the necromancers.” His one eye narrowed, fingers curling into a fist to hide the candle inked on his palm. “Even then, nothing dead could stay risen on its own.”
Lore narrowed her eyes to match his. Straightened, found the spine that belonged in the Harbor District, not the Citadel. “If you’re accusing me of something, Gabriel, say it plain. Don’t dance around it like you’re at another one of Bastian’s parties.”
Something about the other man’s name seemed to startle him. Shake him out of the Presque Mort and back into the man. A reminder of a common enemy, a common goal; a reminder that he and Lore couldn’t afford to be on opposite sides.
Gabe ran a weary hand over his face. “I’m not,” he said finally. Snorted. “You seem just as confused about how your magic works as the rest of us.”
“I’m glad that’s comforting to you.” Lore leaned against the wall, tipped her head back. The chandelier hanging in the center of the ceiling was dull with dust. “I find it rather terrifying, myself.”
