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“No, he wouldn’t,” Bastian scoffed. “He was being strangled, Lore, and you stopped it. You channeled Mortem and Spiritum together to stop it. That’s incredible.”
The servants had kept their faces impassive up to this point, but now their eyes slid toward one another, slightly widened. Lore slumped in her seat.
“How did you do it?” Bastian asked, pouring himself more wine. Lore pushed forward her own glass, and he refilled it nearly to the top. “Do you remember specifics? What it felt like?”
He asked like someone who wanted to re-create an experiment. If he’d had pen and paper handy, he’d probably be taking notes. Lore slid farther down in her chair and took a too-large gulp of her wine, eyeing the servants. She didn’t want to get too far into details when anything she said would be woven into rumor before the sun had fully set.
“I didn’t really do it on purpose,” she said. “I just… acted. It was instinctual.”
That seemed to please him, oddly. In the greenery-crowded windows, the sun was well on its way to setting, the light thick and golden as honey. “So it came naturally,” he said, sitting back. “You didn’t have to… to do anything special, to channel them both together. It just felt right.”
Right wasn’t exactly the way she’d put it, but Lore wasn’t interested in making this an argument. That would mean they’d have to discuss it longer. She took another un-lady-like swallow and set down her glass. “I’d really rather not talk about it anymore, Bastian.”
He set down his own, drained to the dregs. “Lore…”
“No.” She waved a negating hand. “Please choose a different topic of conversation, Your Majesty.”
Her use of his title seemed to knock him out of whatever spiral he’d found himself in. The sun finally slid behind the curve of the earth, and as the golden glow changed to soft twilight, Bastian sighed, rubbing a hand over his face. “All right,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry. I don’t know, I just felt like I should…” He trailed off. “What would you rather discuss?”
Gabe. She wanted to discuss Gabe, wanted to ask Bastian what he’d thought of his stoicism as they climbed down into the catacombs today, if he’d managed to have any real conversations with their former friend since raising him to Priest Exalted. She knew they met together. He was a key leader of the Church, and one of Bastian’s official advisers. All of her own conversations with Gabe had been during sessions to keep up her mental forest, and he’d carefully avoided speaking of anything else. It felt like talking to a statue.
But she wouldn’t talk about Gabe, not now, when rumors were being spun out of the air by everyone within hearing distance. It was too raw a wound, still. It needed a bandage in mixed company.
Instead Lore took up her fork and picked a little more at her nearly untouched dessert—fruit and cream and some kind of flaky pastry. “Horse,” she said finally. “I know you were going to make a party of laying him to rest—”
“The florist is on standby. For Claude.”
She gave him a weak smile. “But would it be all right to leave him for a bit? He isn’t hurting anyone.” And she liked visiting him, sometimes. It was a nice reminder that she could do things that weren’t awful, that Mortem was a tool that could be turned to good occasionally.
“That’s perfectly fine with me,” Bastian said. “I’m rather fond of him, repulsive as he is.” He’d finished all of his dessert, so he reached across with his fork and took some of hers. She smacked at his hand halfheartedly, smearing cream across his thumb, but he just licked it off. “Maybe we can rent him out for parties,” he continued around a strawberry. “That’d be one way to raise money for the next citizen payment. Maybe it’d make the treasurers hate me less.”
“As long as you’re making payments to commoners, they’re going to hate you.” Lore finished off the rest of the dessert before he could steal more.
“The glamorous life of a monarch.” Bastian rose from his chair. “Speaking of, I have meetings.”
“At night?”
“Church meetings.”
The momentary lightness she’d felt crashed back down around her again, the subject she’d been avoiding finding them anyway.
Maybe Gabe and Bastian were both better at this than she was. Maybe they could put all the mess of a month ago behind them for the greater good.
Lore had never been very interested in the greater good.
Bastian came around the table and kissed her on the forehead. It was new for him, this sweetness. The easy intimacy that had risen between them before had never been the delicate kind, but lately, it seemed he wanted it to grow in that direction. There was almost a tentativeness to it, as if he expected to be rebuffed. But she never did. Sweetness was as foreign to her as it was to him, and she craved it.
Though she always thought of Gabe, every time.
“Don’t wait up,” he said. “I’ll be late.”
Then he was gone, and the servants came over silently to clear the rest of the dishes. Lore watched the sky through the window, honey and lavender and encroaching indigo. No moon tonight.
Lore tried not to drink herself to sleep. Most nights, she was successful. But the threat of dreams always hung around her head, knocking at her temples, and when they were loud, an extra glass or two was the only way she knew to drown them out.
Dreaming was dangerous. Dreaming had made her a weapon. And though Anton wasn’t here to manipulate her anymore, Lore still didn’t like dreaming. She wanted her head blank and her mind empty when she lay down, wanted to have no thoughts at all until she woke up in the morning.
So when she closed her eyes, she was not at all pleased to find herself here.
