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Gabe didn’t move, the Heart pendant on his chest gleaming in the light from the candles. “Tell me you didn’t do this.” Gabe’s voice was low and dangerous, a hiss like a sputtering flame. “By all the gods, Bastian, tell me you didn’t do this as some sort of power play.”
The Sainted King was across the room in two steps, his face inches from Gabe’s, crowding the Priest Exalted back into the wall. His teeth were bared, his eyes blazing. “No,” he spat. “Of course it wasn’t me, and the fact you’d ever fucking think that…” The rage in him alchemized, an infinitesimal change, and his wordless snarl became a sneering grin. “If I was going to blow up a ship, Remaut, don’t you think I’d wait until you were on it?”
“Bastian,” Lore said, her voice hoarse from exhaustion and disuse. But even as she said it, she knew he wouldn’t hear, lost somewhere in his mind, another consciousness taking over.
Disbelief flickered across Gabe’s face, chased by a deep hurt. He banished it quickly. Two inches, and he straightened to use it all, looming over the King as much as he could manage. “That’s unsurprising. At this point, I think you’d sacrifice any one of us—”
Bastian’s fist, too quick for Lore to shout. It met Gabe’s nose with a crunching sound, and the Priest Exalted’s head turned to the side, a spurt of blood spattering across the pale wallpaper.
Alie cried out; Malcolm pressed back against the wall, out of the line of fire.
“Bastian!” Lore called again, stronger now but too late, because Gabe was rearing back his own fist, it was cracking against Bastian’s jaw, and Bastian was turning with a laugh and a feral smile full of bloody teeth, and this all felt like a memory, like something that had happened before, a snake eating its own tail again and again—
“Stop it.” Lore didn’t realize she’d stood until she felt her knees wobbling; the force of her voice was undercut by the way she collapsed to sit on the bed again. “This is the last fucking thing we need.”
Her words broke some spell; the two of them backed off each other, but not before Bastian reached up and grabbed Gabe’s chin. He jerked the other man close enough to kiss, their bloody mouths mere inches from each other, both breathing hard. The moment vibrated, caught at the moment of possibility.
Then Bastian smashed his palm over Gabe’s nose. When his hand came away, Gabe’s nose was straight and unbroken again. Spiritum at work.
Slowly, the already-blossoming bruise on Bastian’s jaw faded, smoothed away. The only sign of their brawl was the blood on the wallpaper.
Lore collapsed back into bed. Alie’s hand reached out, as if she’d help, but Lore shook her head. Both of them should be resting; neither of them should be trying to referee a brawl between the Sainted King and his Priest Exalted.
“Are you done?” Malcolm asked warily.
Neither Gabe nor Bastian answered, still staring at each other with a heat in their eyes that could mean anything.
Malcolm threw up his hands and went to the door. “There’s supposed to be a minor lunar eclipse in half an hour. I have to go help the others prepare the well for the extra Mortem. Try not to kill each other while I’m gone.” He slammed the door behind him.
Bastian straightened as Malcolm left, wiping his hands off on his shirt, leaving a smear of Gabe’s blood. He seemed completely unruffled, now, like the brief fight with Gabe had happened to someone else entirely. “We will get to the bottom of this. I’ve already had the Kirythean delegates arrested; questioning will begin tomorrow.”
Stunned quiet.
Then a frustrated noise from Alie. “So you just arrested a foreign delegation with no due process? Without consulting anyone?” Her bandaged hands fluttered in the air, like she could grab the moment this decision had been made and crush it. “That’s not how diplomacy works, Bastian! Are you trying to start a war?”
“It won’t come to that.” He shrugged. “If the Kirytheans are innocent, it will be found out quickly, especially once we get the report from Caldien about the debris. Until then, all Emperor Jax will have are rumors of an attack, and how Lore prevented any casualties.”
“If you don’t think those rumors will also include how his diplomats were arrested and held without trial, you’re an idiot,” Alie seethed.
Bastian gave her a placid smile. “I don’t doubt they will. But I also don’t think that will be a problem.”
She pressed her lips tight and closed her eyes, as if it took all her willpower to keep from calling him every foul name she could come up with. “I’ll need to speak with them,” Alie said finally, deceptively even. “To try and smooth over this fucking mess you’ve made.”
“Feel free,” Bastian replied. “You can today, even. They’re in the holding cells beneath the northwest turret; those were in the best shape.” A sharp smile. “I am nothing if not hospitable.”
Alie said nothing, but her eyes were poison.
The door banged open. On the other side, a Presque Mort Lore didn’t know, sides heaving and eyes wide. Lore’s mind flashed back to that day in the throne room, when Malcolm had run in to tell them about the Mortem leak. Memories, snakes eating tails, time moving in endless gyres.
“We opened the well in the garden,” she said as she caught her breath. “There’s nothing.”
Gabe stiffened, his teeth still bloody though his nose was healed. “What do you mean, Marie?”
“I mean there’s nothing.” Marie flung her hand back. Lore noticed, distantly, that she was missing three fingers and most of her palm. “There’s always at least a little Mortem, tiny bits of it to channel out. But it’s gone.” Her eyes tracked to Lore on the bed, her marked hands, scarred with an eclipse and marked with darkness. “All the Mortem is gone.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
And on His1 return, He will have a new body—one unmarked by the violence of the wayward goddess, one perfectly suited to His purpose.
