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The hand on her shoulder gently wrapped her neck, not enough to hurt, just enough to make her heart speed.
The sconce on the wall flared.
A rush of heat, a flash of light. The flame burst upward, like someone had thrown gas on it, nearly singing the ceiling. Then, as soon as it had grown, it shrank again, once more just a flickering flame rather than an inferno.
Gabe pulled away from her, breathing hard.
“What was that?” Lore’s voice came ragged. She should pull away from him, but the wall was at her back and there was nowhere to go.
His eye closed. Opened again. Slowly, deliberately, he stepped away.
“A sign, probably,” he said. He didn’t look at her. But he did look at the sconce, his face drawn in an expression she couldn’t read.
Something like fear.
The atmosphere rushed back in, their pocket of unreality punctured and leaking. Lore’s face flushed; she pulled her robe tighter around herself.
The Priest Exalted straightened his shirt. He turned and started back down the hall, toward the door that led into the Citadel green, toward the apartments Lore shared with Bastian.
Lore followed.
Footnote
1 In some early translations, the pronouns He and His are instead They and Their, understood to be meant in the plural rather than the singular.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Hell is a life with no constants.
—Seen carved on a vault in Kadmar
Gabe didn’t go with her into the Citadel. He held the door open when they reached the entrance of the Church, staring straight ahead, bowing his body just slightly away as she passed him, as if he couldn’t bear to get too close.
Lore stepped out into the humid green. The door closed softly behind her.
With a sigh, she tipped her head upward.
Night fell like layers of veils, each darkening the sky further. Lavender became indigo became midnight-blue, pricked through with stars. The crescent sliver of the moon shone on the curve of the horizon, a crescent slice into some light-filled reality beyond what she could see.
“Go back,” she muttered, on the off chance Apollius could hear. “Go back to Your Shining Realm and leave us alone.”
He can’t.
Her inner voice, the one that came from elsewhere. The one she still refused to name.
We’re all awakening, slowly, the voice continued. What’s begun cannot be stopped.
She refused to cry. Crying did not come naturally to Lore; anger presented itself much more easily as a response to emotional overwhelm. Even now, it wasn’t simple sadness that made tears threaten. It was frustration, it was crushing hopelessness.
Lore gulped in a deep breath of summer-thick air and stalked into the Citadel.
It was early for courtiers to be out—most revels started when the night was deeper, they’d be dressing and preparing right now—so Alie walking purposefully across the foyer was a startling sight.
“Alie?” Lore had banished tears on her stomping walk across the green; her expression now was just confused. “Where are you headed?”
The other woman stopped, her slippers soundless on the tile floor, and sighed. She’d changed into a filmy cream-colored dress that left her shoulders bare and shimmered when she moved, tendrils of white-blond curls falling artfully from her piled hair to brush her neck. If Lore didn’t know better, she’d think Alie was meeting a lover.
Maybe she didn’t know better. She and Alie had drifted; and really, had there been much to drift from in the first place? Lore had few friends and held the ones she did tightly, but Alie had so many. Losing Lore from their number would be no great blow.
