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It remained to be seen whether that was a good thing.
The staircase seemed to wind up for at least three more floors, but Bellegarde stopped before it did. He led them into another dark hallway, the only light coming through a small window in the middle of its length, moon-silver and weak. Most of that light was blocked by the Apollius icon in said window, anyway. Lore didn’t want to look at it too closely, afraid it might be another one with a hollow chest and a howling mouth.
Bellegarde lit one lone sconce on the wall, next to the stairway door, and gestured to the right. “Largest room,” he said, clipped and cool. He waved the same hand down the hall. “Alienor, you know where the guest rooms are. Take your pick.” The flames made caverns and mountains of Bellegarde’s thin face as he turned to Bastian, like an apparition in the gloom. “We will speak in the morning. When the sun is high.”
When Apollius’s hold was strongest. He knew. Of course he knew.
A month ago, Lore would expect Bastian to have some cutting remark for the old lord for daring to give him an order, and if he was in a really bad mood, possibly a ticket to the Burnt Isles. But the Sainted King, the highest authority in Auverraine and one of the most powerful men on the continent, simply closed his eyes.
“We will speak when I deign to speak with you, Severin,” he said, eyes still closed. When they opened, they were clear and steady and only brown. “Whether under the sun or moon is up to my discretion. Don’t forget that I am your King.”
The lack of light made it near impossible to tell if Bellegarde was cowed, but the man was at least quiet. He ducked his head—not a bow like he’d been about to give downstairs, but a deference that would suffice—and went back down the hall, taking the torch with him.
Lore, Bastian, and Alie stood in the dark. Alie looked to Lore, her face settled in determined lines. “I’ll have the footman bring my things to the room at the end of the hall,” she said. “There’s plenty of space there if it’s needed.” She walked off, apparently knowing these corridors well enough to navigate them without light.
When she was gone, swallowed up by the dim, Bastian leaned back against the wall, head tipped up, eyes closed.
“Are you all right?” Lore kept her voice quiet. It seemed Alie, Lord Bellegarde, and the footmen who’d come with them were the only other people in Courdigne, but secrecy was ingrained in her now, for all she hated it.
Bastian huffed a laugh, rueful and pained. “No, Lore,” he murmured. “I’m not.”
He turned, opened the door Bellegarde had indicated for them. Lore followed, worrying the inside of her cheek with her teeth.
When the door closed, she didn’t bother being quiet anymore. “Tell me.” She took a step, advancing on his tired form. “We can’t keep tiptoeing around this, Bastian.”
He’d been bent over a small table against the wall beyond the door, his hands braced among vases of flowers long dead, but at her words, he stiffened.
Lore swallowed. Then, hating herself a little for it, “We’re on the same side, aren’t we?”
He stiffened even further at that, the muscles of his back bunching visibly against the thin weave of his shirt. “Always,” he murmured.
Don’t tell Him I’m here. Nyxara’s voice, urgent. He suspects, but don’t let Him know.
Why? If it was possible to snarl through a thought, she was doing it.
He wants Me to do to you what He’s doing to the King, Nyxara said. Don’t tell Him I’m here.
Telling Bastian isn’t telling Apollius.
A moth-wing flutter of frustration in the back of her mind. I wouldn’t be so sure.
It made her want to sob, the idea that she had to keep this quiet still, but Lore pressed her mouth closed. She remembered Bastian saying something similar when she tried to talk to him at the astronomy party, telling her not to say anything.
But even if she couldn’t tell the whole truth, she couldn’t leave it like this. Completely unspoken, and Bastian alone.
“It started when we began channeling together,” she said carefully, not saying what it was, trusting he would follow. “Didn’t it?”
Bastian didn’t turn around. His fingers twitched on the dusty table. She couldn’t see his face, but the movement of his shoulders betrayed some struggle. “Not quite,” he said quietly. “Before, for me. I started… it started right after the ritual.”
The spark in his eye, that night. The imperious way he’d tilted up his chin as he put the crown on his head, bisecting the bloody line through his brow. Long live the Sainted King.
Lore drifted into the main part of the room as he spoke. Not an apartment, like the chambers in the Citadel. Simply a bedroom, with a small sitting area at one end and a large canopied bed at the other. She looked at that bed, then jerked her eyes away. “Mine is worse at night,” she said.
Too close. Nyxara sounded more afraid than angry. Have a care, girl. Do you not think He is still more powerful than I am? He designed godhood to suit Him.
Lore swallowed.
Silence, for a moment. Then Bastian straightened, running a hand over his face. “Fuck, Lore.”
