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Moonlight shifted around her as Lore made her way across the room, sat on the bed. She pushed his hair aside, pouring through her fingers like dark water. With a sigh, Lore lay down beside him, her chest to his back, an inversion of how they’d slept before. She hooked her arm over Bastian’s middle, rested her cheek on the broad expanse of warm skin between his shoulder blades.
His breathing never quickened, still the slow slide of sleep. But his hand came and rested over hers, their fingers tangling.
When Lore woke, he was gone.
The pillow was cold next to her—he’d been up for a while, then. A tray of bread and hard cheese sat on the table beside the bed, a consolation prize for the dinner they’d undoubtedly missed, assuming Bellegarde had managed to cobble one together. She choked something down without really tasting it, mostly to stop the complaints of her stomach, and got up in a hurry. The sky was dark, but that didn’t tell her much. She went out into the hallway without bothering to find a candle.
The side staircase was marginally better lit than the hallways, and once Lore got there, it was an easy trek to the first floor, to where she remembered that breakfast nook being. Soft voices sifted through the crack in the door, Bastian’s recognizable baritone, Bellegarde’s reedier replies.
Some habits were hard to break. Lore stopped outside of the room, her back pressed against the wall, and leaned forward to hear better.
“This will never work, Severin.” Bastian sounded like himself, wholly, not the strange amalgam of King and god that he was in the daylight hours. It made her chest ache. “I don’t know what you and Anton expected, but this is untenable. I can’t rule a country and try to hold on to a god in my head. You have to tell me how to revert this… this…”
He didn’t know how to finish, apparently, and his voice trailed into silence. Silence that Bellegarde didn’t seem inclined to fill. The other man stayed quiet, the only sounds the creaks of an old house settling.
A window was cut into the wall at the end of the hallway. The darkness outside was starting to fade, slowly lightening with the creep of dawn.
A loud crash, porcelain thrown against a wall. “Fucking answer me, old man,” Bastian seethed. “You lost. You’re here, locked away, and Anton is living in pain while a whole damn rose garden grows through his spine, do you really want the same?”
“We did not lose.” Bellegarde didn’t sound perturbed by Bastian’s show of violence. “We got what we wanted, Your Majesty. Only one thing went wrong with the ritual, and it seems that one thing is affecting you far worse than us.”
One thing. Lore, still alive. She huddled into herself outside the door, trying to slip farther into the shadows.
Quiet from Bastian, though she could hear the heave of his angry breath. “Tell me,” he said, emphasizing every syllable, “how to revert it.”
“It cannot be reverted.” Bellegarde’s tone was pointed and cold. “You are fulfilling your purpose. The divine office you were created for. It is not a journey that allows for backward steps.”
She could nearly feel the curl of Bastian’s fists, that look he got on his face when receiving news he didn’t like. A distance in his eyes, a bladed grin.
“The girl is a liability,” Bellegarde said, softer this time. “We have known it since the beginning. She served her purpose by strengthening your power, but her continued presence here—on this plane of existence—is making things harder for you.” A pause. “It will make it harder for everyone, in time. Apollius knows this. He dictated the Tracts to Gerard Arceneaux specifically to prevent other gods from rising, so He would be the only one to return. You let Nyxara live—”
“Lore.” Bastian said her name like a prayer. “She isn’t Nyxara. She’s Lore.”
“Whatever you want to call her,” Bellegarde said flippantly. “She is a weakness. She is the one flaw in the execution of this plan, a plan that was centuries in the making. Allowing her to live allows Them all to rise.”
In the frame of the window, fingers of lavender dawn inched into the sky, grabbing at the veil of night and ripping it slowly.
“I need her,” Bastian said. “We need her power.”
A scoff. “That isn’t true, and you know it. You are more than capable of channeling all the Spiritum and Mortem you need.”
There was a plaintive note in Bastian’s voice. It was ill fitting. He wasn’t someone used to asking for things, and even now, he didn’t phrase his words like they were asking for Lore’s life. He just laid out reasons why she should live. “She saved everyone, that day on the docks.”
“You could have.”
“Was that you?” Barely leashed fury. “Did you set the bombs on the ships, instead of the Kirytheans? Trying to get me to use more power, get Apollius more firmly lodged in my brain?”
“Of course not.” And though Lore didn’t make a habit of trusting Severin Bellegarde, the horror in his voice rang true. “I have no idea who did, but I assure you, it was no one working with us.”
He didn’t heap more blame on the Kirytheans, though he had to know about Maxon and Caius’s presence in the Citadel. A fact to file away, though Lore didn’t know what to do with it yet.
“You want me gone.” Strain in Bastian’s voice, now. Scrabbling fingernails, fraying rope. “You want me gone and Him in my place. Fully.”
“Eventually.” Bellegarde didn’t try to talk around it, at least. “But I will admit it is happening far faster than we planned. Rather… abrupt, and disrupting, to be completely honest. This, too, you can lay at the feet of your poison runner.” The sneer was obvious in his tone. “Nyxara draws out Apollius. Corrupts Him. If you’d let us send her with the Night Sisters, let them force her into the tomb and to her death, things would be going much easier for you. You signed the warrant on all this yourself when you insisted on sparing her life.”
“Did I?” So little of Bastian left in his voice. Instead, something dark and light at once, the sun in its awful burning, painful life where it should not be.
The sky was turning rose-colored.
