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A fitting end, really.
Now they rode toward Dellaire, clattering down the road at a punishing pace that had to be rattling Alie in her carriage like a coin in a beggar’s cup. The sun was fully risen, though Lore’s internal clock said it shouldn’t be, not yet.
The world responds, she thought dully.
The morning light illuminated the passing fields, and Lore found herself paying more attention to them than she had before. The crops were dry and listless, drooping in the humidity. The road was near-silent other than hooves and carriage wheels, no birdsong or insectile hum. The world, rotting, shifted off its axis.
Guilt clawed long-nailed fingers into her gut. Kill the girl, Bellegarde said. Kill the girl and slow the changes. He’d meant the changes in Bastian, the way that Apollius had taken him over so swiftly, but what if it could slow the changes in the world itself?
The fields transitioned from wheat to corn. A bulbous, swollen stalk bent, broke as they rode past. Lore craned her neck to watch it slowly split, brown fluid leaking from the wound.
“Don’t worry,” Apollius murmured into her hair, slowing the charger to a trot and then an easy walk. She expected another statement to follow it, an addendum with why she shouldn’t worry. None came, as if the blight on the world was simply beneath them, something too small to be concerned with.
Lore turned back around, her jaw set tight, her back stiff against the give of His chest. “Is he in there?”
She felt more than heard the rumble of Apollius’s chuckle, the same one He’d loosed when inspecting Bellegarde’s body. “Oh, he’s in here. Still screaming to get out. This whole trip to Courdigne was an attempt to get Me out, him thinking he was so clever to go speak to Bellegarde, but it seems to have backfired quite spectacularly. He should have known I wouldn’t allow him to go if there was a chance he could succeed, but it seemed cruel not to let him try.” He held the reins in one hand, and the other snaked around her waist, palm laid against her stomach. “He doesn’t like it when I’m the one close to you. Silly, honestly. I have far more right to you than he does.”
“Neither of you has a right to anything.” The quarters were far too close for her to cringe away, and Lore wasn’t keen on falling off a damn horse, so she pinched the back of His hand, hard.
Apollius raised Bastian’s brow, a lascivious smile curving His mouth. “You like that, I recall. Pinching.”
She pulled her hands away from His, letting them hover awkwardly in the air. That was better than touching Him any more than she had to.
He laughed fully this time, letting His hand fall away, putting it on His own thigh with exaggerated slowness. “We have no right to you, maybe,” He said. “But I absolutely have a right to Her.”
The goddess in Lore’s head was quiet, as She always was when the sun shone. But Lore still felt Her awareness in the back of her mind, knew She was listening. “Not Her, either,” she said quietly. “And I won’t become Her. She won’t do that to me, not like You’re doing to Bastian.”
She wished she sounded surer of that.
Apollius laughed again, full-throated, making the footmen riding behind them toss curious looks their way. “She won’t have a choice, dearest. We are what We are, and so are you.”
Him calling her dearest, like Bastian did, made Lore’s stomach knot up. “Bastian will be back,” she said, mostly because she had a sinking feeling that maybe, eventually, he wouldn’t. “He’s fought You off so far, and You can’t have him when the sun goes down, anyway.”
The god at her back was quiet for a moment, contemplative. “He has been… combative, true. But every day, that resolve weakens.”
He didn’t wrap an arm around her waist again, but He shifted on the saddle so they were closer. Her teeth ground audibly. Apollius knew she was afraid, and He liked it.
“Part of him wants it,” Apollius whispered into her hair, like He could read her mind. “Wants the release, the rest, of letting Me take over. He said it himself: He’s not a good King, especially while he’s so distracted. He knows I would be better. The only thing holding him back, really, is you. He thinks he loves you, and maybe he does, in his inadequate, human way. But you are destined to be Nyxara, and Nyxara is Mine.” His lips brushed her ear. “Silly of him, to let love for you keep him holding on. On his own, he is only an angry man with the misfortune to be born royal, small and petty and mean. And how could you want that? Want him, stripped of everything but himself? The only way he’ll get to keep you is by becoming Me. He’ll figure that out.”
“That’s not true.” She couldn’t lean any farther forward without the pommel cutting into her stomach, but Lore tried, a vain attempt to put space between them.
“Isn’t it?” Apollius asked. “Before the ritual, you were caught up with the monk. You think Bastian didn’t notice? That he doesn’t long for you both, so full of wanting he can’t see anything else? Just like you. Inadequate human feelings that do nothing but destroy.” The scrape of another laugh, but this one had no humor in it. “How much of what you feel for either of them is actually yours, Lore?”
“All of it,” she snarled, but doubt crept into the corners. “And leave Gabe out of this.”
“Gabriel Remaut,” Apollius spit, and despite everything, it struck Lore as a little unfair, that the god Gabe had sacrificed so much for spoke his name with loathing, “has nearly as much to do with this as you do. What’s happening to him and the others is your fault, too. Your stubborn insistence on living. I’m obviously not upset that things didn’t go according to the old man’s plans, but that side effect is unfortunate.”
The old man had to be Anton. “What do you mean? What’s happening to them?”
But she had a horrible feeling that she already knew.
No answer. The god was apparently done giving her useful information. He fell silent, but his hand twitched by his side, then went to her knee, grasping as if her body were a lifeline. “Lore.”
Bastian.
She straightened on the saddle, turned her head as much as she could. Bastian stared at her with all the concentration of someone lining up a gunshot, his jaw tense, his eyes whiskey-brown and bruise-stained.
“I don’t know how long,” he said, every word strained. “I’m sorry if He did anything—it was different, this time, I couldn’t see, couldn’t hear…”
