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Sevro lurches forward and grabs him by the neck. “What the hell are you talking about?”
The Ash Lord smiles at him, their faces inches apart. “You are like me, in the end. I spent my children for my war. And now, so have you.”
Sevro’s grip goes slack.
“Your daughter.” He looks at me. “And your son. They have been taken.”
No.
My fingers curl around the wood post of this rotted man’s bed and I feel the shifting of something inside me. The whisper of formless dread that attends when I wake from a horrible nightmare and for a moment forget my human delusions and see the world for as cold a place as it really is. Dark, hollow wind channels through my heart and I know I have lost. I left my boy behind.
“You’re lying,” Sevro whispers.
We’re each in our little worlds of dread, each sinking into the darkness, each unable to grasp, to believe that he is telling the truth. This is the spite of a dying man. That is all it can be. That is all I can accept.
“You’re lying,” Sevro says again. His face is milk pale.
But he’s not. There is too much satisfaction in him.
“Was it you?” I whisper.
“If only. It was one of yours.”
“Who?”
The Ash Lord watches me and then turns his large head to look away from me out to the bright sea, where his spirit has already fled. “Lorn was right,” he says in a rough whisper. “The bill comes at the end.”
“Who took my son?” I shout. “Who?”
With an animal scream, Sevro launches himself past me and slams his fist into the Ash Lord’s face. Again and again till blood coats Sevro’s hands to his wrists and the Ash Lord’s lips are mangled. I pull at Sevro. He hits me right in the jaw. I hold on, sagging against him as he hyperventilates. He shoves me off, wheeling back to the Ash Lord with his razor drawn.
“We need him alive,” I shout. “We need to know more.”
There’s a soft pop and I look back to the Ash Lord to see foam bubbling from his mouth. He spits a false tooth onto the sheets. Apollonius picks it up and brings it to his nose. “Poison.”
“Who stole my child?” I say, gripping him. “Tell me.”
He smiles, baring his rotting gums.
“He won’t talk,” Apollonius says.
Sevro grunts. “Doesn’t mean he gets to go easy.”
“I agree with the halfbreed,” Apollonius says. He grabs something from atop one of the medical machines. A bottle of antibacterial spray the nurses must have used on the equipment. He takes one of the candles from beside the bed.
“No…” The Ash Lord’s eyes are wide with fear, his words slurred from the poison.
“Apollonius…” I move toward him. Sevro shoves me back.
“Burn the bastard,” he sneers.
But Apollonius looks to me. “Reaper?”
The sorrow in me is fathomless.
I killed Wulfgar.
I broke my family.
