Lore had no weapon, but when the Presque Mort grabbed her, she struggled anyway, lashing out with her feet, clawing with her nails. It was useless, but she tried.
Anton had deserted them. He wasn’t here to stop the ritual.
Maybe he’d never planned on it in the first place. Maybe he’d only pretended, as a way to keep them docile, keep them from running. A gentle touch on the rabbit’s neck before you broke it.
She caught a glimpse of Gabe’s face. He hadn’t quite been able to make himself draw his dagger on his fellows. Through his snarl, he looked lost, stricken.
Across the room, Bellegarde held on to Alie’s hand, tight enough to leave a mark. The slighter woman had no chance of getting away, but still she strained forward, panic on her face. “Gabe!”
Something about his name in Alie’s mouth shook Gabe from his stasis. With an anguished sound, he finally drew his knife, slashed at one of the Presque Mort. They were on him in an instant, overwhelming him, hauling him away. He gave a wordless shout, one that almost resolved into Alie’s name but never quite made it there. A sickening thunk as a fist crashed into his temple; he slumped to the ground.
Someone grabbed Lore’s braid, fallen from its jet pins, and jerked it backward. She snarled, but the Presque Mort’s arms closed around her, kept her confined. It took two to do the same to Bastian; the Sun Prince thrashed, shouting curses that echoed through the slowly darkening atrium. One of the monks struck out with a dagger; the sharp edge sliced through Bastian’s eyebrow, sheeting blood and shocking him into enough stillness to be subdued, arms twisted behind his back.
The shadow of the moon moved closer to the low-hanging sun.
The Presque Mort who held Lore steered her toward August’s throne. The Sainted King stood motionless and aloof, hands behind his back. Another Presque Mort—the one from the leak, walking almost normally on a prosthetic foot—approached the dais and handed the King a dagger, cast in silver and scrolled over with gold. It matched his throne, a marriage of night and day, sun and moon.
“It was always meant to be this way,” he said quietly, pitched so only Lore and Bastian could hear. “Mortem and Spiritum, bound together, held by the same person. The age of many gods is past; now, there’s only room for one.”
“So you decided it should be you?” Lore’s voice was harsh, made hoarse by the way the Presque Mort held on to her hair, her neck stretched forward like an offering. She had to strain to see August, fingering his fine knife.
“Apollius decided it should be someone in our family.” August shrugged. “He chose incorrectly, when deciding on the specific person, but that can be easily remedied. When we are one—when I become His avatar, His vessel—He will understand.”
The Presque Mort hauled Bastian up on the platform as he spat and cursed, twisting in their grip like a cat. His flailing fists had connected with more than one of them—the Mort who held his arms had a rapidly blackening eye, and a bruise bloomed on another’s cheek as his hand tangled in Bastian’s hair and wrenched his head back, just like Lore’s. Bastian squinted through the blood from his head wound, chest heaving, teeth bared.
August sighed as he looked at his son, always the disappointed father.
In return, Bastian laughed, quick and sharp. “How fitting,” he snarled. “You always did have to do things as ostentatiously as possible.”
The King shook his head. A streak of sorrow crossed his face, quick and bright as a passing comment, made more terrible for how genuine it was. “It never could’ve been you,” he murmured. “No matter what Anton’s vision said.”
“Because I’m not pious enough?” There was no chance of escape; still, Bastian fought against the Mort holding him, muscles straining. “Would it be me if I’d killed my own people and farmed their bodies for an army?”
“I didn’t kill them, Bastian.” The sorrow on August’s face turned cold. “That’s one sin you can’t lay at my feet.”
His eyes turned to Lore, slow and deliberate.
Her throat closed. Her mind did, too, shuttering itself against some impossible realization. Mortem couldn’t do something like that. Mortem couldn’t kill an entire village and leave the bodies perfectly intact. No mere channeler could do such a thing.
No mere channeler.
“Now.” August raised his knife as the room slid closer and closer to darkness, closer and closer to the eclipse’s totality. “Let’s begin.”
Lore expected the knife to flash down to Bastian’s exposed throat; the way he thrashed made it clear he did, too. But the Presque Mort holding the Sun Prince didn’t pull his head back farther to make his neck an easier target. Instead he and the other monk wrestled one arm out from behind Bastian’s back, thrust it forward to present his palm to his father.
The scarred lines of half a sun gleamed red in the fading light.
The Presque Mort holding Lore did the same—twisted her hand out from behind her, the hand the Night Sisters had burned the moon into eleven years ago today. Lore tried to curl it into a fist, but the monk forced her fingers backward, almost to the breaking point.
It was quick. August carved Bastian’s hand first, fast and brutal, blood rushing from his son’s palm to patter on the floor, joining what still leaked from his head wound. Then Lore; she gritted her teeth against a scream as the dagger point dug into her flesh, sheared through life and heart lines to add to an old scar.
Half a sun, arcing up from the points of her crescent moon. She knew without looking that Bastian’s palm would match, a moon sliced beneath his sun, their two scars fit into one symbol. Life and death, light and dark.
Through the atrium window above, the sky slipped into totality, two celestial bodies momentarily mirroring their new scars before the moon covered the sun.
Dropping the bloody knife, August took their cut hands and pushed them together before him, palm-to-palm, wound-to-wound.
Lore felt like she’d been struck by lightning. Power arced from where her hand pressed against Bastian’s, shooting down every limb, a magnification of what she’d felt when he pulled the strands of Mortem from her in the catacombs. Life, a rush of blood, a torrent of clean air in labored lungs.
And Bastian felt the opposite. She saw it, and felt it, too, the connection she’d sensed all along made manifest as a bridge between them. Cold and stillness, emptying, traveling through him in a storm of death. Opposites, brought together, strengthening each other.
August’s mouth opened. He made a high, mad sound, not a laugh or a cry but something more animal than either. In the darkness of totality, the angles of his face were stark as a skull.
He dropped Lore and Bastian’s hands. Both of them slumped, consciousness hard to hold. Lore’s body felt like it was pulled in opposite directions, like it would shake itself apart at the seams. Dark and light and life and death, things that shouldn’t live in the same space, both held in her now.
“That’s quite enough.”
Anton. Finally.
The Priest Exalted stood at the other end of the atrium, wearing his white robe and the gleaming pendant. It swung as he walked, slowly, up the center of the floor.
August impassively watched his brother approach, toying with his knife. A smear of blood marred his doublet. “You finally deign to show up,” he said, hiding his wariness behind a haughty tone. “It’s your turn, now. Their powers are bound together, but only a priest of Apollius can strike the last blow and redirect the magic into the proper vessel.” The curve of his smile gleamed as merciless as his blade. “I know you’ve longed for this moment, when your power is needed instead of mine.”