Hard ground. Cold seeping through her ruined clothes, making the wound in her side and her sliced-up hand ache. Wind through stone, curling around leaves turned to rock, granite petals.
Lore forced her eyes open.
The stone garden. Torches burned around the well, replacements for the light stolen by the eclipse. Her vision was still blurry, pain and blood loss making it hard to focus, but she could see Anton standing before the open pit of the well, the statue of Apollius that held it closed placed carefully to the side. Other muted shapes around him—the Presque Mort, all of them that hadn’t been dispatched to the village to deal with the new corpses.
New corpses, after her dream…
There was another figure near Anton, standing on the other side of the well. Willowy, dressed in black, with a long river of pale hair.
Anton turned before her mind would let her comprehend what she was seeing. A small blessing. “Ah. Lore.”
At the sound of her name, two of the Presque Mort approached, gingerly helping her up. Blood soaked the side of her gown; her head felt as heavy as the stone roses lining the path.
“You did so well,” the Priest Exalted said as she stumbled toward him. “Really, Lore, you should be proud of yourself. To be part of this, to have Apollius speak of you by name. And more than once! The vision that brought me my scar is where I first heard of you, but He has spoken to me since—He told me to learn the art of dreamwalking, how to draw out your power to make our undead army.”
He talked too fast, too excited, as if he’d been waiting for the chance to spill all these secrets. “Shut up,” Lore said, but it came out nothing more than a croak, and Anton didn’t hear.
“Gabe teaching you to guard your mind did present a bit of a problem,” the Priest Exalted continued. “I paid dearly for showing him that trick.” His whole hand stroked the other, the one with the new burn scars.
His non-scarred hand held a golden circlet, studded in garnets. August’s crown, the simple one he’d been wearing when his brother cut him down. Lore wondered why Anton hadn’t put it on yet.
“But all has worked out as it should now,” the Priest Exalted continued. “When you finally die, when I strike you again—my apologies for that bit of unpleasantness, but needs must—your power will go to Bastian. He will have the magic of life and of death, Spiritum and Mortem. And then it will begin.”
But Lore was barely listening, the words sliding off her like water to oil. Because her eyes had finally focused on the person across the well.
Smooth golden hair. Pale, fine features. A body long and thin, so different from Lore’s own. But the bright hazel eyes, those were the same.
A Night Sister. The one who’d given her the moon-shaped scar, and then decided to save her instead, sending her to the surface rather than into that obsidian tomb to have her mind scooped out, her eyes made blank, something vital ripped away.
The woman smiled, and there was true sorrow in it. “Hello, daughter.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Endings take time.
—Kirythean proverb
Lore had never known her mother’s real name. The Sisters didn’t use them. By the time Lore was born, her mother had been living with the remains of the Buried Watch for months, completely assimilated into their ranks, though the others watched her with apprehension.
Lore knew why. She’d been told the story. After she arrived, her mother had approached Nyxara’s tomb, as every Sister must, and darkness had reached out. Darkness had caressed her middle, where Lore still slept, unaware of the world and the role she’d have in it.
So the first time Lore channeled Mortem, by accident—pulling a strand of it from the Buried Goddess’s tomb and sending it into the rock that made their underground cathedral, nearly causing a collapse—it hadn’t been a surprise. It’d been something they were waiting for.
The flashes of memory she retained from her first thirteen years were brief—she’d done her best to bury them—but they were filled with sidelong glances lit by the strange phosphorescence of the crystal on the walls, murmurs behind hands.
When the eclipse came, her mother had approached her with the crescent moon brand glowing orange, and that hadn’t been a surprise, either. She’d wept as she burned Lore’s palm, the sign that she would be the next one to enter the tomb. Lore remembered that it’d been a time of celebration for the other Sisters, how they’d congratulated her mother for her strength, for finally doing the right thing.
But that night, while Lore slept—a nudge in her side, her mother’s terrified eyes. She’d led Lore up the tunnels, up to where the light of the last day before the eclipse was already coloring the sky.
“Run,” her mother whispered.
And Lore had.
She’d run and run, and it’d all been in a circle. Because here she was again. Looking at her mother’s face and seeing something like terror, something like deep sorrow.
“I’ve missed you.” Oh, gods, the genuine note in her voice made it all so much worse. The Night Sister stood on the other side of the well, but her hands still stretched out, as if she could gather Lore into her embrace. “You’re so grown up. So beautiful.” She sighed, a hitch in her throat. “I wish it could be different. I thought maybe there was a chance She would change Her mind, that you wouldn’t be one of the chosen…” Her eyes closed, a crystalline tear falling down her cheek, catching the light. “But the goddess is unchanging. I should’ve sent you into the tomb before, let Her power consume you, burn itself out before you reached the age of ascension. Now death is the only way.”
Lore thrashed in the Presque Mort’s grip despite the sting in her side, the stark words finally enough to snap her out of her haze. “No,” she said, and it sounded like her mouth was full of cotton. “No no no no I don’t want to—”
“We can’t let it happen again, my love,” her mother murmured. “The Night Witch was one of Nyxara’s chosen, too; she was to become the goddess’s avatar. And She would’ve laid waste to the world. I’m so sorry. You have to die, and I’m so sorry.”
“But you’ll wait.” Anton’s voice was different, the thin veneer of sense stripped away. Strange, to hear it gone and realize this was what waited beneath. “The deal was that you get your avatar back after six villages are added to the army, and that I get to strike the killing blow. The paperwork to make Buried Watch once again part of the Church is filed, but I can rescind it at any time if the terms aren’t met.”
“Of course,” the Night Sister murmured. “A deal is a deal.”
“Precisely. I see why the Sisters made you the Night Priestess.” Anton’s eyes shone with unsound light. “I hope you do better by the title than the last one.”
Lore’s mother—the Night Priestess—simply inclined her head.
Three mothers, two betrayals, all for some greater good that Lore couldn’t bring herself to care about. She only cared about living. The greater good could hang.
“Please don’t let him kill me.” Lore knew she sounded pathetic. She was pathetic, limp between two Presque Mort, bleeding out and helpless to stop it. “I haven’t done anything, I didn’t choose it, please…”