But something must’ve changed between then and now, because here Horse was.
Lore was frozen. Her hand was still on Bastian’s arm, but she couldn’t feel it. Horse’s eyes shone milky and opaque, his throat still gashed. He nuzzled at Bastian’s outstretched hand and made a sound that would’ve been a whicker, had his vocal cords been intact.
“Quite a specimen, isn’t he?” Bastian’s eyes slid to her, dark in the shadows of the stable. “I call him Claude.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Secrets breed themselves.
—Caldienan proverb
During storm season in the Harbor District, the tide pounded on the shoreline like a drum. It beat against the rocky sand in an endless rhythm, smelling of salt and fish and rain, ceaseless and inescapable and nearly enough to drive you mad in those first few weeks, before it became part of the background noise.
That’s what Lore’s pulse felt like. An endless drumming in her ears, pushing at her throat. If she looked down, it was probably visible, throbbing against the tender skin of her wrists.
Horse—Claude—looked at her curiously. When his head tipped to the side, the gaping wound on his neck yawned open, the edges gummy with blood and pus. She could see the work of dead, grayish muscles beneath his cut skin, the chipped ends of ivory bone.
“Curious, isn’t it?” Bastian petted the horse’s muzzle. The beast nickered again, and the sound was awful, ragged and wrong. “He should be dead. But it’s like he doesn’t know that, and has refused to acquiesce to it.” The Sun Prince chuckled, though something sharper than amusement glittered in his eyes. “Maybe that’s the true secret to eternal life. Just refusing to die. Much easier than slowly turning yourself to stone.”
Before, Lore’s feelings had always been slightly hurt by the fact that Horse never seemed to hold her in high regard. He mostly ignored her, unless she brought apples. Now she was thankful that the creature didn’t act like he recognized her at all. Horse bent his gory head and flicked a fly off his haunch. The bones in his neck ground together.
This wasn’t how Mortem was supposed to work. Not for a normal channeler, even those who’d been strong enough to raise a body from the dead before they were all executed. Animal lives were less complicated, so they didn’t have to be given specific instructions to go about some semblance of living. Still, corpses were marionettes, only active while the channeler held the strings of their death. A fully independent one like this… it shouldn’t be possible.
But she wasn’t a normal channeler, was she?
Lore squashed the thought with physical force, her teeth digging into the meat of her tongue until she tasted copper.
Bastian pulled an apple from within his coat and offered it to Horse. Claude. The animal sniffed it, then shied away.
“He doesn’t eat,” Bastian said, tossing the apple to one of the stable boys, who bit into it with gusto. “Doesn’t drink, doesn’t eliminate. Doesn’t sleep, I don’t think. But other than that, he appears fully alive.”
Long lashes fluttered over cloudy eyes as Claude blinked.
Lore’s stomach cramped. She looked to Gabe, hoping he didn’t look as panicked as she felt. The Presque Mort seemed to be keeping his shock under wraps, though the skin around his mouth had gone pale. “An interesting specimen,” he said, and sounded almost nonchalant. “Where’d you find him?”
A half heartbeat of silence, Bastian’s lips twisting to the side. “Some guards I’m particularly friendly with found him wandering through the Southwest Ward,” he said finally. “They brought him here because they didn’t know what else to do with him. Must be some kind of rogue magic, don’t you think? Left over from one of those dead minor gods, something elemental. Earth, maybe. That power lingered longer than the others, and Braxtos’s body was found in Auverraine.”
It had been, in a cave in the eastern hill country. Parts of Braxtos were still in there, turned to stone, a rocky effigy in the vague shape of a man that backwoods farmers prayed to sometimes. But the excuse was bullshit. None of the magic of the minor gods was left.
It didn’t matter; Bastian was clearly lying, and he knew that she knew it. It was in the curl of his mouth, the slow blink of his dark-honey eyes. The way he reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind Lore’s ear as she stared at the dead horse she’d raised, face blank.
“Forgive me,” Bastian murmured. “I thought you’d find Claude diverting, but it appears your constitution wasn’t quite as hardy as I thought.”
In his stall, Horse nosed at a pile of hay. It made the skin around his cut neck gape. A gnat landed on an empty artery.
Lore shuddered.
“My apologies if you’ve taken a fright, Eldelore dear.” Bastian shrugged. “I thought you might find it interesting, is all.”
She didn’t speak. He was as good as shouting that he’d caught her, a trap laid at the very beginning of a trail, but Lore couldn’t pull any words up her pulse-pounded throat.
If this had been an assignment for Val, she’d be out in an hour. As soon as someone even hinted they knew she was a mole, she was gone, back to the warehouse on the docks, back to the safety of her mothers.
Safety. She winced. She’d never see that warehouse again. Even if she could get out of the Citadel, she wouldn’t go back to Val and Mari. It hurt too much.
A soft flurry of voices, Gabe’s and Bastian’s both, fluttering around her ears like moths around a candle wick. Genteel apologies that fooled no one, acceptances of such that could be carved from ice. Gabe’s hand on her elbow, leading her away, I think my cousin could do with some rest.
As they approached the entrance to the stables, Lore looked back over her shoulder. Horse stared at her, slashed neck rubbing against the wood of his stall door, grating against dead muscle and bone. Bastian stood next to the undead beast, watching.
He caught Lore’s eye. He smiled.
Gabe sat on the couch, hunched over folded arms. “He knows something.”
“He does.” Lore paced back and forth behind the couch, a fingernail clamped between her teeth. She’d shaken off her shock as Gabe led her through the forest, the gardens, the labyrinthine corridors of the Citadel to their suite. The shock was still there, and the fear, but she’d managed to smother it under a burning layer of fury. “Nothing like confirmation via dead horse.”
Disgust twisted Gabe’s face as he shook his head. “How in all the myriad hells is that horse still… still…”
“Walking?” Cold seized the back of her neck, as if someone had laid their freezing palm on her skin. “Acting like it’s alive?”
“It’s not someone else channeling,” Gabe said. “I’d be able to tell. We’d be able to tell. Wouldn’t we?”
Lore shrugged nervously, still pacing. He was right, as far as she knew—the few times she’d been around one of the Presque Mort when they were channeling Mortem, it’d felt like an uncomfortable pull in her veins, as if her blood had coagulated and her heart hadn’t caught up to the fact. It was hard to miss.
Her teeth broke through her nail, sending a wave of pain shooting up into her gums. She cursed lightly, frowned at the now-jagged nail. “Yes, we’d be able to feel it.”