And he found it. Those familiar blue eyes widened. “Lore?”
Michal’s mouth kept working, spitting questions, but they were drowned out in the roar of the crowd. The hay-bale ring broke as people rushed forward to congratulate him, and Michal was borne away by well-wishers, shock still stark on his face.
Next to her, Gabe wore nearly the same expression. “Bleeding God and Buried Goddess,” he cursed, whirling from the crowd to face Lore. “Who was—”
“An old friend.” Bastian was next to them, sneaking up soundless as a cat. The side of his face was bleeding, but he was smiling, that new knife-smile that made all Lore’s insides cold. He held his shirt, but instead of putting it on, he used it to wipe up the blood. “If you’ll excuse us.”
He gripped Lore’s arm tight and hauled her forward, and she had no choice but to follow as the Sun Prince led her into the dark, leaving Gabriel behind, shouting and blocked by the crowd.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A secret is a flame, and it cannot burn forever.
—Auverrani proverb
It only took a moment for Lore to start struggling, pulling against Bastian’s inexorable grip with curses that a duke’s cousin surely wouldn’t know. But that didn’t matter, not anymore. Michal had recognized her, and now Bastian knew who she was.
What she was.
Lore twisted, trying to haul herself away, but Bastian pulled her on, toward the mouth of another narrow alley as the shouts of the crowd dimmed behind them.
No dagger, and she’d be no match for the Sun Prince in strength. Mortem was all she had. And though she wasn’t sure what she could do with it, in the absence of a dead body to raise, there had to be something.
Lore held her breath and waited for her vision to go grayscale, for her fingers to turn necrotic and cold. But it didn’t happen.
Instead there was a spark. A flash behind her eyes. The baked, heated scent of high-summer air, so close she expected a singeing. It collided with the sense of Mortem, familiar and empty, nothingness so compacted it had presence and mass. The two conflicting energies felt, for a moment, like they might tear her apart.
Bastian stopped. His grip on her arm didn’t loosen, but she felt his fingers spasm.
Then it was gone, so quickly it could’ve been the start of an aborted panic attack.
She could still feel the Mortem surrounding them, but she couldn’t see it, couldn’t channel it. Her vision would not change to the monotone that showed her life and death; the threads would not connect to her. Something was… was repelling Mortem, like an invisible wall had formed around her, cutting her off.
And as much as Lore hated her ability, it felt like losing a limb.
Whatever had just happened, it seemed not to affect the Sun Prince. He pulled her into an alley, sooty brick lined with crumpled trash. Then Bastian threw away her arm and spun to face her, advancing until she was trapped between the wall and his still-bare chest, not quite touching.
She reached for Mortem, but Bastian’s hand closed tight around her arm, and her sense of death was gone again.
What was he doing to her?
“Out with it,” Bastian growled, tossing the bloodied shirt in his other hand to the side. Gone was the casual, almost lazy arrogance he showed the court; Bastian’s eyes glinted like bayonet ends, just as sharp. “I was going to wait until we got to the vaults to demand my answers, but now that I know for sure you’re the girl who raised Claude, I’ve found I’d rather know it all now.”
“Horse,” she corrected him, because her brain was stuck in a hurricane, and it was the only thing that made sense for her to do.
“Yes, Lore, I’m aware it’s a horse.”
“No, his name is Horse. Not Claude.”
Bastian shook his head again, straightening; the motion brought their chests closer together. His hand left her arm and came to rest on the wall beside her head.
“Call the damn horse whatever you want,” Bastian said, “just tell me who you’re working for.”
“August.” Anxiety made her voice sound thin, like her throat wouldn’t expand enough to let it out fully. “You know that.”
“Is that it?” he asked. “Or are you on Kirythea’s payroll, too? You seemed very interested in what I knew about them.”
“No, I’m not working for Kirythea. Just your father.” Slowly, Lore managed to get her nerves under control. It didn’t seem like Bastian was planning to kill her. Not yet, anyway. “August thinks you’re working for Kirythea. That’s why I was trying to find out what you knew.”
He glared at her, one curl of sweaty black hair falling over his eye. “Well,” he said, after a moment. “Isn’t that a fun bit of irony.”
Lore set her jaw, still trapped between the prince and the brick. She didn’t know what to expect from this other, truer Bastian. Every line of him coiled with anger, the kind often hidden. Now, unfettered, it was so obvious she couldn’t believe she’d never noticed before, distracted by funny Bastian, clever Bastian, toying Bastian who seemed fairly easy to handle.
This was furious Bastian, and she had no idea what to do with him.
That strange gravity was back, like she’d felt when she and Bastian and Gabe were at the mouth of the culvert. Falling toward something inevitable.
The Sun Prince stepped back, though not so much that she could run for the alley mouth. His hands remained on either side of her head. “Here’s how this is going to go. You’re going to tell me exactly why my father brought you here. Then you’re going to tell me how you managed to channel more Mortem than the entire fucking Presque Mort is capable of.”
“Accident,” Lore said, latching onto the same excuse she’d given Gabe. “When I was a kid.”
His head tilted, a predator’s smile gleaming in the dark. “Oh, no, Lore,” Bastian murmured. “I think we got off on the wrong foot. See, I know who you are. I know you were a poison runner with Michal. I know you were their watchdog, because of some strange affinity you had for the catacombs. It’s remarkable, really, the things people will tell you if you just listen. I like listening.”
“Is that why you come here and get the shit beat out of you?” Lore spat. “To listen?”
“I come here because sometimes, being inside the Citadel makes me want to claw my own eyes out,” Bastian answered. “The listening is just a bonus. It’s how I found out about the villages, how I found out how little tax the nobles pay compared to everyone else. How I found out that the necromancer who raised a horse in the market square was just some girl. Getting the shit beat out of me, as you put it, is really the only way I know anything. Gods know my father isn’t going to tell me.”
Lore didn’t know if the chill in her limbs was from fear or the still-wet hem of her dressing gown.
“Now, I don’t know everything.” One of Bastian’s hands left the wall, went to his boot. Pulled something out. “But I know enough to be reasonably certain that your Mortem affliction didn’t come about in the normal way. I know enough to be sure that the truth is far more interesting than a childhood accident. So when I ask you a question, Lore, I expect it to be answered truthfully.”