Visions and prophecies and coups and wars, but all of those things paled for Lore in the face of the death they’d wrought. The justice she’d apparently never been working toward, that she hadn’t known until this moment she wanted so, so badly.
“So you killed them, then?” Lore asked. All those bodies, that child—all killed for an experiment, to see what could be done with the awful magic leaking from a buried goddess and a girl who’d been cursed with it. To the Citadel and the Church, they were all expendable, and Lore hated that more than she’d ever hated anything in her life. “You murdered all those villages?”
“No,” Anton said, almost pityingly. “No, Lore, I did not murder the villages.”
All this, and they still didn’t know. All this, and they were no closer to answers.
“But what’s killing them pales in comparison with what August is planning to do with them,” Anton continued. “He plans to use them as an army. An army that cannot be defeated.” He looked to Lore. “But it’s an army that you now control, Lore. That’s why we led you to the catacombs tonight, before the eclipse ball. So that you could take control of the armies of the dead before August could.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Curdled love is the most bitter medicine.
—Caldienan proverb
No,” Lore said.
Even Gabe, still stricken with the revelation of her past and Anton’s vision, looked almost proud of her for that. Almost.
“No?” Anton said mildly.
“I won’t do it. I won’t raise them.” Her eyes swung from Anton to Bellegarde to Malcolm, looking for a sign that this would work, that her refusal would mean something. “I won’t raise them, I won’t control them. I won’t do anything for August, or for you.”
Anton sighed. “My dear,” he murmured, “I’m afraid it’s too late for that.”
The sun rising in the window beat heat onto the back of her neck, a burn mirrored by the moon-shaped scar on her palm. “What do you mean?”
The Priest Exalted sighed again, as if this pained him. He raised a brow, a teacher urging along a particularly reluctant student.
But Lore didn’t want his gentle prodding. She wanted fucking answers. “What do you mean, dammit, tell me what—”
“Lore.” Gabe’s voice was hoarse. Still, it made her own vanish.
Bastian lifted his head, staring daggers at the other man.
Gabe didn’t pay him any attention. He looked only at Lore. “Do you remember what happened with Horse? Why we had to go check on the body in the vaults, that night Bastian found us?”
Her brows drew together, unsure what to make of the sudden swerve in conversation. “Of course,” she said slowly. “I raised him, and then he—”
And he stayed raised. She raised him, and he stayed raised, just like the body of the child in the vault.
Anton said that the corpses from the villages were bound together—what happened to one, happened to all of them.
Lore lurched from her seat, the weight of the iron manacles pulling painfully at her shoulders. “I can fix it. I did once before.”
“You can’t this time,” Anton said gently. “It’s hundreds of bodies. Lore—even for you, channeling that much Mortem would be nearly impossible.”
“You have to let me try!” She didn’t want to cry here, not in front of them, but she was so angry and overwhelmed and crying was always hardest to fight off when she was overwhelmed, thinking of the catacombs beneath them, full of screaming corpses who’d been people, just people—
“So this is why you led us down there.” Bastian’s voice, calm and cold and cutting through her panic. His gaze was squared on Gabe. “This is why you came back and helped us. So that Lore would raise the dead, and there’d be no way to undo it.”
Gabe didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. The look on his face proved the accusation true.
Bastian sat back, casual as if the chair and chains were a gilded throne. “Why are we supposed to believe you aren’t working with my father, again? After you just made us start up his undead army?”
“Because August doesn’t control the army,” Anton said. “And if we’re successful, he never will.”
“August wouldn’t be able to control it, anyway,” she said. “He can’t channel Mortem.”
“Not yet,” Anton murmured.
In the distance, bells began to toll. First Day. Somewhere, sunrise prayers were beginning.
Gabe stood still as a statue in his place by the door, face stony, revealing nothing. Lore closed her eyes, turned her head. She didn’t want to look at him, but her eyes kept sliding his way, consistently drawn back into his gravity.
“And what, exactly, made you both decide you couldn’t let this happen?” Bastian asked. “My father has been a tyrant for years. He’s sucked this country dry, let nobles—let you—grow richer while everyone outside the Citadel walls has less and less every year. So you only care when his mind turns to war? When it becomes something that might affect you?”
“August cares nothing for Apollius.” Bellegarde’s expression wasn’t quite a sneer, but it was close. “He would attempt to change his role in history. To take a place that is not his, to try and avoid his own destiny. The Priest Exalted’s vision was clear. August cannot go to war with Kirythea. It would undermine everything.”
It wasn’t an answer, not really, but it gave closure just the same. This wasn’t about protecting Auverraine. This was about power, and about using religion to secure it.
Bastian’s sneer was much more obvious than Bellegarde’s. “None of this changes the fact that I don’t have any magic. I’m not the chosen.”
“It clings to you like ink on paper.” There was a note of reverence in Anton’s voice; he looked at his nephew with a peaceful expression, as if the sight of him soothed some ache in his heart. “Whether you believe it or not, Bastian, you are the one we’ve been waiting for. The one Apollius has blessed. I’m sorry I didn’t realize it from the beginning.”
Bastian twitched against his chair, like he would’ve tried to move away from his uncle if his chains hadn’t prevented it.
Lore’s head hurt. She thought of last night, when they’d stood in that atrium full of poison flowers, of the gold that wreathed his hands.
Bastian’s eyes flickered her way, like he was reliving the same memory. He took a shaky breath, steeled the line of his jaw. “Who knows about this?”
“Everyone, if they believe the Tracts.”
“You know what I mean, old man.” Something poison seethed beneath Bastian’s voice. Something right at the edge of violence.
Anton noticed, eyeing his nephew thoughtfully. “Only your father, and those of us in this room.” His peaceful expression darkened. “It’s another reason August wants you dead. He thinks he can substitute himself as Apollius’s chosen when you’re out of the way.”
“Transubstantiation,” Malcolm murmured quietly. “Overcoming the physical with the spiritual.”