“You will comport yourself appropriately, Rone Comf, or you will be dismissed from these proceedings, and we’ll make the decision without you.” Triumvir Var’s whiplike voice was at odds with the delicacy of the room. The crystal chandelier and its small candles, the floral wallpaper, the leather-bound books on the shelf against the far wall. A room in a house finer than that of Talbur Gwenwig.
It was an almost dizzying contrast to the destruction they’d felt beneath their feet as Kolosos’s steps shook the city. Kazen’s latest rampage had stopped not half an hour ago, and traces of fire still rose from the city’s great center. Now it was up to General Istrude’s scouts, Oz, and Jansen to track the monster. And Sandis didn’t mean Kolosos.
She began a prayer for their success, but it was cut short by the thought that she no longer knew whom she was praying to. But surely, if Ireth could sense her, the Celestial might as well.
It couldn’t hurt. She uttered the final words and fell silent. She’d missed a portion of the ongoing conversation.
“Surely not.” She felt the Angelic’s eyes on her. “She has such a bond? To which numen?”
Sandis curled her knees to her chest, careful to let her skirt fall over them modestly. She sat on the window seat in front of drawn curtains, leaning one shoulder against the edge of the alcove. Rone seethed beside her.
“I’d never read of such a thing myself,” Jachim said, sporting a purple eye, “but I witnessed it with my own eyes.”
Sandis really should pay attention. Listen to what everyone was saying, not just the louder snippets that wriggled past her knotted thoughts. But her mind was fragmented, lost in different parts of the city. Her consciousness bounced between them.
The lair, where Sandis had uncovered Kazen’s truths.
The sewer, where they’d found the broken amarinth.
The Degrata, where Jachim had voiced his revelation.
The cathedral, burned to ash.
The Lily Tower, where she’d watched, helpless, as her lost brother transformed into the greatest horror the world could offer.
“Theorize then,” someone—Triumvir Peterus?—said. “Both of you. Tell me how it could possibly work.”
In her mind’s eye, Sandis stood in front of the stone tablets in the Noscon ruins at the heart of the city, staring at them as though they’d speak to her at any moment. A special bond to a numen. A flash of light. Two hearts, merged into one. Ripped from their shared body to form the glimmering core that powered an amarinth.
Was that why Ireth had been so afraid? Did he know these men would learn how to kill him?
Or was he afraid for her?
“You cannot fight evil with evil,” High Priest Dall countered. “You cannot possibly want to go through with this. Even to theorize about it is blasphemy!”
Sandis’s thoughts shifted again, and this time she found herself in Kazen’s office, peering at the diagrams of the astral sphere. Is it blasphemy, when all of it is the same? she wondered. Celesia, the occult . . . Where did one draw the line?
Did Ireth worship the Celestial, too?
“She is an innocent woman,” said the Angelic.
A long, tense breath squeezed from Rone’s chest. “For once, we agree. Consider our options! Sandis is powerful. More powerful than anyone here. You’d sacrifice her on a whim?”
Could they hear the anger lacing his voice, the sorrow? Rone’s hand touched her back, his thumb tracing one of the symbols embedded into the skin there.
“You’d sacrifice this city?” asked Chief Esgar.
He glanced at Sandis, but she couldn’t escape that moment at the Lily Tower. She was looking at Anon, his dark eyes glimmering with recognition. Watching that flash of bloody light. Seeing that monster rear its head in her brother’s body.
Pressure rose in her head, warm and familiar.
Would it save them, Ireth? she asked. If we gave ourselves up, would it save them? The city? Rone? Anon?
Wouldn’t it be worth it, to die so the people she loved could live? So that the children hiding in their flats could see another day? So that mothers could take their shifts and put food on the table?
“I don’t know.” Jachim’s voice was oddly serious. “I . . . Both are excellent arguments. Lose the woman, or gain our salvation? Surely there are others who might be made vessels in the city . . . but from what I understand, it takes some time to recover from the branding.”
Was it too high a price to pay?
Warmth trickled up her spine. It wasn’t fear. Was this Ireth’s confirmation that their sacrifice would end the violence?
Could this be what he’d been trying to tell her from the beginning?
“That is the other side of the coin,” chimed Triumvir Holwig. “If we want an army capable of fighting this numen, then we must raise it, now, especially if it takes time for the vessels to recover from the branding. We can mandate all people between ten and thirty to come in for inspection. Oz could inspect them, couldn’t he?”
“N-No!” Bastien’s voice was wet with fear. “Y-You can’t just force them into slavery!”
“It’s not slavery,” countered Chief Esgar. “They will be free to leave when the city is reclaimed.”
In a rare moment of speech, Inda, one of Oz’s vessels, said, “Funny how you persecute us, until you need us.”
“Without you,” hissed Triumvir Holwig, “we would not have this problem in the first place.”
“I cannot listen to this!” shouted High Priest Dall.
“We are desperate, you fool!” Triumvir Var matched the priest’s volume. “You must either bend your faith or die by the hand of a demon!”
Rone stood, adding his voice to the fray, followed by General Istrude and Triumvir Peterus. They shouted, pleaded, and coerced well into the night.
Sandis was still at the Lily Tower, frozen in the moment of her horrific reunion with her brother.
Var needed to take his own advice. None of the council was “comporting,” not anymore.
They screamed at one another like little kids. Rone stared at the ceiling, feeling tired, wishing he could just whisk Sandis away and pretend the scarlets never found them in the first place. Bastien had his hands planted over his ears, and his face was scrunched like he was about to explode. No one else noticed. They didn’t actually care about the others in the room, just about making their opinion the loudest.
This was getting out of hand.
It was too loud to hear the door open, but Rone spied it from the corner of his eye. Oz appeared in the gap, his clothing singed, his body ragged. Rone squeezed Sandis’s hand, drawing her attention to the grafter. Bastien noticed, too, and turned in his chair.
“Hey!” Rone shouted, but his voice didn’t carry above the cacophony. “Would you shut up for a minute?”
Both of Bastien’s hands tore from his ears and slammed onto the table with shocking strength. “Oz is here!” He shouted so loudly Rone felt it in his chest. Beside him, Sandis tensed. Thankfully, the others finally shut up and noticed the new arrival. Var and Peterus even ran over, taking the summoner’s elbows and helping him stay upright.
Shaking his head, Oz coughed and said, “I lost it. I followed Kolosos halfway across District Four and lost it. I . . . I lost Jansen, too.”
A small gasp emitted from Sandis, and Rone squeezed her hand harder. But it was Bastien who worried him. The Godobian’s expression cracked. His pale skin blanched to white. His lips formed the name Jansen.
Bowing his head, Var had the audacity to say, “That is unfortunate.”
Bastien hid his face in his arms and sobbed.
Triumvir Var’s house was large and divided into many rooms, most of which were modest in size. Even the very wealthy in Dresberg could only take up so much space. Like everyone else, they had to fit inside the circular stone wall that enfolded them.
Sandis was starting to see why Rone thought of the city as a cage.
The vessels and grafters had been assigned two of the rooms—Rone, Bastien, and herself in one, Oz and his remaining vessels, Teppa and Inda, in the other. Sandis should have talked to the younger women. Seen how they were faring. Learned what they had in common.
If you think it will replace them, you’re wrong.
The thought came unbidden, but it struck like a crowbar. Heath, Kaili, Alys. Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. And what of Dar? Rone had seen him working construction in the city. Was he still here? Was he hiding, or had he been injured in one of Kolosos’s attacks? Did he have work and money, or was he starving in an alley somewhere?
Rone kicked the door to the room closed; Bastien had stayed with Jachim, asking him questions and answering the scholar’s many, many queries in return. Celestial knew he was in need of the distraction.
Sandis sat on the edge of the bed, her body leaden and exhausted, her mind twisted like stripped wire.
You can still save him, she thought. Dar. You can save all of them, if you give them the power inside you.
“Sandis?”
She blinked and looked up. It seemed to take too long to move her neck and meet his eyes.
Rone frowned. He’d been unbuttoning his shirt, but paused on the fourth button down. “This is going to sound like a stupid question, but are you all right?”
She took a deep breath, thinking of how she should respond. But all her thoughts were aligned the same way, so the truth came out. “I could save them, couldn’t I?”
Rone’s eyes widened, and his face blanched white. “Sandis, no.”
Her gaze fell to her knees. “No, I can’t save them, or no, I shouldn’t try?”
“Sandis. Sandis.” His voice was weak yet urgent. He dropped to his knees on the floor in front of her and grabbed her hands. “They don’t even know for sure, all right? Please don’t think like that.”
But Sandis shook her head. “Jachim knows more about the Noscons than even Kazen does. He would know—”
“No!” His response was sharp, and the bump of his throat bobbed. “No, Sandis. And so what? Even if we could make an amarinth, then what? We can’t beat Kolosos in sixty seconds.”
“We could summon the Celestial.”
Rone’s hands turned to ice around hers. The look of horror and pain etched into his face made her heart squelch. Her eyes burned.
Setting his jaw, Rone shook his head. His grip on her fingers tightened nearly to the point of pain. “Please.” His voice was hoarse. “Please don’t, Sandis. If you give in now . . . everything we’ve done is meaningless.” The last word pitched high, and Rone swallowed again, waiting a moment before continuing. Even then, his voice trembled, and the sound of it crumbled something inside Sandis. Something delicate and necessary, and it hurt. “What’s the point of surviving, if you’re just going to leave?”
The image of his face—his beautiful face—blurred. Sandis blinked, and a single tear traced the length of her cheek. She whispered, “I don’t know what to do.”
“Not this.” His own eyes watered. The only time Sandis had seen him this emotional was in that underground tunnel on the evening he’d apologized so genuinely to her. The memory only spurred more tears. “Please, Sandis, not this. I can’t . . . I can’t without you, don’t you understand?”
Sandis pressed her lips together to contain her own emotion. She pulled her hands free and cradled his face, sweeping a curl from his forehead. There was so much she wanted to say. Those unspoken words warred inside her, and inside him, too. She knew him well enough to feel it. They stayed like that a long moment, barely containing their words and their sobs. Sandis’s throat ached. Her chest ached.
Pushing himself off the floor, Rone kissed her, sending spikes of heat through her skin that clashed with the sorrow. She welcomed him, tilting her head to the right and parting her lips. The taste of salt and sadness washed through her, and she gave him her worries and fears in return. He took them eagerly, tracing her mouth with movements both familiar and new. Replacing them with a fire so very unlike Ireth’s.
Sandis tangled her fingers in his hair—hair she loved touching for the softness of it. Rone pulled back just enough for a quick breath, and Sandis nipped at him, needing him. Needing to feel him and not her doubts.
His hand pressed into her lower back. The kiss deepened, his tongue slowly, softly seeking hers. He tasted like the ocean and rain and winter storms. And then the mattress was at her back. Rone’s weight on top of her was tantalizing and wonderful. Their mouths danced, and Sandis’s fingers explored his hair, his jaw, his shoulders. He broke away, placing a kiss just below her ear, making a trail of them down her neck. He supported himself on one forearm by her head, while his free hand slid up her thigh—a touch that stoked the flames growing in her belly.
She whispered his name, and his mouth returned to hers. She cupped his face, guiding his lips where she wanted them, taking the lower one for her own. A soft moan escaped him, and he pressed harder into her.
Regret spiraled slowly, starting in her navel and working up to her throat. She wanted all of him, but her script began to itch, reminding her.
She slowed her movements, forcing him to slow as well. When he paused for another breath, she pressed her fingers into his cheeks and said, “Rone . . . Ireth.”
She barely recognized her own voice. It was half air and strangely low. The regret broadened and filtered into her limbs.
Pressing his lips together, Rone rested his forehead against hers for a moment, then kissed her jaw and slid to the side of her, lifting his head so that his chin touched her hairline. He kept her close to him, and Sandis snuggled into the hollow of his throat, kissing the skin there.
She needed to keep her connection to Ireth now more than ever. And a numen could only be summoned into the body of a virgin.
As she lay there, entwined with Rone, her mind finally gave in to fatigue. She curled into his warmth, resting her head on the inside of his bicep, and drifted to sleep.
She dreamed of Anon.
Rain drizzled around her, gray and thick with pollution. Dresberg’s wall was gone, its towering buildings far away. Beneath her feet looped overgrown, trampled grass and mud. But it didn’t smell like rain. It smelled like chloride lime.
Anon lay on a tarp ahead of her, pale and glassy eyed. Soaking wet. Somehow she knew it wasn’t from the rain. It was from canal water. He’d drowned, just as she’d believed for all those lost, lonely years.
Men without faces, little more than shadows, grabbed the corners of the tarp and heaved him upward. They swung him back and forth three times before letting him go. He fell into a giant square-shaped pit behind them. Sandis ran to it, arriving at the crumbling edge too late to stop them.
It was a grave. A mass grave, with bodies strewn together without grace or sentiment. An arm here, a broken leg there. Anon rested at the edge, his lifeless eyes staring up into the storm, unblinking even when raindrops pattered against the whites. The corpse beside him was facedown, but Sandis would know it anywhere. The exposed spine glistened despite the clouds. Kaili, harvested for her golden script. Next to her was Rist, curled around a bloody pile that could only be his brother. Below him, Alys, the bottom half of her body covered by other corpses, her blonde hair matted and stained red.
Sandis tried to pull away from the sight, but she couldn’t. Her eyes locked onto each face, one after another. Triumvir Var, Jachim, Chief Esgar. They were bloated and pale, unmoving. Bastien lay at the far edge, his braid a noose around his pulseless neck. Near him were a little boy and his mother, the strangers who’d offered her help the first night after she’d run from Kazen. And there, half-buried in limbs, was Dar, a great scar cutting through the symbols branded between his shoulder blades.
Then she saw him. At the very center of the pit, at the crest of all that death, lay Rone, on his side as though he were sleeping. Yet his chest didn’t rise and fall, and the faintest trickle of blood flowed from the corner of his mouth.
Sandis awoke with a start, her skin covered in sweat, her heart pounding and head aching. It took her a moment to orient herself, to sit up and recognize the bed and the room, the sleeping form beside her. He was on his side just like he’d been in the pit of horrors. She held her breath, listening for the intake of his. When she heard it, relief cooled her and left her shivering.
Just a dream, just a dream, just a dream. Sandis was accustomed to nightmares. She wasn’t sure why they still affected her so.
But she’d never had a nightmare like that.
She searched the room for Bastien, but he hadn’t joined them. Turning back to Rone—carefully, as he was a light sleeper—she watched his serene face for a long time, as if convincing herself that he really was alive. She lifted a hand to touch his curls, but dropped it again. She didn’t want to wake him.
She couldn’t watch him die, either.
Will the Celestial save us? she wondered, unease snaking through her middle. Does it even have the power to?
Perhaps it had given her that power.
Steeling herself, Sandis carefully slid off the bed, gently tugging her skirt free where Rone’s knee pinned it to the mattress. The faintest light glowed under the door; she turned the knob silently and slipped into the hallway, fingers trembling when she closed the door behind her.
Ireth? she thought. There was no answering pulse of warmth. He’d been there earlier, however. Not afraid. Warm and resolute. Surely it had been a message. Encouragement.
The house was eerily quiet. The entire city was. Stopping at a window, Sandis drew back a curtain to peer into the night. The faintest orange glow illuminated Dresberg’s center. How many people were fighting that fire at the Innerchord, while the triumvirate snoozed safely in soft beds?
How many had already died?
She closed the curtain and kept a hand on the wall, feeling her way through the darkness. Found the staircase and took it down. The soft glow of lamplight beckoned her to the right, to the study with its door ajar. The politicians, priests, scarlets, and soldiers had left, leaving the makeshift meeting room quiet. Jachim sat at the table, poring over his books, rubbing his neck as he stooped. Bastien sat beside him, studying a ledger. He murmured something to the scholar, who glanced over and nodded.
“Jachim.” Sandis’s voice was quiet, but so was everything else, so both he and Bastien lifted their heads when she spoke. “I need to speak with you.”
Bastien said, “You need to . . . book an appointment?” He picked up a ledger. His voice was strained, but he was at least trying to lighten the mood.
Jachim chuckled. Sandis managed a sliver of a smile. “I do. But . . . alone, if you don’t mind.”
The humor faded from Bastien’s freckled face. He glanced between Sandis and Jachim twice before standing. “I should probably go to bed anyway.” He shrugged.
Sandis stepped aside to let him pass, but before he did, she pinched his shirt sleeve in her hand and, in a hushed voice, said, “In the morning . . . tell Rone I love him.”
Bastien met her eyes, confusion lacing his blue irises. “What do you—”
“In the morning,” she repeated, firm. Turning sideways, she gestured for Bastien to leave. He did, hesitantly, and Sandis closed the door behind him before she could lose her courage.
Nerves pricked her limbs as she crossed the room to Jachim. His eye was still swollen; Rone hadn’t held back when he hit him. She pulled out the chair across from him, but couldn’t bring herself to sit. Jitters danced through her body and stiffened her spine. Anxiety ballooned in her chest as though she were about to confess her greatest secrets. But she supposed everyone already knew those.
“You look worried,” Jachim said.
She nodded. “We all are.”
He rubbed his jaw—it was so smooth Sandis suspected he didn’t grow facial hair. Shaking her head, she brought herself to the present. “I want to do it.”
Jachim blinked. “What?”
“The amarinth,” she specified, toes curling against the carpet. “I want to make a new amarinth.”