We’ll Have to Fix the Gate #2
That was the only redeemable part about the Betrayer’s Serpent. It would at least un-fuck what it fucked up if you did what it said.
Isobel finally rose from the floor, marveling partly at Esme and partly at the gargantuan animal picking at its feathers beside Urias. Esme rolled her eyes and bowed at the queen before backing up and taking her place in front of one of the now-perfect pillars. The other Wraiths did the same.
“You’re the general?” Isobel asked Bal, who was still shaking in the middle of the temple.
He whipped around to face her. “I am, Your Highness,” he said, smoothing his hair only to comb sweat through it. Then he straightened his back, pulled his ankles together, and bowed at the waist. “My deepest condolences, Your Highness. May King Turiel conquer in the afterlife.”
“May he,” said Isobel, and the room shakily echoed her words.
The only person who didn’t answer was a man still pushing himself up at the front of the chamber.
His heavy bun had been whipped loose and now hung by his shoulders.
He pulled it out only to regather the heavy veil of red hair high on his head and—
No.
No, Esme had sunk him. Omniel was at the bottom of the Wyvern, in his deathboat. He—he was so very dead.
So how was he standing beside Isobel right now?
This man had to be Prince Janos. He looked just as perfect as Isobel, but he had Omniel’s everything.
His hair—the color, the thickness, that sickening shine.
His hands, smooth on the outside but red and ruined on the palms. His eyes, his jaw, his—fuck, he had his nose, including the dent from when Omniel had broken his seventy-seven years ago.
He had that posture, his back so straight and his chin just high enough that no one could look into his eyes, arrogant and self-important and disgusting, and if Esme didn’t look away, she was going to scream.
The scars on her back stung. Even they recognized their creator.
Somehow, the funeralgoers rallied enough to finish the service.
Esme watched the ghost up on the dais, terrified that if she blinked, he’d be upon her.
The speeches, the prayers, the incantations—everything rushed past her, unacknowledged.
She moved through Turiel’s funeral inside the ghost of his father’s, replaying it to prove to herself that it had happened, even in the shadow of the man’s living phantom.
When the Wraiths had taken their place as Turiel’s pallbearers, she’d seen Turiel’s yellow gold sarcophagus as Omniel’s ruby one.
She remembered crying at Omniel’s funeral.
She hated that she’d done so. She wished she could have drunk and cackled, but all she’d done was weep.
Now, holding this sarcophagus, red lined her eyes. She couldn’t explain why.
Esme held her emotions together for the whole walk down to the rocky shores at the base of the cliffs.
She wasn’t the only one losing her grip.
Mourners still quaked and cried from their brush with death, and a few glided down the cliffs with blank expressions, maybe thinking this was their own goodbye.
But only one sailboat with a raven’s glass mast waited on the beach.
The wind beat at its golden sails and the hull groaned like an overstuffed stomach.
Asterou men came from conquering blood, and their tradition dictated that a true conqueror was sent down into the underworld with his horde of stolen goods.
Turiel never really conquered anything, not intentionally.
But fifteen years ago, he’d funded King Lukas of the Lake’s coup against his brother, Krv.
Ever since, the Lake had been an unofficial state of Micrea.
For the sake of this funeral, coups would be counted as conquering.
Turiel’s boat bobbed with thousands of fine silver relics from the Lake.
Its people were Waldov in origin, escaping their ice-rock deathtrap homeland centuries ago and taking up residence in the region.
A pile of books in Waldov sat in the corner of the boat, and Esme just barely understood the scrawled words as the Haj-ka, the Lake’s own historical record.
Lukas had sent this to be burned for the funeral? Of course he had…
The majority of the spoils in the boat weren’t books, though. Esme spied all of Turiel’s favorite things: hams and ugly fur coats and gaudy sapphire belts. Whatever Isobel was willing to part with, probably. She was surprised they hadn’t thrown a strawberry blonde aboard.
The Wraiths nestled Turiel’s sarcophagus right in the middle of the hoard.
Omniel’s boat had nearly sunk before they’d even loaded the fucker on, too weighed down with ancient Nuk figurines of their gods, relics from almost a millennium ago, and cultural texts.
They sank those gods, those relics, those texts.
Now, they once again cast history into the Wyvern, accompanied by more food than would feed every gnawing belly in the Foot.
Esme watched from the shore as the boat was freed out into the bay.
Beside her, an archer lit his arrow and loosed it.
Its flaming head landed on the pitch-soaked hull of the deathboat.
Flame swallowed the ship, and Turiel, and that gold, and those books, and all that fucking food so fast it was like it’d never existed.
It was a funeral if she’d ever seen one.
Esme’s heart twisted for the mothers in the Foot who could have used just one of those diamonds to restore the homes that had been decaying in this city long before the Betrayer’s Serpent ruined them again.
For the children who’d starve to death tonight, because children starved to death every night in Amaris.
For the Waldov-Lake men who’d never know the culture that raised their cheekbones and lightened their hair.
All of them, suffering for an Asterou man. The most important kind. One worth thousands of homeless and starving and confused. And this was how Micrea reminded them.
You are not worth the food we burn for the least of our kings.
You are not worth the rocks we cast into the ocean.
You are the stock of trash and cretins atop whose ashes we build our castles.
Press your head to the dirt and pray we do not tread upon you.
And if we do, kiss our feet as we stomp you out.
* * *
Later that night, Esme and Urias stood by the doors to the banquet room. Nobles feasted on roasted pigs and broiled ducks, and though Esme’s stomach roared, she couldn’t eat. Omniel had dissected his kingdom into five stations, and lessers could not eat with their betters.
The most special little boys and girls were the nobles, and then the Valosian goons and Viryan healers, and then professional fighting men, then the merchants, and then, finally, the commoners.
Nobles could feast in front of commoners, but should a poor man lift his fork before a nobleman, he was likely to lose a hand.
And Wraiths? They weren’t noble, nor were they blessed, nor were they technically men by law, though they fought. They were not permitted to involve themselves in trade directly, but as they were not humans, they could not classify as commoners.
They had no class. They were simply less.
And so each Wraith stood by a wall, starving, watching people who had probably never buttoned a shirt on their own scarf down tons of food.
Meanwhile, Balthazar and Janos couldn’t even eat. Janos’s family had fought Asterou rule for decades, meaning he couldn’t be noble, and Balthazar was just a general. Servants sat full goblets in front of them, but no food, not even for an almost-king.