Chapter Fifteen The Villainess and the God-Child #3
“In fact,” Rae continued with gathering boldness, “I don’t want anybody to listen to that hag’s cracked ramblings ever again. Indulge me in a wicked desire, my lost star?”
“With pleasure.”
The lady of snow and flame stood tall. “Let us send guards up the Mountain of Truth. The guards shall roll a stone into the mouth of the Oracle’s cave and silence her forever. Her time of prophecy is over. My time has come. I read from the book of fate, and all my words will be truth.”
Rae heard the guards at the door draw in shocked breaths at the depth of her sinful blasphemy, but that didn’t matter. She was already a villain. What mattered was that Key would be safe.
The Oracle would do just fine. The Oracle never came out of her cave, except once. The Oracle didn’t need to eat, only to drink from the waters of truth in her pool. The books were very specific about this. She didn’t need sunlight, or any worldly sustenance.
If the Oracle was trapped, she could never come down to the palace.
The Oracle could never speak of the Emperor’s doom.
If she never came, the Emperor couldn’t kill her and learn the last word, and thus he couldn’t speak the last word in his time of worst despair.
They could let the Oracle out after Key was safe.
The Emperor nodded. “Let it be done,” he commanded his guard. “Let my lady have her wicked way.”
Rae let out a relieved breath and whisked the blood-hued edge of her skirt to cover the words written in the bone, the last piece of the prophecy that would now never be uttered. No living soul vanished, the word soul lost as if drowned in blood.
She glanced uneasily upward to check if Key had noticed. His attention was on the child’s bones in their royal array, his look searching and angry at what he did not find. His eyes burned red anew.
“Maybe these bones were a beggar’s body they found in the streets. Maybe it was a noble child they wove a story around. Maybe it was me, once. Not any more.”
He shrugged, turned, and stalked away.
At the threshold of the Room of Memory and Bone, Key threw casually over his shoulder, “Smash it.”
“I beg your pardon, sire?” asked the guard to the left of the door.
“Destroy it,” ordered the Emperor. “Grind it to dust. I won’t look to the bones of a dead past. Did you not hear my lady? We make the rules now. I will not listen to legends. I will live a legend.”
He stormed out. The sounds of a storm rose, shaking the walls of the palace with growling and booming as if a frenzied animal ran wild through the sky. The furious storm overwhelmed the noise made by the smashing of a lost child’s bones into dust.
Rae chased after him.
Black clouds in the sky met the black smoke of the abyss. Thunder rolled. Rae feared it hadn’t rolled her lucky number. On the parapets of the Palace on the Edge, the Emperor stood with his back to her, his bruise-blue cloak whirling in the rising scream of the wind.
“What causes a lightning storm?” the Emperor demanded.
Rae wracked her brain for the answer. People once said she was destined for college scholarships. She refused to let her mind fail her.
“Storms are created when hot air rises, and the wind changes direction. Thunderstorms happen after an atmosphere becomes unstable. That can happen quickly or slowly, and the trigger can be either a cold or warm front.”
The atmosphere seemed extremely unstable, just now. Or perhaps that was just Key.
Science wouldn’t help the situation. This was a crisis in literature, the hero torn apart by thoughts of gods and monsters and dark dreams. If she were a heroine, she could help heal his wounded soul.
Instead, he was doomed to stand on the dark battlements in silent agony as the storm raged and tears fell like rain.
Then the Emperor turned towards Rae, red eyes dancing as if they stood in the devil’s ballroom.
“Wrong.” The Emperor smiled like a lightning strike. “The answer that you’re looking for is me.”
The temperature of a lightning bolt could be five times hotter than the surface of the sun, if Rae recalled correctly.
Once Rae had described the Emperor to her sister as a hottie with a body count, and laughed when Alice wailed.
Perhaps she’d always been asking to be hit by this particular lightning strike.
Rae smiled back, feeling deeply unsafe. She thought of a thousand handsome anti-heroes who would brood in the rain over their blighted lives, not smile as Key did. A thousand anti-heroes who were deeply boring. How predictable, to be tragic about a tragedy.
“I worried you might be thinking of the time when you were a hurt child, my lost heart. I feared you might be sad.”
She spoke in wonder more than fear.
“Children get hurt all the time,” the Emperor said dismissively. “They’re small and easy to hurt, so I guess that’s what they’re for.” He shook his wild head. “It doesn’t concern me. Why dwell on the boring past, when I can do this?”
He made a careless gesture. Enchanted metal claws cut red faint strokes against dark clouds. The sky gave a snap, a crackle, and a pop, sounds like bones being broken and pulled out. Or light being born.
Lines the colour of moonlight forked across the darkness.
At first Rae thought it was only lightning, illumination in a storm familiar both in this world and the other, until the lines went in a dozen directions at once.
The sky lit, black cloud dyed violet and blue wherever the arrows of outrageous brilliance darted.
The lines glittered against the cloud, then curved to form a pattern.
White tracery, leading to sudden, astonishing red blooms of bright colour at their ends.
This was the Emperor’s painting of a rose bush, rendered in fire on the sky.
Rae found herself laughing in pure, astonished glee.
The shadow of the Emperor’s glittering claws loomed large against the cloud, and closed like pincers. When he lowered his hand, he held a curl of fire within it. He handed the burning rose to Rae with an absent-minded air, as though stealing a flower from a nearby garden and tossing it her way.
Rae held out her hands, steeling herself to be burned. The shape of the rose came undone at her touch, so she found herself with red illumination cupped in her palms. Holding light was like drinking champagne but feeling the fizz along her fingertips, rather than against her tongue.
She found herself laughing again. She had expected anything but this.
He laughed with her, as if her laugh were a spark to a flame, and his laugh changed the sky.
Lightning transformed into fireworks, shifting colours and shapes, from smoky-green torches to fabulous yellow candles to spinning orange suns.
The Emperor caught Rae’s red hands in his claws and spun her around, feet flying and laughter floating into the roar of abyss flames.
At the top of the Palace on the Edge, under a sky turned opalescent with his lightning.
The air rushing around them seemed singed by lightning, the night turned into a bright and hot whirl.
Guilt and misery had let Rae forget why the Emperor was her favourite character.
There were characters in stories who were similar to other characters; those who followed old, familiar and almost-comforting paths to a predictable end.
Lovers who swore love but seldom proved it.
Guilty secrets which were never that bad.
Characters who could be poured into another story as if into a mould.
The patterns would be unbroken, no challenge ever offered.
Sometimes you wanted such stories and such characters, as soothing as a song heard a hundred times, so similar that characters and stories blended in your head. You liked them, but forgot their names.
The ones you remembered were the weird ones, unpredictable and unforgivable, irresistible and immovable, the characters who needed to be watched and could never be conquered.
Catching you by surprise like a magic trick that brought them to life, even if only in your heart, where they could live forever.
The wild ones – wildly amused, wildly furious, wild for love and ruin, wild to be saved and corrupted.
Contradictory and forever true, despairing and endlessly entertaining.
For Rae to believe in a character, she always had to laugh with them as well as cry with them.
She didn’t want cheap laughs, but laughs dearly bought.
Jokes had cost Rae, at her most miserable, and been worth the price.
The characters she loved best laughed in the face of danger not because danger wasn’t real and horrifying, but because laughter was a sword in their hands.
She loved the wolf-souled, who saw everything except for reason, who knew the only thing to do in a senseless world is start a howl of defiance echoing through the sky. The only ones for Rae were the wild ones, burning with a fire that would light up or burn down a world, but never go out.
Rae stopped to catch her breath. The Emperor caught Rae’s eye, despite the sky full of marvels, and winked.
Her favourite character, catching her by surprise again. She was terrified, wondering what wild thing he might do next, but that didn’t make her love him any less. Rather the opposite.
Rae laughed so hard her chest burned, her lungs weak with it. She leaned against him, wanting to sit, but not wishing to leave the battlements or stop watching the sky.
Her gutter guard inclined his head, and made a gesture as if to show her to a seat like a gentleman. Except there was no seat. Until there was. They had leaned against these stone battlements once, escaping together from the royal greenhouse.
In a corner of the battlements, between two palace walls, one overlooking the burning abyss and one the bright city, the plains, and woodland beyond, a fire was kindled. White and gold, like the gilded wings and the marble and bone of her throne.