16. I LOSE EVERYTHING
Chapter sixteen
I LOSE EVERYTHING
PORTIA
Iwake to chanting, and the first thing I understand is that I am not where I fell.
The ceiling above me is not sky and not catacomb.
It is a vault of black stone veined with the same ember-red that bleeds across the ruined heavens of my country, and it pulses, slow, like something breathing in its sleep.
I know before I have moved a muscle that I am inside the heart of it at last. The ritual chamber.
The place the whole poisoned kingdom has been arranged around like iron filings around a lodestone. They have brought me to the Cup.
I take inventory the way my tutors taught me, before panic, always before panic.
I am on cold stone. My wrists are bound, not with rope but with cuffs of that scorched silver, the anti-dragon metal, and where they touch my skin my fire will not come, the way a hand will not close when the nerve is cut.
My body aches in a deep wrong place, and the second I remember why, the inventory stops being a discipline and becomes a wound.
The coal. The small new warmth I had been carrying like a held breath.
I reach for it the way you reach for a step in the dark that you are sure is there.
And the bond, even torn, even muffled by the silver, tells me the truth before my own body does, the way it has never once let me lie to myself since the moonstone.
The warmth is fainter. Guttering. Not gone, not yet, the stubborn flicker of it still arguing with the dark, but failing, drowning in the same Havoc that drowns everything in this place.
I make a sound I have never made in my life, low and animal and entirely without dignity, and I do not care who hears it.
"Easy," says a voice I know, and it is not Kael's, and that is the only thing in this room that does not make it worse.
Rhun crouches at the edge of my vision. My younger brother.
The shadow sibling, the quiet one, and nine years have done something different to him than they did to Kael.
They have hollowed rather than sharpened.
His eyes do not carry the ember. That is the first thing I notice.
Whatever the Cup has done to my older brother from the inside, it has not finished with this one, or this one has been refusing it, and the refusing has cost him.
He looks like a man who has been holding his breath for years.
"Don't speak to me of easy," I say. "You stood by for this."
"I stood in it," he says, very low, with a glance toward the chanting at the far end of the chamber.
"There's a difference, and I'm not asking you to forgive it.
I joined because the old rule was failing and Kael had answers and I was afraid, and every one of those reasons was true and not one of them was good enough.
" His jaw works. "I have watched what they do here.
I told myself it was the price. I am done telling myself that. "
I study him. The bond is no help, it only reads one person, and that person is somewhere beyond these walls screaming my name into a dark that is eating the signal.
But I have spent my life reading faces without magic, and Rhun's is the face of a man at the exact moment the thing he has been carrying gets heavier than the thing he was carrying it for.
"Then help me," I say.
"I can't get you out. Not from here, not now, not with him watching.
" He presses something into my bound hands, fast, the gesture of a man who has rehearsed not being seen.
It is small and cold and curved. A shard of shell, I realize.
Royal eggshell. It hums faintly against my skin the way the fragment in the catacomb hummed against Leon's.
"But I can tell you the egg you're looking for is real, it's whole, and it's not here.
Kael moved it. He doesn't trust the chamber to hold the most valuable thing he owns.
" His eyes flick to mine, and there is something in them I have not earned and do not deserve, the loyalty of the sibling who stayed, surfacing through everything.
"When the moment comes, sister, look for me. I won't be where you expect."
And then he is gone, folded back into the shadows by the wall, just as the chanting changes pitch and Kael comes down the length of the chamber toward me with the Cup carried before him.
I have imagined the Ember Cup my whole life and imagined it wrong.
I expected something monstrous. It is worse than monstrous.
It is plain, a vessel of dark beaten metal no larger than a thing you would drink wine from at a middling feast, and the only horror in it is what comes off it.
A heat with no warmth. A pull with no love.
The exact inversion of the bond, a thing that takes and takes and calls the taking holy.
My dragon recoils from it so hard I feel her try to climb out of my own skin to get away.
"There she is," Kael says, and he sounds, God help me, fond. "Awake. Good. I wanted you awake. The blood gives more when it is afraid, and you have always been so good at not being afraid, sister, that I confess I was curious whether you still could."
"Where is my father," I say, because it is the only question. It has always been the only question.
"Close." He crouches, the way Rhun crouched, and the symmetry of it is obscene.
"Resting. Like you. We are a family of resters lately.
" He tilts his head, and his ember eyes move over me, and they catch on something.
A flicker of attention. A calculation. And the cold that goes through me then is colder than the cuffs, because I understand he is reading my body the way I read faces, and he is good at it, he has always been good at it.
"You're different," he says slowly. "You've been different since you came through the gate.
Softer in a place you used to be hard." His gaze drops to where my bound hands have gone, without my permission, to my middle.
"Oh," he breathes, and it is the worst sound in the world. "Oh. Sister. You came home carrying."
"No," I say, and it is the most useless lie I have ever told, and we both hear it.
He straightens. He looks down at me with the Cup in his hands and an expression I have seen on him exactly once before, the day our mother died, the day the ambition first got loose.
He holds something out to me. A small thing.
A bundle of cloth gone gray with ash. He opens his hand so I can see what is in it, and he says, gently, the way you tell a child a hard thing, "Then I'm sorry.
The Havoc is no place for something so small.
It didn't hold." He lets the ash sift between his fingers.
"Your baby is gone, Portia. The chamber took it while you slept. I'm told it was quick."
The world goes white and silent and very far away.
I do not believe him. That is the thing I will cling to later, that some cold splinter of me, the strategist, the reader of faces, does not believe him even as the rest of me shatters.
Because Kael lies the way other men breathe, and the ash in his hand could be anything, and the coal under my sternum, faint and failing, is still there. I can feel it. Guttering but not out.
But belief is a slow animal and grief is a fast one, and grief gets to me first. Floods me. Takes me down. And for one endless moment I am nothing but a woman on a cold floor being told the small warmth she carried did not survive the dark.
And somewhere beyond the walls, down the torn and screaming bond, I feel Leon feel it too.
The echo of my grief reaching him through the static.
I feel the exact moment it turns him from a man running into something else entirely, and the last clear thought I have before the white takes me is a prayer, and I do not know who I am praying to.
Don't let him become what they want. Not even for me. Especially not for me.
Dearest Readers,
He showed her ash and told her it was quick.
I am not going to be clever with you tonight. I am going to be plain, because some chapters do not deserve a wink.
But I taught for forty years, my darlings, and here is what forty years teaches you: the cruelest people are almost never the loudest. They are gentle. They lower their voice. They tell you the terrible thing kindly, because kindness makes you believe it.
So look at the ash again. Look at it properly.
Did he let her touch it?
Did he let her close?
Portia is a strategist. She is grieving now, and grief is faster than reason, and it has her by the throat. But the strategist never fully sleeps.
Turn the page. And do not you dare give up on her.
Your author.