Chapter 32
Basten
The streets are thick with the risen dead.
As Rian and I race down the Strand toward the city gates, no one’s dismissing the bodies anymore as leftovers from Artain’s little puppet show.
People scream as they flee corpses, who shuffle their rasping way through the city streets like a virus, cornering and biting any warm body they can manage to trap.
“Lock yourselves in your homes!” I shout, pausing to help a woman who tripped over her cloak. “A church, a business—get anywhere but out on the streets!”
Woudix’s risen dead are relentless, but they’re also seemingly mindless. It doesn’t take long to study them and observe that they take the path of least resistance. The widest streets. Any roads that are flat, downhill. Easy to traverse.
So, Rian and I steer clear.
If Rian knows anything, it’s the back alleys of the Sin Streets district.
He guides me away from the main thoroughfares, along catwalks and across rooftop shortcuts, until we reach a small tavern called The First Stop that serves as a resting point and wayfinding center for travelers entering Old Coros.
The resurrected dead haven’t made it this far yet, but their growls reverberate just a few blocks away. We don’t have much time.
Rian finds an old, coiled rope, left behind from a roofer, and ties it to a chimney. We use it to scale down the front of The First Stop, drop down onto its front benches.
My heart slams as I toss my hair back, turning to face the city gates.
And that’s when I see them.
The dead aren’t here yet, but we aren’t alone.
Immortal Samaur and Immortal Thracia stand before the closed gate’s wooden beam barricade. The beam is reinforced with iron caps and studs, and Samaur is currently using his sunlit fey to melt the iron, effectively creating a seal on the gates that no amount of manpower could ever open.
“Hey!” I shout. “Why don’t you fucking stick to making party favors, eh?”
They’re in their human glamour, both of them. Yet as they whip around, eyes flashing the whites, looking as vicious as animals, it’s never been clearer that they aren’t human.
“Lord Basten.” Samaur’s smile spreads, all teeth and no warmth.
“Or is it King Basten now? You mortals live such short lives that I tend to forget what roles you currently play in your silly little games of pretend.” He aims his contemptful smile at Rian.
“And the Lord of Liars. Shame you never joined us in Volkany—you would have done well in Norhelm.”
“Beneveto sided with you,” Rian says, casually plucking at a wrinkle on his shirt. “How did that work out for him?”
Samaur’s lips curl back, more like a predator now.
“Thracia.” I step forward, ignoring the God of Sun, and appeal to the round-faced girl instead who looks barely old enough to be out of church school.
“We don’t know one another, but I’ve spent more time with Vale’s court than you have.
The rest of your fae brethren put on a good show of being benign, hiding behind their revelries.
But now, they’ve shown their true motives.
” I pause, taking a deep breath. “There’s another way.
Sabine—Solene—isn’t like the others. You don’t have to repeat the past. Just because you always form an alliance with Samaur doesn’t mean you have to this Return.
You could ally with humanity instead. We could use your help. ”
At the same time that I’m entreating to her, I’m quietly scanning the city gates. Looking for any weakness in Samaur’s barricade that we can exploit to get the gates open.
Rian gives Thracia a sweeping bow. “Rian Valvere—big fan, o Immortal One. If I’m not mistaken, your affinity is healing, no? There are a hell of a lot of people in this city who could use your favor.”
To punctuate his point, a scream rings out from a few blocks away.
Thracia blinks her big, painfully innocent eyes. Her hair cascades to her waist in thin braids, held back by a midnight blue ribbon. She toys with the ends of her hair, looking between Samaur and me, biting down on her pillowy bottom lip.
And then she and Samaur burst into cruel laughter at the same time.
She clutches her narrow waist, doubling over, as more laughter bubbles on her lips. When she looks up, it’s with that same wolfish smile as Samaur.
“Healing?” she sneers. “Yes, that is my affinity. Or better stated, that’s one side of it. The other side is poison. It was my godkiss when I was confined to a human body.”
“Your godkiss was poisonwork?” I ask, my voice leveling flat. I slide a look to Rian. “And you lived along the Northwestern coast, near the border wall?”
She looks me up and down with disdain. “Yes, poisonwork. Bit more powerful than your wife’s ability to talk to mice.”
I feel the blood rush between my ears. Because now, everything clicks into place. Why Rian so forcefully denied having anything to do with poisoning the Lunden Valley, in the Northwest. Why Vale made up that lie in the first place.
Thracia poisoned the river valley when she was still mortal.
“Mortals have done nothing to you!” I burst out, unable to bite back my temper. “Not the people in Lunden Valley, and not the people here. Old Coros has embraced you with welcome arms, showered you with gifts!”
“Yes, it was a lovely welcome,” she says, admiring her midnight-blue, angled fingernails.
“I bear no rancor against the people here. They simply need to be taught a lesson. Shock and awe. So they do not mistake our rule for weakness. This Return, there will be no question as to where power lies.” She sighs, listening to the distant sounds of screams. “As far as what happened in the Lunden Valley, that was an accident—I was testing the strength of my godkiss and things got a little out of control.” She smirks.
“Maybe that should have been a sign I was fae.”
Her casual dismissal of thousands of dead bodies chills me to the bone.
“The more people you kill,” Rian says, shifting his stance, subtly falling back into the fighting position we used in the sparring ring, “the fewer there will be to worship you.”
“Humans are like ants,” she says, waving her fingers dismissively.
“There are always more. You’re constantly reproducing.
Waiting a few generations for a larger population means nothing to immortals.
” She grins. “Besides, the ones we spare will pray to us twice as hard, after they’ve seen what we’re capable of. ”
An explosion of light suddenly ricochets throughout the central district, near Valor Circle. The earth trembles from the aftershocks, clay tiles sliding off the tavern roof and crashing to the street.
Samaur and Thracia immediately shift into their fae appearances, fey crackling at their fingertips.
“It’s the monoceros,” Samaur says, narrowing his golden eyes to slits of light. “Come on.”
He starts toward the explosion at a jog. Thracia hangs back, still focused on Rian and me, purple fey snaking up her arms, which already bear the scent of pestilence and rot.
“They’re nothing,” Samaur urges her. “The gate’s sealed. No one is escaping Woudix’s risen army. We did our work, and now Vale is going to need us if Tòrr is loose. Come on!”
His tone is sharp enough to jolt her, and she wrinkles her nose at us one final time before running after Samaur.
The instant they’re gone, Rian doubles over, bracing himself on his knees, and lets out a long exhale. “Fuck me in the ass—they’re annoying as hell, aren’t they? They can all rot—Sabine excluded.”
I immediately begin inspecting the iron seal Samaur welded into the gate’s barricade. “We don’t know about the others. Popelin. Meric. Alyssantha. There could be another good one in the court. Hell, at this point I’d settle for one who just doesn’t want the world to burn.”
Rian grabs a broken flagpole and uses the end to test out the gate, looking for any weak or rotten boards we could possibly break through.
When his attempts come up empty, he tosses aside the pole, impatient. “That Sun God really fucked us.”
Another blast of light from the central district rocks the ground, and I duck beneath the gate’s archway as loose stones tumble down.
“Sabine and that monoceros can do a lot of damage,” I mutter. “But she’s never gone up against the entire fae court before.”
We spare what little time we can to continue testing the barricade, but nothing works.
Then, suddenly, Rian claps me on the shoulder. “Remember that pub in Blackwater? The Lazy Otter?”
My brow furrows. There have been a lot of pubs. A lot of long, whisky-soaked nights with Rian in Blackwater. Most of them blur together in an amber haze.
“The broom closet!” he says, slapping me again to jog my memory. “We couldn’t pay—I’d lost my coin purse. The owner locked us in. To get out, we—”
My eyebrows shoot up. “The hinges.”
He grins. “Exactly.”
We dash to the gate’s massive hinges—great iron brackets as thick as my fist. Samaur didn’t bother to weld them shut. Which means they could be removed.
Rian grabs the broken flagpole and jams the end beneath the first hinge pin, then starts battering it loose. It’s slow work, metal groaning with every strike, but one by one—two on each side—we work the pins free.
“Stand back!” Rian shouts.
We race toward the safety of The First Stop’s entryway.
The gate, still barricaded through the center, groans—then crashes forward in a roar of splintered wood and dust.
A thick cloud billows out. We both stumble back, coughing, eyes stinging.
But when it clears, the path ahead is wide open.
“Quick.” I shove his shoulder, urging him toward the central district. “Back to Sabine.”
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out Sabine’s location. I barely need to use my godkissed senses. All we need to do is follow the explosions of light that rock outward like lit powder kegs.