Chapter V. No Man of Woman Born #2
“As Celene began drinking, I heard Fabién sigh. And though he yet fought against me with all he had, what he had was diminishing by the mouthful. Celene swallowed, greedy, groaning, claws sinking into the stone of that immortal flesh. Voss staggered, pressed between us now, black eyes blinking at the sky. I wondered if he’d ever felt this in all his years.
I wondered if the bastard was bored now.
He began trembling, me pressing down on Ash’s hilt, her tip now sunk through his robe and brushing against his crumbling skin.
But as his knees buckled, I heard a fearful cry.
“‘Don’t hurt him!’
“My sweet baby Patience. Ever she’d been the softest touch.
I swear God, she used to cry if she stepped on a beetle.
And unable to stand by as someone she cared for suffered, she’d thrown herself upon Celene’s shoulders, beating away with little fists.
My sister snarled then, the monster in her surfacing, eyes gone wide and black.
“‘Patience, get back!’
“‘Papa, no!’
“Ashdrinker met Voss’s flesh, marble parting like water.
“The Forever King looked to the sky as she sank into his heart.
“‘Forgive me, brother…’
“And then he was blasted apart.
“His end was thunderous, its heat blistering, a thousand stolen years come to claim their due. I was flung backward like a bag of rags and chaff, crashing into one of those towering pillars and feeling my bones shatter. The pillar wobbled, crumbling, tons of stone crashing down upon me and grinding my twice-broken bones into dust. But it was nothing. Nothing compared to what happened to her.”
The Last Silversaint was staring at his sister now, bloody murder in his eye. The Last Liathe stared back, defiant, chin raised high.
“It was an accident, Gabriel.”
“Fuck you.”
“I did not mean—”
“FUCK YOU!”
The silversaint was on his feet now, roar echoing on the walls, set to fling himself across that gulf once more.
But ready for the outburst, Jean-Francois nodded to the thrall capitaine, and raising his truncheon, the thug cracked it across the back of the silversaint’s knees.
Dario took three fearful steps back as Gabriel crumbled, still spitting hatred at Celene as the other thralls again set to, thrashing the fallen man with their clubs.
The sound of cracking bone rang in the cell, Jean-Francois’s teeth clenched.
He refused to watch as the silversaint was beaten bloody once more, eyes instead upon the monstress across the river.
Celene Castia stood tall, her face a mask.
But the Marquis saw that black gaze soften along with his own heart as he realized Gabriel was no longer cursing.
He was weeping.
Curled into a ball. Bloody hands over his face. This giant of a man. This legend living. Crying like a motherless babe. The sobs shook his body, soul-deep and shuddering.
The hymn of a broken soul.
“What happened, Mlle Castia?”
The Last Liathe looked up from her brother, meeting the historian’s gaze.
He understood at last now—how those awful wounds from her Becoming had been finally healed.
Why her eyes were the pure black of an ancien’s, rather than the fledgling she was.
He understood now, the sense of menace he’d always felt in her presence.
Who it was staring back at him among that legion behind her gaze.
But he could see nothing of Forever’s King now.
Only the girl Celene Castia had once been.
“I thought only to get her off me,” she whispered.
“I did not push her hard. I was lost in him by then, you see. All that power. All those years. Flooding into me. Over me. Through me. The hurts in my flesh finally unwound, just like Aleks had promised in San Yves all those years before. But as I shoved my niece away, that last mouthful of him rushing down into my throat as Gabriel’s blade sank into his heart, Voss exploded.
“We were flung like feathers. Patience and me. And though I was hurled back across the dais and into Dior, shattering that dreadful wheel she was nailed to, my poor niece…”
Celene hung her head, crying now, just like her brother.
“The bowl. The b-bowl o-of…”
Jean-Francois looked to the weeping silversaint, utterly horrified.
“The Redeemer’s blood.”
“I tried to p-put her out.” The Liathe shook her head, bloody tears spilling down her cheeks.
“God help m-me, I tried. She was screaming, just screaming as that fire rushed over her little body.
I t-tore off my coat, tried to smother the flames b-beneath it, but they only spread from her flesh to mine.
I tried to hold on, begging God and Mothermaid for mercy.
But f-fear took me then. The agony of that awful holy fire.
“I threw myself to the ground, rolling about in the dust like some animal as the flames chewed my bones. I managed only at the last to douse them. I was burned, Marquis. Horribly, terribly burned. Nothing left of my arms but charcoal and twigs. Scorched almost blind. But … p-poor Patience…”
Celene looked to the floor and fell mute.
“I hate you.”
The Liathe looked up then, into her brother’s face. He lay yet on the river’s bank, bloodied and broken. Yet he still had strength in him to spit.
“God, I fucking hate you.”
“… I know, brother.”
She lifted her chin then, jaw clenched.
“But the world will soon hate you.”
The Liathe looked from her brother to the historian and back again.
“Tell him the last of it,” she spat. “The final chapter of the great Gabriel de León.”
The silversaint remained silent, gaze falling to the stone.
“What does she mean, Gabriel?” Jean-Francois asked.
“Dior,” Celene hissed.
“What about her?”
Celene shook her head, teeth clenched so tight Jean-Francois heard them creak. The glower she aimed at her brother might have boiled the river between them, but still he stayed silent, avoiding her eyes. And finally the Liathe answered.
“After all that poor girl had been through. All she’d given.
The moment my friend opened her eyes in the aftermath, her first care was not for herself, but him.
Crawling over rubble. Through the ashes and blood to that shattered pillar he lay crushed beneath.
She had barely a drop left inside her. And still, as she reached my brother’s side, Dior took up a shard of stone in one trembling hand and sliced her wrist. Begging him to drink. ”
“I didn’t want it.”
Gabriel’s voice was flat, grey eye haunted. His tears were spent now, insides hollowed out, this last lungful of bitter smoke all that remained.
“I didn’t want it,” he repeated.
“Yet you took it,” Celene hissed.
The silversaint hung his head.
“I’d nothing left,” he whispered. “My bride gone. My baby taken from me again. My body just as broken as my blade.
“This is a good death, I told myself. A good end for a hero.
“Ashdrinker was in the rubble with me, my hand drifting over the cool metal of her skin. She was shattered completely now, split all the way to her hilt and broken off inside the Forever King’s heart.
I knew she was dying, just as I was. But as my blood soaked the sands beneath us, with fading voice, still my old friend sang.
“Live esh …
“Four sp-spoons …
“Me they …
“I saw her above me now. Untouched by the hands of fate or the teeth of time. My Astrid reached out for me, across the wall of death.
“‘It’s time, love.’
“But then…”
Gabriel hung his head.
“Dior. Pressing that bloody wrist against my mouth. Tears falling on my skin like rain. I could see the hurt in her eyes, the fear, the pain, all a reflection of my own.
“‘Please don’t leave me,’ she begged.
“She placed her wounded hand over mine, still on Ashdrinker’s haft, the blade’s voice naught but a whisper now.
Perhaps it was Dior’s bloody touch on her hilt.
Maybe it was the last moment of clarity as the end claimed her.
But as my friend’s silvered voice drifted into silence, her final words rang in the halls of my mind.
Not the whole nonsense song. Just the first fragments of it.
The message she’d been trying to give me all this time.
“Live.
“For.
“Me.
“‘Please, Papa,’ Dior breathed.
“Live.
“For.
“Me.
“‘Don’t leave.’
“So I took hold of her hand. And I started to d-drink.”
Silence rang in the cell beneath Sul Adair, thick enough to slice with a knife.
And as it stretched on, taut as two bowstrings, the Marquis Jean-Francois of the Blood Chastain lifted his head.
Realization was sinking in, eyes falling on the man sat at the water’s edge, arms wrapped around his belly, tears on his bloody cheeks.
“Oh my God,” Jean-Francois whispered.
He looked across the river, chocolat eyes meeting midnight black. The Last Liathe stood tall beneath his stare, fingers and lips curled.
“And you name me monster.”
Jean-Francois stood, aghast at the wretch before him. The silversaint wouldn’t meet his gaze, hair tumbled about his ruined face as he rocked back and forth, moaning soft.
“The cup is broken, you told me. The Grail is gone.”
“Witness now,” Celene hissed, “the wretch who broke it.”
The Last Silversaint hung his head.
His voice not even a whisper.
“I t-tried to stop.”
He drew one shuddering breath, exhaled as a broken sob.
“B-but I couldn’t…”
He doubled over then, brow pressed to bloody stone. His sobs were silent, his shame complete, guts spilled over the floor for the Marquis to finally wallow in. But looking down upon this wretched, broken ruin of a man, Jean-Francois knew not what to feel.
God help him, he knew nothing anymore.
Nothing, save perhaps that in all his nights, all his years, Jean-Francois had never met a man who’d suffered quite so much as this one.
“My God, Gabriel…”
“That was when she found us.”
The historian looked to the thing across the river, watching with a dead king’s eyes.
“Nicolette,” he realized.
“She circled back after Gabriel and Aaron met her on the outskirts. Curiosity kills cats, but not wolves apparently. And stealing into that ruined church with her handful of thralls, your blood-niece came across our aftermath. Dior’s body, cold and bloody and lifeless upon the stone.
Gabriel was yet trapped in that rubble. Comatose.
Healed without, but broken utterly inside.
I was still too burned to fight, too numb to resist, barely aware of what was happening as they locked me down.
But the box they threw me in was bound with silver, and after that… ”
The Liathe shrugged, gesturing to the walls around her.
“So. The end at last. Was it everything you hoped for, seigneur?”
Jean-Francois was still standing, his history clutched in his hands.
The full weight of the tale was yet settling on his bones, and still, he’d no idea how he should feel at all this.
The wolf fretted not for the ills of the worm.
But despite it all, strange as it might have seemed, he still felt a kinship with this pair.
Theirs was a tragedy for the ages. And to have learned fully of the triumph and horror and all between that had led them to this …
“What did she say to you, Gabriel?”
The broken ’saint lifted his head, bewildered.
“… What?”
“You said Prince Morgane touched your mind before she died. What did she say?”
The ghost that had been Gabriel de León only shook his head.
“Nothing that m-matters anymore.”
Jean-Francois pursed his lips. And sighing, he looked finally to Dario.
“Fetch the fetters, love.”
The thrall nodded, walking to the ironbound chest that had once held the bottles of lamp oil.
Fishing about inside, Dario drew out a pair of heavy leg irons.
The irons were in fact solid silver, the thrall wincing as the metal scalded his bare hands.
But after a nod from Jean-Francois, he tossed them swift across the river.
They landed with a clunk at the Liathe’s feet, gleaming in the chymical light.
“See the Last Silversaint to his cell, Dario.”
“Your will be done, Master.”
Dario nodded briskly to a quartet of ’swords, who stooped and dragged Gabriel to his feet.
With a bow to Jean-Francois, the lad headed toward the great stone doors.
As de León was half hauled and half carried from the cell, the historian carefully cleaned his quill, slowly packed away his ink, eyes on the monstress across the river.
“What am I supposed to do with those?” she asked, eyeing the manacles.
“Ankles. Once they’re secured, the good capitaine will be over to check.”
“Don’t want me running away from my execution?”
“Flying is more our concern. My mother has gone to a great deal of trouble to kill you, Mlle Castia. It would hardly do to have you flutter away before you take the stage.”
“Heaven forbid. But pray, how will I get there?”
Celene gestured to the black river between them. Jean-Francois smiled in reply.
“The same way you arrived, mademoiselle.” He nodded to an ironbound chest, still resting on the broken shoreline. “In a coffin.”
Celene clenched her jaw.
“Ankles,” he repeated.
Resigned now, the Last Liathe stooped to the oily stone.
Rather than burn her hands, she shrugged off her coat, cinched the silver bonds around her boots.
When she was done, the capitaine shot a warning glance to his remaining men, still stood on the shoreline with torches in hand.
Wading across the river, bristling with threat, the capitaine stooped to inspect the Liathe’s handiwork. Satisfied, he nodded to the Marquis.
Jean-Francois tucked his history beneath his arm.
“Merci, Mlle Castia. It was truly a tale for the ages. And though I suspect it will not mean much, I am glad to have shared it, and am grateful for your time.”
“Almost over now.”
The Marquis nodded. He would miss this when it was gone.
But even Kings of Forever end.
And with a bow, Jean-Francois went to see his mother.