Chapter 5
Ys.I’ve heard that name before.
As I slip silently away from the corner and step back into the chattering, glimmering world of the party, I search my memories.
Ys.
The archbishop, I think. My first kill. Rome.
So this isn’t about Ys?
I’d thought I’d heard him wrong, that I hadn’t understood the word he’d actually said. When I’d returned to my seedy, anonymous hotel room on the outskirts of the city, I’d searched the word Ys on the web, spelling it every way I could think of. Ees. Is. Ies.
The only thing that came up was a long-ago legend about a French city that flooded after a deceitful princess opened the dikes. Nothing that an archbishop would mention in his last moments of consciousness.
Nothing that would matter to Mark or his sister now.
Ys started the game.
One thing is certain to me, and that is that Mark must have killed Lackland and that Melody suspects as much. And why he killed him has to do with a dead husband who I hadn’t known existed until now.
Does Tristan know? About this dead husband? And about what Mark did while they were in Singapore?
“Ah, my child. There you are,” says a warm, Irish-inflected voice, and I turn to see my uncle Mortimer striding toward me, his scarlet-trimmed black simar moving around his feet. An overwhelming sense of relief swells in my chest as he gives me one of his wide, gap-toothed smiles. His mismatched blue and green eyes are sparkling and kind. “Is everything okay?”
I dip my head, almost a nod. “Can we talk?” I ask him. I know better than to peer wildly around, than to look like we’re having anything other than a sweet familial moment.
“Walk with me,” he says, and he laces my arm through his, tucking my hand in the crook of his elbow and patting it while we walk. I am not a tall woman, but my uncle is shorter than me by an inch, and so our pace is evenly matched as we take the stairs down from the terrace to a covered balcony looking out toward Midtown.
Once we’re alone, I tell him everything I’ve just heard, about Lackland’s death, Mark’s dead husband, and Ys. I bring up what the archbishop said to me the day I killed him, in case Mortimer had forgotten that detail—a detail that, at the time, he’d told me to dismiss as the rantings of a poisoned sinner.
My uncle puts his hands on the railing, a frown on his face. He’s wearing his pectoral cross, a simple silver one, in keeping with the current pope’s penchant for austerity, and it reveals the steady rhythm of his breath while he thinks.
This exact moment is why the pope kept my uncle in his role after he was elected; it was why the pope’s predecessor lifted my uncle into his position in the Curia in the first place. His calm, his brilliance. His ability to sift through information and find the hidden threads linking it all together without letting emotions interfere.
“Ys is a myth,” my uncle finally says.
I stand with my own hands at the railing, but I flex and lift and gesture as I speak, so that it seems like we’re talking about something to do with the city or with my dress or with the party upstairs. The Laurence bride sharing all her plans with her beloved uncle. “I know it’s a myth,” I say. “That’s why it makes no sense. A drowned city off the coast of Brittany?—”
“No,” my uncle says. “There is a different myth.” He looks at me. “That day in Rome, I didn’t tell you the truth about Ys. The entire truth, at least.”
“Why?” I ask, utterly bewildered.
Saints are supposed to know everything. It’s our job to know everything.
He shrugs, a simple, humble gesture. “I hoped I was wrong. I hoped you’d heard incorrectly or that Stitt had been delusional in his final minutes. The alternative was too outlandish—and dangerous—to consider.”
“Dangerous,” I echo. “What exactly is this different myth, then?”
“I suppose it’s less than a myth, if we’re being specific. Ys is a whisper, around for a few decades now. A secret society—or an organization, if you’d like—comprised of politicians and arms dealers and whatever other influential people are convenient to accuse at the time.”
“We’d know about it if it were real, though,” I point out. “There’s almost nothing you don’t know.”
My uncle slowly twirls the ring on his thumb, his gaze out onto the city. “Almost,” he agrees. “Almost nothing.”
I think about this. “You want me to find out what Mark knows about Ys?”
“If the information is anywhere, it’s in his head and in the server room at Lyonesse.”
The server room. I’ve crept into armed compounds, onto private jets, and inside the Vatican itself, but the vault of Lyonesse would be a challenge even for me.
“I’ll do my best,” I say finally.
“You have more tools at your disposal than only theft,” my uncle reminds me.
“Something tells me it would be harder to pry information out of Mark than his underground server room.”
Although I think back to three years ago, the way Mark had spread me open to take my virginity. How he held me in my bed after and called me his honeysuckle queen. For a brief moment, I’d thought that he’d felt…something. For me. If not love or obsession, then possession.
And I’d drunk it down like communion wine.
Of course, it had vanished in the dark. I’d woken up to find him dressed and ready to leave, declaring that we’d done enough to seal the engagement and we wouldn’t need to see each other again.
I have played this game a lot longer than you and with people far more dangerous than you, and I will win every match, little wife, every bout, and I won’t even need to try when I do it.
No, my best chance is the server room. I still hope to crack him open, to become his honeysuckle queen and gain his trust, but that will take time.
“I wish it didn’t have to be this way for you,” Uncle Mortimer says after a long moment. “Nothing is abhorrent in the service of God, and yet I cannot help but be grateful it is not me.”
“I know.”
It’s not something we’ve discussed at length given that I’m his niece, but I know enough from the other saints who work for him—from the people I’ve tortured and from the secrets I’ve stolen—to know that my uncle finds sex distasteful. Like money or luxury, sex only exists as weakness to be exploited in others.
I think power is the only thing my uncle has ever wanted, honestly—which is strange because as a cardinal he could hardly have more of it, but perhaps I don’t understand the appeal of power in the same way that he doesn’t understand the appeal of sex.
Well, maybe I do understand the appeal of power. But wielded against me, wielded by someone who would bite me before a party just to mark me as his.
“You remember what I told you in Rome that day?” Uncle Mortimer asks.
That day. My first day as a saint. First, I’d killed Stitt, who’d covered up sexual abuse committed by a priest in the Midwest, and then I’d killed a deacon for a similar crime after. I’d stabbed the deacon in an alley, a robbery gone wrong, or so it had looked. It had been the first time I’d used my new honeysuckle knife, and there’d been so much blood. So much more than I ever could have imagined one body could hold.
“You said you were proud,” I say, recalling the holy card he’d given me while gore had still streaked my face and my hair. The card was of St. Julian the Hospitaller, patron saint of many things, including murderers.
Tu me superbushad been scrawled on the back.
“Before I said that, before I gave you the card,” he clarifies. “I told you that you were to be a whole sacrifice. A burnt offering. That the pain you felt over your sins to save God’s kingdom would be sweeter than incense.”
I swallow, looking down with a tight jaw. My engagement ring winks in the light, and on my left thigh, hidden by layers of silk and chiffon, is the small knife that I’ve used like an ancient priest, like an angel of death. But even though it has been three years of blood, secrets, and knowing I’ll be the devil’s bride, I still feel like I’m burning on the altar, the smoke billowing high.
I know it’s my path. I know I’m doing what God has meant for me to do.
But it burns yet.
“Your sins to save God’s kingdom,” my uncle repeats. “My chosen saint. Learn what you can about Ys, win Mark’s trust. You will do more as his wife than any of us could do with years of blood and shadows. And you will be holy throughout it all.”