Chapter 63
Chapter Sixty-Three
Roremar
The final day of the Revels.
A part of him was grateful. This mess would finally be over. His guards had told him as much last night when they’d given him a bucket of water and soap to wash up with. Apparently they wanted him presentable for…whatever they planned.
Another part of him was surprised Emmeline and Desmond had never come back. He was grateful for that, too, of course—he didn’t have the energy to chase them away again—but from how well he knew them both, it surprised him. Not enough to try to figure it out, though.
His brother’s death had taken all that ambition with it. Now, he’d just been counting down the moments until his punishment was doled out. Nothing would be severe enough, but at least it would be something. It would stop the threat in his bones.
Darcy was the one to retrieve him. He’d almost given up waiting when his old friend appeared at the iron bars, a key in hand.
“Sorry they made it be you, Darcy,” Roremar said as he was dragged to his feet by a second soldier, Calleus.
“Me, too,” Darcy answered.
They pulled him up the stairs into the main halls of the Trade House. A setting sun streamed in the high windows, burning fiery red. Fitting, though the sudden brightness stung his eyes after a week in the dark.
He squinted against it, nearly stumbling over his own feet when Darcy and Calleus dragged him to the nearest staircase. His stomach dropped. He’d expected them to lead him out onto the Promenade to make a show of his execution, but they were taking him upstairs.
The grand moonstone building was empty but for their echoing boots, each counting out a death toll. Dull shouts from the Revels trickled through the locked windows.
“Any hint of what’s to come?” Roremar ground out as they walked him down a long hall on the third floor.
“Haven’t told us,” Darcy said, grabbing Roremar’s arm a little more aggressively.
“Sure it’ll be brutal,” Calleus added.
“Shut your damn mouth, Calleus,” Darcy growled. The intervention left Roremar more than a little surprised. He’d assumed the Lyra Isle Guard had written him off—he’d be better off if he had.
They passed an east facing window, and Roremar slowed, gazing out over the Promenade.
The festival he’d always disdained, the children waving streamers and running through the streets, weaving between tents selling everything from candy to jewelry to stained glass wind chimes.
Adults lining walkways and balconies, toasting to…
To his downfall, in part.
He forced himself not to think of his own siblings or his mother as he watched. How they were probably shut up in the Academy in mourning rather than enjoying the holiday. They’d probably never celebrate this anniversary again.
His gaze landed on the sculpture in the center of the Promenade, before the Mezzanine and the Trade House. The one erected each year atop a dais—a model of the one the Twelfth Fate, Dryvius, had been executed atop all those centuries ago.
No one really knew what it looked like—the renditions in history books and artwork varied vastly—but every year, Lyra recreated their own for this day. Throughout the Revels, people burned letters before it, things they wanted to send to the grave. Secrets and sins.
It was a useless act, Roremar knew. By lighting those fears, Starsearchers turned them into an offering rather than the cleansing they thought they were.
They gave those pieces of their pasts to the Fate of Chaos and Revelry, and Spirits knew what an ancient being born of calamity would do with them.
The monument this year was a monstrous thing sculpted of black clay, the shape of a panther.
Sometimes, they chose to model it after the Fate himself, sometimes after a symbol.
This year, they opted for one of his pets.
The sun beat down as it fell in the sky, unseasonably warm for this late in the year, withering the clay beneath its heated beams.
At the end of the festival, they’d melt it down.
He wouldn’t be there to see it done.
“Come on,” Calleus said, tugging him down the corridor.
Roremar didn’t look back.
They marched him to a room at the end of the hall, the opposite end baring the door with the heavy iron lock he’d noticed the first time he snuck in here with Emmeline.
Fates, thinking about her was torture, but even she fled his mind when he was shoved through an office door and came to a blaring halt.
“Uncle?” he asked.
Aldryn Falliare’s name sat on the desk, the office decorated similarly to his at the Academy with expensive glass-encased artifacts and heavy books lining the shelves curving around the corner behind the desk. The mantle beside them bore crystal sculptures, and even the rug looked lavish.
It grated on him even more after realizing how deeply his uncle was manipulating everything on Lyra yet kept that wealth for himself.
“Hello, Roremar,” Aldryn said, voice cool.
Tarli Richmond, the Head of the Accords, and Brean Witz, the Head of the Trade House both stood beside the desk. And in one of the matching armchairs before the window, sitting beside a marble chess set, was—
“What the fuck is he doing here?” Roremar ground out when he met the beady eyes of the Snake Charmer.
The man grinned, predatory and gleeful as he shuffled a pawn around the board. “I’m here for the show.” He waved a hand, one finger still deformed from where Roremar had broken them all. The bruising on his face had cleared up—unfortunately.
Roremar’s chains clanged as he lunged, the short length between his wrists pulling tight when he stretched out for the disgusting man who had allowed Emmeline to be abused all those years. Darcy caught his arms, wrestling him back.
“Don’t be stupid,” he whispered in Roremar’s ear.
“Nothing to lose.” He didn’t give a Fate’s damn what any of them considered smart. He was a man meant to die. He may as well avenge her as he went.
“Roremar.” His uncle’s serious voice sobered him, a habit after all these years of being beneath his thumb.
Roremar tossed his disheveled waves off his forehead, assessing the room more clearly. There were two other Starsearchers present. Both high ranking based on their formal leathers and cloaks but not from Lyra as far as he knew.
“Who are you?” He had no need for pleasantries anymore.
“These are the heads of two of the other constellation isles,” Falliare began.
“The War Master of Alvan, Enya Yorren.” The woman with dark brown hair cropped above her shoulders and a sharp stare nodded at him.
Aldryn gestured to the man beside her who towered over everyone else in the room, with eyes as wide as an owl that didn’t seem to miss a beat.
“And the Lead Cartographer of Byron, Maeson Trellis.”
Byron and Alvan?
That was the telescope sigil on his pin, though. And the woman’s bore the starfire phoenix. Roremar’s brow creased as he met his uncle’s eyes, trying to figure out what his goal was here.
“It wasn’t my idea,” Aldryn said. But he offered no more information.
Didn’t matter anyway. Part of him didn’t want his uncle here at all.
At least it was only Falliare and not the rest of his family.
He couldn’t face them after what he’d done.
Couldn’t hear his little sisters’ sobs as his fate was declared or watch Leo try to fight the trembling lip he’d always gotten when he was upset no matter how old he got.
Roremar had to protect them.
“To be honest, I don’t quite know why we’re here either,” Enya Yorren said. “Though I’ve been enlightened about the case by a few different people and was more than willing to assist when I received the letter. But I’m not sure why it is Maeson and me in particular.”
Maeson nodded in agreement.
The double doors to Falliare’s office slammed back against the walls.
“We can help with that.” The voice cracked through the room, bouncing off silver ornaments and stained glass with a force only the Fates commanded.
It sent a mix of unending desire and dread through him.
No.
What in a Fates starry eyed fuck was she doing here? She couldn’t be here now.
But he couldn’t stop himself from turning around, couldn’t pry his eyes from hers despite the questions rising in the room.
Like some avenging Angel, a Fate of Saviors and Sacrifices, Emmeline DeLeoste stood in the doorway.
Her black leathers hugged her body from neck to toe, triple blades glinting dangerously.
Desmond stood at her side with Roremar’s own sword strapped to his back.
And as Roremar’s gaze locked with Emmeline’s, the empty hole in his chest pulled tight. Sheer determination—understanding and compassion and things he refused to name right now—stared back at him.
She knows.
Emmeline nodded as if she heard that horrified thought echoing through his mind, and disgrace washed over him. She knew. She knew what he’d done, and this time she believed him.
“Emmeline, no,” he barely breathed. She couldn’t do this—it would only drag her down, too.
“Emmeline?” Enya, the War Master, asked. “The one I’ve been writing to.”
“The one who invited me here?” Maeson followed up, voice low.
Roremar’s stare whipped between them. “She invited you?”
He looked to his uncle, his nod a confirmation. What in a Fatesdamned ruthless grave was going on here?
“It is lovely to meet you both,” Emmeline addressed Enya and Maeson, and Roremar almost had to laugh.
Ever the proper tutor when she wanted to be.
“While I’d enjoy getting to speak with you at length about your respective isles and the work done there, that is not the reason I asked you here today. ”
“Please, go on.” Enya smiled pleasantly, clearly a fan of Emmeline’s. Of course, she was. How could she not be?
Emmeline stepped further into the room, Desmond closing the doors behind them. Roremar wanted to beg, to fall to his knees and plead. She couldn’t do this—it would ruin her, too, and he’d been trying so damn hard to avoid that cruel fate.
“Roremar Silventa is not responsible for these murders,” she declared.
No. No. No.
Nico’s life, his father’s, the others he had taken. They all hammered at his mind.
“I am!” he shouted. “My hands killed all those women. I killed my brother, and I—” His words caught in his throat, a secret he’d kept for so long, releasing it now felt sacrilegious, but he forced it out if only to convince them all. “I killed my father, too.”
“By the fucking Fates,” Desmond said, blowing out a whistle. Emmeline’s jaw dropped, too. Apparently they hadn’t worked out that bloody piece of his past. That he had not found his father dead that morning ten years ago, but he’d been the one who drove the blade.
Roremar’s eyes flashed to Aldryn, but his uncle only nodded grimly, as if he’d always known. Of course he had.
From his chair, the Snake Charmer grinned as the madness unfolded.
“Your hands may have taken the lives, but it was not you, Roremar,” Emmeline went on calmly.
“It was me. I swear it.” His words were drowned out by questions, one on top of the next.
“What is she talking about?” Tarli Richmond asked. He had known Deacon Silventa, worked with him a few times. His pale face paled even further as he looked from Aldryn to Emmeline.
Maeson blurted out, “Who are you?”
“How is that possible?” Brean Witz asked, voice low.
“It’s not,” Roremar affirmed, refusing to let panic seep into his voice. “It was me.”
He needed them to believe him. Desperation scratched at his throat. His nails dug into the bruises Nico had left on his body. The ones he hadn’t allowed to heal over the past week.
“It was me—”
“Stop lying, Roremar!” Emmeline begged, her expression broken with hurt.
“I’m not!”
Desmond’s voice was low. “Rore.” He met his best friend’s gaze. “Come on.”
“It was me.”
Emmeline’s teeth sank into her bottom lip as her stare pleaded, the agony in that Fatesdamned motion slicing through him.
“If Roremar is not responsible”—Enya interrupted the ongoing calamity with a strike of calm command—“then who is?”
An apology deepened Emmeline’s hazel eyes as she took a deep breath. Without looking away from him, she said, “It was Dryvius. The Fate of Chaos and Revelry.”