Chapter 43
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
I wished I could communicate with Atrius wordlessly. I wished I could tell him to put that damned sword down, right now . Because I knew he was confused, too, but all he knew was that I was a runaway Arachessen and this was the Sightmother, and he had promised to protect me.
If he tried to protect me, he would die.
I held my hand out behind me, a single splayed palm that I prayed told him clearly, Stop .
And what did it say that a childish part of me, the part of me who had been raised by this woman, couldn’t stand to see Atrius kill her—or the other way around?
What was she doing here?
I hadn’t asked for backup. They certainly hadn’t indicated they would give me any. But perhaps I had been wrong when I’d interpreted my unanswered call to the Keep as a sign that the Arachessen had discovered my betrayal.
Perhaps she had changed her mind.
Perhaps she had come here, knowing we were coming for the Pythora King and... and killed him before we could.
It didn’t make sense. But it was the only scenario I could string together.
I was normally good with words, good with playing different roles while thinking fast. But my confusion slipped to the surface now, despite myself.
“I don’t—did you do this, Sightmother?” I gestured to the king—the corpse, more like it. “After all this time, have we finally?—”
The Sightmother approached me, step by step, and cupped my cheek. She smiled. Her touch was overwhelming—she let all her emotions pour through it. Intense motherly love, fifteen years worth of it. The pride of a commanding officer.
And sheer, bloody, cold-as-steel anger. Anger that only cut deeper for all the warmth she felt, burying into my gut and twisting.
Her smile soured as her lip curled.
“What,” she asked calmly, “are you doing here?”
I had experienced fear before. But never fear like this.
There was a right answer to this question. There had to be. I frantically told myself this, forced myself to believe it.
I could give her that perfect answer. I should try.
Instead, I asked, just as calmly, “What are you doing here?”
“I came to meet you, of course.”
This answer was not comforting. Instead, it chilled me down to my bones.
I stuffed that fear as far down as I could, hidden beneath decades worth of genuine love for the Sightmother.
“I’m so happy to see you,” I said. “But why is the Pythora King?—”
“The Pythora King is more than a man.”
I didn’t understand. I didn’t even know how to frame the question on my lips.
“The Pythora King has not been a man,” the Sightmother said, “for a very long time.”
A terrible feeling rose in my throat. A buzzing in my ears, like the breath of a monster behind me, a realization that I didn’t want to turn around and face.
I said, quietly, “Sightmother, I don’t understand.”
Her smile flickered. She laughed softly. “Come, Sylina. You’re so intelligent. How can you tell me you never suspected?”
Never suspected what? I wanted to say. But I didn’t want to open my mouth to let her hear my voice. Didn’t want to betray my own confusion.
“There is power in suffering,” she said. “There is power in having something to fight against. We taught you that. And you know it better than most.”
My ears were ringing.
I didn’t want to believe what she was saying. Couldn’t believe it. Because if I was putting these pieces together right, it meant I had just spent my life fighting against a king that didn’t exist, in service to a Sisterhood that had lied to me. Lied, in the name of the very evil that I was so determined to wipe off the face of this kingdom.
Something inside me simply collapsed. Just came apart. I opened my mouth but found no words. I choked them back, because whatever would come out would just betray my devastation.
Think, Sylina. Focus.
“You were never supposed to know,” the Sightmother said. “If you had obeyed, you still wouldn’t.”
Her face hardened. I felt the shift in her presence, something deadly, like a sword being drawn—except the magic of the Sightmother was more deadly than any piece of steel.
“And why didn’t you obey, Sylina?”
She stepped closer, and that little movement was enough to make Atrius’s thread of self-control, already tenuous, snap.
He pushed past me, his still-bloodied sword out. “Get away from her,” he ground out, and the four words were all command; a way I had never once heard another person speak to the Sightmother. But what struck me more was the protectiveness that permeated his presence with those words, primal and unguarded in a way that Atrius rarely was.
I cringed, because if I felt it, the Sightmother certainly did too.
Her brows rose.
And with a flick of her hand and a powerful burst of magic through the threads, Atrius was on his knees, straining against a body that would no longer cooperate with him, his threads bound by the Sightmother’s spell .
Her head tilted to me. “Perhaps now I’m starting to understand some things.”
I did not give myself time to question the words that flew from my lips next. Didn’t allow myself to think about their consequences.
“You told me to gain his trust, Sightmother,” I said. “I have. All you’re seeing is evidence of my commitment.”
Weaver, how my chest ached, when I felt the shock in Atrius’s soul. The hint of betrayal, still now just a suspicion of something he didn’t yet want to believe.
“I see evidence of your disobedience,” the Sightmother snapped.
“I tried to consult you,” I said. “I couldn’t reach the Keep. I did this for the will of the Weaver?—”
“ The Weaver commanded you to kill him. ”
The Sightmother’s voice boomed through the ancient halls, obliterating the silence along with my secret.
It took every shred of discipline not to show that I’d stopped breathing.
Atrius’s presence went cold. He could no longer avoid the realization.
I had been expecting his anger. I could have been prepared for that. Instead, what I got was his hurt. Pure, raw hurt—the hurt of that vulnerable version of him I saw when we were alone every night, soft and unguarded in sleep. A child’s hurt.
When I was only ten years old, the Arachessen tested my ability to withstand pain. I had hardened myself to it, told myself that if I could endure disfigured eyes or broken bones or missing fingers, I could endure anything.
And yet now, even as I bit down hard on my tongue, right over that ridge of scar tissue, I thought this pain might break me.
But I wouldn’t let it break him.
“Now,” she said, “Where is that dagger?”
I didn’t even have time to refuse it before she held out her hand—and suddenly, the knife was in it, weight missing from my hip.
I had only seen the Sightmother fight a handful of times. It was never a fight so much as a slaughter.
I didn’t even sense her moving until the blade was hurtling toward Atrius’s heart.
I screamed, “ He is god-touched! ”
The blade stopped, hovering in mid-air. The Sightmother’s head tilted, cocked like a bird’s. It was rare that I felt anything at all from her presence, given how skilled she was at hiding her emotions—but at this, I sensed a little glimmer of interest.
“Forgive me, “I choked out. “I was... just taken aback. I should have explained sooner. I tried to reach the Keep. No one answered me.”
“God-touched.”
She pulled the weapon back to her hand. A harsh command in those two words: go on.
“He was touched by the goddess Nyaxia herself,” I said. “ Nyaxia , Sightmother. Imagine what an offering that would be to Acaeja.”
There were few things most of the gods of the White Pantheon valued more than a sacrifice of another’s acolyte in their name—especially an acolyte of a rival god, and most of all one hated as much as Nyaxia. Yes, Acaeja was the most tolerant god of Nyaxia, but tolerance was not alliance. A gift this great would hold significant weight.
The Sightmother went still, the dagger still raised. I couldn’t read either her face or her presence. Then she reached out with her free hand and grabbed Atrius’s chin, roughly forcing his face up to hers as he strained against her binding.
She withdrew her hand just as abruptly.
“ Cursed ,” she said. “Cursed by Nyaxia.”
“But she made a bargain with him, too. He acts on her behalf. Taking land from Acaeja in the name of his heretic goddess. Surely, the Weaver would appreciate that gift.”
The Sightmother considered this.
I bowed my head, hands open before me in a show of piety and obedience.
“Forgive me, Sightmother. I—I acted too rashly. As you’ve warned me against many times. And if the punishment for that is death, I?—”
“Enough.”
In two long steps, she crossed the dais, and then her hands were on my face. My body’s reaction to her touch was visceral—part of me wanting so desperately to lean into it, as I had for the last fifteen years, and another part wanting just as fiercely to pull away.
“I have raised you, Sylina,” she murmured, a slight crack in her voice. “I am well aware of your flaws. I spent two decades trying to protect you from them. You always had such potential—” She cut herself off, her palm sliding to my cheek, and for a long moment she stood there, unmoving.
It was hard for me to gather my own courage, stifle my own anger, to peer through the gap in the door that had opened before me.
“I want to give Acaeja this,” I murmured. And because I knew that the Sightmother could feel my threads, I made sure the words were as close to the truth as possible. How sickeningly easy it was—to let her see how much I still loved my goddess and my Sisterhood, even as I reeled from their betrayal. “Let me redeem myself, Sightmother. Please .”
The plea rolled so convincingly from my lips. Maybe that made me every bit the hypocrite I accused the Sightmother of being.
I could feel Atrius’s eyes burning into my back like the heat of the sun. I could not let myself feel it. Could not acknowledge his presence.
The Sightmother regarded me for a long, long time. I could have sworn I felt something so foreign in her presence—uncertainty. Conflict . Until this moment, it had never occurred to me that the Sightmother could experience such things. I’d always thought that once you reached a certain level of power, a certain level of faith, it was like Acaeja wiped all those thoughts away. Why would an acolyte of the unknown feel any uncertainty? Doubt any decision?
Funny, the clarity that comes in the most terrible moments. I never realized before that this was why I had chosen Acaeja as my fixation, out of all the gods of the White Pantheon.
She was the only one who promised comfort in the unknown.
But even that had been a lie, because now I saw that the Sightmother felt just as uncertain in this moment as any other fallible human .
She leaned her head close to me, our foreheads nearly touching.
“Fine. You have earned your second chance, Sylina,” she said, each word weighted, like a heavy gift.
My relief flooded me. I smiled with a shaky breath. “Thank you?—”
I didn’t even feel her magic—her sedation—until it was too late, and the ground was rising up to meet me.
The last thing I sensed wasn’t her loving stare, grateful as I was for it.
No, it was Atrius’s—cold and unblinking, seeping with the blood of my betrayal.