Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
Isucked up a lungful of clean air as we stepped out of the fortress, but the stench of blood and burning flesh still seared every inhale.
Sometimes, it felt like that smell was just a part of my body, now.
Like I’d been exposed to so much of it in Vostis, when I was seventeen years old, that it had trailed me ever since.
We walked out the back of the fortress into the gardens. They were expansive and well-maintained. The whinnies of distant horses echoed, crying out for a long overdue dinner. One lone corpse lay at the other side of the yard, a silver bolt jutting from its chest. Otherwise, it was empty.
Septimus’s hands were tucked into his pockets, his shoulders square, his jaw set. He remained several strides ahead of me and did not look back. The blood of his friend arced elegantly across his pristine white shirt, leaving no expanse untouched.
I looked down at the harp in my grasp. It played a sickeningly saccharine melody at the back of my head. Its beauty was undeniable, and yet, every perfect note seemed a little off—a threatening, beckoning hand. Zefiah railed against its presence, ever possessive.
Septimus stopped short and withdrew his cigarillo box.
“Apparently Kajmar already knows that we’re on our way to him,” he said. “Good.”
The word was a drawn knife. He flicked open the box at the same time, extracting a cigarillo.
“You were right from the start,” he said.
Fwip, as he struck a match. The scent of vanilla smoke rolled over me.
Not strong enough to mask the death. “The gods know we’re coming for them.
Their followers know it, too. They were instructed to be slow.
So, we will be too. No soft touches. Only blades. ”
There was a time I would have found it satisfying to hear those words from Septimus—you were right. Now, I barely registered them. I parted my lips, not sure what would come out. Some might have offered condolences. Kind words. Platitudes.
Soft touches.
But I only had blades to offer, and so I said, “I will make sure it hurts.”
Septimus’s shoulders lowered as he let out a long exhale.
At last, he turned.
My heart stilled at the expression on his face. I wondered if I had looked like that, when he had found me in Shiket’s ashes, among the bodies of the closest thing I’d ever had to family.
“We have been careless,” he hissed. “Slow.” A brief hesitation, then, as he ripped his gaze away from mine, “Distracted. No more.”
An odd pang of hurt in my chest. Even though he was right.
“A reminder of why we’re doing this,” I said.
His eyes snapped to mine, ablaze, lip twisted in disgust. “I thought you were doing this for riches. Whores recognize whores, right?”
The words came before I could stop them. “Don’t act like I’m the enemy, Septimus.”
“Your blood runs red. Just as theirs did.”
For the first time, it occurred to me that Septimus might see my humanity that way. As a marker of an enemy, not just food. I felt another strange pang in my chest, an ache in a wound too raw to understand yet.
“What color did the blood of the ones who killed my family run?” I said. My knuckles tightened around Zefiah’s hilt of their own accord.
But he ignored me. “Aren’t you going to ask me what you just witnessed?”
The past was too close to the surface of my skin for this. Too easily prodded.
“I know what I saw,” I said. “I’d seen it before.”
“In Vostis, you mean. In Hegaella.”
“Yes.”
He drew in a deep inhale and let it out.
“You’ve seen slaughters,” he said. “But there are some things you saw in that fortress that were not in Vostis or Hegaella.”
He meant what we had seen of the man who had guarded the harp. All that blood, consuming the stone like fungus.
I was silent. I knew I was being challenged.
He huffed a laugh. “Now you choose to have restraint. Say it. You’ve never coddled me before. Don’t start now.”
{He does not know you as you thought he did,} Zefiah remarked, and to shut her up, I bit out, “The curse. That was the curse.”
Septimus whirled around, tossing the folded parchment toward me. The letter fluttered to the ground. I leaned down and picked it up.
It was so bloodstained that the paper was disintegrating with the moisture. Blots of black-red bled into the ink. My ability to read Obitraen was limited. But the message was short:
A century ago, I vowed to follow Gaius to any end. That end comes tonight. Make our deaths worth something. Make the world my child should have had.
—Erekkus
My brow furrowed. Every muscle wanted to drop the letter, but I couldn’t bring myself to.
The very thing that made it so uncomfortable to hold—the way the desperation and determination of someone’s final moments sank into the paper—was the same thing that made it too precious to release.
It reminded me of people I had chosen not to save.
My free hand involuntarily slipped into my pocket and folded around Shiket’s well-worn metal profile.
When my gaze lifted to Septimus, I saw a familiar weight over his shoulders.
The question that sat on the tip of my tongue was dangerous. Dangerous because it threatened to reframe everything that I knew of Septimus. Dangerous because it would force me to challenge what I did not want to.
But words slipped out, anyway. “Why are you doing this?”
I meant: why are you making such sacrifices for this?
He let out an exhale of smoke.
“The same reason you are, Vindica Ultis. Riches and power.”
His voice was so bitter, the words ate into my skin.
“You can’t bullshit me after that.” Not with someone’s desperate blood-soaked final words in my hands. Not with all that death still burning behind every blink. “I want the truth.”
Another long exhale. He didn’t turn.
“Fine. I’ll tell you another story, and perhaps it will answer your question. It’s such a nice story. Full of kings and queens and handsome princes and magic. A story told to a generation of Bloodborn babies.”
Every word burned like a brand upon flesh, and his voice grew tighter and tighter, as if they hurt like one, too.
“Once upon a time, there lived a beautiful queen and a handsome king. Their kingdom was imperfect and cursed—cruel punishment from their goddess, and even they didn’t know what their kingdom had done to deserve it.
Still, they loved their people and each other very much.
When they were expecting their first child, they went to a seer, as Bloodborn royalty often does, to learn what sort of ruler their unborn heir might be.
The seer gave them shocking news. Their unborn prince was destined to be the one to save the Bloodborn people from their millennia of plight.
They were overjoyed. They raised their son to be everything that a chosen one should be. Intelligent, skilled, measured, kind.”
He let out another long exhale, smoke pluming.
“What they did not pay attention to, and perhaps should have,” he said, “was the specifics of the seer’s wording. That their son would not only be a chance at their kingdom’s salvation, but the chance. No one considered that.”
Another vicious inhale.
“My brother,” he hissed, “never thought of that. Not when he took a few hundred of the Bloodborn’s greatest warriors, Atrius included, and went off to serve Nyaxia across realms, in the hopes of earning her forgiveness.
And he did incredible things. Every impossible feat.
Every task that she asked of him. He bested them all.
” He turned, just enough to show me the sliver of his profile.
“But you and I know how these sorts of tales go, don’t we, Vindica Ultis?
The chosen one is groomed to be everything a chosen one should be.
They play by all the rules, win every game. And then—”
Somehow I already knew before he said it.
“She killed him,” he spat. “She laughed at him, and she killed him, like he was a toy she’d grown bored of. A dog that had the audacity to wish to be a wolf.”
I thought of Nyaxia’s face, cruel and disaffected, as I had seen it over both of the worst nights of my life.
I thought of Shiket’s, right before I killed her, bitter and cold.
The gods loved us when it suited them. Resented us when it didn’t.
And it was so very easy to wipe us away once we stopped being useful.
Septimus’s gaze fell to the paper in my hands.
“Erekkus was one of the soldiers who accompanied my brother on that mission. One of Atrius’s men, who had followed them across realms. He was banished from the House of Blood for decades.
Then lost a child to his mission in Glaea.
And this is how he ends, after all of that.
Succumbing to a curse that took his dignity, all to protect this harp. ”
The curse. I had suspected it. But seeing it in person, witnessing the brutality of what that man had become, made nausea roil in my stomach.
I said, because it was the only thing I could think to, “He gave his life to his kingdom. Right up until the end.”
Septimus dropped the cigarillo, grinding it into the dirt with his heel. His eyes were brighter than I’d ever seen them, the ring of red in them stark and bloody.
“Spare me that saccharine bullshit. You’re too smart to believe it.
I am sick of lionizing the selfless sacrifices of my people.
They were noble. My brother was noble. Erekkus was noble.
Anjelika was noble. What a kind thing to say at their graves.
What a nice story to tell their grieving families, if there’s even anyone left.
All my other brothers, all five of them, fell chasing that.
But I’ve never been like them. I’m the last resort. ”
A chill ran up my spine at the look in his eye. The anger. The hunger. Something nagged at me, something that didn’t piece together quite right.
“Then why serve her, after everything she did?” I asked. “Don’t you hate her?”