Chapter 22 #2
The paper birds wheeled high above, zipping from one end of the library to the other. They were graceful. Beautiful. Silent, apart from the quiet rustle of their wings.
Still staring up at them, I said, “Lorreth is on his way. He just went to get changed.”
“He’s coming here again? Why?”
“Because Lorreth’s supposed be your friend,” I answered tartly. “He wants to make sure we don’t get into another fight and I don’t kill you. Plus I want him here to make sure you’re not lying about whatever you’ve found in these books.”
There were a lot of books. A lot. The sight of them was cheering.
If Foley hadn’t found anything to help me with my conundrum, then surely he wouldn’t have bothered to gather so many of them.
I tossed a net over my emotions, caught them on a line, trapping them tight.
The vampire had been a member of the Lupo Proelia once.
He’d also been Fisher’s friend. There was no denying either of those facts, but I had no reason to trust him.
Plenty had changed during the years Foley had been sequestered away in his high tower.
He was a shunned member of the Blood Court, yet he had remained here, reading books for hundreds of years, with no one for company but a Lord of Midnight he resented, a Lord of Midnight who ignored him, and a salty cat made of shadows.
Who knew what kind of person he was now, after so much time and torment?
“The chances of you killing me are nil, Your Majesty. And Lorreth won’t be able to tell if I’m lying.
He isn’t my maker. Even Tal can’t read me like that anymore.
” I had used that same sour tone whenever I’d kowtowed to a guardian back home in Zilvaren.
My disdain had been a blunt instrument that had lacked finesse, but Foley’s was a subtle knife.
It cut. “He denounced me and rescinded his claim on me. I’m sure he’s proposed the same to you as well by now. ”
I ran my fingers lightly over the spines of the first stack of books. “He has,” I confirmed.
“Hm.” Foley processed this. “So Tal doesn’t want you, either. He must see you as the rest of us do. Weak. Vulnerable. Naive . . .”
“Are you trying to hurt my feelings, Foley?” I ran my tongue over my top row of teeth, slowing down my heart; letting it thunder accomplished nothing. “I wouldn’t waste your time if I were you.”
“Oh, but you aren’t me,” he snapped out of nowhere, his control slipping for a second—just one tiny split second—showing me the truth of what lay beneath.
He was afraid.
“You think you’ve known hardship, stealing water and fending off bullies for a quarter of a century?
Try eight hundred years, fighting for your right to exist. This place is worse than hell, because no matter how bad things get, there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel. A hope that you might escape—”
“Then why haven’t you?”
Foley’s jaw snapped closed.
“If you hate it here, then why haven’t you left? Why didn’t you just go back to your friends, where you belonged? You’ve been up here throwing yourself a fucking pity party for the better part of a millennium, complaining about how terrible it all is, when you could have left at any time.”
“How?” he whispered. “How could I have gone back to them, when I had become one of the monsters they swore to kill? They would never have accepted me.”
“Lorreth said they wrote to you! They wanted you to leave Sanasroth. Fisher commanded you to come home!” I didn’t need to shout at him, but gods, he was exhausting to be around.
Tal might have felt bad about giving Foley this new life.
He had let him skulk around up here, feeling sorry for himself, but I had no tolerance for this kind of defeatism.
Zilvaren wrung that out of a person pretty quickly. Either that, or it killed you.
Foley turned to look at the pale green evenlight fluttering in the huge hearth by the stairs. I watched the muscles feather in his jaw, his nostrils flaring. “You’re misinformed. There were no letters. They left me to my fate here, and I can’t condemn them for it.”
“Fool. Are you seriously that stupid?”
I was getting better at sensing Lorreth.
Over time, my awareness was sharpening, blossoming in the back of my mind.
I hadn’t felt him sneaking up on me earlier at dusk, but I had registered him climbing the stairs up to the library this time.
Foley had felt his approach, too. Would he look at Lorreth, though?
Like hell he would. “There’s no need to pretend, bard. I know how it is,” he said.
Lorreth strode across the room and set Avisiéth down on the reading table with a loud clunk.
The vampire flinched, his lips peeling back to reveal those plated golden teeth.
He had his fear well under wraps again now, but his discomfort was harder to conceal.
Avisiéth had plenty of silver folded into its blade.
But it wasn’t just that; Avisiéth was a god sword.
The magic of the gods ran through it—magic made to undo the likes of Foley and the other members of the Blood Court.
It seemed unkind of Lorreth to have tossed the blade down so carelessly, considering the effect he knew it would have on his old friend, but then I saw the hard light in his eyes and knew there was more to the action.
“I’m not pretending, and you know I can’t lie. Look at me, Foley,” he said.
Reluctantly, the vampire looked at him.
“We wrote to you. Many times. I did. Ren did. I know for a fact that Fisher sent you many missives during those first five years after that night at Ajun. After that he cut down to one letter a year. Even Danya wrote to you. Her letters were mostly curse words, calling you every name under the sun for ignoring the rest of us for so long, but I know she asked you to come home. All of us have asked. And all of us have told you the same thing: It might be tricky, sure, but we would find a way to make it work. For you to have a place in Cahlish, with your family.”
Foley had set his jaw defiantly as Lorreth had been speaking. “So many letters,” he mused. “And yet none of them reached me.”
“For the love of the gods,” I snapped. “Look, neither of you can lie. So you’re both telling the truth.
There are plenty of ways that can be true.
The letters could have been intercepted and stolen, for one.
In fact, that seems like a reasonable assumption, given that the vampires of this court are nosy as all hell and spiteful to boot. Now, can we please put this—”
“Saeris?”
“—aside and move on, because—”
“Saeris,” Lorreth said more firmly, speaking over me for a second time. “Your hands.”
They were glowing again.
Fuck.
I’d worn a new pair of leather gloves today.
I still didn’t want my runes becoming a major talking point in the halls of Ammontraíeth—it was bad enough that I kept catching my friends staring at my hands—and besides, the gloves made me feel powerful.
Capable. They were a part of the costume I had donned when I’d walked down those stairs into the Coronation Hall and declared myself queen of this court. And right now, they were smoldering.
“Gods fucking damn it.” I bit out the words, my canines lengthening with frustration. I ripped off the gloves. The pain wasn’t so bad right now, but it was getting worse. The backs of my hands blackened as the runes throbbed with power, embers of fire flaring just below the surface of my skin.
“Does it hurt?” Foley asked curiously.
I gave him a look. “What do you think?”
He snorted, peering over to study the smoke curling away from my burning skin.
The tendons in my hand looked like they were lit up from the inside.
“Yes, that does look painful,” he conceded.
He picked up a quill from an ink pot in the middle of the reading table, using its sleek black feather to point out the lines of one of the runic shapes in particular.
“This one seems especially inflamed,” he observed.
“This—” He cast a wary glance at Avisiéth; he’d had to come closer to Lorreth’s sword to reach me.
“You see this rune here? The one that looks like an arrow bisecting a circle? This is one of the most important Alchemical symbols.”
I saw the rune he was talking about, all right. The shape had already burned through my skin and was weeping plasma; the clear liquid ran over my hand and dripped from my wrist. “What does it mean?” I asked.
Foley’s eyes snapped to mine. “I think you can probably guess that one,” he said. “That rune is so predominant because you’ve already been utilizing its magic for some time.”
“It’s the rune for quicksilver?”
Foley nodded. “The quicksilver’s sentient. It pulls power to it. It makes sense that this rune is hurting you the most. In the records I’ve found, the quicksilver rune has always been the hungriest. The first to awaken.”
Oh, I knew how greedy the quicksilver was. Always wanting something. Always making demands. I had plenty of firsthand experience with that.
The vampire’s curiosity rose as he angled his head, inspecting the back of my right hand. “Remarkable. Truly. I’ve never seen an Alchimeran shield this intricate before.”
“Alchimeran shield?”
“Yes. This,” he said impatiently, tapping the back of my hand. “This is your shield. All Alchemists had them.”
“You don’t need to talk to me like I’m stupid. Magic hasn’t existed in Zilvaren for a very, very long time. How am I supposed to know any of this?”
From his expression, Foley wasn’t about to accept my upbringing or my background as an excuse for my ignorance.
“You cannot eradicate magic from a city. Once it takes root within a community, it never leaves. It will find a way to thrive, one way or another. You just didn’t care to look for it. Like within yourself, for example.”
“I kind of had some other things going on at the time. Y’know, trying to make sure my brother and I didn’t die of dysentery.”