Chapter 39 Ransom
When dawn came, Ransom was sitting alone on the steps of the cathedral. A guard dog on alert. Or a beast in seclusion. The midnight rain had come and gone, washing the blood from the square. It had chased off Andreas’s assassins too. Only their arrows remained.
As the sun dragged itself over the spires of the Saints’ Quarter, Ransom unfurled his magic.
Shadows bled from him like oil. It was like exhaling.
Or finally scratching a maddening itch. He couldn’t hold it in any more.
He didn’t want to hold it in any more. It was too much – the regret, the fear.
The sight of those black thorns wreathing Seraphine’s body.
He welcomed the rush of his magic and let his nightmares devour the dread in his heart and the creeping sense that she was slipping through his fingers.
Beasts flooded the square.
Ransom prowled alongside them, searching for signs of danger. Wanting to find something amiss, just to rip it apart. He itched to kill, to maim.
Darkness pooled at his every step, as if the shadows slipping from the lamp posts could not resist the ones that seeped from his soul. Raking his hands through his hair, his thoughts reeled back to her.
All magic had a cost.
But not like this.
Not like hers.
He lingered by a fountain, watching the dawn light dance across the floating blossom.
Spent prayers. Wasted petals. And yet, for a moment, it felt like he had stumbled into an oil painting, the kind he used to marvel at for hours as a boy wandering the galleries of Fantome, greedily devouring the grand breadth of nature, all that beauty in its rawest form.
When he became a Dagger, his imagination got darker, crueller. He sketched nightmares instead of landscapes, and monsters instead of people. The artist in him was all but dead, the light fading from him like colour bleeding off a canvas.
He scowled at his reflection. His hounds stood next to him, but the fountain offered no mirror. It was as though nature itself had turned its back on him.
At a twitch of his fingers the hounds turned to black smoke and were replaced by a sea serpent with a gruesome dragon’s head. It dipped beneath the water without so much as a ripple.
The blossom curdled to ash.
‘And yet more ruination,’ crowed a familiar voice.
Ransom turned around.
Madame Fontaine was sitting on a nearby bench wrapped so tightly in her shawl he’d never spotted her. Now, in a sudden shaft of sunlight, she was impossible to miss, as if Saint Maurius himself had parted the clouds to reveal her.
She noted his surprise with a wry smirk. ‘You’re not the only one who can creep around in the shadows, Dagger.’
‘I’m not a Dagger any more.’
‘Once a Dagger always a Dagger, Bastian.’
He hated that she knew his name. How she wielded it with such smugness.
‘You don’t know me,’ he said gruffly.
‘If only that were true.’
The old crone rose from the bench and leaned on her cane, skewering him with that unnerving milky gaze. ‘What kind of saint are you exactly?’
Ransom frowned. ‘You already know.’
Everyone in this damn city knows.
She looked at him blankly.
He summoned his most unsightly hound, sharpening its claws and elongating its canines. He made it prowl close just to see if she would flinch.
She did not.
He said, ‘I am a walking nightmare.’
Her eyes narrowed as she studied the hound. ‘Is this really the best use of your power?’
‘What would you like me to conjure instead, Madame Fontaine? Another dragon to sit on the steps of the cathedral?’
‘That is not what I meant.’
‘Then elucidate.’
Her scowl rivalled his own. ‘Is this all that you are, Bastian? Shadows and death? Beasts and brutality?’
His laugh was mirthless. ‘Why don’t you ask Andreas’s bannermen?’
She let the silence linger until he felt like he might choke on the memory of what he’d done, lose himself, at last, to the crush of his own self-hatred.
‘You know, I’ve been watching you since you were a boy, Bastian.’
His brow furrowed. ‘What?’
‘I’ve known about you since the moment you became Dufort’s heir.
An orphan with a split lip plucked from the banks of the Verne.
Gifted a new destiny like a cinder block around your neck.
’ There was a note of tenderness in her voice, as though she could sense the storm of his pain.
‘It was dumb luck that he found you that day. Dumber luck that you hated your own father enough to kill him that night. You could have come to us instead and just as easily been a Cloak.’ She paused.
‘Or a corpse, I suppose. Fantome is no place for a runaway. I imagine that’s why you sent Fabian to us. ’
And now the boy was gone too. Another casualty he would have to bear.
‘I was fascinated by you,’ Fontaine went on. ‘This child who killed and killed like a deadly weapon. So easy to mould. So eager to please. So terrified to be tossed out.’
‘Is there a point to this?’ he said with mounting unease.
‘I knew you before Seraphine Marchant ever learned your name, Bastian. Before Lark Delano set foot inside the catacombs. Before Nadia Raine gave herself to the same encroaching dark. I knew you before you ever knew yourself.’
Ransom bunched his fists. It was not a pleasant feeling to be watched. To be known.
Her words quickened, her gauzy eyes flitting back and forth like there was another world turning inside her head.
‘You, Bastian, are as unchanging as the seasons.’ She removed a card from her pocket.
The gilded edge winked at him, gold like the blood of the saints.
She set it on the bench. ‘All these years, the tarot has only ever surrendered one card for you. Over and over again, no matter how the deck shuffles, it’s the same telling. For the boy. For the Dagger. For the saint. It remains so even now.’
Ransom stared at the card on the bench. It was face down.
‘It does not match what I see before me.’ She canted her head. ‘So, tell me, Bastian, who is lying… the voice of destiny in my ear or the man who brewed the dragon that nearly devoured this city? The man, who clings to the same shadows that have been eating away at him for ten years?’
It was not for him to answer. He didn’t know the answer. His thoughts were on a different kind of darkness. A question shoved itself onto his tongue, and before he could stop himself, he said, ‘Tell me, diviner, how much do you really know of the future?’
‘Too much.’
He swallowed thickly. ‘Am I going to lose her?’
She frowned. The quiet was so loud he heard the rush of his own pulse in his ears. ‘Tell me,’ he begged.
But she sighed and shook her head, pleading ignorance. He thought she was done with him then, but as she pottered back towards the cathedral, she tossed a parting remark over her shoulder. ‘I think the better question is, Bastian, are you going to lose yourself?’
He waited until she was gone, then he went to the bench with embarrassing quickness just like she knew he would and turned the tarot card over.
It read: THE DREAMER.
It showed a boy looking towards the faraway moon, his head tipped back as though to take it all in. There were no lurking shadows or skyborne monsters. Just a sky full of stars. And light, so much light, shining down on him.
It was a card of hope. Of life and untold possibility.
Not this endless leaching dark, this troubling ache in his soul.
On the steps of Our Sacred Saints’ Cathedral, Ransom fell to his knees and wept.