Chapter 23 #2
The words were sharp and furious, but I hated how false they tasted. I was the one who had given the gauntlet to Mirie. I was the one who had sent them to Hegaella. Maybe, in truth, the accusation was directed at myself:
You could have stopped them. You should have stopped them.
“I couldn’t have changed Egrette’s mind,” he said.
“I rushed to Hegaella when I heard of her plans because I was certain that the Shadowborn had captured you, and I was as surprised as any to find that was not the case. And you should be grateful it wasn’t.
Especially after what we witnessed tonight. ”
The images of people in cages, chained up, burning alive, flashed through my mind. Perhaps I imagined that Septimus’s fingers slowed as he washed my hair, as if conscious all over again of what was in it.
“Grateful,” I repeated. “I’m not grateful, Septimus. I’m fucking furious. What are those lives to you? You talk to me about sacrifices, but how easy it must be to make them when they mean nothing to you. In Vostis, I saw—”
A faint wrinkle between his brow. A blink of surprise. “Vostis? You were in Vostis?”
I clamped my lips shut. I didn’t like to talk about Vostis. Never to Marko or Val, and barely even to Mirie.
“Yes,” I said, without breaking the stare. “Were you?”
Were you one of the monsters I saw ripping apart children?
An odd grimness passed over his face. “No.”
“But some of your people were.”
“Because you cannot say no to a goddess. Just as some of your people tortured mine for sport. Yes. Do you really want to play this game? You were right beside me in Kastivai today. My people were in cages right next to yours. And my people have bled for this, died for this, just as yours have.”
For a fleeting moment, he wore the exact same expression he had when he’d thrown that match into the cell. The screams that had come from within, agonized and horrific, echoed in my ears.
My people. Some part of me had suspected it. But I still blinked in surprise to hear it confirmed.
He read my face, giving me a tight, humorless smile. “We are all resources to someone, dove. Do not think that vampires are any kinder to each other than they are to humans.”
“And yet,” I said, “you brag to me about all these choices you’ve made. Because the collateral damage doesn’t matter to you.”
His mouth thinned. “Let me tell you a story, Vindica Ultis. When I was a young man growing up in the House of Blood, I had a close friend. Angelika. She became one of the finest warriors that the House of Blood has ever seen. Skilled. Strong. Loyal. Steadfast. Tell me, are you familiar with the Kejari?”
A vampire tradition, often spoken of in fantastical stories by children. A tournament to the death held every century in honor of Nyaxia. The winner, the stories said, received a wish from the goddess herself. I had assumed that, like many vampire stories, it was exaggerated.
“It’s real?”
“Oh, it is very real. The Kejari is one of the only opportunities the House of Blood gets to interact with other Houses. Angelika was among the first picked to compete. Other vampires fight for themselves, but in the House of Blood, the decision of who enters the Kejari is a strategic one, because the entire House has so much to gain or lose.”
I considered this. “Because if she had won, she would have asked Nyaxia to lift the curse on the House of Blood.”
Septimus’s hands paused.
“Nyaxia would not have granted such a wish,” he said. “Perhaps she wouldn’t have granted a wish to a Bloodborn victor at all. We are not her favorite children.”
My brow furrowed. “So why enter at all? Why spill your blood for a goddess that hates you so much?”
“It was not Nyaxia that Angelika spilled her blood for.” He resumed working at the tangles in my hair. “Angelika was a good warrior. A great one. Better than any other damned soul in that competition. She progressed to the final round.”
“Did she win?”
“She could have.” Then, quieter, “She should have.”
“But she didn’t.”
He was silent. He gently pushed my shoulders up. “Sit up. Your hair is too long to get at from here.”
I did, relieved to no longer be staring into his face. His fingers danced over my bare back, now working at the snarls near the ends of my hair.
“Angelika did not win,” he said curtly. “She couldn’t win, because we needed to make sure someone else did, instead. I told you that I have been working on this plan for a very, very long time. She was merely the hands that would force the right outcome.”
The right outcome. Seers and prophecies.
“Before the final trial, I met with her,” he went on.
“Not as a friend, but as her prince. And I told her every card dealt in this intricate game. Every move she was to make until the moment she would let herself fall in that ring. I sat down with my oldest friend, and I commanded her to kill herself.”
His touch on my back stilled, like he’d slipped into the past.
“As a prince,” he said, “I understood that this was a necessary decision. As her friend, though, I wanted her to fight for her own life. But she merely told me, ‘I understand, my prince, that I’m merely one small piece of something greater.’ ”
It was the sort of thing I had heard Mirie say so many times. No doubt this was what countless desperate people thought when they looked at me, the Vindica Ultis, chosen savior.
It will all be worth it. There is some grand plan.
The scoff escaped me without permission, and I immediately clamped my lips down on it.
“I didn’t mean—” I started.
“No. I agree with you.” Septimus’s voice changed in a way that, at first, I couldn’t quite name.
“I made the decision that I had to make. But perhaps I am not as noble as Angelika was. Because there is not one single night that has passed in the last eleven years that I don’t resent that I had to make it at all.
And I despise every single being, every single twist of fate, that made that sacrifice and all the countless ones that came before or after it necessary.
Despise them. So don’t tell me, Kyrene, that I do not care about the collateral damage. ”
That was when I understood the tone in his voice:
Hatred. Utter, scalding hatred.
And gods, how deeply familiar it was. What a strange relief to hear that feeling echoed in another soul.
I turned around, ignoring the protest of pain in my right shoulder. Some of the bathwater sloshed over the edge of the tub. A few wet tresses of hair covered my breasts, and only partly, but I wasn’t self-conscious at all.
I wanted to catch it before he had time to throw it back into that box.
Septimus’s anger. Raw and unfiltered and ugly and petulant.
His eyes were bright in the darkness, as if lit from within, and suddenly all those broken-glass shards of silver and amber no longer seemed discordant, but fully unified in their rage.
It was like looking into a mirror. It scared me, actually scared me, how deeply I saw myself in that expression.
“Then why are you doing this?” I asked. “All to please the goddess who put you in this position to begin with?”
His gaze locked to mine, unblinking, broken in all the same ways as mine. His hand was still on my shoulder, fingertips light against my bare skin, hands still covered in my blood.
“I understand now that I misjudged you when we first met,” he said.
“We have failed so many people. The one thing we have left to offer their memories is blood. I told you once that I believed we shared a penchant for making the right beings bleed. And I will help you do that, dove, if you will help me.”
Gods. If only he knew how right he was. A moment stretched to an eternity, and words evaded me, as if I were breathlessly hanging over the edge of a cliff.
But then I gave him a clumsy half shrug with my good arm. “It’s the only thing I’m good at, after all,” I said. “But doves don’t make anything bleed.”
He laughed softly. “True. I’m long overdue in coming up with something else, should we continue working together.”
Should we continue working together. I knew, in the end, there was no choice. But I appreciated that he offered me the illusion of one. Perhaps more than his doomed friend Angelika had gotten.
“About that,” I said. “So, you’ve made it very clear that I fucked up our shot at Srana. What does your little prophecy say about that?”
“You still sound so disbelieving.”
“I know what I’m capable of, and I believe in that much more than I believe in whatever your friends hallucinated in the Salt Keep. Besides, I’m not the religious type.”
A flicker over Septimus’s face—like he was considering what an odd thing this was for a supposed divine warrior to say.
But then he chuckled. “I like you,” he murmured, as if to himself.
“No, Kyrene. Our misadventure does nothing to contradict my seers’ ‘hallucinations.’ Fate is fluid.
A web, not a single road. There are multiple paths to these outcomes. ”
“And where do those paths take us next?”
“Kajmar.”
The god of illusion, seduction, and performance. In the vision, his blood had dissolved into flower petals.
I shrugged. “No great loss. Not much beauty left in this world, anyway.”
Septimus’s gaze lowered, dancing over my body before returning to my face—so quick that perhaps I might have missed it if I hadn’t been watching him so closely. So close it might have been unintentional, which was the most interesting thought of all.
“Not much,” he agreed. “I think he’ll be no match for you.”
An unspoken agreement passed between us. The two of us, imperfectly united, choosing once again not to acknowledge the collection of corpses we dragged behind us.
I glanced down at the water. It had turned a murky burgundy. A piece of gore lazily bobbed by.
Ugh.
Still, I couldn’t help, however briefly, thinking of who that piece of flesh had probably belonged to. Thinking of that boy running into the forest.
“Do you think he made it?” I murmured.
It surprised me that he knew exactly what I was talking about.