Chapter 51
I spend the rest of the afternoon with Flora, packing my bag. I leave the jewelry, my uniforms, and the dress I arrived in from Delvos. On a whim, I pack the bottle of wine Alaris gave me. If anyone spies it, I can claim Alaris brought it on the road with him to celebrate capturing the criminals.
Flora helps me bathe and wash my hair, using stronger soap to coax out the last of the charcoal.
She lathers and scrubs and rinses until the water runs clear, and my hair is rose gold from root to tip.
I face the mirror, and Princess Lysandra stares back, pampered, oiled, cheeks still flushed from the heat of the bath.
She blinks when I do. Her chest lifts when I take a deep breath.
But it’s lavender that fills my nose, not roses. And I still look different than I did when I left. Muscles show that weren’t there before, and there is a leaner seriousness to my face. I hope that lends credibility to my cover story.
When we emerge from the bathing room, Alaris is there. I dip my head, resisting the urge to smooth my hair. He’s seen it as it grew out, of course, but I was unconscious for most of that. Or bedraggled, waking from fever and dreams.
“Thank you, Flora,” he says, as she exits. Alaris turns toward me, eyes locked on my hair. He crosses the space between us slowly. He lifts a finger and hooks a lock free, rubbing it with his thumb. “Beautiful color,” he murmurs.
Heat blooms across my cheeks. I reach up, self-conscious. “I should do something to make it darker. My father hates how pale it is…”
“Don’t.” His voice is soft. He curls the strand around his finger. “It’s perfect. It looks just like…”
“The dawn. That’s what they tell me.”
His eyelids are heavy. “Funny. I was going to say it looks just like a sunset.”
My chest squeezes. Not dawn. Sunset. The end of the day and the beginning of the night.
I swallow hard. My gaze drops to his mouth, then the ground. “Did…did you send the hawk?”
He nods. “The emperor knows we are coming. The countdown has begun. Are you ready?”
“As ready as I can be.” Marriage has always preceded my death. As soon as Alaris asks for my hand, my mother will become all the more desperate. But it’s worth it. The plan is sound, right up until the moment we are shut in the chamber. “You still haven’t told me how you’ll extinguish the Flame.”
“I can do it.”
A non-answer. “I’m going to be in the chamber with you. I’d rather not be surprised.”
“Alright then. I’ll show you. I need that.”
He points directly at my chest. I glance down, wide-eyed, unsure what he means, until I follow his finger to the voidstone dangling around my neck. I lift the chain over my head and hand it to him.
He walks to the bed, slides one knee through the sheets, and reaches across the huge wooden headboard.
He puts the point of the voidstone against one of the carved stars…
the very star I noticed in my search that looks like it is made up of inlaid pieces.
They fold around the facets of the voidstone as he presses in, and one of the carved clouds thunks open.
He reaches inside and retrieves something, then walks back, dangling the voidstone toward me. “Here.”
I didn’t know I had the key to a secret compartment around my neck all this time. I snatch it back and loop it over my head. “What if I had lost that?” I ask, indignant. “Or gotten angry with you and thrown it in the river?”
“After you did so many memorable things to get it?” His eyes travel over my body as he chuckles. “Unlikely.”
My cheeks flame.
He walks to the sitting area. “And you did throw it in the river. With yourself attached. Please don’t repeat that.”
“I’ll throw whoever I like in the river,” I mutter, stalking after him.
He sits on the couch with plenty of space for me and places the bundle on the central table. “Hands to yourself, troublesome Ly,” he says, as he unwraps it.
“I’ll put my hands wherever I like too,” I say as I sit.
“So I’ve experienced.”
I cough, eager to change the subject.
He unfolds the last edge of the white cloth, revealing a black blade.
It’s as long as my forearm, with a wicked curved tip and a simple T-shaped handle.
It’s one solid piece with no seam between the blade and the grip.
The black material absorbs all the light around it.
It might be the deepest, truest black I’ve ever seen.
And it looks familiar…
“I’ll use this to destroy the Flame,” he says simply. “It was named ‘eternal,’ but even the strongest flame in the world can’t withstand the truly eternal nothing that exists in the void. This blade has its power.”
The blade looks plenty dangerous, and I’m glad to have a concrete answer over vague assurances, but another question rises up: “Then can’t somebody else wield it?”
Alaris isn’t the type to send someone in his place, but his words from yesterday still haunt me. I’m prepared to die, Lysandra. Even remembering the calm way he said it makes my heart race.
“I am the only one who can wield it. And I’m the only one who can kill your father.”
“Why?”
“I wonder if you already suspect why,” he says softly. “Even if you think it’s impossible.”
Alaris is the most powerful divinial I’ve ever met. Far more powerful than a fifth-generation lord should be. But the arastorian line is well documented, with every birth and death on file, so I’ve dismissed my own questions about the potency of his blood.
But now it seems like he’s giving me permission to throw away what I think I know…
Then I remember where I’ve seen this blade before.
I stand and cross to the bookshelf, pulling down the painted book of the gods. I return to the couch and flip to the end, to the picture of Arastor dragging a black blade across the sky. It’s unmistakable. The blade in front of me on the table has the exact same shape.
But that isn’t what I’m struck by. “Why do these pictures look so much like you?”
“That is an old book.” He examines my face carefully. “When humans first saw incarnials, they thought we were the gods. They started modeling their paintings and statues after us, until they learned we were something new.”
Us. We.
He holds for a heartbeat longer, then lifts his hand to his earring and twists.
The change is immediate. His hair spills down to his waist. His eyes lose their void-dark depth and fill with soft, glowing silver. Ethereal. Ancient. His features are the same, but they are more precise now. The cheekbones cut closer. The jawline sharper.
And the power. It rolls off him, making it harder to take a breath.
Every divine presence I have ever felt, my father’s included, was a candle held up to this.
This is the source, undiluted. Everything left of Arastor’s power, the power that formed the night and void, incarnate in the world. Incarnial.
The shadowgates. The blasts of starfire he threw at the masked man. The raw, terrifying power flowing out of him at Noctus. The wings.
They unfurl now, appearing at his back, misting black feathers that fade and reform and fade again as he stretches them and then lets them settle. I should have known the first time I saw him in that field; no divinial looks like this.
Alaris isn’t even partly mortal. He was made, not born. And he’s ancient, older than my father, older than the empire.
“But the incarnials were all killed in the wars,” I say, still struggling to understand how this could be true.
“Those were chaotic times,” he says. His voice is the same melodic low tone, but it reverberates differently, as if he is speaking in a much bigger space. “The death of a descendant was reported as my own.”
“Oh!” I hadn’t yet realized this means Alaris was the start of the arastorian line. “I’m so sorry.”
“It was millennia ago.”
“Still, you had a family member who…”
“It’s not like you’re imagining.” He shakes his head.
“I had no interest in humans or other incarnials, though both approached me to join their side of the wars. When it was clear I couldn’t be won over, mortal women were sent to me until I got curious enough to participate.
One of them had a child who posed as me and fought for the human kings.
I didn’t find out until centuries later. ”
“They never told you?”
“I kept myself apart from humans. Sometimes I didn’t set foot on the ground for centuries, existing in darkness and between stars.
But even if they had, I don’t know if it would have mattered to me.
I didn’t experience that type of attachment back then.
I had no feelings about things like birth and death.
” He pauses. “But I suppose finding out must have impacted me, somehow. I never lay with a woman again. Which was no strain. I had little interest.”
I swallow, trying to picture a cold, detached Alaris, soaring above it all, and find it easy. The painting in the book shows Arastor the same way.
I’m losing track of how many times I’ve had this feeling: like I’m seeing Alaris for the first time.
I already overwrote the flippant lord with the rebel leader, striving to fix what’s wrong with the world.
But now it’s getting layered over again.
I know the word for that look in his eyes now: ancient.
It is the expression of a being that has spent millennia alone in the dark, watching the world from a height no other living thing could reach.
I stare into his bright eyes, and I understand why people thought the incarnials were gods. He looks so inhuman. Then he blinks, and he is just Alaris again. Just. As if that word could ever apply to him.
It scares me a little, the idea of how cold he was. But I have watched him crouch at the bedsides of the dying, watched him set up tents in the mud, watched him press lavender to the smallest of my wounds. Whatever he was before, he chose to come down.
“Then why are you here? Something must have changed.”
He nods. “From my unique vantage point, I saw the cost of the wither. It…sparked something in me. It’s one thing to fly above the world in darkness, and it’s another to let it all go dark.
I couldn’t stay apart anymore. I approached the ruling family of Arastos.
I told the lord and his wife what I was and what I intended to do.
They agreed to let me pose as their son and take the house.
My cousin is their real son, the true heir.
Vesper helped me disguise my appearance with this earring. ”
When I saw him in the field and on Noctus, I assumed it was a temporary transformation, but this is his true form. I flip through the book to the page that’s nagged at me since I saw it: Cyralia and Arastor on a hill.
“Then is this what she really looked like?” I ask. “Cyralia’s incarnial?”
“I never had an occasion to meet Cyralia’s incarnial, back then. I stayed away from most of them.” He taps the page. “This is a portrayal of Arastor’s life, not mine. I’m not sure where the artist got this influence.”
That calms me more than it should. Whatever pull I feel toward him, it is mine alone, not an echo of a relationship he had with my ancestor.
But I shouldn’t even be asking him about such trivial worries. I close the book slowly. He has lived for thousands and thousands of years, and I have been taking up his time with…what? Where I sleep? Whether I can walk down a hallway? Whether my jaw aches?
I suck in a shuddering breath. “I’ve been bothering you with…so many things.”
His starlight eyes land on me. “You think your concerns are small compared to what I’ve seen.”
“Yes,” I admit.
“No, Lysandra.” The sound of my full name in that reverberating voice pins me to the cushion.
“I’ve lived a long time, but I was outside the world.
That made everything easy, but meaningless.
I don’t want to watch from a distance anymore.
I want to be in it. The way you see the world—you make me want to be in it. ”
I open my mouth and close it again. Then I clutch the book to my chest.
“I hope you are satisfied now, my Ly, that all I need is a way in.”
I raise my gaze to his, just in time to see him twist his earring. The shift is immediate. His wings vanish. The glow dims. The divine being in front of me becomes the man I know again.
He is no less beautiful, and even though no part of him is glowing, I wonder how I ever thought him even partly mortal.
“I’m satisfied,” I say, mouth dry. “That’s quite a transformation.”
“I wanted to check on you.” He stands. “But I have more to take care of tonight. I’ll see you tomorrow. Sleep now, my Ly.”
He takes the blade from the table, nods, and disappears, the shadowgate crackling open and closed in a breath.
I’m not sure how to process all of this, or any of it. He came down for the wither, for the people dying at the edges. I know that.
But when he said he wants to be in the world, he was looking right at me.
You make me want to be in it.