Chapter 10
Act Like Pigs, Die Like Pigs
The Resplendent Reliquary of the Guardians, a kingdom-renowned feat of iron and stone, looked like a rural monastery compared to the grandeur of the Sept of Rivenholde.
Even in the darkness, the golden domes emitted ethereal light.
Jesstin counted four from the courtyard, but from farther back, it had seemed there were dozens ascending the hills, marked by spires that looked like swords scraping the skies.
Up close, he could see the gold was not solid but etched with nearly invisible designs of a light red.
Lines, swirls, shapes he’d never seen... None of it was familiar.
Taven’s explanations to Elloven filtered back to the coach, but he refused to listen to a liar. He’d decide for himself what to think.
The only thing he was sure of was that he’d been under direct and unrelenting assault from the dead since passing into Rivenholde.
Thousands of them—more. There were too many to consider counting.
Their whispers followed him, climbing over one another, but he heard one word repeated over and over in the melee.
Necromancer.
Sesto watched with concern from the other bench until the carriage stopped.
The entrancing man led Elloven away, Taven following like a sycophant. Except he hadn’t called her Elloven. He’d called her something else, something that sounded like her name but wasn’t.
She turned back and pointed at the carriage, after which Estelar, who was also the pretor, seemed to say ahh with a dawning look of understanding. They waited.
Jesstin’s head pounded with the insistence of the dead’s messages. He wouldn’t last the night if he couldn’t get ahold of it.
“Tell me,” Sesto said, leaning in.
“It’s the dead. They’re...” Jesstin trailed off when the door opened, and they were ushered out.
The stones felt smooth and welcoming, and the night air was refreshingly clean and crisp.
More of those macabre lanterns decorated the trees, but there were also some strung on lines running across the top of the courtyard, forming a canopy.
The dome ahead gleamed so brightly, it almost seemed like daylight.
“Come, come,” Estelar said. “It’s quite chilled, and you’ll be hungry.”
Until Estelar said it, Jesstin hadn’t noticed that the horrible heat had gone away, but he wasn’t cold either.
Elloven was shivering ahead, as was Taven. Sesto had a hand fisted at his mouth.
Just me then.
Jesstin followed the group inside. His balance dithered when his boots struck the interior floor with a muted clang—a floor made entirely of tightly woven wrought iron. Steam billowed through the tiny gaps.
The walls were made of stone, but they shone as though regularly polished. And the colors... some stretches were gray, others white. Red stones were checkered through in no particular pattern. The mortar was chalky, crumbling in spots, congregating in small piles of dust on the floor below.
Sesto sucked his teeth. “Oh my. We did not ask nearly enough questions, I’m afraid,” he said from the corner of his mouth.
“You’ll get accustomed to the floors. Everyone does,” Estelar said, loud enough for them all to hear. “Our atelier will outfit you with our own clothing and boots, which will make your experience here feel more natural.”
The dead continued their offensive but had faded into the background. Jesstin didn’t believe they’d stay there for long though. They’d hit him the instant they’d left the forest, and there were too many competing for his attention for it to be an accident.
They followed Estelar around a corner and up a long, steep flight of stairs. When they reached the top, they were standing in a solarium of sorts. A clear dome was all that separated them from the night sky. In the center of the room sat a long dining table, where people were already seated.
The esguards guided the four of them to their seats.
Jesstin was placed beside Elloven, across from Estelar and a beautiful woman in her middle age. There was also a young man, not much older than Jesstin, and another closer in age to Taven. At the far end sat a woman alone. Her eyes were closed, her hands were folded, and her plate was empty.
“The bracers?” Estelar’s reminder was terse but polite. Jesstin looked down, but before he could remove them, the esguards went to work on it.
Jesstin flexed his sore wrists and ankles just as a large, boiling bowl of broth was placed on the plate in front of him. Everyone else received the same.
Attendants visited each bowl and lowered a large hunk of raw meat into each scalding vessel. The water sizzled on contact, and a heady steam billowed from everyone’s bowls. It turned his stomach but then, curiously, fueled his hunger.
Suddenly, he was ravenous.
Beside him, Elloven tore at her meat like a wolf after a fresh kill.
Everyone else was doing the same, and soon, so was Jesstin, astonished at his own savage treatment of the meal.
It felt so natural, so right. Before he knew it, all that remained was a broth with the leavings.
Juices dripped from his chin, staining the gold tablecloth.
There hadn’t even been introductions.
“I don’t know what just happened,” Elloven whispered. One hand traveled to her mouth. “It was like I was possessed. Forgive me.”
“Forgive you? Ah, darling, you were possessed, with the hunger.” Estelar grinned, as did the woman beside him and the younger of the men.
“We honor the dead in many ways here. When we eat meat, we revert to our basest, most carnal state, a sign of our reliance on the death of others to sustain our exuberant lives.”
Jesstin glanced at Sesto, but he was gaping at his bowl like it might soon murder him. Elloven just looked lost.
“Not keen on greens here?” Jesstin asked.
“We eat them,” the woman with the pretor said.
Like Estelar, she wore the same deep-red leather, but her shoulders were adorned with gold tassels.
Everyone at the table had seven gold bands on their sleeves.
Sesto had guessed right about rank then.
“At morning sup and afternoon relief. Evening is for reverence.”
“This is Tansea, my consort. Beside her is Malon, my other consort,” Estelar said, referring to the younger man. “And my son, Ryquin. Lexsea, my daughter, is in the village tonight, but you’ll meet her later.”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Sesto said, “though with no shortage of questions. You said you are a pretor? Is that like a lord?”
“Nearer to a king,” Tansea said smoothly. “And you want to know about consorts? Sons and daughters of the curia do not engage in marriage as you know it. We choose partners, for seasons, sometimes for life. Estelar and I have been in our season for over thirty years.”
Jesstin realized the son, Ryquin, was staring at him. The man didn’t bother to break his gaze when caught.
He heard that word again. Necromancer.
The voices flooded back to the front of his mind with a vengeance.
“You can choose not to hear them,” Gennady said, appearing on the table, his legs dangling over the side.
Are you helping me, you prick? Communicating telepathically with Gennady took so much more energy, and he couldn’t hear himself think over the deluge, but an audible conversation was out of the question.
“Not for your sake,” Gennady retorted.
I tried to ignore them. They didn’t like it.
“Try harder. You’ve blocked me before. You can block them. Elloven needs you to have your wits about you, because no one else will.” He disappeared.
“Though there are some who choose the bond. The Vinculo Sagrado,” Estelar said, and Jesstin snapped his attention back to the conversation. “It’s brash and unnecessary, but there are those who feel so intensely, they wish to make their partnership permanent and irreversible.”
“Irreversible?” Elloven sagged in her chair. “So there’s no way to undo a bond?”
“There is,” Ryquin said. He was still staring rudely at Jesstin. Did no one else notice?
“You must bond with another.” Estelar silenced his son with a hand in the air. “To reverse one already sealed.”
“That’s it? That’s the only way?” Elloven moved her hands to her lap. Her fingers twitched, one by one, as though counting.
“We get ahead of ourselves tonight. You have traveled far to get here. It’s time to rest.”
“You said you were her uncle,” Sesto said. “On her mother’s side?”
“No,” Estelar said. He watched Elloven closely.
“Lady Elloven’s father is from the Easterlands though.”
“Aelloven’s father was not Wilder Hawthorne. Her father is my brother, Laxius.”
“Why are you calling her that?” Jesstin asked.
“It’s the name she was born with,” Estelar answered. “It doesn’t surprise me to learn it was changed, though I would have expected more of a deviation than a single letter.”
Elloven’s fidgeting got worse. Jesstin felt himself whisper, Are you all right, but the words didn’t leave his lips at all. He imagined his fingers traveling to her knotted ones, but he couldn’t move.
“And where is this Laxius?” Sesto asked.
“Resting,” Estelar said, but he blinked.
“Elloven would like to learn more about her magic.” Taven’s words sounded perfectly timed and rehearsed, like Estelar had been expecting them. “How to control it.”
Tansea tapped a finger against her lips. “What is your prominence, Aelloven?”
“My what?” Elloven stopped and sat straighter.
“Everyone with the blood of the Coventicular of the Seven has a prominence, a birthmark that reveals which of the seven bloodlines is strongest within you. Many of us have mixed blood, so prominence tells us which one has dominance.”
“I don’t know. How would I be able to tell?”
“She’s Duskmaw prominent. Chaos,” Taven answered. He didn’t meet Elloven’s shaken gaze. “The four-colored star on your outer thigh, Ellie.”
She flushed in embarrassment. “That’s...”
Jesstin simmered at how casually the pervert spoke of Elloven’s body in front of others.