Chapter Fifteen
He had a latticed heart, and that heart had to be protected.
The lattice was sewn into the heart itself.
There was no linen. The muscle served as the base, dark red and slick, clenching and easing as it pushed blood up through the thick vessels at the top.
The bone shards sat in rows across the organ, stitched down with black thread that pierced the flesh.
The shards sunk halfway into the muscle, and tissue had grown closed around them, so that the whole pattern lifted and settled with every beat.
In the furrow that split the heart down the front, between its two halves, sat the keybone.
It was larger than the rest of the shards – a single polished piece, pale and irregular, broken from something big.
Stitches ran out from it to every shard around, wrapping the heart in a tight, complex lattice that couldn’t be separated without slicing through the organ.
“Tell me,” Nine begged.
“Your heart is enclosed in a lattice,” Seraphina said. “The bone shards are sewn directly into it. I’ve never seen anything like this. Never imagined it.”
“Now we know,” Idris said. “I will close you back up.”
“No!” Nine jerked on the table, his hand reaching for the front of Idris’s shirt. “Take it out.”
“Take out your heart?”
“It might be the thing that kills me,” the revenant said. “Do it.”
Idris held his unnatural, golden gaze.
“I don’t want to kill you.”
“You must. Release me. Let me rest, at last. Let them rest.”
Seraphina reached over and placed her hand over Nine’s. He looked at her and slowly let go of Idris. She set the candle down and held the revenant’s hand between her own.
“I think you should do it,” she told Idris.
“Seraphina, it goes against everything–”
“It’s mercy. Be merciful. Do it.”
Idris closed his eyes for a moment. His lips started moving, and Seraphina knew he was praying. When he opened his eyes again, he was resolute, his jaw set.
He got to work quickly, reaching into the chest cavity with one hand to lift the heart forward.
The vessels at the top drew taut. He cut through them with the catlin, then moved to the broad vessels that fed into the heart from behind.
He sawed fast where the flesh tried to close around the blade.
It was as if the revenant’s body didn’t want to give up its most precious part. The flesh had a will of its own.
The heart came loose into Idris’s hand, heavy and beating steadily. He lifted it clear of the cavity and laid it down on a clean piece of linen, where it went on clenching and easing against the cloth.
Seraphina felt Nine’s hand go slack. His face was relaxed, a smile tugging at his lips. His eyes drifted shut.
“You did the right thing,” he whispered as his last breath left him.
She started shaking. It took a lot of strength to control herself enough to place his hand on the table, then she was running out into the night, trudging through the snow, tears running down her face.
She ran past the house, into a small orchard of bare apple trees, slipped on a patch of ice and slid forward until she crashed into a tree.
She wrapped her arms around the trunk and sobbed, holding onto it to keep herself from collapsing into a heap.
She knew they’d done the right thing, so why did she feel so wretched?
Why did it feel like her very soul was stained forever?
She’d watched men die and hadn’t felt remorse.
She’d killed two with her own hands – slit one’s throat, shot the other in the head.
The Sentinel had maimed and murdered more people than Thomas Mayer and Franz Holzer, than the other three men she sought to deliver her vengeance.
He’d been a weapon of mass destruction, and his demise saved lives.
Hundreds of them. Why was she crying for him?
Rune.
She had to get to him. If he and Briar hadn’t encountered obstacles, they were at Saint Vivia’s Convent already.
He had a latticed heart, and that heart had to be protected.
She and Idris were the only ones on the resistance’s side who knew.
She hadn’t been too worried about him – even knowing that he was blind – because he was with Briar.
Putting aside their differences, she trusted Briar.
He was invincible, immortal.
Not anymore. Now Seraphina knew his one weakness, and suddenly, it seemed like if she’d found it, anyone could. It was only a matter of time.
“I have to… Can’t stay here anymore,” she whispered against the tree bark, her lips pressed to its cold, rough surface.
She coughed violently and spat on the ground. It felt as if she’d just dislodged half her lung.
“I’m dying… No. Rune.”
She straightened, fingernails digging into the trunk. She pressed her lips to it once more, as if whispering a secret into a lover’s ear.
“The Bastion Weave is a class A ward lattice… There are six of them, five placed in the walls of five cities… The sixth is inside the wall of Kr?henstein Academy. They will not fail. They will not fail.”
She whispered the names of the five cities, over and over, like a litany.
“Its shape is that of a trebled chevron. It’s a trebled chevron…”
A heaviness lifted off her shoulders as she spoke the words out loud, into the tree, her voice low enough that only someone standing right beside her could’ve heard.
There was no one there. She was alone, and she knew she would’ve felt even better if she told it to a human being, but for now, it was enough.
The sound of Idris’s boots crunching in the snow made her jaw clench.
“Seraphina?”
She brushed her hair out of her face, wiped the tears off her cheeks, cleared her throat, and focused to the best of her ability. Her head was killing her. Her sore lungs didn’t agree with the cold air.
“Are you all right? Are you hurt?”
She turned to face him.
“Idris, I’m dying.”
“What? No, you’re not. You just need to rest. I’ll make more tea–”
“I won’t recover from this. I can feel it in here.” She tapped her chest. “And we don’t have time to sit around and wait. Enough feeding me, and making me tea, and giving me minted water to inhale. None of it will work. This sickness will kill me, and there’s only one cure.”
He sighed, and she knew that he knew what she was talking about.
“You must implant a relic,” she said.
To her surprise, he nodded. He’d been against it before, but he’d seen and done things so much more horrible tonight that implanting a sacred bone into a person was child’s play. He reached for the atlas vertebra.
“Not that one. I have to give it back when we reach the convent, or the sisters will never forgive me. If they have Rune, they will make my life unbearable before they even let me see him. They don’t implant relics either; they venerate them too much.”
“The vomer bone?” Idris asked, incredulous. “The relic that gives you nightmares?”
“I can handle it. I stole it off a dead woman who’d had it for years.”
“I feel like I must point out that the keyword here is dead.”
“The relic didn’t kill her.”
“What did?”
“The Harvester’s men. Not before she gave them hell. They were too many, she was one. Not even a thrall relic can save you when you’re outnumbered.”
“Sera–”
“You must do it. Please.”
He brushed a hand over his face.
“Where do you want it?”
“Somewhere hidden. Between the ribs?”
He nodded. “I have to wash first, disinfect… everything.”
“What did you do with the heart?”
“I put it on ice. It’s as alive as can be, beating steadily even with no blood to pump.”
“And the Sentinel?”
It felt strange to say his name. Stranger, because that name had remained a number. She should’ve asked him a name he remembered. Since his creation, something must’ve been on the tip of his tongue. Something he would’ve liked to be called.
“I will wrap him up. Do you want to leave him here, or…”
“We’ll take him with us. He deserves a proper burial, but the earth is frozen. The convent has a dead house.”
“I don’t think the nuns will agree his parts, taken individually, deserve a grave on sacred ground.”
“No, you’re right. But him as a whole…”
Idris sighed and shook his head, too tired to get into a philosophical debate.
“We’ll figure it out when we get there,” Seraphina said.
He walked with her to the house, got her into bed, and threw more logs in the hearth before going back to the mill to finish cleaning up. An hour later, he returned.
In the weak candlelight, Seraphina noticed how old he seemed. He’d aged years in the span of a few hours. He turned to her, scalpel in hand. She got up and removed her dress. Pulled her shift up to expose her ribs.
She gave him the vomer bone.
It was a simple procedure.