Chapter 17 #2
She looked at him anew, the dimness sharpening his features. His careful control took on the shape of a leash on something genuinely terrifying. What must it have been like to carry such power? To know that a moment’s lost control could unravel the very fabric of reality around him?
And if they were to bond, her Creation affinity would be his perfect counterbalance. She could build what he destroyed. She could knit together what he unraveled. The thought was dizzying.
Except it was a moot thought to entertain, because they would not bond. He’d made that exceedingly clear.
And she didn’t wish to bond him, anyway.
“So you were at the funeral to erase the Gilt’s memories of the mark. Yet, I still remember. How is it—”
The understanding crashed over her, tide breaking against stone, reshaping everything in its wake. She saw, in a single, blinding moment, the reason he’d sought her out at the funeral. And yet, he did not follow through.
The man she had accused of being nothing more than the Emperor’s perfect weapon had looked at her tear-stained face and chose defiance, proving every harsh judgment she’d made about his character utterly, devastatingly wrong.
“You disobeyed orders.” The words escaped, barely a whisper.
“Have you ever heard of the Children of the First Flame?”
Sabine hesitated. She’d never heard the name, but it sounded like something the pamphlet man could be involved in. And while Sabine didn’t like to lie, either, telling the Emperor’s Hand, of all people, of what she’d witnessed in that tannery…
She didn’t know what she’d seen, anyway. “Tell me about them.”
“They’re a sect of rebellious fanatics. Heretics, really. The Emperor believes them responsible for the Fade,” Lord Vaelros explained.
The mention of the disease had Sabine’s stomach churning, damn near to the point of spilling itself.
If these Children were responsible for the Fade, and if the pamphlet man belonged to this sect…
she’d stood feet away from the people responsible for her parents’ deaths, and had done nothing. Worse, she’d run away.
“The Registry wants the memory of the Bennetts’ marks erased because they don’t wish for the Gilt to question their innovation.
But whether we like it or not, you and I are bound by these marks.
If the magic woven in them is unstable, or if the Children are targeting them, it puts us both in danger.
” He fell silent, staring down at his hands.
His fingers flexed, then stilled. “Erasing your memories would have meant risking both our safeties. You may believe me cruel, but I don’t find pleasure in actively putting people in danger. ”
Sabine blushed. She had called him cruel, just weeks ago. Now, she wasn’t certain that the assessment had merit. “So the Registry believes these… Children… are hunting marked pairs?”
“They have no proof to substantiate it, but let us say it would surprise no one if they found it.” He paused. “Which means the marks themselves make us targets of threads know what dark magic.”
Sabine fell silent. She’d been looking for someone to blame—someone who wore a real face, not the monolith of Gilt society—for her parents’ deaths and the misfortunes that followed for the past twelve cycles. Now, she had her answer.
And yet, the ceremony she’d witnessed in that tannery… that Child didn’t look to have been hurting those two women. He seemed to have been performing a union, a wedding, a… blood vow, except with no blood, no Registry.
Heretic, no doubt, but deadly? Sabine wasn’t so certain.
Although there were always two sides to every war, and only the victors decided which story got written. The Children could’ve been responsible for the Fade and killing the Bennetts, and have been benevolent to their own people at the same time.
The Empire might’ve called them heretics, while they likely thought themselves revolutionaries.
“We have to find out more,” she said. “Of what happened to the Bennetts.”
“More? Whatever do you mean?”
“Two healthy people in their twentieth cycles do not simply die, my lord. There has to be evidence of how it happened.”
He scanned the crowd for a long moment, pausing on the Registry clerks stationed above them.
“I might know where to find it. But, Miss Almarien…” He turned to face her again.
“It will be risky. I’m not asking you to like me—I realize Velyar has not frozen over yet—but you will have to trust me. For your own good.”
Sabine considered it for a moment. When she’d woken this morning, the Emperor’s Hand had been her greatest liability. Now, she realized he might be her only protection against plans much larger than herself and her sister’s social Season.
Trusting him didn’t seem like such an impossibility.
“That, I might be able to manage.”
The play blazed on, all color and sound, but Sabine could barely see it. The Emperor’s perfect weapon had chosen insubordination.
For her.
“Lord Vaelros?” she said quietly during a lull in the music.
“Yes?”
“I did not make you for a rebel, but I must say, you are all the more interesting for it.”
For the first time, he smiled—not the careful mask, but something real.
The transformation was breathtaking. The knife-edge of his face softened, his eyes catching the light like river stones in dawn.
She’d once thought his face might have been handsome were it not so utterly devoid of warmth.
Now, warmth flooded his aristocratic features like sunlight breaking through Frosttide clouds.
It was so beautiful it silenced her.
“I’m glad I could find ways to surprise you.”