Chapter 39 #2
Conversation moved in easy spirals as the evening advanced, touching on everything and nothing.
No one mentioned the matter of Liora’s prospects, or the possibility of tea with the Duchess of Marethine.
They circled the subject with practiced grace, letting it fade into the shadows like a guest who’d overstayed their welcome. Sabine was grateful for its absence.
Azrian held his own in the conversation. Liora, emboldened by the conviviality, peppered him with questions he answered with far more grace than Sabine had expected him to offer.
At last, the clock struck midnight, the chime echoing through the old bones of the house. Liora yawned, unselfconscious as a child, and Lady Delarine set down her cards, declaring the game at an end.
“I shall not send you out into the night with the wind so fierce,” the Duchess pronounced, rising with the effortless authority of one accustomed to being obeyed. “You will stay here, both of you.”
Azrian stood, offering Sabine his hand. “Thank you for your hospitality, Your Grace. We’re in your debt.”
“Nonsense. If it is debt, it is only the sort that requires future dinner invitations.”
Liora floated up from her pouf, arms stretching overhead. “I am glad you came.” She hugged Sabine fiercely before releasing her. “It feels normal again, like before the Season started.”
Sabine held her sister for an extra moment. Though things felt farther from normal than ever, she could not bear to contradict her.
When goodnights were said, the household dispersed. Azrian and Sabine’s guest suites were mirror images of each other, separated by a small study. Azrian hovered in the study, leaning against the desk.
“Azrian,” Sabine said quietly. “Thank you. It was good to spend time with my sister, regardless of our ulterior motives. I appreciate you entertaining her without mockery.”
He shrugged, smile crooked. “I’d never make such a fatal mistake as to mock anything precious to you. You should know that by now.”
Sabine fought the urge to cross to him, take his hand, even embrace him, perhaps.
Instead, she stood stubbornly still for what felt like hours before retiring into her own chamber without another word.
There, she waited until the entire house had drowned itself in sleep, sitting rigid and alert in the black velvet of her dressing room, listening to the last echo of servants conversing in the corridor, the closing of the last door.
She waited until even those sounds died before dressing in riding breeches and sensible boots and sliding the Star of Corven from her finger to a chain around her neck.
Then, she opened the door that separated her room from Azrian’s. He stood on the other side, already prepared, in similar breaches and a simple linen shirt.
They’d stripped every contingency down to its cleanest line: wait until the house was dead, make for the conservatory, and find the uneven stone Sabine had once tripped over.
Lady Delarine was meticulous in the upkeep of her home; they could only hope something so obvious was not an oversight, but an invitation.
So they made their way through the shadowed belly of Braythar House, Sabine taking the lead. If they communicated, it was in the barest brush of fingertips or a fleeting touch to the elbow.
The sky cloaking the conservatory was coal black, clouds shuttering the moon.
The scent was loam, crushed fern, and the slight mineral tang of the stone footpaths.
Sabine navigated by memory, counting her paces from the door to the place where her foot had caught over the buckled seam.
She crouched, feeling along the floors, and nearly gasped when her fingers found a shallow depression, just wide enough for a thumb, hidden in the grout line between two slabs.
Azrian knelt beside her and slotted his knife into the depression.
It didn’t budge.
He tried again, sliding the knife sideways instead of down.
A click. The tile lifted. Sabine worked her fingers under the edge and, with Azrian’s help, levered the tile free. Beneath was darkness and the faintest breath of ancient, still air.
They glanced at each other, a final check for doubt.
Azrian went first, and Sabine followed.
The ladder was iron, cold, and slightly damp.
Her hands slipped once, and her heart battered itself against her ribs until she found the next rung.
She counted five breaths before continuing.
The shaft was narrow, barely enough to accommodate her shoulders.
It stank of iron, wet earth, and a tang she could not name.
After what felt like twenty rungs, her feet found the ground.
The chamber was not large, the walls hand-carved from limestone and lined with crossbeams for reinforcement.
The floor was hard-packed earth, tamped flat and swept of debris.
To their left stood a bank of low, built-in shelves, each crammed to capacity with stitched tomes, vellum folios, and tightly rolled scripts.
To the right, a table dominated the room, hewn from a single slab of pale wood.
Its surface was pitted with the marks of candle flame, stained with old ink, and scattered with the detritus of a dozen interrupted projects: quills, a glass rod for melting wax, a stoppered bottle of some dark liquid.
Azrian crossed to the shelves, running a finger along the spines, reading the titles. Sabine moved to the table, drawn by the sight of a letter—half burned, the flame arrested halfway down the page. She lifted it, careful to avoid the crumbling edge.
The script was sharp, slanted, unmistakably Lady Delarine’s.
She read it out loud. “ If they suspect, it will not matter how powerful the magic, we shall be as good as dead. The only hope for success is if they believe it to be a reckoning, not … it cuts out.”
Azrian drew a small, slim volume from its slot, regarded it for a moment, then brought it to the table. The cover was dark blue, stained with what looked like oil or blood.
He handed it to her.
She traced the title: The Inheritance of Marks, A True Account of the First Soulbonded.
Sabine skimmed the preface, then the first pages. The writing was dense, the language arcane, but the meaning could not have been clearer. She read aloud again, for Azrian’s sake, though he stood over her shoulder, close enough to read for himself.
“ In the time before the Empire, marks appeared among those destined for one another. Two halves of one soul, who bore perfectly compatible affinities in kind and intensity. Bonding according to one’s mark granted unimaginable powers, the union greater than the sum of its parts. ”
Two halves of one soul.
She’d spent the past few months carefully cataloguing her feelings, folding them into neat boxes she could argue away. Not attraction, but recognition. Not longing, but circumstance. When the ache had become unbearable, a physical weight on her chest, she’d nearly folded to it.
And now…
What if every feeling she’d felt, especially the ones she’d worked desperately to deny, to attribute to circumstance or the intimacy of shared danger, had never been hers to begin with?
Two halves of one soul.
She’d never asked to be half of anything . She hadn’t asked for the mark, or the Season, or him . And yet here she was, bound to a man she’d convinced herself she couldn’t care for, only to discover the mark branded into her skin had been quietly constructing the caring in her place.
How would she ever know the difference? How could she make out where her own mind ended, and the magic began?
Virelle had asked her if wanting him, with no artifice, couldn’t be the greatest act of rebellion.
But how could she ever do so, if the artifice itself was buried in her own skin?
The thought was worse than panic. She set the book down on the desk and leaned against the wood. Counting helped. One. Two. Three. The numbers were a rope she could hold on to when everything else went liquid.
“Sabine—” Azrian took a step closer.
Sabine raised a hand to stop him. “I simply need a moment.”
When she felt steady enough, she picked up the book again. She did not look at him. But she was aware—as she was always, infuriatingly aware—of exactly where he stood. Motionless, lips pressed in a hard line.
Now was not the time to worry about her traitorous heart, or the parasite that magic had burrowed into it. She paged ahead, fingers moving faster, hunting for the place where the story of the soulmarks must have soured.
“ After the First Imperial Wars, as annexed regions brought diverse traditions to the Empire, the elites feared the unpredictable power of soulbonded magic, and soulmarks were outlawed in Velyar. ” Sabine’s voice caught.
“ The Empire began a systematic and targeted purging of soulmarked individuals .”
She stopped, bile rising to her throat for an entirely new reason this time.
“The Children were telling the truth all along.” Azrian spoke very quietly. “Why does the Duchess have all of this? Didn’t you say she was working with the killer?”
“Perhaps she is. After all, she’s a member of the Royal Circle. Though perhaps she’s double-crossing them, as well?”
Each of the Duchess’s secrets Sabine uncovered painted a muddier picture, and she was no longer sure what to believe about her sponsor. Was she friend or foe? And would Sabine ever know for certain?
For a long time, neither of them spoke. The only sound was the sizzle of the affinity flame in the wall sconce and the gentle shifting of the air, disturbed by their breath.
Sabine paged through the volume, seeking further clarity. The book was part treatise, part confession, and the later chapters grew increasingly panicked, as if the author knew their time was running out.
She found an entry, near the end: “ It is this author’s belief that the marks have never truly vanished.
They have only been rendered so dangerous that none dare speak of them, or bond outside the sanctioned channels.
Should they reappear in numbers, the Registry’s first instinct will be annihilation.
Our only hope is in knowledge, and in preserving the memory of what we once were . ”
She met Azrian’s gaze. He was the one to speak the truth out loud. “So this is why the Registry wants marked pairs eliminated.”
The missing piece of the puzzle that had been buzzing around Sabine’s brain like an insistent bug finally snapped into place. It all made perfect sense, now. Why the Registry wanted marked couples to come forward. Why they did not want them to fear the marks.
Their goal had been, since the beginning of the Empire, to eradicate this ancestral form of magic. They could not do so if the Gilt thought themselves in danger.
She tucked the book under her arm. “We have to show this to Caelen and Virelle.”