Chapter 26
It had been two years since her first Veilmarch, the one she could not see through to its end. Since she had slain Lord Veylen. Since Death had crossed the line, choosing to protect her instead of merely collect, and then vanished into smoke.
Ilys could not describe the sensation, but she knew that though two years had passed, she would not be granted a third. Death would come for her this Veilmarch. She knew it in her blood.
One evening, while dining with the King, veal and carrots were set before them. Hanna had not yet been invited to join their table. The King remarked, almost wistfully, that he already mourned the solitude he and Ilys still shared, soon to be lost to the presence of the child.
Ilys smiled placatingly, but inside her head she scorned him. Then why did you ask me to name a successor? she thought. But she chided herself, knowing the King’s place as a servant to Death just as she knew her own.
The King scraped his knife against the stoneware plate, pushing the veal from side to side before speaking. “I asked you to this dinner because we’ve had word. Death will arrive in a day’s time.”
Ilys offered a silent thanks to her veil, masking the dread that coiled in her gut behind a diplomat’s composure. She did not want him back.
The King, always more attuned to the intangible than even Death himself, seemed to catch the shift in her spirit. “I wish it were not so,” he said softly, setting his palm flat against the table, the gesture almost a reach, almost a comfort.
“I think it is important that while you are away, Hanna sees to her first execution.”
Ilys choked on the mead she’d just drawn into her mouth. “What?”
“It’s time she became more intimate with what is asked of her.”
“She is seven,” Ilys said flatly.
The King cocked his head, consuming Ilys’s presence with a barbed curiosity. “You were only nine,” he pointedly offered.
“It is—” Ilys coughed. “Too young. Entirely too young.”
He quirked an eyebrow, a discontented tug teasing the corners of his lips. “Where is the reverent girl I raised? Have you so quickly forgotten your role, your divine nature?”
The words rattled around in her head. Her vision blinked between the dining table and visions of Hanna. Sweet, tiny Hanna, looking to Ilys with blood on her hands.
“I uphold my duty, my Shepherd. I only ask that we wait longer for the girl to mature.”
“She is no girl,” he snapped, sudden and surprising. “She is a Veilwalker.” He closed his eyes, visibly cooling and fighting for resolve. “You are not yourself, Ilys. I worry that you were forced to the helm too early. Too soon.” Grim’s departure flashed through her mind.
The King settled deeper into his chair, lounging comfortably in himself. “I believe some direction may help. Some additional oversight to aid you. Such a burden to shoulder alone, at your age.”
“My Shepherd, I apologize. I did not mean—”
“Veilwalker,” he cut her off. “A member of my Ebon Choir will attend you and the girl from here on out. No need to harangue further. Clearly youth has blurred your purpose.”
He stood, leaving the table. More and more, she found their conversations ending as such: a king’s demand followed by a tantrum. She had forgotten herself in the meeting, and now both Hanna and Ilys would pay for it.
Ilys’ gaze bored into the top of Hanna’s head as the girl flipped through the sketchbook that evening.
They were seated on the low couch in Ilys’s chambers, the fire burning low in the hearth, shadows playing across the stone walls.
The faint scratch of the pages susurrated throughout the quarters—Hanna’s favorite sound, it now seemed.
It had become a habit of hers, this plucking of the leather book from Ilys’s desk and opening it without question or permission.
With Grim, Baron, and Rowenna gone, no one treated Ilys with such casual familiarity.
Her heart leapt every time the child did, even if the medium Hanna clung to was painful.
Hanna stopped at one sketch and pointed to it. “You said he is in the guard, but I never see him.”
Oh, Hanna. The girl materialized with an affinity for questions that tortured.
How strange, silly, and utterly horrid to Ilys that Hanna had never met the hulking man.
How precious Baron would have found her.
How entertaining he would have been, performing for not one, but two girls utterly enthralled with him. Ilys’s eyes burned at the thought.
“He’s gone now,” Ilys admitted nimbly, her voice throttled and watery. “He lives in the Veil.”
Hanna, attuned to the shift in Ilys’s diction, turned to her veiled predecessor. She slid her veil off and crawled into Ilys’s lap, ducking under the larger veil as though it were a tent. Her small palms pressed against Ilys’s cheeks, wiping the tears there.
“I’m sorry that happened,” Hanna offered, lilting and tender.
Ilys broke further, sobs wracking her body. She was sorry? This darling child was sorry? A ridiculous notion. And yet the words lifted Ilys. No one had ever offered her such a sentiment before.
Yes, she thought bitterly, how sorry we all should all be.
A short rap at the door culled the tears. Ilys cupped Hanna’s face, tucking the child’s small features into her palm as she slipped the veil back from its makeshift duty as shelter. The fabric fell between them once more, a wall re-raised.
“Coming,” Ilys called, her voice level. The Ebon Choir attendant assigned to the Veilwalkers had already begun flitting on the outskirts of their existence. Gabriel, the man was called, seemed fatesbent on never leaving them to peace. All in one day’s work.
“Goodnight, my pet,” she bid, brushing a last touch across Hanna’s hair before stepping away.
“Goodnight, Ilys,” the girl called back. “I love you,” Hanna mumbled into her pillow.
Those fickle words lodged like iron nails in Ilys’s palms.
She slipped from the room without sparing Gabriel a glance. His towering frame loomed to her right, but she felt his needy presence without sight.
“Fates bless you, Gabriel,” she said, the words wry as she swept down the hallway.
“Veilwalker,” he replied, but did not follow.
Ilys’s mouth tightened. Of course—the King had set the Ebon Choir attendant to watch Hanna, not her.
The knowledge sat sour in her chest. Gabriel meant no harm, she knew, but the thought of anyone hovering so near the child without her close by scraped against every instinct she had.
She’d be gone within a day. Then who would guard Hanna?
Her mind turned to Elspeth. They were not intimates, but Ilys trusted her enough and she admired the quiet, maternal way the woman tended to Hanna. Ilys would speak with her before she left and make certain she understood to stay close to the girl. Keep her safe.
Ilys stepped back into her chamber, the door shutting softly behind her.
She would have to impress Hanna’s safety upon Gabriel as well.
The Ebon Choir might answer to the King, but the King answered to Death.
And soon, Death would answer to Ilys. It would be a simple thing to corner Gabriel and remind him just how thin the barrier to the veil could grow, making it clear which side he would find himself on if harm ever touched the girl.
The thought coaxed a loitering, dangerous smile to her lips as she drew the veil from her face, the fabric pooling like shadow in her hands.
There was a kind of lawlessness and pride in loving something small.
A fierce, unyielding urge to protect it, one that bred a defiant contempt for every gray and measured action.
“And what has made you so pleased?” The voice, cool and unhurried, came from behind her.
She turned to find Death, mortal and lanky, lounging on her bed. She flipped to face him, face bare and heated.
“What are you doing here?” she barked.
He only smiled, coy, and pressed a finger to his lips. Hush, his gesture seemed to say. He crossed one leg lazily over the other, burrowing deeper into her sheets as though staking a claim.
“I arrived early,” he said with a shrug. “I thought I’d absorb the sights.” His gaze slid deliberately to the sheer nightdress draped over the chair—the one she had nearly stripped to put on.
Ilys unsheathed her dagger and stalked toward him. He did not wear his usual heavy robe, but a black tunic that hung loose against his frame, baring a long pale stretch of throat and a sliver of chest. He did not flinch at the flash of steel, only smiled wider.
“Angry Veilwalker,” he observed, as though naming a caricature.
She pressed the blade’s tip beneath his chin, forcing his head back. “What are you doing here?” she hissed.
He leaned into the knife until blood beaded, red against white. “I am here to see you.”
“To retrieve me?” Her head tilted, voice sharp. “The gate has served well enough every other time. Why my chambers?”
“To talk, Ilys.” His voice dropped soft. His long fingers closed gently around her wrist, easing the dagger aside. “Good girl,” he said when she let him.
She relented, not out of mercy but because confusion and curiosity stayed her hand.
Killing him could wait. Stepping back, she drew a breath, willing the spice-scent of him to leave her senses.
It had been two years since she’d stood this close.
She lowered herself onto the chair draped with her nightdress, posture deceptively languid.
“By all means, let us natter,” she said, edged with saccharine elaboration.
He rose from the bed, gesturing lazily toward her sleeping quarters. “I meant to catch you off guard,” he admitted. “I imagined you’d try to kill me quickly on this journey, without the compromise we made the last time we met.”
Ilys glowered at his very correct assumption. He smiled wilder at her lack of denial, nodding and moving on.
“I have a new proposition. One I believe suits us both well.”