What We Devour

by Linsey Miller

  The Sundered Crown could not reign much longer, but to ensure that, I had to make the Heir trust me.

  When we reached a stairwell at the center of the palace, the Heir spent a half hour contracting his vilewright to open a set of five doors. There were real locks and a key as well. Behind them all was a single staircase down into the depths of the mountain. We spiraled down it and deep into the earth, water oozing from the stone walls. Far-off screeches echoed down the halls.

  “The sacrifices,” the Heir said. “Try to ignore them.”

  This was where Will would’ve been.

  We came to a stop an hour after leaving the lab. The near rush of water rumbled up my feet, a heavy damp hanging in the air. Salt and sulfur tinged the space, and a bone-white dust stuck to the wet walls dripped around us. The path dropped off, and the Heir offered me a hand as we descended into a cave system lit by the pale-green light of luminescent spiderwebs. My wrights writhed within me. Moss the color of old teeth lined our path.

  And at the end, beyond dragging footprints and sacrificial stains, in the middle of a small sandbar encircled by salt-encrusted runoffs of river water, looming over me as it had that day more than ten years ago, was the door to my mother’s sickroom. She’d only survived three days, but I’d still know it anywhere.

  “What is this?” I whispered.

  “The Door,” he said. “It’s different for everyone.”

  It was a crooked door set in a listing jamb. The wood was old and wet-warped, bug holes freckling the lower half, and the uneven slats left a gash of space in the middle. A brilliant white light spilled out through the cracks. No light so bright had ever existed in the Wallows.

  This wasn’t some specter created by a noblewright; I would’ve noticed. This was the memory that marked the loss of my mother in my mind.

  I was not afraid, and in that clarity came fury.

  “Get out of my head,” I said, stalking to the Door. “That home’s not real anymore, and I never wanted to open that door.”

  The Door grew, shrank.

  A breath.

  I leaned in close, unafraid, and whispered, “I burned that house. Did you miss that part of the memory, or are you grasping?”

  And through the crack in the door came a soft, shivering laugh. I stumbled back.

  I wanted to open the Door. Something in me whispered that my mother would be on the other side, her flesh healed. Her arms would fold around me, and she’d smell of soap and sawdust instead of seared skin and hair. She would laugh instead of scream.

  I had never wanted anything so deeply. It was in my bones, my blood, every pounding thought in my head urging me to rip the door open.

  “Messing with this will end the world,” I whispered. There were dark things beyond that Door begging to be let back in. They were begging me to let them in. “What if we can’t fix it?”

  “There is no such thing as ‘can’t,’” he said. “There is only what we do not understand yet. This Door would not exist if it were impossible.”

  I turned him to the Door and held his face so that he had to look at it. “Only someone who’s been handed the world would say that. It’s not the rich who will die. It’s not the peerage. You’ll all be safe behind your soldiers, stone walls, and wrought. It’s the rest of us who will die. You’ll destroy us.”

  “No!” He yanked himself from my grasp and spun, red glasses cracking against the ground. “No, I can and I will. I was made to destroy. I have always destroyed lives, but for once, I can destroy this and create something better! I made myself a monster when it was expected of me, but I will not be that monster now!”

  I knelt and picked up the glasses, far too aware of the Door at my back.

  “I can,” the Heir whispered, eyes wet, breaths stuttering. “I can. I can. I promise. I can create something better. I just need more time. I need to understand it. To know.”

  He sunk to his knees, gaze stuck on the door, and shuddered.

  “I can create things. Good things.” He looked to me. “Please, Lorena, you understand, don’t you? My mother has never cared, but I do.”

  Alistair Wyrslaine, the poor boy desperate to understand everything because no one understood him.

  “Alistair,” I said, setting the broken glasses on his nose. For all the good I had ever done, I’d done it to survive. Not out of goodness but survival. We were not the same, but we were plucked from the same plot. “Of course I understand, but you have to be careful. Your mother has been down here an endless number of times. What do you think it’s done to her? Those sacrifices? Alistair, they have to stop. Even without them, she’s killed so many people. She doesn’t want you to succeed. Why do you think that is?”

  “They’re guilty. Those are the rules,” he said, his gaze stuck on whatever Door he saw beyond my back. “I tried—I didn’t like…” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Willoughby Chase is an exception, not a standard. Most buy their way out of the sacrifice if they can. Perhaps you’re right. He’s innocent. If he weren’t, he could’ve paid.”

  Oh.

  Society was built on the corpses of those the court cast aside—those who couldn’t pay a fine, those who stole to survive, those who couldn’t afford an education and didn’t know all the rules—and why should this be any different? Of course the wealthy only cared about the validity of the sacrifices when it happened to one of their own. Did Julian know?

  “But then he did the one thing my mother cannot forgive,” said Alistair.

  I couldn’t imagine the Crown forgiving anything and could not think of what Will must have done. It had to be insulting. It had to be demeaning. But Will didn’t have enough power or money to degrade the Crown.

  “Lorena?”

  “I know what we have to do,” I said, “but I’m afraid you won’t understand me.”

  “Of course I will.” He rose up on his knees, the unnatural light of the Door reflecting red in his eyes, and grasped my coat. “I do not want to be remembered as the red-eyed vilewrought monster of Hila. I can’t be, and you understand that. I promise I will understand you.”

  Maybe I didn’t deserve the people I was trying to save.

  “We have to be very, very careful.” I stroked his cheek, suddenly seeing the boy Julian and the others were so afraid of. “We must deal with your mother. The Door will open within five months. We cannot let her stop your research. We cannot let her continue killing. She must be stopped.”

  I had to convince him to kill the Sundered Crown.

  Sixteen

  “It knows you now,” he said when escorting me back to my room. “It will try to make you open it. Don’t.”

  It was the Door in the depths of the palace in a world where the Vile were banished. It had no power here.

  “I understand why you think this about my mother.” He adjusted his glasses—he was lying about something then—and moved as if to touch me but didn’t. “But I need time. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  Long after he’d left, hours into the dark night, footsteps echoed up and down the hall, and someone who sounded like the Heir rapped twice at my door. I jerked up and was halfway to the door before stopping. The Heir always knocked thrice. I crawled back into bed. They knocked for an hour.

  Perhaps the Heir was right: I had seen the Door, and it had opened another in me, letting the vileness in me free.

  Dawn was bleeding through my window when I woke. A fat waxing moon still hung in the sky. Footsteps shuffled outside, and hushed voices echoed in the hall. Carlow’s door creaked.

  “I’m annoyed,” said Carlow, her voice gritty from sleep.

  “And I’m serious.” Creek sighed. “Stay in bed today.”

  “I’d mock you for playing my father, but we both know what befalls people unlucky enough to be my family,” Carlow said, her voice pitching. She laughed. “You never cared before.”

 
; “You were never so reckless before.”

  Before Poppy’s death, he must’ve meant.

  “Why are you doing this?” Carlow whispered. “I can’t. You know what happens to the people I love.”

  “The heart is a garden, and a gardener does not always control what takes root and grows,” said Creek, his voice steadier than I’d ever heard it. “Your curse should never have been inheritable.”

  “Well,” she said, “when we ruin everything and accidentally destroy the Door, you can tell that to the Vile who placed it before I kill them.”

  “He deserves it, but that isn’t how you break a curse, Franziska Carlow,” he said, her name the pause between his quickened breaths. “I would know.”

  “Because you failed to break yours two years ago?” She let out a bark of a laugh. “We’re going to be stuck together for eternity.”

  “Franziska, I’m not—”

  A door slammed down the hall, and one of them stumbled. Carlow’s door shut. A dozen people at least thundered down the hallway. I threw my blanket off and dragged a dress over my head. I pulled the greatcoat on just as the door rattled.

  “The gall of him, installing locks,” came the gentle voice of the Sundered Crown. “Lorena, I have come to speak with you.”

  “One moment, Your Excellency.” I stomped toward the door so that she would be sure to hear that I wasn’t avoiding her and shoved the ledgers and notes on Will’s case onto my bed and under the blanket. “I’m sorry. It has been a slow morning.”

  When I opened the door, she was staring down her nose at me despite me being taller.

  “Yes,” she said, gaze rolling to take in the full room behind me. “My Door has that effect on people.”

  Behind her stood a host of guards and the Heir. His red glasses were pushed close to his eyes, and his black hair was twisted up in a smooth bun. The collar of his shirt could have cut his chin. Even his mouth was a sharp, little line.

  “Would you like to come in, or shall we go somewhere else?” I asked, head bowed.

  “I would like for you to bow properly.” She inclined her head—not a bow but an instruction. “You’re far too uncouth to be the only other dualwrought. We will remedy that.”

  I sunk to my knees and pressed my head to the floor. After a breath, she tapped her toes against the ground. I rose, head bowed.

  “Good.” She smiled, close-mouthed, and patted my hand. “Fetch another chair.”

  My mother’s voice rose up in my head. “Beware of creatures hiding their teeth.”

  One of the guards darted away. I tried not to glance at the Heir. His mother glided past me and sat at my desk, the wide cut of her white trousers spilling across the floor like snow. Another guard set a covered tray before her, and yet another sat a new chair beside me. I sat, clutching my greatcoat at my stomach. Julian’s coat was thrown across the end of my bed.

  “We’re going to discuss what you do know,” she said, dismissing everyone with a wave, “and then I am going to teach you what you do not.”

  I glanced at the Heir. He stood, unmoving, at the wall behind his mother.

  “Now.” The Crown gestured to the tray on my desk and drew a cup of milk tea toward herself. “You know how to heal yourself, yes?”

  I nodded.

  “Good,” she said. “Eat.”

  Slow-baked black bread slices lined the outside of the tray. Boiled eggs, seared tomatoes, and hard yellow cheese covered the rest of it. Poached eggs jiggled in the valley of a saucer, their orange yolks speckled with thick flakes of salt, and slivers of toasted white bread were stacked next to them. There were even three small cakes stuffed with candied peel.

  “I am glad,” muttered the Crown, frighteningly dreamily, “we got tea before we were cut off from the rest of the world.”

  There were no plates, only two knives and two spoons, and the Crown made no move for either.

  “Yes, Your Excellency,” I said and ate a tomato. “What is it you would like me to learn?”

  “I am curious.” She picked up the knife and twirled it exactly like the Heir always did. “All wrought have a preference—tangible or intangible?”

  “Intangible,” I said, and the Heir’s jaw clenched.

  “That won’t do for most injuries.” The Crown took a sip of her tea, licked her lips, and impaled her hand with the knife. “If I use a relatively simple contract to sacrifice a feeling and destroy this…”

  The Heir’s breath caught in his throat. I froze, one hand gripping my spoon. The Crown didn’t even glance at him, her gaze focused solely on me, and the knife in her hand began to degrade. Her vilewright enacted the contract slowly, leaving a ragged and bleeding hole behind. The Heir pressed the back of his head against the wall.

  “No weapon,” she said, “but hardly enough to fully heal the wound. The invasive aspects that cause infection are still present, and the jagged pieces of bone are still where they shouldn’t be. A feeling is not an equal sacrifice.”

  “I see.” I sipped from a cup of water, tongue curling at the sweet hint of orange and almond syrup, and swallowed my first thought. She would never believe me unskilled enough for that. “How long did it take you to learn all this?”

  “Years.”

  I cocked my head to study the wound. The knife wasn’t completely gone, and rust floated in the blood.

  “When did you destroy your ability to feel pain?” I asked.

  “The day I was betrothed,” she said with a smile. “Good. You’re thinking how you should be.”

  I was thinking how she did, she meant.

  She glanced at the Heir, and he rapped once at the wall. A guard in the same sleeveless uniform as Hana Worth entered. He kept his eyes down and held out his hand, fingers shaking. The Crown cut the tip from his littlest finger. It vanished. Her hand healed.

  The long, detailed contracts were designed so that wrought knew exactly what to tell their wrights to enact the outcome they wanted, and she had been doing this for so long that she must have had dozens of contracts memorized. She could probably think specific contracts like I could, but it still took her longer than I would’ve thought. How had she not died instantly when Beatrice rent her in two? Was there always such a long moment between the wounding, the wright understanding the contract the Crown asked it to undertake, and the healing? Was there always a moment of weakness?

  I gripped the desk edge to keep from flinching.

  “Alistair,” said the Crown, “ensure he does not collapse before reaching the healer.”

  The Heir followed the guard out of the room, and I picked up my knife, spearing a boiled egg. I held on to the blade even once I was done eating.

  “It’s good that you have a strong stomach.” The Crown’s hands curled around her cup. Not even a scar remained. “I could teach you how to do that, but your work with Alistair would have to end. The Door is a waste of time anyway. I require a certain dedication from my students. Could you do that?”

  So Carlow and the Heir hadn’t shared her calculations.

  “Why don’t you want him studying the Door?” I asked.

  “It is useful for me,” she said, “and it is better, in the long run, if we are not the cause of it opening, even by accident, but the peers who helped our people survive its opening.”

  “But what happens when it does open?” I asked.

  “I’m sure that would be unfortunate for some,” she said, “but my son and I are quite adept, and my peers have the resources to survive. A little chaos, like a wildfire, is sometimes necessary to keep the world in order. If the Door does open one day, then those who survive are certainly the ones worthy of rebuilding the mortal world.”

  No, they were the ones rich enough to survive. It was easier to survive the end of the world when you were healthy at the start of it and coddled by your safety net of resources. Those withou
t would die first. Maybe a few would survive. Many wouldn’t.

  “You survived so long with so little.” She reached across the desk and patted my hand. “After all, cream always rises to the top.”

  “Oh.” I ducked my head, offering her a small half smile, and lied. “I see what you mean, but I signed a contract with him. I can’t not help.”

  “You are a resourceful girl. I’m certain you’ll think of something.” She leaned back in her chair, poured what was left of her tea into my empty cup, and offered me the little tray with sugar and cream.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “It’s still a bit too rich for me.”

  “Of course. It’s a pity you’re from the Wallows.” She sniffed, nostrils flaring. “What is the worst wound you have healed for yourself?”

  “Nothing like what you’ve done,” I said. “Crossbow through the calf, probably? No one knew I was vilewrought, though, so I had to do most of it alone.”

  I’d sacrificed a whole hutch of chickens to keep from bleeding out, and still my vilewright had wanted more.

  The Crown hummed and tilted her head. “Passable. You can do better.”

  “May I ask you something?” I forced myself to stumble over the words. “Please. I never had anyone else to ask.”

  The Crown grinned. “Of course, Lorena.”

  “Is it easier on your own body?” I asked and held out my arms. I had scars aplenty from my sacrifices and surviving, but the Crown only had one. “It was always easier to destroy or create something in me than someone else. I used to heal folks when I could, but some died. Was that me, or was that—”

  “The curse of being vilewrought?” The Crown laughed gently and took my hand in hers. “Yes, it takes longer for our vilewrights to work than our noblewrights, especially when working outside our bodies. We are familiar; others are not. The vilewright must acclimate itself with the new body.”