I ducked my head and let out a sigh. “So it’s not just me.”
“It will never be just you ever again.” She untangled her hand from mine. “You’re with people who understand now.”
I understood perfectly—like me, if she used her wrights on herself, they worked faster. If she was to die, it would have to be quick.
Seventeen
The Sundered Crown was right. I could do better, and I did. She spent two hours going over the inner workings of my arm with me, pointing out the tendons, bones, and muscles that were the easiest to re-create if I needed to sacrifice them. She flayed herself open for me and asked for nothing—yet—in return. She let me use her for the sacrifices so long as I wrote beforehand what I was asking my vilewright to do. By the end of our meeting, I had repaired the shattered bones of my off hand’s little finger.
The Crown, of course, had done the shattering. She said that I, like all wrought, would get used to the pain.
She said, for now, the pain was useful, but later I would need it as sacrifice.
The Heir’s familiar three knocks rattled my door. I let him in, hands still shaking from the easy way the Crown had severed that guard’s finger. He didn’t linger in the doorway, this time slipping inside and shutting the door, and he sat gingerly on the edge of my bed. I sat next to him and wrapped myself in Julian’s coat. He took a deep breath.
“You could have warned me,” I whispered without meaning to.
“It’s how I learned,” said the Heir. “It’s how many noblewrought have learned how to heal. Warning you of something so natural did not even occur to me until I saw your face.”
“That explains so much.” I shifted, the papers under the blanket crinkling.
The Heir reached under it and pulled out my notes on Will’s case. “You didn’t have to do that. She knows about our agreement.”
He rose and helped me organize them. We stacked them on the floor near the desk, each tower a different section. Business expenses, tax information, and citations from the court and council: I had read them all and learned little. There was nothing treasonous in the documents.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “He hasn’t committed treason unless your mother suddenly cares about wage violations.”
“She doesn’t.” He folded himself onto the edge of my bed and picked at the blanket. “You asked her some interesting questions.”
“Alistair, it took everything in me to not just scream the whole time she was talking.” I collapsed next to him. “Which question?”
His mouth quirked up. “Lorena, you asked her if her wrights were always so slow.”
Had I made it too obvious what I was truly asking about?
“Like anyone else could have done anything faster or survived Beatrice,” said the Heir. “I remember that day. I was there. The blow didn’t sunder her face. It only tore it open. It was her chest that was sundered. I saw her heart, Lorena. We all thought she was dead. It took her hours to heal those wounds. I don’t know how she did it. I don’t know if she does.”
So her healing wasn’t fast. Mine wasn’t either, but it didn’t take hours. I’d never had my chest cracked open though. She would’ve had to slow her heart without killing her brain. To kill her, her heart had to go.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I lied. “Do you think she’s upset?”
“No. If she were, she would have said so.” He straightened his glasses—it was such an easy tell—and froze with his fingers on the arms. “Her moods are hard to predict, but no, she is no more upset with you than she would be anyway. Even if she is, she’s too thrilled by the concept of a dualwrought daughter to care.”
I shuddered. “I don’t want to be her daughter.”
“Yes,” he said with a laugh. “That would be awkward.”
“Take them off.” I tapped one finger against the back of his gloved hand. “It’s me, Alistair. I know exactly who you are.”
He pulled the red glasses from his face. The shadows beneath his eyes were puffy and tinged with red. “Who knows you best, Lorena Adler?”
“My wrights.” They trilled, the sound inaudible but shaking within me. “They know me as well as I know them.”
They were as harsh as the world, giving nothing without taking something.
“Not your mother?” he asked.
“I was so young when she died. She never really knew me,” I whispered. “I never asked her anything important. I know her favorite color and joke, but I don’t know what she wanted from the world beyond surviving. I don’t know what she would’ve done if she left the Wallows. I never asked her what flowers she wanted for her funeral plot.”
Maybe I was destined to be an undertaker the moment I heard her last breath.
“No one knows me now. My mother does but she doesn’t,” he said.
I nodded. “I know what my mother’s heart looked like. We shouldn’t have to know that.”
The Heir’s hand twitched. He laid it on my shoulder, fingers slightly curled. The warmth of his body seared. My mother and so many I had grown up with were dead and cold, and the memory of her death still haunted me, and the Heir seemed to know. He yanked his hand away and sighed. Laughter bubbled out of my chest as a sob. I pressed my palms into my eyes.
“I know what my sisters’ blood tasted like,” he whispered. “I know how blood arches from a slit throat. I know how knowledge of death makes nightmares of grief. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not fair.”
“The world isn’t fair,” he said. “It demands we harm ourselves and others to manifest power. Without coldness, we would suffer. I used to care so much that it hurt and I thought I would drown in it. To care in a world so soaked in cruelty is to suffer. We can’t afford to care.”
“Is that what you tell yourself?” I lifted my face to him. “Everyone except you and the peerage has to harm themselves to survive. That back-breaking, finger-flaying work of factories and mines or the endless hours at any other job in Cynlira. My mother worked in a munitions factory. She was never not bleeding and tired. She had to be to keep us housed and fed, and that is not a fact of the world but a fact of Cynlira. She’s dead because Lankin Northcott didn’t care if his factory went up in flames so long as he got enough money out of it first. She wasn’t even the worst off. You’ve always been powerful, even if bad things have happened to you, so of course the first time you noticed that power had a cost was with your vilewright. The rest of us didn’t need wrights to notice.
“I am scarred not because I am noblewrought,” I said and held out my arms, “but because I scrubbed floors till my fingers bled to pay for my mother’s cremation. The world doesn’t demand we break ourselves to survive; the people refusing to help us do.”
He blinked at me and reached into his coat, pulling out a tall, thin flask. He held it to my head. The cold metal burned and eased the ache.
“Once the threat of the Door is dealt with,” he said, “we may begin dealing with the other threats to Cynlira.”
“You know I mean the peerage, right?” I took the flask from him and held it to my cheek. “You didn’t tell her about Carlow’s prediction.”
He smoothed tendrils of my hair from my forehead, tucking them behind my ears. “No. I know what she will say—we will survive, and the strong will survive with us. Telling her now isn’t beneficial.”
“Does she always use you for sacrifices like that?” I asked, turning to face him. My cheek bumped his hand, and his fingers fell to my shoulder. “What did her vilewright take?”
“I have extensive journals, so I’ll figure out which memory it was later.” He held his breath for a moment and then let it out. “She makes sure I always fill in the blanks.”
“Alistair,” I said slowly, “how do you know she’s telling you the truth after she sacrifices a memory?”
“She loves me. She
is a monster, but she loves me.” He pulled his hand away from me, gray eyes wide, and stood, looking nothing like the red-eyed vilewrought Heir his actions had made him. “How do you know Julian is not simply using you to save his father?”
Because he loved me, and I knew him better than he knew himself. He couldn’t lie worth a damn.
“He’s my best friend,” I said. “He wants to marry me. I doubt he’d propose such a binding contract if he wanted to be rid of me.”
The Heir’s brows shot up. “Such a vivacious boy for a girl who survived by staying hidden.”
“It’s easy to hide in his shadow.” I had made myself unassuming and standoffish to stay safe, but Julian was too cheerful to be scared off by sarcasm and jerked-away hands. Being an undertaker had kept nearly everyone at bay. “Are you jealous that I have friends and not contractually obligated business partners?”
He flushed.
“Don’t worry. I understand. My wrights were my only friends for years until I moved to Felhollow.”
He rose, cheeks still an unsettling shade of pink. “I’ll have someone bring you lunch. I’m sure breakfast was unappetizing. Thankfully, I’m fairly certain my mother will leave you be now.”
“Small mercies,” I said. Five months—what a horrifying number. That was hardly any time, and it wasn’t enough to get the Crown out of the way. Will would be safe by then if he was innocent, but how many would we be sacrificing every week by then? It wasn’t enough to keep Will safe. Eventually, all of us would be sacrificed to the Door. Cynlira couldn’t survive like this. “Have you eaten? I want to tell you about my time in the Wallows. I want to tell you what Mori is like for the rest of us.”
Eighteen
It was almost nice, talking to Alistair Wyrslaine, during the moments when I forgot he was the Heir. He was intense but no more so than Mack when he got talking. He didn’t try flirting with me again, and I was thankful for that. We couldn’t both be playing each other.
It was harder to think of him as the Heir now that I was committed to using his name with him. He was barely older than me but so much bloodier.
The next morning, there was a flask of tart lemonade—barely any sugar and no poison—outside my door. I drank it sparingly as I left for the laboratory. Carlow’s door was shut tight, voices whispering behind it, and a sound that might have been sobbing broke through. I stopped and touched the door. I’d never thought of Carlow as a crier.
I withdrew my hand and kept walking.
I didn’t know her well enough. She would hate being caught crying by me. I decided to send Creek after her, but by the time I got to the laboratory, she was already there. There must have been a less winding path between our quarters and here.
“Within three months, the sacrifices necessary to keep it shut will equal the population of Port Altiver,” she said, nose so close to her journal there was ink smeared across it.
“Well,” drawled Creek, peering over her shoulder, “at least that’s not a very large town.”
I’d passed through it with the Heir on our way to Mori. Port Salt-Swallowing-the-River was as old as Felhollow and as deserving as any other town, no matter how many lived in it.
“We’re going to have to decide how many people we’re willing to let die before we try to replace the Door,” I said. “We’re at three a month now. Is five too many?”
“Not if they’re rapists and murderers,” Basil muttered.
“But what about when we run out of those?” I pulled the bowl of red dirt toward myself, hand shaking. “What about when we no longer have time to judge folks with wrights and must guess if they’re guilty or not?”
“The more pressing question you’re avoiding,” said Carlow, “is how many innocent people are we willing to sacrifice to the Door so that we can buy ourselves enough time to replace it and save the rest of Cynlira, and how do we choose them?”
“Risk everyone now or sacrifice some to lessen the risk?” Basil groaned and closed the book they had been reading. “We can’t decide that.”
If we didn’t, who would? The Heir? The Crown?
“I do not like either of those choices,” said Creek. “Let’s just not make a choice.”
I laughed a bit too loudly and sent my quill nibs rolling across the floor. I stumbled from my stool, shooing the others away from my mess. Carlow snorted as I crawled under her desk. I swept all the odds and ends beneath it into my pockets.
“What is our number?” I said, kneeling. “What number of survivors makes the number of dead worth it?”
The door swung open. Hana entered first, followed by the Heir. He was dressed as he had been yesterday, as if he had an identical outfit for each day of the week, but his glasses hung around his neck from a thin gold chain. Basil dropped their inkpot, and Carlow screwed up her face. Even Creek stared at the Heir as if they had never met.
Then the Crown entered, and we all dropped to the floor.
“Since you seemed more accustomed to intangible sacrifices, I grew curious.” The Crown wore white again, a tightly fitted bodice that showed off the carved binding on her chest. A few stray beads of blood welled across the tangling lines of Life’s and Death’s sigils. “I would also like to go over your numbers, Franziska, but first Lorena.”
So the Heir had told her. She led me into the washroom and then behind a curtained door I hadn’t noticed before. The little nook was hardly big enough for the desk shoved into it and seemed to be nothing more than a closet. I sat on the stool nearest the door. She laughed.
“Relax,” she said. “I have two simple tests for you, hardly anything at all, and then you may return to fulfilling my Alistair’s curiosity. He is only researching this because it is a great puzzle and he has no self-control when it comes to things that intrigue him.”
I crinkled my brow and feigned confusion. “But what if Carlow is right? What will we do then?”
“We continue on as we have been, albeit slightly less populated.” She pulled an old set of scales from the shelf beside us and walked her fingers along the top. “There are always people not valuable enough to keep around.”
A chill crept down my spine.
“Of course,” I said, afraid I’d pushed her too far already. “What were the tests, Your Excellency?”
“Ah,” the Crown said with a sigh. “When I was your age, people always asked me why I did things, and they hated that my answer was ‘because I wanted to.’ Nothing I wanted was ever right, and then I realized that all I had to do was take what I wanted. I owed no one answers. I have read your contract with my son. You gain nothing from it.”
How unsurprising that caring about someone else was such a strange concept to her.
“Intangible sacrifices were never really accepted or considered until recently. When I was learning, memories were untouchable. Only tangible sacrifices were known, taught, and allowed.” She took my hands in hers and ran her thumbs across the backs of my knuckles. It would’ve been loving if I didn’t hate her. “I was tempted the moment I realized destroying memories and creating new ones was possible. Alistair opened my eyes with Hila. There was so much more possible than I had previously thought. I considered letting Beatrice live. She was the best fighter in Cynlira, and I could have destroyed her loyalty to my husband and created a whole new life for her where she was loyal to me.”
My vilewright growled. For all the terrible things I had heard about the Crown, I had never heard of her destroying memories and creating new ones like that. When the Heir had destroyed the free will of the people in Hila, that had been the first time such a blatant intangible sacrifice had been made publicly.
“Did you ever alter someone’s memories and free will?” she asked. “Did you ever want something enough to try?”
I knew want better than anything. I had grown up hungry, and food had never filled that need. My wrights were ever-growling with longing
for something, anything, more than this, and my parents, too, had wanted. My mother had wanted to live. I had wanted to live.
I so rarely indulged, but I had. Altering a healer’s memories so they wouldn’t remember me stealing supplies to save my mother or a guard’s so they wouldn’t know which kid had robbed them. Memories made a person. What was the difference between altering them and changing someone’s will?
“No,” I lied, “but I thought about it quite a lot. I didn’t think I would be able to pull it off. Those soldiers were my first. I panicked.”
“Disappointing.” She pulled away. “What do you want, Lorena Adler?”
“I want Will Chase alive,” I said. “I want Felhollow to be left alone.”
“I don’t believe you.” She took a breath, and the scales crumbled. A minute later, a knife appeared in her open hand. “What do you want?”
I forced myself to flinch, but this was good. Her contracts with her noblewright, just like those with her vilewright, took longer than mine to enact.
“I want to go home. I want to forget all about you and your son and your rotting city, and I want to live a life that never crosses yours again.”
She pressed the blade into the back of my hand.
I hissed. “I want to tear this entire fucking city from its mountain. I want all your court to drown in the waters I was born in. I want to break you down like you lot break us till not even the historians remember your name, because I know what it means to survive, and for all your talk, you wouldn’t last a week in your own city.”
“Finally,” said the Crown, grinning. “Honesty. You lie so often I was afraid I would never get the truth.”
“You’re not as terrifying as you think,” I said, eyes on my blood welling around the blade.
“Have you been able to destroy any part of the Door?” she asked.
I jumped at the change of questions, and the blade sunk deeper.
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