I pushed the tip of the needle into the vein in the crook of her elbow. There was no need for violence with sacrifices. My vilewright would claim what it was owed no matter what.
Take her blood, I prayed, and destroy the memory she spoke of.
My vilewright glided from me to her arm, and the Crown, for the first time I had seen, shuddered. It would have been easier using something intangible for the sacrifice. She thought violence a solely physical act.
Wait. Do it slowly. Let her underestimate us.
We sat in silence, my fingers loosely gripping her wrist, and she stared. I squeezed my eyes shut and moved my lips. Pretending wasn’t a lie.
Now.
Her eyes glazed over. She shook her head, using her free hand to pull a scrap of paper from her pocket.
“Good,” she said, reading the note that must have listed what she ate this morning. “That was good, but we can improve it, especially the speed. Your vilewright is slow. It will learn, and you will get used to the sacrifices.”
My vilewright growled deep in the pit of my stomach, and I set the needle aside. Distantly, I thought I heard Creek laugh.
“Have you stopped researching the Door like I instructed?” she asked.
“I have stopped researching the Door,” I said. I hadn’t researched anything since yesterday, only experimented. She was not pedantic enough for this game.
Or perhaps so many feared her that she had never needed to consider the importance of words.
“Good.” She smiled and stood, her stout frame blocking the light from the hallway. “Do I terrify you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I love the truth.” She touched my chin and tilted my head up. “Alistair will need someone to look out for him once I’m gone. Will you still be here when he is the Crown?”
This was all I and every other Liran was to her—a tool to be shaped and used regardless of what we wanted.
“Yes.” Though that time would come sooner than she thought. “I will be.”
“Good.” She said, “You will join Alistair and me in court tomorrow. Prepare yourself.”
No lies—she had handed me the perfect way to trick her and everyone else.
“Of course, Your Excellency.” I didn’t breathe again until she was gone. “Prepare myself.”
The door shut, and behind it stood Creek. The knife was still in his chest. Blood dripped down his front.
“You’re not real,” I said. “You’re dead.”
“Thanks to you.” He clucked his tongue and waggled a finger at me. “Quaint little Lorena Adler, who had never been trained and had never killed before. What would your mother say if she saw you now?”
“Creek was annoying,” I said and turned away to my desk, “so you’re a bad manifestation of my guilty conscience.”
I had dreamed about him last night too. This was exhaustion. A trick of—
He was sitting on my desk. “You wound me.”
“You’re the Door, aren’t you?” I asked.
“Am I?” He brought his hand to his ruined chest and fluttered it over his heart, except I had cut his heart from his corpse not a day ago. “Shouldn’t I be telling you to ‘open the Door’ or something trite then?”
“I wouldn’t want to tell you how to do your job.” I pushed him from my desk.
My hands shot through him and smacked the wall. Creek laughed.
“I thought she would hurt Franziska,” he said, “and you used that care. So devious.”
“Necessary,” I whispered and stepped back. “It’s necessary.”
He vanished from my desk. I sat in the chair, stiff and uneasy. My stomach rebelled, and I gagged, panic sticking in my throat. I covered my eyes and breathed.
“What’s your number, Lorena?” Creek asked.
“Not real. Not real.” I grabbed a sheet of clean paper and quill. “You’re not real. You’re the Door or my guilty mind and neither—”
“Is of any consequence?”
My hands shook as I wrote.
Julian and Mack, Stay inside tomorrow. Don’t worry about me or anything you hear. Don’t leave unless you must. I love you both. Lorena
That was vague enough, and it was reasonable for them to worry about me being present for court. I slid it under my door for one of the palace messengers and laid my forehead against the warm wood.
“Lorena,” said Creek, his mouth near my ear, “open the Door.”
Someone pounded at my door. I stumbled back, crashing against my bed. Creek was gone, nothing to prove he’d ever been here, and my door rattled in the wall. They rapped another three times.
“Lorena,” the Heir called, “open the door. We need to talk.”
Twenty-Three
I took a moment to collect myself before opening the door. My entire plan, if I could even call it that, hinged on the Heir’s state of mind. His mother had taken away what he loved the most today. He had lost his research and one of his few friends all in one fell blow.
Dusk had fallen outside. In the dark, shadows danced around flickers of moonlight. Stars stared through my barred windows like curious eyes. I opened the door a crack, and the Heir nodded to me. I prodded his shoulder. He felt real enough.
“Satisfied?” His greatcoat and gloves were gone, and his sleeves were rolled up. For the first time, I could see his red binding on his chest. “You once said my mother had to be stopped.”
“Inside.” I beckoned him in and shut the door. “First, you should know that Carlow, Basil, and I kept experimenting with the Door.”
He tilted his head to the side. “I see.”
“It didn’t work completely, but it did work somewhat.” I sat him on my bed and pulled the chair from my desk over so that I was across from him. “I understand if you are angry, but five months is not a lot of time, and this is progress.”
“I’m not angry with you,” he said softly, “but she is my mother.”
I reached for him, and he flinched. My vilewright unfurled around me like a cloak coming undone. Gently, gently, it seemed to say in the way it moved. The Heir needed coddling. He’d probably never had it before.
“She’s going to bind me, Alistair, and go back on our deal. She’s going to get us killed and kill all of Cynlira.” I leaned slightly toward him as Julian always did when trying to coax me to bed. “You have spent years researching the Door. For what?”
He looked away from me. “What experiment did you undertake?”
“We used pieces of Creek’s body to see if it could slow the replication of the Door after destroying the granules with my vilewright.” I trailed off and turned away, shuffling through papers on my desk. He followed, and his fingers brushed my sleeve. I stilled that hand. “I haven’t checked it since yesterday, but the smoke didn’t reform into granules like it normally does. Even if it does, it might not be able to breach the box and rejoin the rest of the dirt.”
“That is more than we’ve accomplished, and Creek would like that. I knew him my whole life, you know.” He pinched the hem of my sleeve between two fingers and tugged. “She wants you to rule with me, as an adviser.”
“Is that what you want, Alistair?” I turned to him. “To be remembered as the Sundered Crown’s son who stood aside as she sacrificed a tenth of Cynlira and saved only her chosen few from the Vile who invaded after?”
“No,” he whispered. “That’s not what I want at all.”
“You said once she wouldn’t let the Door devour us all because the dead don’t bow,” I whispered. “But if it is fear and power she longs for, what greater power is there than standing atop a nation of sacrifices and staring down at the survivors?”
I took a small step forward, and he stepped back. Another step. His knees hit my bed. I pushed him down on it and knelt at his feet.
“Alistair, she made me kill hi
m. What else will she make us do?” I asked.
He took a deep breath. “I will be a bad Crown. I do not care for politics.”
“But you have me.” Carefully, slowly, one word at a time, like stitching shut lips before a viewing, I said, “If you were Crown, you could assign people to care for your court responsibilities. No one would question your research with the Door. We only have five months. Imagine what you could learn in that time if you could dedicate yourself to your research? Imagine what we could create.”
This close, his red gaze burned.
“My father made us watch the sacrifices. He thought it would make us harder and prepare us for the responsibilities of ruling. He didn’t have trials. It was simply whoever he didn’t need anymore, but back then, it demanded far fewer people. The peers who backed my mother did so because she said she would have trials.” He curled his fingers around my throat, my pulse fluttering, and tilted his head to the side. His thumb stroked beneath my ear. “I have killed so many people but rarely with my hands.”
I could not say that his mother killed Creek; that was too far from the truth.
“You blame your mother for Creek even though I held the knife,” I said and didn’t pull away. “Nothing we could sacrifice would equal taking a life. I’m sorry, Alistair.”
His grip loosened. “I know. I must do it.”
“I know you feel…” I stopped, his eyes narrowing behind his glasses. It wouldn’t help to talk of feelings or morality. He wanted to be objective, so I had to appeal to that. “You pretend not to care, but I know you do. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be so careful with your contracts. I understand that your apathy lets you be objective. Use that.”
The only logical conclusion was that he had to kill his mother tomorrow, but I had to let him get there, fully invested, on his own. It would do no good if his reign began with him distrusting me.
“If I didn’t love her so, then I would have my answer.” He slid to the floor, gripped my hips, and turned me around. His legs stretched out on either side of mine, and I leaned back against his chest. His left arm encircled my waist. His right hand traced the sigil of Death over my heart. “I want to understand everything.”
“I know.”
“No, I don’t think you do.” He dug his nail into the flesh beneath my collarbone. “I want to peel back the skin of the world and see how it works. I want to see the way its tendons move.” He dragged his finger to the center of my chest and pressed against the sternum. “I want to break it down to its bones like you would break a corpse and study every little piece until I know how to put it together perfectly.” His hand flattened. “Not knowing has left a hunger in me I cannot sate. It’s a contract with no sacrifice. I can feel your panic just like I could see your disgust when you talked of using Creek’s body for experiments. When we traveled to Mori, you could barely stand to look at me. You were horrified by what I did to Hila and all I did after.”
“Was I?” I asked.
For what I was orchestrating now, I hardly had room to be upset.
“I can’t afford to care about who I kill, or I would never stop caring,” said the Heir. “I’m not like you. I don’t think I care about people dying when the Door opens. I just want to understand how it works and why.”
I leaned my head back against his shoulder. “How many times have you destroyed your feelings rather than deal with them?”
“If I asked you that, Lorena,” he said, tracing the sigil of Death across my skin again, “could you tell me the number?”
How much had I given up that I couldn’t remember? How much did it matter if I couldn’t remember? At least I, not the world, was the one breaking me down piece by piece.
“Your mother took the comfort of lies from me. She took your friend and research from you.” I reached up and tugged his glasses from his face. “You don’t owe her because she’s your mother. Family isn’t infallible.”
People with good families never understood. It was unthinkable and called into question everything they’d ever known. Family loved each other. It had to be the truth.
If it wasn’t, what else was a lie?
“My mother loves me,” he whispered. “Even at my worst, she loves me.”
“Love isn’t enough, Alistair.” I reached back and stroked his tangled hair.
He leaned into my hand. “Can good ends come from bad means?”
“I hope so.”
“Are you sure?” His grip on me tightened. “The coattails of past victories. How long before I must demonstrate my power to them again?”
“Alistair.” I was losing him, but his real name on my lips made him sigh. I threaded my fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck. “I always wondered what your contract was. I was there that day your mother paraded you through Mori.”
“You were?” His breath hitched.
“Of course I was,” I said and let my hand fall away. “You were the only other vilewrought I knew of who was near my age. We were the same. I wanted to see you.”
“The same?” he murmured, chin bumping my crown. “The contract wasn’t right, and the sacrifice wasn’t enough. I slept for days and couldn’t use my vilewright for months.”
So what if his reasons weren’t altruistic? With the right help, he could be a far better Crown than his mother. With the right push, I could get him to be better.
“Tell me,” I said. “I want to understand it all.”
He talked for hours. I hated how easy it was, knowing the root of that ease. Alistair Wyrslaine—it was hard to think of him as the Heir now that I knew why people called him that more than his real name—had spent so long feeling terrible that he’d used his wright to wash it all away and let him live without the threat of guilt or shame. He couldn’t sacrifice his feelings as I did, but he could sacrifice something else to destroy his guilt. How monstrous we made ourselves to survive.
What monsters Cynlira made of wrought. We were forced, contractually obligated, to use our work and wrights only for the “good of the country,” but it rarely benefited everyone. Only the peerage and wealthy reaped the rewards our wrights sowed. They used our wrights for their gain, all while promising us more.
“You’ve learned so much.” I turned away to hide my disgust and pretended to be straightening my dress. “You’ve created so much without having a noblewright. We can stop the Door, Alistair. I understand why you’re hesitant.”
He wanted to be understood so badly. A lonely little boy full of thoughts and absolutely no feelings for how those ideas affected others.
Dawn crept through the window outside, and he tapped his fingers against my stomach. “We should part and get ready.”
“Are you ready?” I asked, helping him up. This time, he didn’t flinch when I touched him.
“Yes, but you must wear the proper attire. You’re an undertaker, Lorena. You must look the part today.” He touched the collar of my coat—of Julian’s coat—and smiled. “She always said the reason they listened to her those first few years was because she took the crown from his still-warm corpse before their eyes.”
Twenty-Four
I took off Julian’s coat slowly. Blood drops speckled the sleeves near the wrists, dark red against the pale brown. I laid it across my bed, the wrinkled cloth leaving a smear of dust on my arms, and I changed clothes with tired hands. Each button of the greatcoat calmed my heart. Obscurity was the best armor.
Once I was dressed, I dragged a hand down my face, drew a line across my mouth, and slipped a knife into my sleeve. The old, brown coat I tucked beneath the bed.
“Adler?” Hana knocked once. “I’m coming in.”
“It’s lock—”
She shouldered the door open, and I stared at her. It was attractively competent.
She shrugged. “I’m His Majesty’s guard for a reason. Come. I won’t be late because of you. Today i
s already odd enough.”
“How so?” I asked as we left.
“He’s never used another guard. They annoy him,” she said. “I know all his specifications and contracts.”
“I imagine he has a lot,” I said.
“The contracts require a knowledge of the sacrificed memories.” She glanced at me. “My parents were guards. He knows many of my memories. That makes the sacrifices easier. A new guard is a hassle.”
“Well, that makes sense,” I said, because I couldn’t say that it would be fine.
Court was held well within the palace grounds. The nearer we got, the more orderly the gardens grew until there were no trees. It was as if I’d walked into a different world. Glittering quarters of stained-glass windows overlooking patches of blue tulips and gold sunflowers speckled the landings dug into the side of the mountain, and the building that housed the court, where peers made and altered the laws of the land, was a great thing of pale marble inlaid with blue stones. I definitely didn’t belong here.
Hana led me into a large room and pressed me against a wall near the door. “Don’t move.”
The courtroom was as wide as a city street and as tall as three stories. A long, low table in the shape of a half-moon carved from a single slab of pure black stone took up the center of the room. The chairs that lined it—the two hundred and something peers that made up the court—had not been set around the table but carved from the stone of the floor, making them as permanent as the peerage. There were gilded wooden chairs along the borders of the room for councilors on days when both groups met. Rich but replaceable.
As if there only being twenty-five allowed on the council wasn’t hint enough.
At the front of the room was a raised platform and a dark throne inlaid with slivers of sapphires, rubies, emeralds, diamonds, and onyx. Every god who’d abandoned us was represented in those colors.
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