Bonesmith (House of the Dead, #1)(115)

“There is more at stake here than your bloody house, Vance.” Odile, on the other hand, gripped her cup tightly. For the first time since Wren had met her, the contents appeared untouched.

“It was our house, last I checked,” he said. “And I’m pretty sure we both agreed to tell the story we told.”

Odile looked away. “I was afraid. Now I think there are bigger things to fear than the truth.”

“We didn’t lie, Odile. We omitted. There is a difference, and what we did saved lives.”

“The only lives we saved were our own. You might be able to fool yourself, Vance, but you can’t fool me. I was there, the same as you. And I told Locke not to do it. But that woman… She had her claws in him from the start. She saw his hero complex, his need to do whatever it took to protect the Dominions, and she exploited it. He couldn’t resist it, the power she promised. So he took it without a second thought.”

There was a strange, bitter expression on Vance’s face. There was jealousy, too, the kind she always saw there when people talked about Locke.

“The way he glowed with it,” Odile continued, and Wren knew exactly what she meant. “I thought he truly was a hero, some figure from legend. But then, when he mowed down those people—our people—I knew he’d become something else. That power… it was too much for him. I’ll never forget the look in his eyes, the fear, as it took control of him. As he lost himself to it. We can call him a hero all we want, Vance, but it doesn’t change the fact that he was a mass murderer. We cannot allow the same thing to happen again. We cannot omit the true threat here, and it isn’t the regent, or the queen, or the iron revenants…. It’s that well of power. Without it, the others are nothing.”

Vance stared into the contents of his cup. “Funny you should have such strong feelings about omission, given how in the dark you have kept me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t you?” he asked, glancing up at her.

Odile leaned forward. “I tried to tell you the truth once, and you buried it, along with the body of my messenger and the package he delivered.”

“Part of the truth,” Vance corrected lightly. “And this package, do you mean?” he said, placing Wren’s ring on the table between them. “Wren found it.”

So that messenger Wren found in the Bonewood had not come from the Corpse Queen but from Odile?

“I guess you didn’t bury it as well as you’d thought,” Odile said, smirking.

“Apparently it’s part of a set,” Vance said idly, and the smile slipped off Odile’s face. “But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” When Odile didn’t respond, he slammed his hand on the table. “First you send some anonymous messenger across the entirety of the Dominions carrying information that could have ruined me, my house, and my daughter, and then you have the audacity to keep this from me?”

“I still don’t—”

“Come now, Odile. Wren has just told me everything. There is a Corpse Queen, and there is a boy. You seemed quite certain about who the former was, according to your messenger. What about the latter?”

There was a long silence. “I was trying to protect you.”

Wren’s heart plummeted. Did that mean…?

“Excuse me?” Vance said, bristling at the suggestion that he needed such care. “I am not a child to be coddled. I want the truth.”

“Because you responded so well the last time,” Odile snapped, putting down her cup. “We have more important matters to—”

“The truth, Odile. All of it.”

They stared at each other for a long moment, then—

“Fine,” she said with exasperation. “Fine.” She took a heavy breath, then straightened in her chair. “If you’ll recall, after Ravenna came here, fit to burst, you wouldn’t see her.” Her tone made it perfectly clear what she thought of that. Wren, meanwhile, was hung up on the name. Ravenna. Her father had never given her one. “Lady-Smith Svetlana was here, the war was almost over, and with Locke gone, you were all your mother had. Her shining war hero. Her brand-new heir. You didn’t want to give that up, did you? Didn’t want to show her the ugly side of what happened during that campaign. No, instead you pushed that little problem onto me.”

Vance rolled his eyes, then waved his hand impatiently, telling her to get on with it.

“She gave birth in the dungeons, with only me and the old healer for company. Ravenna was different from when we’d met her in the Haunted Territory, when she was pretending to be the sole survivor from some attack, alone and afraid. I had always known her poor damsel routine was an act, but I couldn’t figure out what she really wanted. Well, besides attention from both of you.”

Both of you? Did she mean Locke? From the way Vance’s jaw clenched, Wren would say yes.

“Now I could ask her. Why had she led us to the well in the first place? How had she known of it? And where had she gone when things went… wrong… with Locke?”

Wren had suspected the well was the source of Locke’s power… and that things must have gone awry for him to do what he had done. The confirmation did not comfort her.

“She was delirious with pain—and the drugs the healer had given her—so much of what she’d said made little sense. But she made a few noteworthy confessions. She said she wasn’t just a fair-haired, green-eyed girl of Andolesian ancestry, trapped in the Breachlands after her family had died. She was Ravenna Nekros, a smith—and not just any smith, but according to her, the last ghostsmith. Her people had been living in secrecy for decades, and she had known of the well because it was her birthright, stories of its power and location passed down generation by generation. She said they were the ones who’d caused the Breach, taking their chance by diverting an ironsmith mining tunnel and seeking out their lost city. She intended to reclaim her house’s fallen glory and insisted that this was just the beginning. I didn’t get much more out of her… until the child was born. A girl, and she had bonesmith eyes, which was a relief… until the second set of contractions started.”