“He’ll be there to pull it off.”
“Such faith you have in our monk.” Bastian mounted the stairs and started climbing, carefully, the muscles of his shoulders moving beneath his dusty shirt as he kept his balance with one hand on the wall. “He’s such a fickle thing; I wouldn’t be surprised if he turned tail as soon as we came down here.”
“You should have more faith in him,” Lore said to the broad expanse of Bastian’s back. Realizing she was staring, she dropped her eyes to her own feet making their careful way up the narrow stairs. “He showed up, didn’t he?”
Her answer was the lid of the well opening, sending down piercing light. Not full morning, but edged enough into dawn that the brightness made her look away.
When she turned back, Bastian was gone, the round opening ahead showing nothing but pink-washed sky. Lore rolled her eyes. Of course he would just hop out of the well once she was proven right. He and Gabe were probably spitting curses at each other right now.
But when Lore reached the top of the stairs, Bastian was on his knees between two of the Presque Mort, his head wrenched back, the tip of a bayonet denting the skin of his throat. Behind him stood Malcolm, his expression pensive, but the line of his mouth set in determination.
Before the well, Anton, his Bleeding God’s Heart pendant glinting in the thin light.
And next to Anton, Gabe.
Bastian laughed, a terrible, rueful sound, all teeth. “What was it you were saying about having faith in him, Lore?”
But Lore didn’t speak. She knew when she was caught.
A pause, the only sound the flap of Anton’s robes against his legs in the morning breeze. Then Gabe stepped up to the well, offering a hand to help her down.
She didn’t take it. She didn’t look at him. She stepped down to the cobblestones on her own, even though her legs were shaking.
Anton waved a weary hand. “Take them to the Church. Our colleagues are waiting.”
“Your colleagues?” Bastian spat. The Presque Mort hauled him up; she vaguely recognized both the guards holding Bastian from the day of the Mortem leak, and they both seemed a bit too eager to manhandle the Sun Prince. The bayonet tip never left his throat, but Bastian didn’t stop snarling. “That’s an interesting way to say fellow traitors.”
Next to her, Gabe flinched. Bastian noticed, and turned his blazing eyes toward him, mouth twisted in an ugly mess of anger and betrayal. “I guess it’s true what they say, huh, Remaut? When someone shows who they are, you’d better believe them. I thought to give you the benefit of the doubt. More fool me.”
Gabe wasn’t close enough to touch, but the very air around him seemed to vibrate with the force of keeping himself still. His fist curled by his side, white-knuckled.
“He’s right.”
All eyes snapped to Lore. She stared straight ahead, not looking at any of them, keeping her gaze locked on the thin flaring line of the sun emerging over the garden wall. “It seems like betrayal comes easily to you, Duke Remaut.”
She’d wounded him. She’d meant to. Still, the subtle deflation of his shoulders, the way his face turned so all she could see was that infernal eye patch, made all her organs tie themselves in knots.
“I’m afraid it’s a bit more complicated than you and my nephew think.” Anton peered at her, the rising sun behind him making the scarred side of his face a mass of runneled shadow. “Questions of betrayal and treason often are. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.” He turned sharply, headed toward the door cut into the wall of the garden that led back into the Church. “Come. We have much to discuss.”
The Presque Mort deposited Lore and Bastian in a large antechamber, empty other than a long table and a handful of chairs, hung with one simple tapestry of Apollius clutching His bleeding chest. It reminded Lore of the room she’d been taken to after accidentally raising Horse.
Her bonds were a bit more intricate this time. So were Bastian’s. Instead of ropes, their hands were manacled, and those manacles attached to thick iron rings in the floor. A slanted echo of the iron bars crossing the floor in the Citadel.
She supposed no one needed that particular reminder of their holy purpose in the Church. There were reminders everywhere.
It was Malcolm who locked the manacles around her wrists. “Why?” she asked as he worked, not bothering to whisper. “I thought you wanted things to change, Malcolm? I thought you were on our side?”
She didn’t mean to sound so wounded.