Something nudged her shoulder. Gabe. “Wake up, cousin.”
“I’m awake, cousin.” But another yawn cramped her jaw as she said it. “Why in all myriad hells are First Day prayers right at the ass-crack of dawn? Surely Apollius can still hear them around noon.”
Gabe inclined his head to the stained-glass window at the very front of the sanctuary. The Bleeding God’s Heart, set out in panels of red and gold and ocher. As the sun rose, its gleam traced up the window, slowly illuminating the glass until the whole thing blazed with color.
“That’s why,” he answered. She couldn’t tell if he sounded reverent or resentful. Maybe a little of both.
For sleeping against the doorframe all night, Gabriel seemed positively refreshed. Dressed in plainer clothes than he’d had for the masquerade—dark doublet, dark breeches, and a linen shirt beneath, this time with sensible sleeves—this was the handsomest he’d looked in their brief acquaintance.
Lore, on the other hand, had carefully avoided the mirror this morning, even as she brushed out her hair. The bags under her eyes were probably deep enough to smuggle hemlock.
The double doors at the back of the sanctuary remained open, emitting the last straggling courtiers. Alienor glided down the thick tapestry carpet running through the center aisle, the sun through the windows making her nearly white curls glow the same colors as the stained glass, a halo-like nimbus around her head. Her eyes were clear and her gait steady as she approached the altar at the front of the sanctuary, knelt, and kissed its polished wood. Lore and Gabe had done the same when they entered. Lore tried not to think about all the lips that had been on it before hers.
When Alie straightened and went to find her seat, her eyes met Lore’s. She smiled, threw a tiny wave. Lore returned it with a genuine smile of her own. Gabriel didn’t look at Alie at all.
An older man walked close behind Alienor, close enough that they had to be arriving together, though they looked nothing alike. His skin was milk-pale to her warm-copper, his hair wood-brown and pin-straight instead of white-blond and curling. His expression was dour, and the lines around his mouth said that rarely changed. The man’s gaze flickered to Lore, as if taking her measure.
“Who’s that?” she murmured to Gabe out of the side of her mouth.
“Severin Bellegarde.” Gabe didn’t have to move to answer the question; he’d been watching Alie already. “Alie’s father.”
Lore arched a brow. Alie must take after her mother, then, in every way.
She looked away from Bellegarde, made a show of studying the windows. Apollius, again, in various scenes both imagined and taken from the Tracts. Healing a mortal wound with a touch. Stepping through a door of cloud into what she could only assume was supposed to be the Shining Realm, leaving the world behind. Lore frowned and turned her attention to the crowd instead.
For all her resentment at being here, the North Sanctuary glittering with the gathered finery of the Court of the Citadel was certainly a sight to behold. They all knew exactly what to do, where to go, how to sit and wait and look holy, even with their eyes spiderwebbed in red from drink and poison the night before. As a non-noble, Lore had never been permitted in the North Sanctuary, and she’d only been in the South Sanctuary for common prayers a handful of times, mostly when she got caught in the shuffle while doing reconnaissance for a nearby drop.
The last of the courtiers filed in. The double doors leading to the green space and the Citadel beyond closed, booming in the silence.
At the front of the sanctuary, a small door on the raised platform behind the altar opened, emitting Anton, dressed in a robe so white it almost hurt Lore’s eyes, his Bleeding God’s Heart pendant swinging from his chest. Another of the Presque Mort emerged behind him, dressed in the usual black, holding a thurible spilling with thick incense smoke. She was missing a hand, the stump riven with lurid scars. It was rare to see women in the Presque Mort—before, anyone who wasn’t a man and could channel Mortem would’ve joined the Buried Watch, if they didn’t choose to simply try ignoring the call of their new death magic—but it did happen. Anyone of any gender could become a Mort.
And the Buried Watch wasn’t an option anymore. At least not officially.
Lore slid her eyes to Gabriel, still and stoic next to her. She probably would’ve tried to ignore her abilities, were her circumstances more conventional. The Presque Mort didn’t exactly make being a monk look fun.
Next to the Mort, a priest Lore didn’t recognize stepped up to the braziers lining the front of the dais and lit them with the flame of his beeswax taper. He was dressed in white, and unscarred. Just a general clergyman, then.