Anton ducked out of the door for a moment, then returned carrying a rosebush in a large pot. He set it down—it was heavy for someone his age to carry, but he didn’t appear to have an issue—and stepped back between Apollius’s stone hands.
“Now, don’t worry yourself with asking the questions,” August said. “Simply command it to follow my orders, and then you’re free to wait outside.”
Lore wasn’t listening, but she nodded anyway.
The King swept a hand toward the body on the slab. “And so we begin.”
Mortem was thick here; she could almost smell it—empty, ozonic. The smell of the sky during a storm, she’d always thought. The space between thunder and lightning. Lore closed her eyes tight, imagining her forest again, a touchstone to hold on to.
The child’s corpse conflated with Cedric’s in her mind, and it constricted her thoughts, made it more difficult to concentrate. She’d been betrayed, imprisoned, conscripted into using an awful power she’d rather forget about to help a King who didn’t seem to give a shit about anyone outside his gilded walls.
But Lore had been born with the ability to channel Mortem. Born with the dark running congruent to her bones. It’d only ever been a wound, a fault, a thing to fear and run from. Maybe now she could use it for something good.
Lore opened her eyes, took a deep breath, let it empty from her lungs. Slowly, almost without her direct thought, her arms reached out, turning pale, cold, necrotic.
“Bleeding God hold us in His wounded hand,” Anton murmured. The words were shaped for fear, but his tone wasn’t. It was almost eager.
Lore didn’t have time to dwell on it. Her vision went grayscale, white light in the shape of the King and the Priest, nothing but a yawning void where the body of the child lay on the slab. The huge statue of Apollius looked monstrous in shades of gray and black, the dead stone unilluminated by any shard of light.
The moon-shaped burn on her palm glowed dark as Lore held her hands over the slab. The child’s death was distant, the instant, awful power of it long gone. She could sense it but couldn’t touch it; dim threads wavered in the air above the body, but they weren’t thick enough to grasp.
Death had gone deeper.
Lore stepped closer, until her palms hovered just barely above the corpse, almost touching. In life, there was a ring of energy around a body. Spiritum, which Apollius alone could channel—the same power He’d allegedly given the Arceneaux line. It surrounded a person like the corona of a miniature sun, and in the moment of death, it burned out, exploded, a dying star. That’s what she’d seen when Horse died, what she’d grabbed onto. Spiritum turned to Mortem, seized at the very moment of its alchemizing, the same precarious balance that could make poison lead to horrible immortality.
But that explosion of energy dissipated soon after death, sank deep into the body and eventually withered away. If Lore wanted to raise this corpse, she’d have to search out that tiny spark of Mortem still within it. Take hold of death and pull it out.
It took her a moment, her teeth clenched tight in her jaw, her necrotic fingers lowering until they rested on the still chest. For a moment, Lore didn’t think she was going to find it at all.
Then—the barest slink of darkness, a thin thread of latent death.
Lore grabbed it like a lifeline, and wound the strand of Mortem around her hand, tugging it out as deftly as threading a needle. It flowed from the body and into her, twisting through her veins, braided into herself.
Her heart froze. Tithed a beat.
Her hand thrust sideways, Mortem flowing out of her and into the rosebush Anton had brought into the vault. The blooms withered instantly, leaves dropping, the soil turning dry and pale.
Lore’s eyes opened, banishing the grayscale world in favor of the true one. Her veins were blackened to the elbow, her fingertips white and corpse-cold. The body on the slab was still, with no visible change to mark what she’d done.
This was a human, not an animal. She had to give him a direction. And though August had told her what to do, she couldn’t remember what it’d been, so she asked the question they all wanted the answer to.
“Tell us what happened,” Lore whispered, the sound hoarse and broken through her death-dry throat.
August started, rounding on her with his brows drawn low. “You are not performing this interrogation,” he said, with every scrap of regal authority he had. “I gave you instruction. Do not overstep your place.”
But it was a moot point. The body on the slab stayed still and silent.