“A devotee of the equestrian arts?” Bastian asked, a lilt in his voice that said he was teasing.
“I could certainly be persuaded to become one.”
The prince laughed, pulling her toward the stables. “That’s one of you. Gabe hates horses.”
Lore glanced back at the man in question. His eye was narrowed at the side of Bastian’s head, since the Sun Prince still wouldn’t face him. “I don’t hate horses.”
“You told me so.”
“Yes, when I was eight. After falling off a rather formidable stallion that you dared me to ride. Most people mature between eight and twenty-four, and their particular hatreds change.”
“I hated roast peahen when I was eight, and I still hate it now.”
“I said most people.”
Bastian waved a flippant hand.
The inside of the stables was just as well made as the outside. Horses whickered at Bastian as he passed, and he patted their noses absently, headed toward the very back of the building.
A gaggle of children were crowded around the last stable in the row, some dressed like the offspring of courtiers, others as if they were employed by the stables. None of them spoke, all with wide eyes, staring at whatever was housed there. “Move along,” Bastian said, but it was soft. Lore expected the children to scatter when they realized who he was, but they just stepped aside, eyes still glued to the creature in the stall.
When they approached close enough to see, Lore understood why.
Horse. It was Horse.
But it couldn’t… it didn’t make sense, didn’t follow any of the rules of Mortem she knew. Dead was dead, and unspooling the magic of it from a body couldn’t change that, there was no possible way to pull all of it out. A dead thing couldn’t regain a semblance of life, couldn’t exist on its own. She’d seen the animal fall after she snapped the threads, seen death come back over the corpse.
But something must’ve changed between then and now, because here Horse was.
Lore was frozen. Her hand was still on Bastian’s arm, but she couldn’t feel it. Horse’s eyes shone milky and opaque, his throat still gashed. He nuzzled at Bastian’s outstretched hand and made a sound that would’ve been a whicker, had his vocal cords been intact.
“Quite a specimen, isn’t he?” Bastian’s eyes slid to her, dark in the shadows of the stable. “I call him Claude.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Secrets breed themselves.
—Caldienan proverb
During storm season in the Harbor District, the tide pounded on the shoreline like a drum. It beat against the rocky sand in an endless rhythm, smelling of salt and fish and rain, ceaseless and inescapable and nearly enough to drive you mad in those first few weeks, before it became part of the background noise.
That’s what Lore’s pulse felt like. An endless drumming in her ears, pushing at her throat. If she looked down, it was probably visible, throbbing against the tender skin of her wrists.
Horse—Claude—looked at her curiously. When his head tipped to the side, the gaping wound on his neck yawned open, the edges gummy with blood and pus. She could see the work of dead, grayish muscles beneath his cut skin, the chipped ends of ivory bone.
“Curious, isn’t it?” Bastian petted the horse’s muzzle. The beast nickered again, and the sound was awful, ragged and wrong. “He should be dead. But it’s like he doesn’t know that, and has refused to acquiesce to it.” The Sun Prince chuckled, though something sharper than amusement glittered in his eyes. “Maybe that’s the true secret to eternal life. Just refusing to die. Much easier than slowly turning yourself to stone.”
Before, Lore’s feelings had always been slightly hurt by the fact that Horse never seemed to hold her in high regard. He mostly ignored her, unless she brought apples. Now she was thankful that the creature didn’t act like he recognized her at all. Horse bent his gory head and flicked a fly off his haunch. The bones in his neck ground together.
This wasn’t how Mortem was supposed to work. Not for a normal channeler, even those who’d been strong enough to raise a body from the dead before they were all executed. Animal lives were less complicated, so they didn’t have to be given specific instructions to go about some semblance of living. Still, corpses were marionettes, only active while the channeler held the strings of their death. A fully independent one like this… it shouldn’t be possible.
But she wasn’t a normal channeler, was she?
Lore squashed the thought with physical force, her teeth digging into the meat of her tongue until she tasted copper.