The memory of the small body on the slab still made her chest tighten. The open mouth, the whispers, the black eyes—it was both like and unlike Cedric, and she couldn’t quite wrap her head around that. Maybe her magic had changed, become darker, become somehow worse.
And they wanted her to do it again.
Bastian said he thought that the tragedies in the villages were caused by Mortem. She’d told him it was impossible, but after seeing Horse—Claude, she reminded herself, nose wrinkling—Lore wondered if maybe she didn’t know that much about Mortem after all. Maybe she didn’t really know anything.
As much as she hated the idea of attempting to raise someone from the dead again, the idea of just walking away and letting her failure stand wasn’t an option. Wouldn’t be even if the other option wasn’t the Burnt Isles. Whole villages, whole families, were dead. She’d known that, in the abstract. But to know it and to see it were two different things, and to know that she was apparently the only one who could figure it out was still another.
Her failure felt as damning as blood on her fingers.
And it wasn’t until then—thinking of her failure, of Claude/Horse, of how they collided—that she realized how the two things fit together.
Lore sat bolt-upright in bed. “Shit.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Nothing binds people together better than desperation.
—Eroccan proverb
Gabe was still awake when Lore burst through her bedroom door, though he’d moved out of the dusty study and was now staring into the fireplace with his usual pensive expression. He’d taken off his shirt and piled his bedding in front of the door, and the flame-light played over the muscled planes of his chest.
He whipped around as her door banged open, brows knit. “Lore?”
She cast a look at the clock on the wall—nearly midnight. Hopefully everyone would be either sleeping or involved in other distracting endeavors. “I have to go back to the vaults.”
“You what?”
Lore shoved her feet into her boots and tied a quick knot in the sash of the dressing gown she’d found in the wardrobe. Perfectly tailored, once again, and a pretty blush-pink that she never would’ve chosen for herself. “The body I raised from the dead today—I channeled Mortem with him the same way I did with the horse.”
She didn’t pause as she spoke, rushing to her boots and shoving her feet into them, moving as quickly as she could. Behind her, Gabe stood slowly from the couch. “I don’t understand the problem.”
“The problem,” Lore said, sitting down hard on the ground to tie her laces, “is that he might wake up, just like the horse did.”
Cedric. Gods, had it happened to Cedric, too? They’d burned him after Lore snapped the strings of Mortem animating his corpse; had he been awake for that, his mouth an open maw like the child in the vaults, a scream with no sound?
Lore didn’t realize she was hyperventilating until Gabe’s hand landed on her shoulder, a calming weight. She fought to control her breathing as the shirtless Mort knelt in front of her, brow creased in concern.
“But you have to tell a human corpse what to do, right?” he murmured. “It’s not like an animal; he won’t get up and walk around. We can go in the morning.”
“No.” She shook her head. When her eyes closed, she saw Cedric, his body a horror, his eyes open. “No, I have to try and fix it now, I can’t leave him like that. I can’t.”
Gabe looked at her, his one eye searching both of hers. Then he nodded, once.
Lore made for the door, not giving him time to change his mind. Gabe cursed at her speed, grabbing a shirt and pulling it over his head, hopping on one foot to tie his boots. “Slow down, Lore, it’s not—”
“I have to fix it before August or Anton sees.” She wasn’t sure why. But she knew, with that same deep, primordial sense that told her how to raise the dead, that neither the King nor the Priest should see what her magic could really do. Horse was one thing, humans another.
And even though the body on the slab would never be truly alive again—never truly conscious—the thought of leaving him alone in the dark turned her stomach.
“No one should’ve been in the vaults since you and August and Anton left, other than the Sacred Guard,” Gabe said, nearly toppling over as he tied his second boot. He hadn’t quite managed to pull his shirt all the way down in his attempt to catch up with her, and the hem was caught high on his rib, showing a distracting amount of abdomen. “They aren’t a place you visit casually. If he woke up, no one will have seen.”