Bastian kept those golden-brown eyes on her, unreadable. Then he smiled, but it wasn’t the playful, irreverent grin he usually wore. This smile was sharp. This smile was a knife that had found its mark, even if she pretended she wasn’t bleeding.
“You just keep coming back for more.” Michal already had his fists up, bouncing back and forth on his feet. There was no real violence in the words; he grinned at Bastian companionably. “Not tired yet?”
“You talk like I haven’t thrashed you the last two rounds.” Bastian made a predatory circle, with none of the fake sweeps of fists Michal used. No theatrics, just prowling.
“Luck, my friend.” Michal’s fist darted toward Bastian’s face. Bastian bent out of the way, laughing.
Michal and Bastian bobbed and weaved around each other, movements vicious but practiced. There wasn’t any malice in the way they fought, just business-like precision. Bastian avoided another swipe of Michal’s hand, ducking beneath his arm to come up behind him and land a choppy blow across the other man’s back. Michal fell to a crouch but rallied quickly, using the lower vantage to punch out at Bastian’s knee. The crowd howled as Bastian almost went down, then regained his balance. He winked at Michal, beckoned him forward with his wrapped and bloodied hands.
“We’re going to be here all night,” Gabe muttered darkly, arms crossed over his chest. “Longer, if neither one of them gets their shit together and knocks the other out.”
Michal circled Bastian, still bouncing on his feet, but his movements had grown more ragged. All his posturing was taking a toll, pointless expenditures of energy. He’d done that in bed, too, Lore remembered. Sometimes acrobatics were just unnecessary.
Bastian, by contrast, looked almost relaxed, dodging punches with ease though he barely threw his own. Still, sweat gleamed on his chest, and there was a tiny cut at the corner of his lip where one of Michal’s blows had landed.
The prince looked back over his shoulder, finding Lore again. In front of him, she vaguely saw the shape of Michal readying himself, cocking a fist. The crowd yelled, the young man still holding Bastian’s shirt practically jumping up and down, but Bastian paid no mind to their warnings. His eyes stayed locked on Lore’s as he reached up, slowly wiped blood from his split lip.
Got you, he mouthed.
Then Michal’s fist crashed into the side of Bastian’s head. The Sun Prince went down.
Silence. Michal looked almost surprised, glancing first at his fist, and then into the crowd, like he was searching for whatever had so distracted his opponent.
And he found it. Those familiar blue eyes widened. “Lore?”
Michal’s mouth kept working, spitting questions, but they were drowned out in the roar of the crowd. The hay-bale ring broke as people rushed forward to congratulate him, and Michal was borne away by well-wishers, shock still stark on his face.
Next to her, Gabe wore nearly the same expression. “Bleeding God and Buried Goddess,” he cursed, whirling from the crowd to face Lore. “Who was—”
“An old friend.” Bastian was next to them, sneaking up soundless as a cat. The side of his face was bleeding, but he was smiling, that new knife-smile that made all Lore’s insides cold. He held his shirt, but instead of putting it on, he used it to wipe up the blood. “If you’ll excuse us.”
He gripped Lore’s arm tight and hauled her forward, and she had no choice but to follow as the Sun Prince led her into the dark, leaving Gabriel behind, shouting and blocked by the crowd.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A secret is a flame, and it cannot burn forever.
—Auverrani proverb
It only took a moment for Lore to start struggling, pulling against Bastian’s inexorable grip with curses that a duke’s cousin surely wouldn’t know. But that didn’t matter, not anymore. Michal had recognized her, and now Bastian knew who she was.
What she was.
Lore twisted, trying to haul herself away, but Bastian pulled her on, toward the mouth of another narrow alley as the shouts of the crowd dimmed behind them.
No dagger, and she’d be no match for the Sun Prince in strength. Mortem was all she had. And though she wasn’t sure what she could do with it, in the absence of a dead body to raise, there had to be something.
Lore held her breath and waited for her vision to go grayscale, for her fingers to turn necrotic and cold. But it didn’t happen.
Instead there was a spark. A flash behind her eyes. The baked, heated scent of high-summer air, so close she expected a singeing. It collided with the sense of Mortem, familiar and empty, nothingness so compacted it had presence and mass. The two conflicting energies felt, for a moment, like they might tear her apart.