A large oak desk dominated the study, empty except for a cut-glass paperweight housing a blood-red rose in its center. Bookshelves lined the walls, but they were mostly empty, too, holding only a dusty copy of the Compendium and a potted fern in desperate need of a good watering.
The study was small enough that Lore didn’t have to enter all the way to hand him the cup. For a moment, he just looked at it, but then he took it from her.
She leaned her shoulder against the jamb. “Your mood has taken a drastic turn for the dour.”
He huffed, sipped the wine. “Being reminded of the excess in this place will do that.”
Understandable. It had itched at her, too, wandering through the museum-like halls, seeing all the accumulated wealth while knowing firsthand the lack felt outside the Citadel. Lore had never worried about starving—Mari and Val made sure of that—but hunger was a sleeping wolf crouched at the door, a continuous threat that you learned to live with and did your best not to wake.
Lore stared into the depths of her glass. “Our guilt isn’t helping anyone, Gabe.”
He stiffened.
Her foot tapped against the floor, a nervous rhythm to order her thoughts around. “I mean, part of me feels guilty for enjoying it, too. For wanting all this for myself, when I know how little most people have. But we don’t have time for the luxury of guilt. Not if there’s an actual war coming, and not while we’re stuck here either way.”
Gabe still didn’t look at her. He slumped back in his chair, an inelegant pile of monk. “I didn’t think I missed it. But here, in a place where I was… was happy, once…” He trailed off. Sighed. “I remember when it was like a home, before I knew it was rotten. The Citadel was easy to love, then. And hating it was just as easy, once I learned how corrupt it was. But hating it is only easy from far away.”
He wanted that ease back. Wanted simple answers, clear delineations. And if it weren’t for Lore, he’d have them.
“It’s shameful,” he murmured. “It’s shameful, how much they have, how much they steal.”
“It is,” Lore said. “I want to do something about it. To fix it, somehow. But I…” She trailed off, shrugged. This was something she’d thought about so often, and never quite been able to translate. “I don’t know how, I guess? I’m one person. One fairly insignificant person, and against so many years of so much power, I feel completely useless. Like… like trying to dam up a river with a pebble.”
“It would take a lot of pebbles,” Gabe agreed. He picked up the glass paperweight and twisted it in his hands, making the rose inside stretch and refract into odd shapes.
Lore crossed to him. Took the paperweight and placed it gently back on the desk. “Give yourself some of that grace you were prattling on about, Mort,” she said softly.
And with that, Lore went into her room, still carrying her book of erotic poetry, and left the one-eyed monk staring into the dark.
She tried reading for maybe an hour or so, lighting the candle by her bedside when the sun completely slipped past the horizon. But the poetry was too flowery to really be titillating, and instead Lore found herself staring into the embroidered canopy over her head and thinking of the vaults.
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—”