“Is that why you come here and get the shit beat out of you?” Lore spat. “To listen?”
“I come here because sometimes, being inside the Citadel makes me want to claw my own eyes out,” Bastian answered. “The listening is just a bonus. It’s how I found out about the villages, how I found out how little tax the nobles pay compared to everyone else. How I found out that the necromancer who raised a horse in the market square was just some girl. Getting the shit beat out of me, as you put it, is really the only way I know anything. Gods know my father isn’t going to tell me.”
Lore didn’t know if the chill in her limbs was from fear or the still-wet hem of her dressing gown.
“Now, I don’t know everything.” One of Bastian’s hands left the wall, went to his boot. Pulled something out. “But I know enough to be reasonably certain that your Mortem affliction didn’t come about in the normal way. I know enough to be sure that the truth is far more interesting than a childhood accident. So when I ask you a question, Lore, I expect it to be answered truthfully.”
Whatever he’d retrieved from his boot gleamed in the dim light of the alley, brighter than his bared teeth. A dagger, held casually in his hand, but tilted so she could see its shine.
“Let’s try again. This time, we can start with the questions about my father, since it seems you might answer those more easily.” Bastian leaned forward, close enough to kiss. The blade of his dagger scraped lightly at the silk of her dressing gown. “Why did he bring you here, other than to spy on me?”
“The villages.” She could try to lie again, but what was the point? Bastian still didn’t seem like he was going to kill her, but any conversation that included a blade seemed best to meet with truth. Gabe had tried to warn her.
Gabe. She hoped he had the sense not to come after her, but she wasn’t counting on it.
Lore swallowed, continued. “August and Anton are trying to figure out what happened to the villages. They want me to raise the bodies and ask them.”
“And do they have any suspicions?” If Bastian was shocked by the task his father had given her, he didn’t show it. “I can guess.”
“They think it’s Kirythea, using some sort of elemental magic left over from the minor gods. And they think you’re working with them, somehow.”
Something seemed to shutter in Bastian’s face. Not guilt, nothing that simple. Almost… hurt. It softened the lines of the predatory thing he’d become.
“Of course they do,” Bastian said quietly. He huffed, the sound too weary to be the start of a laugh. His head dipped just enough for the shadows to hide his eyes. “So that’s why you’re supposed to stay near me, I take it?”
She nodded, quick and truncated. Bastian held his dagger loosely, almost like he’d forgotten it was there, but she certainly hadn’t.
“Look what we have here.”
A new voice, coming from the mouth of the alley, high and scratchy.
Bastian rolled his eyes. “Wonderful,” he muttered.
Lore tore her gaze away from the Sun Prince’s gleaming dagger, focused on the figure instead. A small white man dressed in ratty clothes, bruises on his arms and scabs over the side of his face. He didn’t look very intimidating.
But the huge man behind him did. Intimidating and glassy-eyed, pale face flushed. He’d been poison-dosed, and recently.
“Gentlemen.” Bastian turned, the hand with the knife gesturing politely while his other palm stayed flat on the wall next to Lore’s head. “While I admire your enterprise, rest assured that neither I nor my friend has anything of value to offer you.”
“For your sake, I hope that’s not true.” The smaller man spread his hands apologetically. “Or our employer will be even more upset than he already is.”
“You lost.” The larger man advanced, making his face easier to see. Scarred and rough, with ears swollen from years of fistfights. Lore and Bastian both still wore their black domino masks, but these two didn’t, and it did not improve their appearances. “You lost, and you left without paying up.”
“A mistake.” Bastian didn’t sound concerned, but his fingers shifted around the hilt of his dagger, and he had that same waiting stillness he’d had in the ring. “I had a spot of business to take care of, but I assure you, I’m on my way to pay what I owe.” His lip quirked. “I assume you bet against me?”
He moved ahead of Lore as he talked, slow and easy enough to be nonchalant, putting his body between her and the two men. Almost protective now.
Gods dead and dying, she could not wrap her head around Bastian Arceneaux.
“Don’t worry about it,” the scarred man said with an unsettling smile. “We’ll collect now.”
“It can’t ever be simple,” Bastian muttered as the scarred man’s fist shot toward his head.
He feinted, turning on a bent knee to slam the heel of his hand into the man’s back. A grunt, but the scarred man seemed hardly fazed, twisting to meet Bastian from the new angle. His recent poisoning hadn’t slowed him down at all, apparently. The man’s knee came up, and Lore flinched, but it sailed past Bastian’s chin without making contact. The knife hung unused in his hand, like he didn’t want to employ a blade unless he had to.
Something else shimmered around his hands, though. Maybe it was just a trick of dim light and a terrified mind, but to Lore, the air around Bastian’s moving fists looked like it swam with gold, trails of soft sun-glow following the path of his skin.
Another dagger glinted silver as the scarred man pulled it from his belt, breaking her concentration on all that odd gold. Bastian didn’t seem to notice it, and she opened her mouth to warn him, but a slam of stars exploded in her temple before she could. The scarred man had knocked the hilt into her head.
Lore hit her knees, bones aching against the bite of cobblestone.
Then—something cold and sharp on her neck, and a boot between her shoulder blades, holding her down.
Time slowed. Her ears rang, making everything crystal clear and muffled at once. Lore had been in plenty of situations where the loss of life or limb was a possible outcome, but she’d never been held at knifepoint, never been in a place where the possibility of help was next to none. The sharp edge of the knife almost vibrated with Mortem, her fingers tingling in time.
But she still couldn’t grasp it.
Lore’s eyes met Bastian’s. She didn’t know what kind of look she gave him, whether it was pleading or defiant. He’d asked why she was here, what his father wanted; those were the answers that mattered, and he had them. The questions about her, about her magic—those were mere curiosity, and curiosity wasn’t reason enough to save her, not when there was a perfectly plausible excuse for her death holding a dagger to her neck.
Bastian could let her die and leave her here. He could kill her without even touching her.