“More expensive than just your losses, now,” the scarred man rasped, digging his knee further into Lore’s back. “You’ll pay double for making a fuss. Think how much belladonna I can buy with that, eh?”
Lore watched the calculations spin behind Bastian’s eyes. Watched him weigh and measure.
Then the prince reached into his pocket.
The movement took his concentration away from the fight, and the smaller man landed a punch to his stomach. At the moment Bastian bowed forward, hunched over his middle, he thrust out his hand, the thick gold of a signet ring gleaming in the dark.
“If you please,” Bastian said, somehow managing to barely sound winded. “Unhand my friend.”
The smaller man looked at the ring. Paled. “Milo. Let the lady up.”
But the scarred one—Milo—paid no heed. “Don’t care who he is. He owes, and my stash is nearly done for.” The dagger bit in, just enough to sting, and Lore pulled in a ragged breath.
Bastian straightened, stalked across the alley. His hand fisted in Milo’s hair and wrenched the man’s neck backward, pointing his blade at the vulnerable artery. They made a deranged chain of threats, Bastian’s knife at Milo’s throat, Milo’s at Lore’s.
“I’m the Sun Prince of Auverraine, Apollius’s chosen heir,” Bastian hissed. “And you will unhand the lady.”
A pause. Then Milo’s bulk was gone; Bastian shoved his shoulder, forcing him to his knees beside his smaller friend.
Lore dragged in a deep breath and pushed herself up to sit; her legs were too shaky to stand just yet. A tiny cut scored across her neck, a thin filament of pain.
“I really didn’t want to have to use that,” Bastian muttered, shoving the ring back into his pocket. He didn’t look at Lore.
There was no gold around his hands now. A trick of the light, then, her fear affecting her vision. Probably.
“Our apologies, Your Majesty.” The smaller man looked terrified. Milo bowed his head too far to see his expression, but Lore could bet it was glowering. “We didn’t know, we had no idea—”
“And I would very much like to keep it that way.” Bastian sighed. “I was planning to go back and pay my dues, after an… interlude.”
He cocked his head at Lore. She was still too rattled to do anything but stare at him. He’d saved her. He’d had the opportunity to dispose of her, a tidy solution to his problem, and he’d saved her instead.
What in all the myriad hells was she supposed to do with that?
The prince turned to the bruisers. “I probably won’t be returning, unfortunately, but I would greatly appreciate if you would keep this quiet.” Bastian gave them a smile; the sharp one, the predator one. “And if I hear the news get around, I’ll know who to blame, won’t I?”
They nodded. And when Bastian jerked his chin, dismissing them, they nearly tripped over each other trying to get away.
At the mouth of the alley, Milo looked back, shadows obscuring his face. Then he was gone.
“You let that one off easy, all things considered.” Lore’s voice was hoarse. She rubbed at her neck.
“Call it magnanimity.” The light of the gas lamps beyond the alley limned Bastian in red and orange as he turned to face Lore. He held out a hand. “There’s still a question you haven’t answered.”
Lore hadn’t been planning on asking him why he’d blown his own cover to keep her alive. But she thought that if she had, this would be his reason. Unanswered questions, unsatisfied curiosity.
She didn’t know whether she believed that or not. There was one more thing to consider, along with that light she might or might not have truly seen around his hands, along with him saving her—that sense of gravity, of things falling together. Of knowing, the same knowing she felt with Gabe, like the deep parts of her recognized both of these men, even if her mind and heart couldn’t keep pace.
She took his hand.
Bastian hauled her up, then let go. He didn’t back her against the wall again, trusting her not to bolt. They’d knit some kind of understanding between them, and neither wanted to be the one to fray it.
“Now,” the Sun Prince said. “Tell me how you managed to become such an accomplished Mortem channeler. And don’t lie this time, please. Like I said, I’ll know.”
He would. She knew that like she knew her own name, like she knew the raised edges of the moon scar on her palm. Gabe had bought her lie, even with that sense of knowing, but whatever thread bound her and the Sun Prince was different—thicker, coarser.
He’d saved her once. She had no guarantee that he’d do it again, if she went against his orders. So Lore took a deep breath, and she spoke truth.
“I was born in the catacombs,” she murmured. “To one of the Night Sisters, in what’s left of the Buried Watch.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
There will be two factions to control the power of the Buried Goddess—the Presque Mort, the Almost Dead, who will channel Mortem when it reaches the surface, and the Veilleurs Enterre, the Buried Watch, who will ensure that what has been struck down by your god does not rise again.
—The Book of Holy Law, Tract 35
Silence.
Then, a hoarse laugh. Bastian’s eyes were a dark glitter in the gloom of the alleyway, his bloody hands clenched to linen-wrapped fists. “The Buried Watch? They were disbanded after the Night Witch went mad. There’s no one down there anymore.”
“There is.” Lore swallowed. Her throat felt like she’d eaten live coals. “There aren’t many of them left; maybe twenty or so. But they’re still there. Still watching Nyxara’s tomb.”
Still waiting. Still sending someone into the obsidian tomb on every eclipse to see if the body of the goddess had stirred. Lore remembered what those people had looked like when they came back out. Their faces blank, their eyes vacant, as if their very sense of self had been scooped away.
The moon-shaped scars on their hands a burning, angry red.
“That doesn’t make any sense.” Bastian spoke slowly, like he didn’t trust her capacity to understand him. “The Buried Watch hasn’t existed for centuries. The Church would never let a faction persist, not after the Night Witch decided she was Nyxara reborn.”
Lore shrugged. “Like I said, there aren’t many of them. The Church killed most of them after the Night Witch—they thought the same madness might infect the others. But some of them were able to hide, to keep the order alive.”
“How the fuck do they get new members, then? No one goes to the catacombs.”
“They do if they have nowhere else to go.” Like a merchant’s daughter, pregnant with a bastard child that she desperately wanted to keep. Lore’s mother had fled to the catacombs when her parents told her they were going to send her to a sanitarium. It’d been panic; she’d only gone there to hide.
But she’d found so much more than a place to hide.