He Who Breaks the Earth (The Gods-Touched Duology)
He Who Breaks the Earth: Chapter 14

The air was heavy, the clouds above just waiting to pour rain down on Lia’s head. She leaned in to pat Vivi’s neck when he strained against the reins. As usual, the pat was enough to get him to sulkily settle into their less than brisk pace.

“I know you want to go faster,” Lia murmured, raising a hand to push a branch out of her way. “These poor Trib horses can’t keep up with you. Especially not on this little trail. They can’t even tell where the ground starts to go brittle.” She raised her voice a little for Gilesh and Bane to hear even as Vivi toed his way around a spot in the ground, as if he could feel the dirt thinning beneath his hooves. “They should have all gone back to Trib land like I said.”

Gilesh gave her a cheeky wave when she looked back at him. “That thing would have eaten you a long time ago if it weren’t for us watching your back, Miss Lia.” Bane drew up behind him, keeping a good fifty feet between his horse and Vivi.

Ominous shapes fluttered in the trees as Lia led them toward the river that would take them to Kingsol, vines looking like snakes which looked like vines until Lia wasn’t sure what she was looking at. There was an echoing roar of water from one of the many underground rivers in this place, the earth nothing but thin crust floating on what sounded like a long-forgotten ocean. The thinner the earth, the more Lia itched to turn Vivi directly south instead of southwest toward Kingsol. She wanted to replace the lake. She wanted Aria.

But every time she started to turn Vivi’s reins, the memory of standing in the tomb next to Mateo would come haunting back, the way her arms and legs had begun to shake, her muscles all quivering with fatigue after Mateo had stolen her energy…

It still rankled that he hadn’t tried to contact her. Hadn’t written or appeared on that little mare of his with Aria sitting behind him in the saddle. It jabbed at her, the thought of him doing nothing. At the very least, Lia had expected Mateo to try.

The first few days after Chaol, she’d missed his wry self-deprecation, missed the way he grudgingly did the right thing as soon as he figured out what it was, then surprised her by doing it again, and again, even when the right thing was hard.

When she’d gone out hunting for Tual’s tracks, she’d looked for signs of him. Dropped sweet rolls or paintbrushes. That ridiculous hat with an arrow painted under the brim to point the way.

But every day, she’d found nothing. And every day, her hope tarnished a little more until it was a mottled, unrecognizable thing, a disappointment she couldn’t bear to look at. How could she have hoped that Mateo, the boy raised by a shapeshifter—

The boy who thought he was going to die—

The boy who’d made her laugh when she’d wanted to crush the world between her fists—

The boy who’d stood between her and Ewan Hardcastle when the Devoted had been rabid, a sword in Ewan’s hand and his oaths long forgotten.

The boy who’d come for her in the middle of one of his episodes to warn her the Warlord was coming, even though getting caught would have earned him a slit throat.

Lia had thought that boy would do something. She hoped that boy could still do something, even if he hadn’t found a way to do it yet.

Lia locked her hope away into a box deep inside herself. Whatever Mateo wanted, Tual would have no scruples about stripping Lia of every drop of power she had, then forcing her to hold still for Mateo to stab her through the gut.

Lia couldn’t go to the estate on her own. She needed a plan, and plans came from Anwei.

“We’re going to get flooded out,” Gilesh called. “Rain’s going to start, and these cave openings will overflow. Then that thing you are riding will eat all of us to survive.”

“Built for slaughter and survival. Just like me.” She grinned back.

“You know I’m going to beat you when we spar.”

“Your horse has spent this whole trip trying to run away, and we haven’t even drawn swords.” Lia turned forward in her saddle. “Pardon me if I don’t spend any extra time practicing before our match—” The words stuck in her mouth as Vivi reared back, the auroshe barely managing to avoid going headfirst into a swollen channel of water that had been hidden by the foliage. Lia frowned at the water, which was flowing a little too quickly for something so flat. “Another one of those waterways.”

“Miss Lia!” She looked up to replace Bane on slightly higher ground in the trees to her left, boulders jutting up from the ground next to him. “The water just… stops.”

Nudging Vivi to walk up the bank, Lia patted him consolingly when he lashed his tail. She had to tap his sides to get him to the rocks where Bane had stopped, the water oddly still and silent where it pooled beneath them. The rocks made an odd semi-circle opposite where the channel flowed out from it, each one jutting up almost unnaturally, like fingers clawing their way from the ground.

Dismounting, Lia pointed to the ground in front of Vivi’s nose. “You’ll stay?” she asked.

His neck twisted away from her, jabbering toward the trees. Probably a cat or a snake of some kind slinking away at the scent of a predator like Vivi. Knowing he’d obey regardless of temptation, Lia picked her way around the pool, circling up to the rocks, then back down, the water too still. It wasn’t until she went back around that she saw it. A gap in the rocks.

When she took a step forward to get a better look, it disappeared, the rocks blending together to hide the opening.

Brow furrowed, Lia inched up to the tall rocks directly above where she’d thought she saw the hole, disappointed when there was nothing below her but water, brown rock, and…

A reflection. A tall, black reflection of an arch across the pool. A tunnel that led into the hillside.

Vivi gave an angry keen from below as raindrops began to fall. Lia could hear the slush of his hooves in mud, leaves brushing soft against one another, and something…

Lia closed her eyes, searching for the source of alarm fingering up her spine. Calsta had returned her ears and eyes, allowing Lia to hear and see better than the Trib. There. A rustling sound that felt measured. Exact, like a beast trying to walk as quietly as it could.

Something smarter than an average beast. And much larger. Lia climbed back down to Vivi, her mount balking when she reached for his reins, hackles raised as he peered into the darkness.

“Are you sure we’re going in the right direction?” Bane asked from a safe distance down the channel. “These trees should all be cut down, if you ask me. No honest rocks and mountains—”

Lia put up a hand, which hushed him quick enough.

Vivi let out a hiss toward a clump of ferns grown so large that their long leaves were at Lia’s eye level. Lia reached out to calm Vivi, edging closer to the trees, which was when she saw it: a flicker of gold at the very outside edge of her aurasight. Vivi jerked his head, pulling Lia forward, and the dusting of gold turned into a deluge. A swarm of aurasparks zipping this way and that.

Devoted.

Lia stumbled back, the gold rippling to nothing beyond the edge of her aurasight. She leapt onto Vivi’s back and kicked him around. Her mind stretched as wide as it could for any auras that might have seen her.

“Move,” she rasped, both Trib horses rearing when she charged Vivi toward them. “Now.”

Tual had always told Mateo to stay out of the abbey rooms hollowed from the cliff. Of course, Mateo had explored most of the floor level beyond the glass walkway anyway, but on various, slightly rebellious occasions, he had approached the stairs that led up into the ruins above, which he’d seen from the lake house, the empty windows like dead eyes staring down at him.

He’d never made it far.

The nameless god’s touch had begun to blossom inside him even a few steps up, igniting the energy drain Willow had made of him. With no energy to take, he’d gone faint, sickly. But not enough to stop Mateo from feeling death in the walls.

Not just the taste of metal and gears, of false floors and unmarked tiles that would unleash the wrath of Basists on intruders in this place. It was the bones that stopped Mateo.

So as Tual passed through the end of the glass tunnel and immediately started up the stairs, Mateo hesitated, a taste of decay in his mouth that didn’t belong to Willow. With the ghost burning inside him, Mateo’s energy branched farther than it ever had before, sinking into the walls and touching stone, metal, and paint. He caught his breath when his energy didn’t fizzle to nothing, tracing the shapes of rooms above and below him, clear down to the lake walls riddled with tunnels that branched out into the forest. All Basist made. Sealed for too many years to count since there were no Basists to operate them.

The tapping of boots on stone brought him back to the stairs, his father rushing up into the darkness Mateo had never braved. “Wait,” Mateo called as Tual got near the top, something menacing waiting beneath the step. “Wait!”

But Tual hopped the stair as if he’d done it a thousand times. Insides twisting, Mateo trudged after him, stepping over the rigged stair.

According to Tual, the upper rooms were where most of the abbey children had stayed. There were training yards, a kitchen, lookouts, and sleeping chambers, the whole place peppered with traps that Basists could feel but no one else could, making it a safe place for those learning the nameless god’s arts because it kept everyone else out. But then, toward the end of the shapeshifter wars, a monstrous shapeshifter king had come and killed them all. She’d stayed in their rabbit warren, drinking down their souls one by one until the first Warlord led a charge on the stronghold. Somehow, the Warlord had won, and Devoted had scratched every design from the walls, burned every remnant of the creature that had scurried through these tunnels… and every last hint of the people who’d lived and died there too. Every record of their learning, their history, even the fact of their existence.

Gone.

A massacre performed twice.

Death breathed out from these walls.

Tual ran down a walkway, narrowly dodging another trap before starting up a spiral staircase that burrowed directly into the rock above, the bag of tools bouncing against his side as he ran. Picking up speed, Mateo followed through glass passages, more stairs, through corridors and over a flowing channel of water that must have been connected to the waterfall, shouting a warning every time his mind snagged on something nasty lying in wait to catch his stone-blind father.

Somehow, Tual avoided every single one.

The higher they went, the thicker the smell of rot and bone layered in Mateo’s nose. Willow had grown quiet in his mind. I’ve been here, she whispered. I know this place. Mateo ignored her.

Tual turned down a side corridor, glimpses of dusk over the back side of the cliffs away from the lake peering in at Mateo through the stone-cut windows. When Tual darted through yet another doorway, Mateo began to swear inside his head, sprinting to catch up, then almost tripped over his father, who had dropped to his knees just inside.

It was a large room, the ceiling arching more than two stories overhead with high pointed windows lining the left-hand wall, though the glass had either been broken out or had never been there to begin with. Through them, Mateo could see rolling hills covered in gently swaying trees, the sound of water whispering through the air. At the far end, opposite the openings facing the trees, there were more windows giving a view of the clear twilight sky over the lake.

The remains of what might have been a chandelier hung drunkenly from the center of the ceiling, smaller fixtures dripping broken strands of mud-coated lumps that might have been crystals around it. Mateo lowered himself onto the dirt-strewn floor, the outlines of broad black-and-white-checkered floor tiles showing through near where his father was kneeling, but obscured everywhere else, with what looked like bits of stone rubble poking through the dirt here and there.

Tual’s ribs heaved as he tried to catch his breath, one hand to his chest. He pulled the tool bag from his shoulder and let it rest on the floor between them. “The air feels thicker up here.”

It mostly felt cold to Mateo—unnaturally cold, as if the Basists who had lived here so long ago preferred the feel of living underground. The corners of the room were lashed with shadows and the walls rough, as if something had been violently torn from the side facing the lake.

Looking around, Mateo stood, suddenly understanding the rubble strewn throughout the room. Turning slowly, he tried to assess where the stone fragments had come from based on their current positions, trying not to step on any of the pieces when he walked a few steps closer to the center of the room. “Father, how have we never come up here? We’ll have to categorize it like a tomb—these bits are from the wall. Is it possible these are what Devoted left when they tore this place apart?” He pulled out his shirt tail and used it to cover his hand, carefully dislodging one of the fragments. On the underside, there was a faint outline that looked like paint. “The top side’s been exposed to the elements, but the rest of it—” Mateo’s heart began to speed, excitement winding up inside him like a spring. The checkerboard floor would make it easy to map out where the pieces had fallen. If only he’d brought his drawing satchel. “This could be a huge replace. A mural from a Basist abbey? This is our history.”

“No.” Tual breathed, putting a tentative hand to the section of tile in front of him. “We can’t disturb this place.”

“It’s not disturbing if you’re trying to put it back together—”

“At least.” Tual’s voice was quiet, his eyes glazed. “We won’t disturb it any more than we have to.”

Mateo barely turned in time to see Tual raise a chisel from the bag of tools, then stab it into the tile.

“What are you doing?” Mateo jerked forward, hands outstretched to stop his father from breaking every rule of archeology, but Tual batted him away.

“I have to see.” The hollow ring to his father’s voice stopped him, as if his father was more ghost than Willow.

The spot Tual had chosen had less accumulated dirt, and he’d gouged the chisel into the seam between tiles, chipping the one closest to him. Grunting, Tual leveraged the thick marble square up with a muddy crack. He dragged it away from its spot in the floor with a groan, exposing dense clay beneath. Without looking up, he started after a second tile.

A jolt of uneasiness wormed through Mateo’s chest at the sight of his father furiously clawing at the clay with his bare hands. “You made me run up stairs to watch you desecrate an important archeological site? What could possibly be under the tile that’s more important than the mural Devoted tried to destroy?”

“You say your ghost came back. The sword came back when it wasn’t supposed to.” Tual bared his teeth as he leveraged the second tile back, leaving streaks of clay smudged across his hands. “You didn’t even lose your breath on the way up here, and Miss Aria…” He groaned, sliding the tile onto the dirt next to the first. “Whatever is happening, it’s changing you. The sword was supposed to melt, but if it didn’t…” Groping for the tool bag, Tual extracted a trowel, the point wickedly sharp. He looked up at Mateo. “I have to replace out if my dagger came back too.” Tual stabbed the trowel point first into the black clay.

“Your dagger… the one you… it also melted?” Mateo knelt on the ground next to his father, careful of the bits of rock that needed to be categorized and pieced together but unable to look away from the hole his father was making in the ground. Willow held still inside him, her breath corroding the edges of his thoughts. I know this place. I know these bodies.

How could you know this place? Mateo shot back. I’ve never been here.

The rest of me knows it. They’re louder now because they remember their deaths.

“If the weapon you used to turn shapeshifter melted, then what are you digging up?” A terrible thought bled into Mateo’s mind. “Is this where you buried the person—”

“—who mattered most to me? Yes.” Tual dropped the trowel and began digging with his hands. He went still, his fingers curving around something deep in the clay. “Honestly, I know almost nothing about what we are, what we can do, how it all works—but if my dagger came back, it would have come back here.”

“But how could the body…? It’s under the tiles.…”

“I grew up here, Mateo. We learned where the traps were, one stupid, dead high khonin at a time—not all those graves under the watchtower are from the curse.”

“There is no curse,” Mateo said automatically. Then his gut twisted as Tual uncovered the first black-stained bone. “You were a servant here,” he whispered. “You grew up in the tower? Your house mark—”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

But it did. “The cleared area with less dirt… You’ve pulled up this floor before.”

Tual nodded as he dug, and bile rose in Mateo’s throat as Tual unearthed the bottom of a rib cage, then a sternum, a clavicle. An upper arm and scapula. Next, the very tip of the widest part of a pelvis, as if this body had been buried on its side. There were threads of clothing, all decayed enough for a century to have passed. Perhaps two.

The rubble was just as old, based on the weathering and dirt.

Each bit of black-stained bone slowed Tual a little more, his breaths coming faster until he stopped, hunched over the grave.

“Father?” Mateo could feel him shuddering with each breath.

He threw the trowel aside and stared Mateo in the face. “I can’t.”

“You can’t what?”

“I can’t do this.” Tual wouldn’t look at the bones, his eyes glued to Mateo’s. “I need you to do it with your energy. Look for my dagger.”

“Who is she?” Mateo could see from the bones that she’d been female, an adolescent with hips that had borne no children. He placed his hands on the ground near the hole, then pulled them back again, trying to pretend that she was like Patenga. Like any of the other entombed bodies he’d helped excavate. A discovery. A clue to who he was.

But she wasn’t.

She was his father’s dead love, murdered by his hand.

“Beryl was my dearest friend. We grew up together like brother and sister. I would have died for her.” Tual’s voice cracked. He looked past Mateo to the cracks in the wall, his face pained.

Mateo bit his lip. Tual obviously hadn’t died for her.

“It wasn’t Devoted who broke that wall. It was a mistake after we found them buried down in the lowest caves. We brought them up here, not knowing what they were—”

“You found what? What are you talking about?”

“The caprenum blades. There were two of them. Devoted must not have known how to destroy them, so they hid them away.” His head bowed.

“Two blades. The sword you used for me. And…?”

“My dagger,” Tual breathed. “Devoted didn’t go looking quite so hard for gods-touched back then. They hadn’t found… me.”

“You?”

Tual met his eyes. “I was Calsta’s. And Beryl belonged to the nameless god. I didn’t know it until she found the blades. It was like she could feel them waiting down there. We brought them up here, and we argued.”

“About…?”

“What to do with them. She knew there was something wrong. We’d been all through the caves, seen everything the Devoted couldn’t destroy….” He swallowed. “I wanted to keep them. To study them—I’d always wanted to go to the university, and she’d always said maybe her parents would pay….”

Mateo waited, Tual’s head bowed. “You argued.”

“It was a mistake. Well, it started as one. It was a terrible choice to have to make, Mateo. Her or me. It didn’t have to be that way, but she decided it was—as if there is evil in an object, evil in me for touching them, wanting them. She made her choice, and I had to make mine.” When Mateo didn’t move, Tual took in another long breath and let it out again before forcing himself to look back down at the bones. “I wanted to live, not be killed for wanting to know more. Just like you, Mateo.”

“To know what?”

“About the swords. About artifacts. About beings with so much power that they didn’t need money, they didn’t need family, or a university, or swords, or anything at all. They were free.” The clay crumbled between his fists. “Healing was the first thing I tried to learn once she was gone and I had her powers. I would have used it to save her if I could, though it would have been the wrong decision.” He looked down. “It was only a matter of time before someone reported something, before they came for her. This was a better death than the Warlord would have given her. So I’ve spent my life using her magic to do good. Healing. Changing the world. Saving you.”

Mateo couldn’t breathe, the rubble around them, the dirt, the mud, the stone, the body itself too old, far too old. “How long ago, Father?”

Tual slowly raised his head. “Do you really want to know?”

Mateo shivered.

A curse. Willow sang in rotted notes, each vibrating deeper into Mateo’s brain. One soul stolen every generation, the energy stored away to gobble up when he needed it. How else could he have lived so long?

You weren’t here. You weren’t even born, Mateo savaged back at her. You don’t know anything.

“Please,” Tual breathed. “Help me replace it. A dagger made of caprenum.”

Closing his eyes was as much to shut out Willow’s awful keening as it was to shut out the open grave. Mateo placed his hands on the ground, his energy flowing out until he felt bones, so many bones—in the walls, in the floor. Everything inside him stuck. You don’t want to kill until you do.

I didn’t want to kill until he killed me. Willow’s husky voice had thinned down to her girlish rasp. But now I haven’t much choice. Neither do you. Both of us are broken, and it takes blood to fix the holes.

I was already broken before he broke you, Mateo wanted to argue. The holes in his soul hadn’t come from Tual. They’d come from his blood parents, from the village elders who’d found the nameless god’s touch in his hands.

Mateo opened his eyes when Tual grabbed hold of his shoulders, bits of black clay from his fingers grinding into the fibers of Mateo’s fine paisley coat. “You are all that matters now, Mateo. Your life. Our family.” And Tual pulled him close.

The horror inside Mateo dulled, and he hugged his father back. This was his true father. The man who had carried him through life despite the extra risk it brought just to keep Mateo alive. If anyone loved him, it was Tual.

He’d always known his father was willing to do whatever it took to get the right things done. Sometimes that meant blood. Even Mateo knew that. His father was far braver than Patenga, who’d taken his own life instead of trying to fix what he’d broken.

So Mateo reached for the nameless god’s energy inside him. Only it wasn’t the nameless god’s; it was Aria’s.

He faltered, feeling sick. But then the room came alive in his mind. The stone walls whispered about how they fit together. The clay bed under the marble floor sang out a complicated combination of elements that were mixed together with the soft, slick feel of bone. Bones in the walls, in the floor, so many bones deeper than the ones his father had unearthed, generations’ worth of the dead hidden from sight. There were more beyond this room too, dead in the stairwells below, dead in outcroppings and tunnels that wormed farther out past the abbey, unfortunates who had tried to come in and were denied.

All of it was quiet and cold, waiting the way Willow did at the back of his mind.

But there was something warm under the half-exposed skeleton in the clay before him.

As soon as Mateo’s energy focused in on that warmth, goose bumps prickled down his arms. The object was, every molecule, wrong. The elements had been twined together like musical notes to form something perfect and beautiful, but then it had been corrupted, tortured, blasphemed.

Just like Patenga’s sword in the artifact room, like the walls, the reliefs, the mosaics in his tomb. Like the spot of wrong at the top of the watchtower. This object was full of shapeshifter magic.

Energy rang in Mateo’s ears, the corrupted metal calling to him. He wanted it out. And when he reached with his mind, the dagger was underground one second, then lying on the clay between jutting bones the next, absolutely clean as if it had been sitting there the whole time.

Just think of what you want, Tual said that night in the tomb. Then take it. The blade was pockmarked, like the sword Tual had stabbed the boy in the tomb with. Like Patenga’s sword they’d taken from the burial chamber. Caprenum.

Tual reached out and grasped Mateo’s shoulder. “You’ve never been able to do that before. Your control. Your power,” he breathed. “You moved it.”

Aria Seystone did, anyway, Willow whispered.

Mateo recoiled, inching back from the hole, but death was inside him, rattling out with each breath. He could feel it twisting him into a new shape, one that wanted to reach for the dagger sitting so innocently on the clay floor, surrounded by rotting bones.

His hands felt tight, swollen. When he looked down, he froze, his carefully manicured nails bruised and black.

Lia kicked Vivi faster, but he keened, calling to the herd of auroshes they were leaving behind. He bent his head as if he meant to run back toward them, his serpentine neck twisting against the reins. Heart pounding like a beast caged inside her ribs, Lia spurred him deeper into the trees.

There had been ten Devoted right there on the edge of her aurasight. If she’d taken another step, would she have seen more? Fifteen, twenty of Calsta’s warriors, able to see her aura clear as an afternoon sky? Lia jabbed a hand into her saddlebags and pulled her veil out from where it was stowed to spread it across her lap in the saddle. Calsta hadn’t restored her third oath yet, leaving her weak in the face of so many brimming with Calsta’s strength. Surely the goddess would see her need for the third oath, then for the fourth to help her track auras, then the fifth, so she’d be able to see into Tual’s and Mateo’s minds when she got to them—to understand what was truly going on rather than making guesses. Her sister’s life and her own depended on it.

What were so many Devoted doing in the middle of nowhere?

Lia sent up a prayer to the Sky Painter, the veil clutched in her hand. I’m here. I’m trying to stop Tual, like you want. I’m keeping my oaths. I need my sister. She fumbled to drape the veil over her head as Vivi stormed forward. When the folds had settled over her face, Lia breathed in, willing Calsta’s energy inside her to change.

It didn’t.

Batting a branch out of her face, Lia clung to Vivi with her knees as he jumped a fallen tree. Mateo had been excavating Patenga’s tomb on the promise that some kind of wasting sickness cure would come out of it.

Could it be that the Devoted had come to collect? Or had they been invited?

“Lia?” Gilesh called from behind her. “Would you perhaps tell us what under Calsta’s sky could spook a Devoted into stampeding a fully grown auroshe across unstable ground? Maybe let us know which direction this threat of yours is coming from and whether or not we should hide?”

Vivi tore the reins from Lia’s hands, darting to the side and jumping a second felled log. Lia swore, her arms coming up to protect her face from the branches and leaves swatting by. “Vivi,” she hissed. “If you don’t—”

But then she saw it. A shape snaking through the trees after them. It was large, running with its head low as it darted after them: an auroshe.

“Don’t follow me, Gilesh! Head for the river!” Lia let Vivi run, Gilesh’s and Bane’s auras winking out the moment they were out of range. Vivi snaked between trees and up a hill, not fleeing from the creature so much as testing it. Finally, Vivi swiveled around to rear just as the other auroshe overtook them and struck at the thing with his hooves. The other auroshe hissed, hackles all the way raised, but it didn’t attack, as if it had seen one of its own, and despite the unfriendly welcome, couldn’t bring itself to run away. Both its horns were broken, its teeth jagged, ribs showing like starvation itself.

“Vivi!” Lia coaxed her auroshe back onto all fours even as the feral auroshe made a play at charging—it was almost teasing, like a cat batting at a string. It shied off to the side long before it came within reach of Vivi’s sharp horn, its eyes darting between Lia and her mount. Twisting to keep his eyes on the creature as it circled them, Vivi cried to be given permission to tear out its belly.

The other auroshe’s hide held a familiar pink tinge.

Once Lia was certain Vivi was under control, she dismounted. “You stay,” she whispered to Vivi, staring straight into his eyes and blowing into his nostrils. He lipped her veil, then threw his head back with a rebellious screech, but after a moment Vivi’s horn dipped down to touch the forest floor. He’d stay.

Turning very slowly, Lia faced the half-starved auroshe. It had gone still, only the glow of its eyes visible in the darkness of the trees. “Rosie?” she whispered. “Is that you?”

The auroshe’s head jerked forward into the light, wrinkled muzzle relaxing just a hair. Then its hackles began to lower, even when Vivi screamed, baring all forty-two of his sharp teeth. Lia gave Vivi a reassuring pat, then took a cautious step toward Rosie, the auroshe she’d freed from the fights in Chaol. She’d touched her horn and blown into her nostrils—the only way to bond to an auroshe—but Rosie wasn’t trained the way Vivi was, so it was hard to know what the creature would do.

Rosie gamboled forward, her movements erratic and aggressive, but when Lia held a hand out toward her muzzle, the auroshe bent her head and rubbed up against Lia’s palm, shivering when Lia stepped closer to blow into her nostrils through the veil to reaffirm their bond. Rosie’s feet still danced, and her sides twitched, but her black eyes searched for Lia’s through the thin fabric, unblinking.

“How did you get out here?” Lia whispered, scratching her behind the ears.

After rescuing Rosie from the fights, she’d left the auroshe on the beach beneath Mateo’s house with plenty of fish and little beach creatures to eat.

Mateo’s house. She didn’t want to think of that night, of her pressing Mateo’s hand to Rosie’s forehead and bending him down to breathe into her nostrils as the first shots in Castor’s and Jaxom’s godly war streaked across the sky like runaway stars. Of shaking his hand and replaceing calluses, as if he’d done something worthwhile when she hadn’t been looking.

Mateo had more to him than most people saw. At least… she’d thought he did. She bent down to press a cheek between Rosie’s broken horns. “Did you follow him here?” she whispered. “And he left you out here like he’d never met you, either?”

Vivi screamed behind her, scaled nose pointing into the boulders beyond them.

Lia turned to look. They were very regular-looking boulders—so aggressively average that the formations seemed almost man-made.

A flash of aura showed above the trees. Not Calsta’s gold—it was perfectly white and plain. The white light stuttered, then disappeared as quickly as it had come into being.

Lia took a cautious step forward, her senses singing. What could cause an aura to flash in and out of being like that?

The roar of water caught in her ears. A waterfall. Like the one next to Tual’s house on the map Anwei had shown her.

She was close. Far, far too close.

Vivi chortled, making Lia jump. But before she could quiet him, the aura appeared again, a burst of light that once again extinguished almost immediately. This time, the flicker was enough to see the aura hiding in the rocks.

It was Mateo Montanne.

Hands shaking, Tual picked up the dagger from its cage of bones. A flower had been forged into the handle, the blade short with a decorative curve, as if it had been made to be looked at, not to kill. Pushing up from the tile, Tual turned away from the bones and held the weapon up to Castor’s blue light—

And suddenly there was nothing in Mateo but hunger.

So hungry, Willow agreed. Aria will help for a while, but it’s not enough. We can sip from your staff, and maybe—

Don’t, Mateo growled back, but still his insides ached.

Where’s my sword? Willow whispered. It could make us all better.

“How can this have returned?” Tual almost seemed to have forgotten Mateo, holding the dagger close to his face, then far away, his eyes squinted. “I don’t know what it means. I have to know what it means. I always thought the shapeshifters’ kings knew something I didn’t to become so powerful. Conservation of energy could make an argument for the caprenum returning, but are the two related? Maybe Bettany’s rule?”

“Isn’t Bettany’s rule about energy being split into two kinds of—”

“Shapeshifters are always depicted with their weapons in hand, Mateo!” Tual twisted to face Mateo, the dagger held out in front of him. “How many murals have we found with caprenum swords, knives, axes all scratched away? I always thought it was a symbol to show what they were, not an accurate depiction of how they lived. I’ve been blind.” He moved toward the window at the far end of the hall, Jaxom’s brighter gleam beckoning for him to hold the dagger high in the moon’s light. It was as if the weapon had changed from a terrible memory into something precious in less time than it had taken Tual to inhale.

Mateo followed slowly, the world shaky under his feet. “What does it matter how it came back?”

Lowering the blade, Tual looked at his son. “That ghost latched on to her brother. Then, when you were all in the same room, she switched to you. Is the distance a problem? Has she told you to get the sword?”

Mateo nodded.

“The sword must matter, then. You’re stronger now that she’s with you, but she only knew she could switch to you because you were close to the sword. Her brother interfered in the original ritual, then kept the sword close all these years….” But he shook his head, turning away again. “You aren’t a representative sample. We know what went wrong with your turning, and I’ve never seen anything anywhere about a shapeshifter bond that included three people—”

An auroshe scream shattered the air, making Mateo jump back from the window, his hands shaking. Rosie had found him.

That was the only explanation. Rosie had followed him from Chaol, watched him and Aria in his sleep, and was now ready to tear him apart so Lia could retrieve her sister.

But then he saw it. A sparkle of gold through the gap in the windows, the stone walls blocking any other suggestion of godly power. Before he could think on that—the walls blocked auras?—he ran to the window openings facing the lake. It wasn’t Rosie. There were three auroshes crossing the bridge onto the island below them, each one crowned with a golden aura “Father, she’s here. The Warlord is the only aura I recognize, but there are two other Devoted with her.”

“What?” Tual thrust the dagger into his belt, his voice uncharacteristically rough. He sprinted for the stairs, calling over his shoulder. “We were supposed to have another day! If she replaces Aria, we’re dead.”

“I thought we couldn’t die!” Mateo called after him, not feeling reassured by the way Tual ran from the room without answering. The lake was supposed to be safe. He was supposed to be safe. Heart drumming hard, Mateo pulled back from the window. It wasn’t just Aria they needed to worry about. Evidence of what they were was easy enough to spot without a little freckled girl screaming about being kidnapped.

He held up a single hand, his artist fingers tipped in black, black nails.

Lia scrunched her eyes shut, as if straining would make Mateo’s aura appear again. She stepped closer to the rocky horizon, the landscape dipping and bulging in odd places that made Lia remember something about Basist-built defense mechanisms around the whole lake. Vivi keened from behind her, Rosie screeching a challenge in response, but the ragged auroshe shrank back when Vivi reared. At least Vivi was still abiding by Lia’s command to stay.

The sky was too dark to make out where the river turned into a waterfall, stars glaring down at her from between the two moons. Jaxom’s orange glow seemed to egg Lia on, the warrior god mocking her for standing frozen when the answer to all their plans was nothing but a little climb up. We’re going to replace Mateo, Anwei had said, and Tual will follow.

One last step forward, and the aura shimmered into existence, Mateo’s essence blazing back to life. Lia ran back to Vivi, hopped on his back, and unsheathed her sword.

Hiding his hands in folded arms, Mateo started toward the stairs, his mind full of traps, of swords, of bones and shapeshifter wrongness. But when he got to the door, something in his mind stilled, like a doe just before a parchwolf pounced.

She’s here, Willow whispered.

I know the Warlord is here, so whatever you are doing, stop! Mateo started forward again, only to pause when another auroshe scream tore through the night from the forest behind him, far, far away from where the Warlord was gleefully conquering his home. Turning very slowly, he faced the windows that went out the back side of the cliff, the trees below a mask.

Were there more Devoted creeping up on them from behind? Not a friendly visit and demand for a cure to a terrible disease, but some kind of attack? Or maybe it was Rosie. Would the Basist traps keep out an animal, or had she finally found a way to get to him? No glass in the windows to keep her out, no hostlers, no Father—

The scream came again, the sound drawing Mateo up to the rough sill. A solitary aura sparked into existence down in the trees, crowned in gold.

She’s here, Willow croaked.

Clapping hands over his mouth, Mateo darted back behind the wall, back slamming into the stone, then sliding down until he was on the floor. It was Lia’s aura. Had she come with the Warlord?

Where’s the sword? Willow rasped, the words lashing like talons. We need the sword.

The wall between him and Lia Seystone blocked the golden burst of light her aura made out in the trees—since when could stone walls block auras?—so much stronger than she’d been when they were in Chaol together. How many oaths did it take to make a Devoted glow like a little sun? Mateo’s arms prickled with energy, and his palms began to sweat.

He’d yearned to talk to Lia. Thought about seeing her, what he’d say, what she’d say, then stopped thinking about it at all because what happy ending could there be to that conversation?

Peeking over the edge of the sill, Mateo caught sight of an open patch in the trees below, Jaxom’s light turning the figure on aurosheback below an unbecoming orange, a twirl of fabric blowing behind her like a flag.

She was veiled. Lia had pulled off the last of her face coverings right in front of him, swearing them off because she no longer had reason to be afraid. Now she was covered and holding a sword.

As he crunched back down onto the floor, Mateo’s fists ached, his slightly too-long fingernails like blades to his palms. Swords were what Lia knew. Calsta and all her warrior nonsense were what Lia knew. He’d seen it time and time again back in Chaol. Lia’s world was made of weapons and problems meant to be hacked into pieces until they were problems no longer.

Mateo tried to shove aside all the good things that had happened between himself and the shadow sprinting toward him. The sight of her red curls, the blaze of her aura returning, the look on her face when she’d finally taken off that awful blue scarf. The laughs they’d had. Rosie, because they’d saved her together. The way she’d looked him over when she found out he was a Basist and then shrugged it off, not afraid, not judgmental. She knew who he was and that magic didn’t make him evil.

In that one moment, Mateo couldn’t think of anything he wanted more than Lia.

She was made of flames, and Mateo wanted to stand next to her, to grow bright the way she was until she could look at him and see the flame he was too. That was why Tual had taken Aria—so that Mateo could return her and manipulate Lia into giving him a second chance.

And Mateo wanted to go. Not to pretend, not to lead Lia back to the lake and a shapeshifter’s sword. Not to steal her energy to save himself.

He’d accepted his father’s plan because underneath wanting to live, he wanted to see Lia again.

But, in the cracked moonlight, sitting in a chorus of bones, Mateo knew what a fantasy it had been. He knew who Lia was, and Lia Seystone needed nothing, no man. She’d almost died rather than ask him for help, and the very idea that Mateo might be interested in more than friendship had made her sit so very straight that he’d taken it back before she’d even properly responded.

He knew. And by all the gods together in the sky, in the earth, in books, paintings, in the very air, that knowledge tore at him. Lia had chased after him, just the way he’d hoped. She’d found him, just as he’d hoped. But of course Lia had come brandishing a sword.

He’d known it from the first time he’d seen Lia in her father’s study, covered from head to toe in blue. Mateo carried pencils, not weapons. Even after they’d fought together, laughed together, stolen the auroshe together, plotted to stand up to his father together, watched the stars fall from the sky together… when he’d finally got up the courage to really look at her, she’d looked the other way. And now it was going to have to be his father’s plan or a choice of two deaths: death by ghost or death on the point of a sword.

It was a terrible choice to have to make, Mateo, Tual had said. Her or me. She made her choice.

I had to make mine.

And now Mateo had to make his.

She will never accept me as I am. We could never be. Not in a world that is true.

Mateo pulled himself up from the floor and stepped back from the window. Back from the blistering cloud of gold racing toward him and straight into the defenses old as the nameless god himself. Then he ran after his father.