He Who Breaks the Earth (The Gods-Touched Duology)
He Who Breaks the Earth: Chapter 28

Noa looked both ways, hand latched tight around the shard of stone Lia had given her before she ran up the gangplank onto the boat that was no longer her father’s. It almost felt like coming home, the railing familiar, the prow just waiting for a new house mark. Maybe.

If they lived.

She ran to the back of the boat to pull up the anchor as Gilesh, Bane, and Altahn followed her on board. She hissed orders as she ratcheted the anchor back into place, and by the time she went to the sails, Gilesh and Bane were at the oars and the boat was headed upriver. Altahn joined her, Galerey scolding Noa from her spot inside his collar when she slapped his hand away from the ropes that would send the sails tumbling down. “Falan’s curls, do you know nothing about boats? Here, tie this one.”

Altahn frowned when she reached out to scratch Galerey’s head spines, and the firekey stopped chittering. “Hey, you’re supposed to like me best.”

Noa wasn’t sure if he was talking to Galerey or her.

“Go on, get dressed!” Noa shooed him away toward the hold and the clothes Anwei had stolen back in Chaol to make them look like Devoted. When she turned to the tiller, her skin prickled at the sight of the little channel that would lead them back to the caves. Anwei and the others weren’t far behind them, ready to return to the spot Abendiza had tried to kill them. Abendiza, who had disappeared in the middle of the night and never come back.

“If you try to put anything sparkly on my clothes, I’ll have Altahn set Galerey on you,” Bane informed her solemnly, his lips and fingers stained with something orange he’d been eating the whole way to the boat. “Fire isn’t so friendly when it isn’t at the end of a tether, you know.”

“You concentrate on keeping our boat ready for us to get away.” Noa caught sight of Altahn emerging from below, a sword hilt bristling out from behind his shoulder. “If you die, I’ll visit your fiancée and her cows and tell her it was her name breathed out last.” She furrowed her brow at him. “What’s your fiancée’s name?”

Altahn laughed, moving to stand at the prow. “I don’t even remember. Only that she was from another clan and that there were no cows. If you die, I’ll write your father an insulting letter every year.”

Noa nodded enthusiastically. “Include ransom demands. And have Ellis send a bill to pay for that carom you lost him.”

“I lost? You were the one who sank the boat. And he wasn’t supposed to have it, anyway.”

“Knox sank the boat.” Noa waved her hand dismissively. The pool came into sight, and her whole body seemed to be made of wire, twisting tighter and tighter. It was all well and good to joke, but she didn’t like the idea of disappearing into the darkness never to come out again.

But she loved Anwei. She was coming to love Lia. And Knox with all his shadows had saved her life, and she meant to return the favor. It was the other shadows, the ones dancing around Mateo, that she worried about. She went to join Altahn at the prow as the boat slid into the pool, silent and fast and perfect. Lowering her voice, she didn’t quite look at him. “Do you think Mateo is really going to help us?” The plan, after so many weeks of chattering teeth and nights sleeping on the ground and elsparn and poison, had come down to something so simple. The Devoted would go with their swords and their magic, and Tual would try to talk to them, but Mateo said Tual was done hiding, so if they didn’t want to talk, he’d fight. He could fight, a change no one had bothered to explain, as if Tual had spent years hulking in the shadows and had only just decided to step into the light.

A fight was a fine distraction for Lia to get her sister. Not as fine as the one Noa and Altahn would make, of course, because Devoted didn’t know how to sparkle. The explosives from the caves would sparkle well enough, and though Altahn seemed to know more about breaking and burning things, Noa knew how to make a show that not even a shapeshifter could look away from, which would give Anwei enough time to take Patenga’s sword and cover their run back to the boat, where Gilesh and Bane would be waiting to row them to safety.

She thought through the plan once, then again, to make it absolutely clear in her mind. Mateo had said that was the most important part. Thinking very clearly what was supposed to happen.

Noa shivered at the thought of trusting him, a true belanvian, the darkness inside eating at everything and everyone around him.

“I came to win Calsta’s favor.” Altahn’s voice interrupted her thoughts. He was still looking toward the cave. “Let’s hope that Mateo helping us is what happens instead of us sending the most powerful Devoted to their deaths so that there’ll be no one left to stop two shapeshifters from draining the rest of the province. The Commonwealth. The continent.”

“Look at the bright side.” Gilesh squinted as he looked up from the oar. “Salpowder prices would rise clear to the sky. That’s favor enough for me.”

“The plan will work.” Noa whispered it. Then said it again, running through it in her mind once more. When Altahn looked back at her, she smiled as brightly as she knew how. “Then, when we’re through here, we can get to what we’ve all been wanting to do.”

“We? I have no plans to kiss Altahn,” Gilesh jeered. Bane sniggered, giving Gilesh a jaunty salute.

Clearing his throat, Altahn shrugged them off. “More like the first one to track down Ellis gets a prize. We need to get that carom back. Put some fear into all who take Trib treasures.”

“I’d like a prize!” Noa went back to the tiller to maneuver them to the very edge of the pool and into the dark maw waiting for them. The boat felt small compared to the mouth of it, Noa hugging the tiller to her chest and looking up at the sails, the rail, the deck like promises of a future she didn’t realize she could choose. “Having a carom has made trading down this river quite profitable for the Butcher. I might be in the market for one myself. Maybe I’ll get to it before you do.”

“Noa, you don’t mean…” Altahn’s brows creased, the darkness taking him first as they moved into shadow. “You wouldn’t dare. Go pirate? It doesn’t matter how prettily you smile, I wouldn’t let you get your hands on that carom—”

“Let me?” Noa shivered as the darkness rolled over Gilesh, then Bane, then came for her, the cool air inside the cave like a grave. She reached up to touch Falan’s flower and sent a quick prayer for the goddess to bless them with all her luck. Darkness was what came before the performance, the breath before the fire tethers ignited and the music began. The black before the spotlight. Noa clenched her eyes shut, feeling the brush of Falan inside her.

There would be an after to this darkness.

She believed it. She had to. You needed light to sparkle.

“You want to stop me?” Noa turned to grin at Altahn before the last light from the cave opening disappeared around the corner, everything around her falling into blacks and grays. “Who says you’ll be able to catch me? I’m the one with a boat.”

Anwei fingered the shard of stone Lia had given her as she sat at the very back of the canoe, Lia at the front and Mateo between them, a blindfold over his eyes. The long night of whispering together once they’d snuck out of the camp one by one hung like heavy shadows around her feet, no match for the brightness of the day. She’d gone back to the boat and sat in the room with Knox until the sun started to rise, reaching out to grab hold of his tunic as she always did. To keep him in this world so he didn’t float away.

Which was what she was going to do.

The boat passed under the arch that led into the caves, and Mateo flinched at the sudden change of warm sun to cold, his fingers gripping the sides of the boat hard. Anwei kept silent, hoping it would be enough to stop Willow from using him to attack her again.

“Gilesh and Bane are already getting into place with the boats for when the Devoted storm up the beach,” Lia was saying, her chin tipping up to look at the statue of the woman holding up the ceiling on her shoulders. “Altahn and Noa will set off the salpowder. Then, by the time you get to your father, Mateo, Anwei will cause a ruckus in the antiquities room where the sword is. That’ll pull Tual’s attention.”

“Let’s hope Willow stays put like a good girl.”

The edge of his voice corroded with worry, the bite of it familiar. Anwei’s hands stalled on the paddle, a memory she’d long forgotten of them sitting just like this with ocean waves pushing them up toward the sun, being grateful because it meant they weren’t carrying them back to the apothecary and their father just yet. But there was something about the set of his shoulders, something that tasted different.

She looked away. It was almost harder, seeing him this way. Without Willow filling up all the cracks.

“I’ll be there to help if Willow causes a problem,” Lia said. “It’ll be all the more distracting if she does. Once he’s taken care of… You’re sure you know where Aria is?”

Mateo nodded slowly, drawing his answer out a little too long. “Yes. My father… probably has her in his office.” After a moment, he sat forward. “I remember Anwei now. I didn’t before.”

Anwei forced herself to keep paddling, her chest contracting. Lia looked over her shoulder to meet her eye. “And?”

“Father made her sound like a monster. Worse than anything we could ever be. But… I think it’s like Aria down in the tunnel. She wasn’t really there. She wasn’t herself. She was what he thought we should see.”

Teeth grinding hard together, Anwei dug in the paddle deep, Lia glaring at her when the canoe lurched too far toward the wall. They were almost to the tunnel where Abendiza had emerged from the lake, where the passage could take them onto the lake or into the monastery caves.

“This is ridiculous.” Mateo’s hands went to the blindfold, and it was off before Anwei could move. “It won’t matter if I know how you got in and out—” And then his eyes set on Anwei. She froze, paddle raised before her like a weapon, her connection to Knox like a line of fire inside her. She could smell again, the sweat on Mateo’s brow, the mud and bloody smell of auroshe on his coat, and something she hadn’t smelled in years. Like… home.

Not herbs, not mortars and pestles or glass containers or wounds or pus, but him.

He stared at her, both of them still. And in that moment, looking at him, she could see that he wanted what they’d lost too. That his life had new things, things she didn’t understand, but that deep inside, he could feel what they’d been so long ago. Anwei held tight to Knox’s bond, thought of Noa, of Lia, even of the nameless god, the things that were both hers and kept her from turning into something else.

But then the nameless god breathed inside Anwei, letting the last dregs of Arun fill her. It smelled like sorrow and loss and a hurt she could never want to let go of. An ending that had whittled her down to her bones, and it was only now she could see how those bones let her stand. The nameless god sat with her as she explored it, making her muscles tense because she knew that the things they wanted weren’t the same and the god wasn’t above reaching through her to accomplish his own goals.

But he was rock and stone, solid inside her the way Knox and Lia were, as if he didn’t mind being heavy enough to keep her from blowing away.

Mateo’s eyes closed, tension flickering across his face, but then he forced himself to open them again and look her full in the face. “I remember a little. That’s what you asked before.”

Anwei’s throat was made of blades, her arms and legs heavy as iron. But she nodded slowly, because now she was here for Knox, not retribution, or murder, or her life wasted away. Knox had to be what she fought for. “I loved you,” she whispered. “I thought chasing Tual would fix it. You being gone. Our family and what they did. The whole town. What… I was.”

Mateo leaned forward a hair, his hand reaching toward her, then going back to grab hold of the canoe’s side. “I wish things were different. That I could be what I was before.”

“None of us are what we were before,” Anwei croaked. And then he was standing up, Lia helping him onto the dock that led up into the caves, and he disappeared into the darkness.

Lia held a hand out to pull Anwei up after her. “Are you ready?”

“No.” Anwei searched for her calm, her center, her smile. For some reason, she didn’t mind not being able to replace them, relishing in the feel of herself crackling like a storm and not needing to be anything else. “But it’s time.”

As Mateo walked down the passageway, the abbey walls felt like prison bars, the bodies encased inside with their weapons, their magic. None of it enough to stop the shapeshifter who had killed them, then pressed their remains into the foundations of this place they had built to rot. Not enough to stop Devoted burning every last hint of their existence away that they could. The walls seemed to breathe, and he started to run, hating the hole inside him that couldn’t be filled with anything but blood.

He ran until he came to the stairs, then down to the platform where he’d broken the glass walkway and sealed the entrance on the far side, the glass on this side molded to close over the entrance somehow, as if the Basists had expected someone to destroy their creation and had instructed the glass to preserve the abbey in its last throes. Using the energy Willow had stolen from the Devoted, Mateo reached out with his mind and touched the wall.

It touched him back, the rock molding around his hands, then shooting out into the water like a wave of molten lava. The pieces all arranged themselves in his mind, to make a stone tunnel to replace the glass one he’d broken. When he opened his eyes, a passageway lay dark between the island and the caves. Where his hand touched the wall, a picture formed, a girl with curls made of stone, wide eyes, and her name in stark lines.

He hated the way it looked, hated looking at it. So he crossed, holding his breath until he was in the crypt. There, he couldn’t stop his lungs any longer, breathing in the dead as he passed monument after monument to the people who had thought they could live.

Their names followed him out of the tower, across the courtyard, all the way to the kitchen where Hilaria was upright once again. The sight of something so normal as the cook sorting blueberries into three separate bowls calmed his nerves and made them worse all at once. Until he realized she was just staring at the wall, her cheeks still stained blue. She jerked to life when he waved a hand in front of her face, joy blooming in her like a little girl in a field of flowers. Then she frowned, of course. At least, one side of her face did, the other hanging slack. “Half the blueberries you brought me were unripe,” she mumbled.

“Hilaria.” Mateo grabbed hold of her arms. “Are you all right?”

“I told you I was going to make muffins.” She tried to pull away from him, but she was too weak, her body trembling. “There’s no need to grab me—”

“Hilaria. Gather the other servants. Can you walk? Is anyone out there… alive?” He peered out the window, the spot empty where Harlan had been lying. “Find anyone you can and hide them in the stables.”

Hilaria’s head tilted to the side, her eyes screwing up tight. “Is there something you want to tell me? Maybe about stolen blueberries?”

“I haven’t stolen any blueberries. Hilaria, please! Listen. I need you to get everyone out—”

“Because your father’s finally come for all of us.”

“Hilaria—”

“We all knew something… was wrong… I was going to leave….” Her words came in fits and spurts as if she forgot every other word that she was speaking. “I was going to hide. So he wouldn’t come replace me. But then he brought you to the house, you with your crying every night, asking for your sister—”

Mateo’s hands pressed hard into Hilaria’s arms, but the cook only trembled harder.

“I knew we could keep you safe.” She reached up and patted his cheek, and he could feel the blueberry juice smearing across his skin. “You come with me now. We’re going to the stables.” Hilaria tried to wipe her hands, but she only managed to knock the towel onto the floor, purple dripping from her fingertips. “We’ll protect you, Mateo. I’ll bring the muffins from yesterday to keep you quiet, of course.” She grabbed the half-mashed bowl of blueberries. “Unless you feed that horse of yours my good apples again. Then I’ll let Tual have you.”

Swallowing hard, Mateo’s hands dragged down her arms to hold her free hand to his chest. But then he let it go. “I’ll… I’ll be there soon. Stay out of sight.”

Hilaria blinked twice, but she toddled off when he gave her a push toward the stables, already muttering about Harlan and the maids. When she closed the door, Mateo stood for a moment, unable to move. But this wasn’t a moment to be stuck between all the different paths in this world that he could take. The choices weren’t real.

There was only one end to all this that he could make sense of.

So he went to the glass-walled office where his father sat, Tual’s head in his hands.

“They’re coming,” Mateo whispered.

Tual peeled his fingers back from his cheeks, his eyes alight, and his smile made from bones and blood. The dagger was in his hand, the metal pressed against his cheek as if he couldn’t be away from it. “Perfect.”

Anwei strode up the stairs, through a tunnel made of stone, past monument after monument to the idiotic families who stayed here despite Tual Montanne killing them one after the other.

Lia’s hand darted out to touch her arm when they got to the door that led out into the courtyard. Peeking through, Anwei saw the Devoted in their boats, silent as any grave when they stepped onto the bank. The air warped around them, colors fuzzing to hide them from view.

Anwei stuck her head out the door to look for the little white-stone beach Mateo had mentioned and found Gilesh and Bane there throwing down the anchor just as they’d planned. Noa jumped onto the beach, her arms full of salpowder taken from the caves.

Lia squeezed Anwei’s hand, and the two of them walked together toward the house. Anwei’s stomach twisted, and she wanted to run because the pull of Tual Montanne was there, but she focused instead on the feel of Lia’s hand in hers, Knox’s guttering light inside her, and everything unfolding around them as if it was just another job.

Her last job.

They stepped into the house of marble columns. Anwei let go of the rock shard in her pocket, almost able to taste the hungry nights she’d slept on apothecary tables or outside under benches. These walls were carved in butter and sugar, icing and fruit, and they smelled of silver and magic.

Resisting the temptation to pocket one of the miniature paintings or the figurine of a horse by the stairs, Anwei slipped past what looked like a dining hall, Lia craning her neck to peer at the woman laid out on the table inside—the Warlord, shrunken and gray and too small for her armor. Across the entryway was a large set of doors set with bubbled glass: the antiquities hall Mateo had showed Lia on the map. Anwei pulled the door open, wondering how she would replace the sword, then rolled her eyes at the sight of it standing on end at the very center of the room on a fancy display. The bronze-colored hilt glinted in the sunlight coming through the huge windows at the back, the shape of a horse’s head.

Lia gave Anwei’s hand one last squeeze before hurrying past the door toward the hallway where Mateo had said Tual’s office would be. They were a little early, Anwei thought, because Noa hadn’t come through the entryway—

A scream cut through the awful silence.

Anwei wrenched Patenga’s sword from its display, hating the sticky feel of it in her mind. She grunted at the weight, the tip clanging against the floor.

Another scream curdled the air, and then another, neither so ominous as the dull rumble that began to shake the floor. Anwei dragged the sword toward the entry hall, the sharp point scraping along behind her. As she poked her head out the door, relief flooded through her at the sight of Noa prancing across the entryway. The dancer’s teeth were gritted when she spun to a stop next to the grand staircase and pulled out the first of three salpowder packets to place at the bottom of the stair, as if she were telling herself this was nothing but a performance.

“Noa!” Anwei hissed, the dull rumble vibrating up through her feet, making her voice shake. But before Noa could answer, two Devoted sprinted out from the hallway Lia had disappeared into, no swords in their hands and fear in their eyes. A ripple in the black-and-white-checkered tile rolled after them.

Anwei gaped at the tile bending and cracking as it rolled past her, going faster and faster. It knocked Noa off her feet, then crashed around the Devoted’s legs. One shouted, falling to the floor, and he sank into the stone, one arm and both legs encased in a swirl of tile. The other Devoted ran out the entryway doors, abandoning him there. And then there were ten Devoted. More. All running.

Anwei started toward Noa as the dancer frantically tried to tie down the bits of string linking the salpowder packages together, but the sword was too heavy, like an anchor holding her in place. Noa grabbed for a flint from her pocket as a terrible wail came toward them, growing louder and louder. Anwei’s mind was full of blood, of the storm that let her escape the last remnants of her home, of sand and trees and the people who loved her not loving her enough. She breathed, trying to let go even as the walls twisted toward her, the floor lipping her toes as if it meant to swallow her next.

Tual was a panic inside her, the monster she’d hunted for so long, only to replace he was a fight she never could have won. Her hands gripping the shapeshifter sword had begun to sweat, the bones in her arms grating as she tried to carry its weight.

“I can help,” Anwei gasped, but she wasn’t sure she’d be able to pick the sword back up if she let it go. Noa was already striking a little knife against the flint, her hands shaking, and then, in a blink, there was a man in front of the dancer, the air a crackle of lightning around him.

The floor around Noa bulged, and then she was gone, nothing where she’d been kneeling but a surprised gasp. The trapped Devoted was next, there one moment, swallowed down into the stone the next. Anwei froze, the sight of her friend there one moment, then gone the next like a kick to her gut. Something boiled inside her like a scream, building and building, but there was no way for it to come out.

“Quick, there are more in the courtyard.” The man turned toward her, eyes glossing past her as if even now Tual Montanne couldn’t be bothered to remember who she was. Then shock fizzled up Anwei’s throat.

It wasn’t Tual.

It was a boy wearing a new coat with long embroidery swirls down the back. His boots were capped in silver. “I’ve found them,” he called over his shoulder, ignoring Anwei as if she were teash. “Just like I said, they came for the sword.”

Mateo. It was Mateo.

Tual strode after Mateo with a thunderous burst of energy roiling around him, as if he couldn’t have asked for a more joyous event than the prospect of death in front of him. He’d never liked killing or pain before, at least not that Mateo had seen. Everything was changing.

“You said there were five—” Tual said.

“Eighteen Devoted, six others, and the boy who was supposed to die on the boat. We can take care of him once all these others have been dispatched.” Mateo started for the door, sliding to a halt when Tual broke off. Because his father had seen her there in the antiquities room door.

Anwei.

Willow stirred inside him.

The girl who shared his nose. Patenga’s sword was in her hands, but it was too heavy for her, Anwei swearing as she tried to pull the tip off the ground to point at them. The feeling of energy and life inside siphoned away at the sight of her, and death crept in, Willow’s little-girl voice hardly hiding the warped croon of the thing she really was. The sword. That one’s not ours. Where is our sword?

Mateo flinched when his father stepped forward, pity on his face. “That sword was built for a shapeshifter much larger than you, dear.” Tual’s eyes traced the line of her long braids, her cheeks pink with frustration, her eyes full of rage.

We can take her the way we did Aria, Willow sang inside him. That would be much easier.

“Mateo,” Anwei croaked. “Mateo, you promised Lia—”

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you ever since the tomb,” Tual interrupted, striding toward her. Mateo’s stomach jumped, the murder on Anwei’s face sharp enough to cut without the help of any sword. “You’re practically family.”

“Mateo!” she grunted, tears streaming down her cheeks as she tried to lift the sword, then dropped it dead on the floor with a foul curse.

Tual threw his head back, laughing at the sight of her and beckoning Mateo to join. And Mateo did because this was his fight, after all. Pulling the energy flowing through his father from the Devoted attack, Mateo touched it to the floor. It was easy, brimming with power like this—he couldn’t hold it all himself, but Tual was a well that ran deep, sharing with his only son as if it were no more than water. The stone around him burst into colors, each different kind singing out to him to make them into something new. Mateo breathed in, then pushed the power out, sending a ripple of stone toward the sister he’d forgotten, knocking Anwei off her feet. The sword skittered away from her, the point slamming hard into the wall and sticking, inches deep.

Not like that. We need—

He cut off Willow as she tried to raise her head, the thought of Anwei lying still on the floor the way Aria had like a sickness inside him. The thought of his father taking Patenga’s sword—

We need her, Mateo. And his fingers began to swell. Grabbing hold of all the power he could, Mateo drowned Willow out, focusing on Anwei as she rolled onto her knees, her teeth bared. “All I ever wanted was to avenge you!” she hissed.

“I didn’t need to be avenged,” Mateo said quietly.

The Trib came racing out from where he was supposed to be tying salpowder packs to the far side of the hall. Mateo pressed out with his power, and the world answered. Altahn dropped into the stone’s clutches, not even a hair left from his head.

Anwei’s scream turned feral as she fought the tiles gripping her boots. She fell forward again, scars peeking out from under her torn sleeve, and Mateo suddenly realized that it wasn’t just his fingers that had been taken by their family.

He looked away from her. Not wanting to see her nose, her freckles, her anything as he closed his eyes and concentrated on the magic.

Mateo thought of what he wanted. Then the floor twitched, and the sword came skidding toward her, so when she fell, her head crashed into the hilt. Tual reached out to grasp his shoulder as if he meant to hold Mateo up when she didn’t move. His sister. Limp as a ragdoll. Red dripping onto the tile and down the sword’s blade. “Son,” he started, “you—”

But Mateo couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but turn to face the aura emerging from the hallway leading toward the office. Stomach twisting, Mateo tried to block the doorway before Lia could see what had happened.

But she had already seen, her eyes darting from Mateo to Anwei’s body on the floor. And as he always knew she would, Lia drew her sword.

The sword! Willow surged up inside him, making his hands twitch, his chest inflate, his whole body strain at the seams. The sword the sword the sword the sword—

Panic jolted through him, unbelief and terror shaking through his hands even as they reached for the weapon that was supposed to be lost. Where had Lia gotten it? The same pockmarked blade he’d seen in the tomb. The blade that had killed Willow. Why had she brought it into the keep, why hadn’t she told him—No one had mentioned… How was it possible—

Lia extended the blade toward him, the tip level with his chin. “You told me Aria was being kept in your father’s office.”

“Lia, it’s not what you—”

“And Anwei?” Her aura was like a smattering of gold and silk as she pivoted to move closer to his sister even while she held the sword firmly between them. Her hair was all in curls, and there were scratches across her cheek, red to match. Her dusting of freckles with her bruised knuckles and torn shirt. She was perfect.

“You are everything I thought you were.” Her voice came out low, in a growl. She lowered the sword so it pointed straight at Mateo’s heart, the blade shaking because she was shaking, her whole face twisted in rage. “I trusted you—”

There was blood on the floor all around Anwei, and it colored the soles of Lia’s feet, splashing up her boots as she walked toward him. Willow was a drumbeat in his mind to take it, take the sword. Anwei’s gone, and Knox will be too once the last of her drains out, and Abendiza will go easy enough when we replace her, and Lia likes you, she does, you can take the sword, you can take her, and then we’ll take you, we’ll take you, and then we’ll be free. What are you doing, why can’t we take you—

Mateo concentrated on Lia, trying not to look at the sword. Why wasn’t Willow taking him? Lia’s jerky movements had brought her past the pools of blood, and she stabbed the sword toward him until it pressed against his sternum. “Calsta take you, Mateo! Where is my sister?”

Why can’t we take you? the voice inside him raged, and Mateo’s eyes screwed shut as he thought of the plan, only the plan, his whole body quaking as the ghost battered against him. I don’t want what you want, he whispered, as much to himself as to the monster. I don’t.

Tual lashed out, striking the blade with his dagger, and Lia stumbled, the sword dropping a few inches and her arms going slack. “It’s all right, child,” Tual murmured, opening his arms as if he meant for her to collapse into them. Mateo could feel the warp of power coming off him, as if he were trying to burn away the thoughts he didn’t want her to have. “Anwei wasn’t your friend.”

Face contorting, Lia pushed off the lie he was trying to feed into her mind and rushed toward Mateo, spinning at the last moment so the sword was against Tual’s throat rather than Mateo’s. The last sparks Calsta had left to mark Lia flitted back and forth over her head like mad. “I should have killed you in the tomb,” she whispered.

“Your sister.” The words ripped out of Mateo before his father could do something terrible. “She’s—”

Lia jerked toward him, the sword leveling at his chin instead. “Tell me.”

“You said you wanted to be someone different,” he said quietly.

“Where is she?”

He drew in a deep breath and let it out. “She’s gone, Lia. I couldn’t… save her.”

Lia’s eyes went wide, and she froze. But then she was moving twice as fast, throwing the sword up and snagging it out of the air by the blade, driving the point toward her chest.

Mateo moved the same time she did, the terribleness of what she meant to do like a stain in his mind. But he wasn’t fast enough. The sword was already sticking out from between her ribs. Mateo slid to the ground, catching her as she fell.

“I knew there would be only one way to stop you if you turned on us,” she gasped. “I hope you die like all the Devoted you drained did. In pain. Wishing death would come faster.” She spat in his face with her last breath.

He cradled her even as her aura dissipated and her eyes glazed. A single drip of blood trailed down her chin, and he tried to wipe it away, but the red made an ugly smear up her cheek. The sword jabbed between them, sticky with blood.

The Devoted hadn’t worn her armor. Her oaths were gone. She was nothing but Lia, the girl who had wanted a life of her own.

I want to live. A sob racked from deep inside his chest, and Mateo suddenly felt just how alone he was. His father rushed over, reaching for Lia as if somehow he could force her to stay. Force her to love his son, to fix everything like he’d planned. But Mateo sent power into the stones beneath her, prying them up and letting her sink into the ground before Tual could reach them. The sword somehow slid out of her, staying behind to stare at him, alone and bloody and alive on the floor.

Mateo turned away from it, batting back Willow’s howls. At least he’d managed to tell her, Aria’s death like a pall in the air around him.

All of Tual’s plans worked.

Until they didn’t.

Tual fell to his knees beside Mateo, his arms wrapping tight around his chest, his skin too warm and the air around him buzzing with power. Willow’s voice had gone quiet in his head as he spoke to Lia, at least until now because it began to scream in a thousand voices, each of them fighting to overcome the next.

“We can fix this.” Tual’s voice wasn’t calm any longer, almost as frantic as the terrible fight inside his head. “Bring Lia back up! I have so much energy, enough to fill a hundred people. Why not Lia? Son, I know you love her. Why didn’t you—”

“It wasn’t going to work,” Mateo whispered. “You can’t make someone like Lia love me. Not more than her family. Not more than the people we took. All she wanted was Aria.”

“You didn’t take anyone—” Tual faltered when Mateo looked up at him. “Aria was a mistake. You weren’t trying to hurt her. That has to count for something.”

Mateo shook his head. “I don’t think it’s loving someone when you have to hide most of what you are and the things you’ve done. What you actually want.” He let Tual’s arms pull him tight for a moment before the shouts of Devoted from outside curdled in his ears. Through the windows he could see some lying on the ground, barely any flicker of Calsta’s touch over their heads. Some were trapped knee-deep in stone, and some…

Tual had gotten to some of them already.

“We’ll try again.” Tual’s voice was rough but determined. “If Lia wasn’t ever going to fit, then we’ll replace someone who will. I don’t care how long it takes. We don’t have to hide anymore. With Devoted so weak, we can help them change the rules about oaths and who has to become a Devoted—we’ll replace you a girl who won’t fight so hard.” He sighed. “Though I like the ones who fight. She suited you, son.”

Mateo couldn’t speak, his hands and arms where he’d been holding Lia were so cold. He reached up to wipe away her spit still clinging to his cheek, then didn’t, not wanting to move. Willow was still inside him, her screams building louder and louder until it was all he could hear. He felt heavy, tired. Finished.

But he wasn’t finished.

He looked up at Tual. Father. Shapeshifter.

“I can keep you healthy until we replace someone better,” Tual was saying. He pulled back to grip both of Mateo’s shoulders, forcing Mateo to meet his eyes. “A gods-touched who can see there is more to be gained in this world than a god’s favor. We can fix this. We can fix anything.”

“More than Calsta,” Mateo whispered. “Is that what we are? Will we have people Devoted to us, begging to be allowed to keep their own souls? Like the people in Patenga’s reliefs.”

“We can be anything, Mateo. No one can hurt us anymore. We’ll never be nothing. We’ll never be alone.”

Us. Mateo wondered again what had happened in that room so high in the old abbey with the girl Tual had loved enough that they’d bonded despite the snake carved into his tooth. But Mateo couldn’t see a future that wasn’t like Patenga’s—the deeper they went into the tomb, the more tragedy he saw. The more regret.

The tomb was made from despair. A warning to any who came for the sword.

Would Abendiza’s end be different? He’d only seen her a few moments, but what shapeshifter full of power would spend five hundred years as a snake unless it was to forget?

Tual pulled Mateo close again. “It’s going to be all right.”

“You used Sleeping Death on the Devoted you stole from Chaol.”

Tual’s brow quirked. “Yes. I worried you’d relapse, and I needed power—”

“You used it on Aria.”

He nodded slowly. “To try to save her life. I’m so sorry I failed. There are some things I haven’t learned to do yet. But us together—”

“Did you ever use it on me?” Mateo thought of Aria’s poor body, no way to fight, completely helpless. The Devoted who lived to fight, rolled up like rugs in the wagon to be used and disposed of as his father saw fit.

“I… Yes. I did. When you first arrived. You were injured. Afraid. And—”

“And I missed home. Until you took my memories. You put me to sleep until you could take my family away. Why did you do it?” Mateo hadn’t planned to ask the question, the words hoarse as they scraped out of him. “How often did you put things into my mind like Aria?”

Tual’s hands pulled Mateo closer. “I… wanted you to be happy. You’ve always been so fragile, son.”

The answer felt like a hole inside Mateo. A hole to match the one his father had made with the shapeshifter sword. A hole to match the one in his mind where Anwei was supposed to be. Worse, he wasn’t sure his father was wrong about him. “You did it again in the past few days. You made me see a memory I wasn’t there for: my sister killing our village.”

“It might not have been your memory, but it was still true. I worried that she… that Lia would persuade you to put yourself in her power. She was dangerous. You saw what she was trying to do here—she wanted to kill you.”

“Maybe. Maybe I would have deserved it.” Eyes clenched shut, Mateo slipped a hand into his father’s coat to touch the caprenum hidden just over his father’s heart.

Tual convulsed forward so fast, Mateo almost didn’t understand what was happening until the dagger was in his father’s hands, the metal pressing into Mateo’s throat. Tual’s eyes were wide, a burst of power rippling over him as he drew in even more energy, the Devoted, the people, everything on the island suffering, crying out. Mateo froze, Tual’s fingers a fist in his hair pulling his chin back, the burn of skin parting and a hot drip of blood running down to pool in his collarbone. “Father…?” he whispered.

“Father…,” Tual repeated, seemingly in a daze. “Mateo. Son. I don’t want—” He jerked the blade away from Mateo’s neck, but the fist in Mateo’s hair only tightened, pulling his head back until Mateo was afraid his neck would break. “I don’t want to hurt him,” Tual rasped, and his fingers began to elongate. “I don’t want to hurt you. I love you.”

Mateo closed his eyes and thought of what he wanted.

A life he couldn’t have.

Because he was supposed to have died years ago.

The rest of the world could have the life he wanted, but only if he stepped aside. Mateo knew he was no match for his father—couldn’t hold even a fraction of the storm of energy churning around Tual Montanne. But the small sip Mateo took from him was enough to jerk the stone out from beneath Tual’s feet. Mateo drew in as deep as he could, wrenching stone blocks from the ground, groaning as they erupted out and bent to his will. The first caught Tual across the back of the head as he fell, knocking him forward across the second block. Tual’s hand, still clenching the dagger, sank down into the stone, trapping it.

Mateo forced himself to stay back, growing the stone up to snatch Tual’s feet, knocking him sideways onto the ground so the paving stones could slither up over his legs and torso, trapping him against the ground.

“Mateo?” Tual’s voice was hoarse, but he did not lash out. Did not drain Mateo.

His expression was the worst part.

Unbelieving.

But then, even as tears streamed down Tual’s cheeks, the whites of his eyes bled black, his whole body stretching and breaking into scales and spines and everything not human. Mateo clenched the stone together, sinking his father’s hand the rest of the way through the rock so the dagger poked out on the other side, the fabric of stone crying out against the wrongness of what Mateo was doing to it.

“Son,” Tual rasped, reaching toward him, even as the rest of his body convulsed toward the stone trapping the dagger, trying to wrench it free.

Stone was the one thing he’d always needed Mateo for.

After less than a second, Mateo felt his father lose control, claws of power ripping at his chest, stabbing into his humors, grasping for the energy he was using to trap Tual. It siphoned away faster than even Willow could take it, Mateo wilting down to his knees, so weak he could hardly hold his head upright.

But then it stopped, Tual straining against himself. “No,” he croaked. “I…” His eyes pressed closed, his shout like a terrible clap of thunder, “No!”

The claws pulled back, and with the last breath of energy inside him, Mateo forced the stone to pry his father’s fingers open. The dagger fell. Before he could think, Mateo caught the dagger, the caprenum burning hot in his mind.

He forced himself to look at the scales, the black eyes, the hulk of the thing that lurked inside his father. And at the tiny piece of his father left there that was still looking at him with love.

Then he opened the stone at his father’s chest and stabbed the dagger into his heart.

Instantly, the scales and feathers, the claws, the teeth all shrank back to leave the man who’d hidden with Mateo under the bed. The man who had sat by while he painted, who had taken him to every dig he’d wanted to go to, given up his whole life to keep him safe.

Mateo collapsed, tears hot on his cheeks.

You don’t want to kill until you do.

Mateo still didn’t, despite the burst of hunger from Willow inside him, pressing him forward as if she could make him sip the last of his father down. Instead, Mateo let the stone holding his father captive collapse back to its natural state, relieved to be released. He gathered Tual close as his father had done for him so many times. The last beats of his father’s heart like ink and shadows as the caprenum bubbled through his humors, mixing with his blood. “I’m sorry,” he sobbed.

This was the only possible end. The end where everyone else got to live.

“I love you, son,” Tual gasped, his arms wrapping around Mateo’s back. He held him tight with human fingers instead of claws, his head falling to rest on Mateo’s shoulder. “That much of me is true.”

Mateo sagged under his father’s weight, his arms buckling as he tried to hold him. “I love you, too.”

But love wasn’t enough when it came to monsters like them. They were too dangerous, too big for the world to hold. Lia had put herself in the same box as him, calling herself a monster, as if anger were enough to warp her into something so terrible as he was.

Maybe it was. Maybe it would, now that he’d told her the truth. But he didn’t think so. She wanted to be something new.

The true monsters were the people who took. The people who blamed. The people who weren’t willing to have anything less than everything they wanted, even when every breath they took cost two from someone else.

People who looked at their own monstrous selves and were somehow surprised when the claws came out even against the people they loved most.

You don’t want to kill. Until you do.

The last of Tual’s energy flickered, and his aura was so inflated and bright that even Mateo could see it condensed into a bubbling mass that sank down into the dagger instead of up into the sky.

Mateo bent over him and wept.

He didn’t want his father to die.

He didn’t want to kill.

He didn’t want any of it.