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Shock made Gabe’s face taut and pale. He shook his head, slightly, like he could make Anton’s words connect in a different way, one that made sense.

Of course the thing he latched onto was her. This proof that she was something unholy. “The daughter of a Night Sister…” Gabe turned to Lore, shock transmuting to horror. “What is he talking about?”

She didn’t know what to say. All the reasons she hadn’t told him came into sharp focus: the sickened expression, the way he took a short, instinctual step back from her, though they were yards apart already. Anton had just said they’d all been used this entire time, made to play out a vision he hadn’t shared with them wholly. But the part that hit Gabe hardest was Lore the Night Sister, Lore holding death in her hands since birth.

Bastian noticed. His eyes narrowed, a cruel curve bending his mouth. “See why she didn’t tell you, Remaut?”

Gabe swallowed. “You told Bastian?”

She still couldn’t make herself speak. The Sun Prince did it for her. “Yes,” he said, leaning back in his chair, its legs creaking and his chains clanging. “She told Bastian.”

Malcolm, Bellegarde, and Anton said nothing, letting the silence drop around them like a shroud around a body. Anton’s expression was blank. He’d just dealt a blow to Gabe, and he didn’t give a single shit. He’d just completely torn apart everything they thought they knew about each other, about themselves, and not one emotion crossed his face.

Visions and prophecies and coups and wars, but all of those things paled for Lore in the face of the death they’d wrought. The justice she’d apparently never been working toward, that she hadn’t known until this moment she wanted so, so badly.

“So you killed them, then?” Lore asked. All those bodies, that child—all killed for an experiment, to see what could be done with the awful magic leaking from a buried goddess and a girl who’d been cursed with it. To the Citadel and the Church, they were all expendable, and Lore hated that more than she’d ever hated anything in her life. “You murdered all those villages?”

“No,” Anton said, almost pityingly. “No, Lore, I did not murder the villages.”

All this, and they still didn’t know. All this, and they were no closer to answers.

“But what’s killing them pales in comparison with what August is planning to do with them,” Anton continued. “He plans to use them as an army. An army that cannot be defeated.” He looked to Lore. “But it’s an army that you now control, Lore. That’s why we led you to the catacombs tonight, before the eclipse ball. So that you could take control of the armies of the dead before August could.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Curdled love is the most bitter medicine.

—Caldienan proverb

No,” Lore said.

Even Gabe, still stricken with the revelation of her past and Anton’s vision, looked almost proud of her for that. Almost.

“No?” Anton said mildly.

“I won’t do it. I won’t raise them.” Her eyes swung from Anton to Bellegarde to Malcolm, looking for a sign that this would work, that her refusal would mean something. “I won’t raise them, I won’t control them. I won’t do anything for August, or for you.”

Anton sighed. “My dear,” he murmured, “I’m afraid it’s too late for that.”

The sun rising in the window beat heat onto the back of her neck, a burn mirrored by the moon-shaped scar on her palm. “What do you mean?”

The Priest Exalted sighed again, as if this pained him. He raised a brow, a teacher urging along a particularly reluctant student.

But Lore didn’t want his gentle prodding. She wanted fucking answers. “What do you mean, dammit, tell me what—”

“Lore.” Gabe’s voice was hoarse. Still, it made her own vanish.

Bastian lifted his head, staring daggers at the other man.

Gabe didn’t pay him any attention. He looked only at Lore. “Do you remember what happened with Horse? Why we had to go check on the body in the vaults, that night Bastian found us?”

Her brows drew together, unsure what to make of the sudden swerve in conversation. “Of course,” she said slowly. “I raised him, and then he—”

And he stayed raised. She raised him, and he stayed raised, just like the body of the child in the vault.

Anton said that the corpses from the villages were bound together—what happened to one, happened to all of them.

Lore lurched from her seat, the weight of the iron manacles pulling painfully at her shoulders. “I can fix it. I did once before.”