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“You can’t this time,” Anton said gently. “It’s hundreds of bodies. Lore—even for you, channeling that much Mortem would be nearly impossible.”

“You have to let me try!” She didn’t want to cry here, not in front of them, but she was so angry and overwhelmed and crying was always hardest to fight off when she was overwhelmed, thinking of the catacombs beneath them, full of screaming corpses who’d been people, just people—

“So this is why you led us down there.” Bastian’s voice, calm and cold and cutting through her panic. His gaze was squared on Gabe. “This is why you came back and helped us. So that Lore would raise the dead, and there’d be no way to undo it.”

Gabe didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. The look on his face proved the accusation true.

Bastian sat back, casual as if the chair and chains were a gilded throne. “Why are we supposed to believe you aren’t working with my father, again? After you just made us start up his undead army?”

“Because August doesn’t control the army,” Anton said. “And if we’re successful, he never will.”

“August wouldn’t be able to control it, anyway,” she said. “He can’t channel Mortem.”

“Not yet,” Anton murmured.

In the distance, bells began to toll. First Day. Somewhere, sunrise prayers were beginning.

Gabe stood still as a statue in his place by the door, face stony, revealing nothing. Lore closed her eyes, turned her head. She didn’t want to look at him, but her eyes kept sliding his way, consistently drawn back into his gravity.

“And what, exactly, made you both decide you couldn’t let this happen?” Bastian asked. “My father has been a tyrant for years. He’s sucked this country dry, let nobles—let you—grow richer while everyone outside the Citadel walls has less and less every year. So you only care when his mind turns to war? When it becomes something that might affect you?”

“August cares nothing for Apollius.” Bellegarde’s expression wasn’t quite a sneer, but it was close. “He would attempt to change his role in history. To take a place that is not his, to try and avoid his own destiny. The Priest Exalted’s vision was clear. August cannot go to war with Kirythea. It would undermine everything.”

It wasn’t an answer, not really, but it gave closure just the same. This wasn’t about protecting Auverraine. This was about power, and about using religion to secure it.

Bastian’s sneer was much more obvious than Bellegarde’s. “None of this changes the fact that I don’t have any magic. I’m not the chosen.”

“It clings to you like ink on paper.” There was a note of reverence in Anton’s voice; he looked at his nephew with a peaceful expression, as if the sight of him soothed some ache in his heart. “Whether you believe it or not, Bastian, you are the one we’ve been waiting for. The one Apollius has blessed. I’m sorry I didn’t realize it from the beginning.”

Bastian twitched against his chair, like he would’ve tried to move away from his uncle if his chains hadn’t prevented it.

Lore’s head hurt. She thought of last night, when they’d stood in that atrium full of poison flowers, of the gold that wreathed his hands.

Bastian’s eyes flickered her way, like he was reliving the same memory. He took a shaky breath, steeled the line of his jaw. “Who knows about this?”

“Everyone, if they believe the Tracts.”

“You know what I mean, old man.” Something poison seethed beneath Bastian’s voice. Something right at the edge of violence.

Anton noticed, eyeing his nephew thoughtfully. “Only your father, and those of us in this room.” His peaceful expression darkened. “It’s another reason August wants you dead. He thinks he can substitute himself as Apollius’s chosen when you’re out of the way.”

“Transubstantiation,” Malcolm murmured quietly. “Overcoming the physical with the spiritual.”

The Priest Exalted nodded. “And once he has Spiritum, he can take Lore’s power and channel them both. Wield life and death like a sword in each hand.”

“You can’t have both.” Lore shook her head. “Mortem and Spiritum cancel each other out.”

“On the contrary,” Anton answered. “One strengthens the presence of the other. They can only be held simultaneously in certain circumstances”—his one seeing eye flickered between Bastian and Lore, unreadable—“but it can be done. On an eclipse, for example.”

Bastian in the catacombs, making her promise not to go to the eclipse ball, all because of a feeling. All of them knowing things they shouldn’t, knowledge slotting into place with no reasoning behind it.

“So it’s been you from the beginning.” Lore’s vision blurred, the iron ring that held her chains becoming a splash of gray against the floor. “You watching me since I came up from the catacombs, you organizing the raid so I would show myself. You bringing me here and planting clues that would lead me to raising the army, all to make the pieces of your vision fall into place. Stringing August along, too, until he decided he wanted a war.”

Anton nodded, smooth and unruffled.

So used to being used, all of them.

“And you?” Tears blurred her vision still; when she looked at Gabe, all she saw was a tall shadow, a shock of red-gold. “Staying with me, being with—being my friend?” She caught herself before she said something else, something more heated. “Was it all an act?”