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A quick sliver of pain—she’d given herself a paper cut on the invitation’s edge. “Is she engaged to someone else now?”

“Not that I know of. Not that it matters.”

It seemed to matter, if the set of his shoulders was any indication. And it made something unpleasant prick in the center of her stomach, that it mattered to her if it mattered to him.

The connection she’d felt between them had faded, no longer a constant feeling of déjà vu. Faded, but not gone. There was still the disconcerting sense that she knew Gabe, that they were something more than tentative allies thrown together mere days ago.

It didn’t mean anything. When she first started spying on other poison runners, Mari had warned her against trusting feelings of quick closeness born from strange situations. The mind looked for connection in such cases, wanting something to cling to.

Lore placed the invitation on top of the table with all the other unopened envelopes. “Well. I hope you know how to play croquet, because I certainly don’t.”

“I’m rather rusty. We didn’t play croquet much at Northreach.”

“No, you were too busy staring dewy-eyed at paintings of Apollius and reading the Tracts until you could recite them in your sleep.”

“Precisely.” Gabe stood in a flurry of motion, stretching his arms over his head. “Are you as tired of this room as I am? I have a deep desire to be elsewhere.”

“Do you have an elsewhere where we won’t run into curious courtiers or ex-fiancées or asshole princes with dead horses?”

“As a matter of fact,” Gabe said, walking toward the door, “I do.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Nyxara’s power was death, but death made concrete—the essence of un-living, independent of a host. Only someone who has touched death can channel its raw form, cycling it through themselves and then into something else, rendering it dormant. Channeling this raw death—which we have elected to call Mortem—into living matter can kill weaker hosts, such as plants, but cannot kill stronger hosts, such as healthy humans and animals. However, there is a way to carefully channel Mortem into a living host that does not kill it, but rather makes it appear as stone, balanced somewhere between life and death through an equilibrium of Mortem and Spiritum. This method appears to work on all living matter, if the channeler is skilled enough to do it correctly.

—From the notes of Hakem Tabbal, Eroccan naturalist, dated two years AGF (after Godsfall)

Elsewhere turned out to be a garden made of stone.

Not entirely made of stone—there were a few living flowers twined among their rocky counterparts. Bloody-crimson roses blooming out of a bank of granite doppelgängers; green ivy climbing up the statues of their fellows. But mostly, everything was stone.

But not dead.

Lore couldn’t make sense of it, not at first. Rock was something in which she always reliably felt Mortem: unalive and with no hope of being different. But the stone plants had a buzz of life around them, muted yet undeniably there, threaded through with just the barest hint of Mortem.

It felt… peaceful. The aura of the garden was one of rest, of sinking into a soft bed at the end of a long day.

Next to her, Gabe’s shoulders loosened, tension sieving out of him like rain down a gutter. Maybe she looked relieved, too. Maybe both of them were always walking around like there were weights tied to their feet, and they’d never even noticed until someone cut the strings.

The garden he’d brought her to was in a courtyard against the Church wall, guarded from the interior Citadel grounds by a tall, ornate fence with a tall, ornate gate. It was small enough for Lore to see every corner from where they stood by the entrance, the walkways between the flower beds laid out in a neat grid that reminded her of Dellaire’s streets. In the center stood what looked like a well beneath a peaked golden roof. The well was closed, covered with a large circle of wood. A small statue of Apollius stood on top of the wood, as if to hold it down.

Looking at the well interrupted the sense of peace from the rest of the garden, made a chill crawl down her spine. She averted her eyes.

Tentatively, Lore reached out and touched one of the stone roses. The texture was surprisingly smooth, still petal-like. “So this is what you channel all that Mortem into?” She’d heard the tales, how the Presque Mort were skilled enough to channel Mortem into plants without killing them. But hearing about a stone garden hadn’t prepared her for how uncanny seeing it would be. The expectation was harsh and brutal; this was beautiful instead.

Gabe nodded. Next to him, flowers layered on top of one another, striations of rock and leaf, the new garden continuously grown atop the old.

“How?” A gust of wind made a living rose bend her way, tiny thorns catching on her sleeve. Gently, Lore unhooked them, let the rose bob back upright. “I mean, I know how, but how did you make them… I mean…”

“Carefully.” Gabe snorted. “We channel the Mortem into the barest surface of the thing. It doesn’t overwhelm the Spiritum, just… shrouds it. Puts it in stasis, somewhere between life and death.” He gestured to the garden, almost proudly, meandering down the path. “We could reverse this, if we needed to. Channel the Mortem through us again, put it back into something dead, and release the flowers to what they were before. It’s a kind of death, but it isn’t permanent.”

Lore stared at the roses a moment longer, watching them wave back and forth in the sunlight. Then she caught up with Gabe, who was still ambling good-naturedly along the cobblestones. He walked like a different person here, like he carried less. She wondered if he looked like this all the time when he was just a monk, when he was able to exist without reminders of who he could’ve been in the eyes of every courtier.

“Seems like cheating.” Lore couldn’t match his stride, but she did her best to keep up, two steps to one of his. “Going back and forth from death to life with no consequences.”

“Consequences like what happens when you take poison?” Gabe shook his head. “Anyone who does that deserves what they get. Humans have been given the time they’re supposed to have; trying to cheat it isn’t part of Apollius’s plan.”

Lore wondered if he’d noticed the smell of August’s flask. What he made of it. “Have you ever tried this with a person, then?” She waved her hand at the garden.