Page 16

Eight

“ I t was you who sent the blood mage to scare me in the garden.” I stared at Tallu, who I’d been foolish enough to begin to trust. No, that was impossible. I didn’t trust him. I didn’t .

“No, I didn’t send him.” Tallu shook his head, his eyes wide and his chest rising and falling quickly; he looked as much of a child as I felt. He looked between me and the mage, his fingers flexing open and then shut. “Do you see him?”

“Do I see the man standing right in front of me?” I asked sharply. “Yes. I see him.”

“You see him,” Tallu said. “You see Lerolian.”

“Are we having two different conversations?” I asked. “Why should I not see him? Do blood mages have invisibility powers? If so, he needs to work on his because we can both clearly see him!”

The blood mage stared at me. “You can actually see me.”

“What is this? Of course I can see you. You’re standing right here.” I threw up my hands. Was this some Imperium nonsense? They all just pretended they didn’t see or hear the blood mage wandering around?

“I’m not standing here,” the man, Lerolian, said.

“You are standing right there,” I snapped. My annoyance grew as we talked in circles.

Tallu sat down on the bed, his eyes still wide, his expression shocked. He licked his lips and shook his head sharply before turning to Lerolian. “He’s not.”

“Why do you both keep saying that?” I stepped closer and pointed a finger at his chest, moving forward until it touched.

Only it didn’t. My finger passed through him just like I had earlier when I’d tried to fight him.

“Because I’m dead,” Lerolian said, looking down at where my hand was all the way inside his chest.

I pulled back, a chilly, tickling feeling creeping up my arm. With a yelp, I stumbled backward. Falling onto the bed, I said, “What in the great northern bear’s asshole ?”

Lerolian blew out a breath. “Well. Wow. It’s been a while since I had to explain this to anyone.”

“You didn’t explain it to me,” Tallu said.

“Well, his people didn’t brutally murder mine! I think he deserves an explanation, don’t you?” Lerolian shook his head. “Forgive Tallu. I think he’s jealous that now I’ll have someone else to talk to.”

“What?” I breathed because my brain couldn’t possibly fit more information inside. “ You’re dead ?”

“Very,” Lerolian said. He pulled open his tunic, revealing puncture wounds. “Lots of arrows, some lightning, even a stabbing, although that was excessive. At that point, I was extremely dead.”

“But you’re here.” I turned to Tallu. “When you said that the deaths of the blood mages haunted you , you weren’t just talking about the trauma of witnessing your army kill an entire country. You were speaking literally. The mages are ghosts only you can see.”

“And now you,” Lerolian said helpfully. “Apparently, you can also see us!”

“I need more clothing to have this conversation,” Tallu said. He turned, and I saw his muscled back tense as he searched the bedding for clothes. When he finally found his pants, he pulled them on, leaving the laces undone, a delicious hint of hair visible where they weren’t cinched tight.

“Why can I see you now?” I demanded. “I saw you yesterday, but then you disappeared.”

“In my defense, I didn’t know you could see me; I just thought you were looking at the garden.

I would have introduced myself if I’d known you were looking at me and not the pond.

” Lerolian put a hand to his chest and bowed his head.

“Lerolian. I’m the Inner Heart from what was once the Silver Path Monastery before the Imperium burned it and killed us all as we slept. ”

“The Inner Heart?” I asked him. Tallu looked down, his shoulders hunched, and I couldn’t see his expression. “A blood mage was a monk?”

“We were all monks,” Lerolian said. “I know ‘necromancer’ and ‘evil magic practitioner’ is the more popular myth, but the blood mages weren’t mages at all.”

“You were monks.” I thought again about Miksha in the forest. Had her husband, Liku, seen her in monastic robes and decided that the only way he could live with himself was to save one nun rather than kill them all?

“Some of us. All of the blood mages. Not the whole nation, but the entire Imperium doesn’t practice electro magic.

The entire north can’t speak with animals.

” He raised an eyebrow pointedly, and I realized he had seen me before I’d seen him.

He’d watched me talk to Terror; he’d known what I could do. Had he told Tallu?

He probably had, but like everything, it only made more things clear. “ He’s how you know everything going on in the palace. He’s the way that you were able to take down the Emperor’s Council. You learned all their secrets because you had invisible spies everywhere.”

Lord Fuyii had burned his letters, but that wouldn’t matter if there was a spy who could read them right over his shoulder and then tell Tallu what they said.

“Yes.” Tallu bowed his head. “They told me everything I needed to know, and I used it.”

The way he said the words was like listening to someone knot their own noose, like he was convicting himself because no one else would do it for him.

“They were all bad people doing bad things,” I said tentatively.

“Why can’t the blood mages or blood monks”—that was not a phrase that rolled right off the tongue—“help you now? Why can’t they tell you who is behind the airship?

Your father was talking about it at one point. He received missives about it.”

“No one speaks of it in the palace. Not one whisper. And we cannot go very far from Tallu, certainly not to the war fronts that the generals command. Sometimes we can manage the Capital City, but only if Tallu is close enough to the wall.” Lerolian wrinkled his nose in annoyance.

“After the Council, someone learned the limits of Tallu’s spies was the palace wall.

Someone smart, someone cunning. Or perhaps someone who was never in the palace at all. ”

There was something there that I didn’t quite understand. Lerolian kept saying we , but he was the only one I saw. What happened to the ghosts who traveled too far from Tallu? I glanced back, and my eyes caught on Tallu, the arc of his spine, the pain on his face.

“Why were you helping him at all?” I directed my question at Lerolian, although I couldn’t quite look away from Tallu and his slumped shoulders.

“We aren’t helping him.” Lerolian’s voice was solemn, and the teasing in his tone was gone.

“No.” The pieces fit together too terribly. “You were taking down an empire.”

“And we failed,” Tallu said bitterly. “After all that, all those councilors killed, all their families destroyed, and we still failed.”

Watching his face, I began to have a sinking, terrible fear. “Did you want to destroy the Imperium, or are the blood mages forcing you to?”

Lerolian turned, his expression thoughtful as he observed Tallu. Stripped of his grin, he looked older. Matted hair and gruesome wounds showed what was in his heart. The murder of the Imperium wasn’t just on Tallu’s hands; Lerolian wanted his own share.

“Tallu?” I prompted.

“Lerolian, leave us,” Tallu said. “Please.”

The blood mage tilted his head to the side, one palm open over his heart as he bowed. Then he walked through the locked metal door and was gone.

“Is he truly gone?” I searched the room with my eyes, but I didn’t see any evidence of the blood mage. Blood monk?

“Yes.” Tallu sighed. “We should have asked for breakfast before I locked us in.”

“You could let us out,” I said, the chill in the air raising goose bumps on my skin.

“I should explain first, shouldn’t I?” Tallu looked at me, his gaze pleading, and I wasn’t sure how I felt or what I knew, but the desperation in his eyes was impossible to ignore.

Without letting myself hesitate, I crossed the room and gripped his shoulder tight, pressing down until he sat on the edge of the bed. Grabbing my own pants, I slid them on and sat next to him, leg pulled under me so I was facing his profile.

“So,” I said. “Explain.”

“As I said, when I was thirteen, I was in the Blood Mountains. My father wanted his own legacy. The failure in the Northern Kingdom made him furious.”

I started to interrupt, and Tallu gave me a raw smile.

“To anyone else, the peace in the north would have been a victory. But my grandfather had conquered Tavornai, conquered part of the Ariphadeus, and claimed Mountain Thrown Lake from Krustau. My father wanted a similar legacy. He wanted to fulfill the promise set by the dragon seers.” Tallu looked up, as though examining an invisible map.

“Sure. Understandable. My mother set out to make a better elk stew than her mother, so I understand how he’d want to conquer an entire nation to outdo his father,” I said, the sarcasm dripping from my words.

Tallu smiled, huffing a laugh. “The blood mages were formidable fighters, and we learned that their magic, though beautiful and probably stronger than ours, could do everything the stories said. They’d raise up dead fighters and force them to strike against us, like macabre puppets.

If you had even the slightest cut, they could use your blood to—” He broke off, shaking his head.

“It’s been so long since I’ve even thought about telling anyone about this. ”

“I imagine the Imperium frowns on thirteen-year-olds having any sort of feelings after being sent to fight the most frightening mages on the continent.” I watched the lines of his face, the way he looked down at his hands.

His profile was the same as ever, but now I knew him better, and I could see the deep, painful terror that had distilled down to sorrow.

“When it was done, the Silver Path Monastery was all that was left. They’d opened their gates and were housing what was left of the civilians.

My father ordered our troops to burn them out.

” Tallu opened and closed his hand, and without thinking, I put my own palm inside his.

He turned to me, startled, his eyes wide.

“And then?”