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CHAPTER ELEVEN

LORE

One will hold any hand in the dark.

—Kadmaran proverb

T he week passed in a foggy blur, much like every week before it.

Dani offered to keep her on dock duty for the few days it would take for the Ferryman to arrive, cleaning glass and swabbing ship decks instead of hacking apart rocks in the mine, but Lore didn’t take her up on it.

If she didn’t have backbreaking work to keep her occupied during the day, she would go insane, and she was already close enough that it felt like hubris to tempt a further fall.

So she was in the middle of whacking at a clod of dirt in hopes for gold when she saw Jean-Paul.

Back when she lived in the Citadel, for the brief months she was nearly the Queen, Lore had dreaded seeing anyone she’d known in her former life as a poison runner.

The two stations were grossly incompatible, and she didn’t know how to live in the space between them, much less perform it for others.

But now she was as far from a Queen as she could get, in station if not official title.

Selfishly, seeing a familiar face was a relief.

Jean-Paul was still chained to the same line as the other newbies—they kept you on it for three days, usually, to make sure you knew your place.

The days were up, and a guard marched down the line, freeing the new prisoners from their shackles.

Jean-Paul had been arrested the day she raised Horse in the Ward market, but apparently he’d managed to escape then. For a while, at least.

She cleared her throat to say something as she passed, but the words died prematurely.

Lore lingered behind the line for the lift, blinking ridiculous tears from her eyes.

Dammit. She hated crying, always pushed it down when she felt it coming on, but that usually just meant it would come out unexpectedly.

It’d come easier since that day at Courdigne, when she broke down in the hall. Good for her, probably, but extremely inconvenient when one had so much to cry over.

“Taking a break, Your Majesty?” Fulbert stopped too close behind her, his humid breath on the back of her neck. “Expecting someone to bring you tea?”

It wasn’t worth the fight. Lore moved forward, pickax held in her limp hand.

“I’m talking to you, Queenie.” A sharp shove between her shoulder blades. Lore lost her balance, her knee hitting the sand. Golden lines wavered in her vision. “Maybe you could have ignored me in the Citadel, but here, I’m your better—”

“Lore?”

Jean-Paul. He’d come up close, his bulk crowding out Fulbert, whose small eyes swung from one of them to the other, clearly assessing his chances in a brawl. One hand gripped his pistol, so even if it did come down to a brawl, he clearly had no intentions of playing fair.

“A new one,” Fulbert sneered, even as he stepped back from Jean-Paul. “Too new to know that you shouldn’t get mixed up into things that don’t concern you.” A split-second decision, his pistol coming free of the holster.

Lore grabbed his Spiritum and tugged.

Not enough to kill him. Just enough to speed his heart, like she’d done to Martin, sending him stumbling back.

The momentary brush with mortality was enough to convince Fulbert that this wasn’t worth it. With one more halfhearted kick at Lore, he wandered away, rubbing at his chest.

Jean-Paul offered his hand. Lore took it, let him pull her up. When she was upright, she threw herself at him.

He let her hug him, though the baffled way he returned the embrace only reminded her of how she’d kept her distance during her time as a poison runner, how aloof she’d been all those years she hid from what she was.

“You’re all right,” Jean-Paul rumbled. “You’re all right.”

Those damn tears threatening again. She was the furthest thing from all right.

She let go, gave him a weak smile. “I would ask how you’re doing, but I’d wager the answer is bad.”

“Spot on.” Jean-Paul snorted. “I assume the same could be said for you?”

“You assume correctly.” She steeled herself for questions, a barrage of curiosities about her life in the Citadel and how it had ended here, but Jean-Paul just nodded.

That was one of the things she’d always liked about him.

He had a calm, easy manner, going his own way and letting others go theirs.

Another guard walked past, looking too harried to harass them, headed toward the beach. Two ships were being repaired, Lore knew. The arriving prison barges were overfull, necessitating all hands on the proverbial deck.

So far, Dani’s plan was going seamlessly.

Jean-Paul looked slightly dazed, taking in the crowd and the mine. All jewelry was confiscated when you reached the Isles, but his thumb kept tapping against his ring finger, as if he was looking for something.

“Is Henri all right?” Lore asked, remembering his husband’s name. “Etienne?”

“They’re safe,” Jean-Paul said quietly. “When the Sainted King started going after everyone who’d ever run poisons for Val, I sent them both to Henri’s mother, over in Ratharc. It was too risky for me to travel with them.”

Ice prickled down Lore’s spine, followed by intense gratitude that Val and Mari had been on that ship to Caldien.

Part of her had anticipated Apollius taking some sort of revenge—something more than sending her here—but going after everyone who’d known her, everyone who’d ever had the opportunity to show her kindness, was a level of cruelty she hadn’t anticipated.

Stupid of her. Apollius loved being cruel.

She couldn’t think too hard about how he was using Bastian’s body to enact those cruelties, or she would lose it.

“How’d you escape the first time?” she asked.

“Slipped from the bloodcoats’ hold while they were preoccupied with looking for you,” he said. “You offered a hell of a distraction. Laid low for a bit afterward. Mari had me doing paperwork.”

“She always hated that,” Lore murmured, thinking of her mother. “But she had a better head for numbers than Val.”

“Didn’t do much good in the end.” Jean-Paul sighed. “When the King came calling, he knew right where to look.”

Bastian knew the way to the warehouse. Back then, he couldn’t guard his thoughts from Apollius.

Oblivious to her rapidly deteriorating emotional state, Jean-Paul gave her a wearily amused smile, like a man might wear at the gallows when he knew there was no escape. “You must have really done a number on him.”

Lore laughed, a ragged sound.

“But really,” Jean-Paul went on, achingly sincere. “You went from engaged to the Sainted King to a prisoner on the Burnt Isles. What happened , Lore?”

And how in all the myriad hells was she supposed to answer that?

She was all out of lies. She’d never been that great a spy, at least not at this level, doing anything more than petty subterfuge for warring criminal enterprises; she could see that now. And gods, she was so tired.

So she told him the truth. Kind of. “He… isn’t himself.”

“I suppose I’ll take your word for it.” He shook his head. “Though he’s certainly acting like an Arceneaux.”

“I guess none of us got far from where we started,” Lore said quietly.

“You did.”

Her brow knit.

Jean-Paul shrugged. “After that business with the horse—I still have nightmares about that thing, by the way—Val told me about you. Where you came from, what you were meant for.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “And you rose from that to become a Queen.”

“And yet here I am.”

“For now.” He nodded. “But if there’s one thing about you, Lore, it’s that you always land on your feet.”

She could only hope he was right.

“Well.” Jean Paul patted her shoulder with a bemused smile. “At least there’s no horses here for you to accidentally reanimate. That was a bit of a shock. Didn’t know you could channel Mortem until that day, and it was a hell of a way to learn.”

“Horse,” Lore said, thinking of the animal, how she’d always wanted his affection. How Bastian had gotten it, albeit after the beast was dead. Nuzzling the Sun Prince’s shoulder, his neck hanging open, still sweet even in death. Animals were less complicated than humans. They could come back.

Bleeding God , how she wanted to go back.

She didn’t realize she was finally crying until she felt Jean-Paul’s hand on her shoulder again, drawing her attention away from thoughts of the past and to the wet slide of tears down her neck.

And she was too far gone to swallow it back now; when she tried, she just sobbed, a grating sound that tasted like seawater.

Lore sat on the sand, burying her face in her hands. Jean-Paul lowered himself beside her, a solid arm over her shoulders. And she cried and cried and cried, while the other prisoners filtered around them, uninteresting rocks in a rapidly drying stream, hiding them from the eyes of the guards.

She only cried for about five minutes, but it was more than long enough to feel absolutely mortified once the storm of emotion abated.

When she apologized to Jean-Paul, jumping up from the beach like something in the sand had stabbed her, he just waved a hand.

“I’m used to parenting an eight-year-old. This is nothing.”

“I don’t think that’s a flattering comparison.” Lore wiped at her eyes. “But thank you, anyway.”

He glanced around them, a line of prisoners still waiting for the lifts. “I was under the impression we were supposed to mine while we’re here?”

“Stick with me,” Lore said. “If we find anything, we’ll share.”

And he did, staying by her side as they spent hours breaking apart rocks, collecting enough for them both to get dinner and for Jean-Paul, at least, to get a pallet. They didn’t speak, but his presence near her was bolstering. And no one approached to taunt her, which was a nice change.

When the day was done, they walked down to the barracks. Lore showed Jean-Paul where to pick up a pallet, explained the haphazard way sleeping arrangements worked. “I sleep in a cave. You’re welcome there, if you want.”