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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

ALIE

We remain vigilant, for buried does not mean dead.

—Vows of the Buried Watch

I t was a miracle, really, that Brigitte didn’t insist on coming.

In their shared childhood, Bri had been the friend up for anything, adventurous and charismatic, able to get them out of any scrape.

She’d never been part of Gabe, Alie, and Bastian’s trio, soldered together by unhappy mothers, but Alie had spent nearly as much time with Bri as she had with her boys.

When Bri looked into Lore’s erstwhile engagement ring and saw the word carved there, Alie braced herself for the questions, Bri’s insistence on accompanying her into the tomb.

But Bri had put down her magnifying tool and held out the ring as if she didn’t want to touch it anymore. Silence rang between them, its own kind of confession.

“Don’t tell me anything,” Bri finally whispered, her lips barely moving. “It makes me a coward, probably, but I don’t want to know.”

“It’s all right,” Alie murmured. “It’s all right, Bri.”

“It’s not.” Bri took a deep, shaky breath. “But I’m doing it anyway.” She stood from her bench, gave Alie a tremulous smile. “I’ll always be there for you. You know that. But this… it’s too much.”

And Alie didn’t blame her at all.

So now, waiting for Lilia by a derelict house near the Harbor District under a sky blue-dark before dawn, Alie was alone.

The ring weighed heavy in her pocket; Alie spun it around in her fingers like a worry stone.

There was no reason to bring it—it wasn’t a map after all, just a clue, a one-word answer—but she didn’t want to leave it in her room.

The heft of it was somehow comforting, her nail skating along its facets a counterpoint to the thud of her heart.

Alie had never been this far into Dellaire.

The southern Wards were a little larger than the northern ones, and this district was right at the edge, putting it nearly as far from the Citadel as you could get without leaving the city.

She knew this was where Lore had lived before being caught by the Presque Mort; she supposed she understood the appeal.

This building was one of the outer entrances to the catacombs, according to Lilia. The house looked like it was barely holding together, like a stiff breeze might knock it over. Alie wasn’t quite brave enough to venture in on her own, on the off chance the whole thing might collapse.

At least, not until she saw the bloodcoats.

They came around the corner of the street, torches outheld, the flames reflecting off the polished ends of bayonets.

Patrols out here near the city limits were common, but Alie assumed she’d missed them, not thinking they would be so close to sunrise.

Apparently, she was wrong, and she desperately didn’t want them to see her.

She wore a cloak; she could just cower on the stoop, hope they mistook her for a beggar woman. But Alie had seen how bloodcoats treated beggar women. Best not to chance it.

With a curse in her teeth, she slipped into the house.

It didn’t immediately crumble, so that was something. Alie pressed her back against one of the graffiti-covered walls, eyes canted sideways to watch the bloodcoats pass. They were loud, shouting to one another, obnoxious and vulgar and some clearly drunk. She wrinkled her nose. Dellaire’s finest.

“Don’t be afraid to show yourselves, whores!” one of them yelled. “Apollius loves whores! The gods are on your side!”

“Apollius said you should give us a discount!” another roared, and all of them laughed, sharp and brassy in the predawn.

Alie deeply hoped every working girl in the district was safe in their beds by this hour.

“You’re one of them.”

The voice was close, right in front of her. Alie swallowed a scream.

In the hallway before the door, stretched out on the floor and half hidden in shadow, was a revenant.

She’d heard of them. She was even sure that some of the courtiers would qualify, had they been born into different circumstances, with less money and less access to things that could hide their diminishment.

More than one noble family had a relative who’d taken too much poison secreted in a faraway estate, haunting the halls as their mind wasted away just as their body had.

But she’d never seen one up close. Not one this far gone.

Poison had ravaged out all markers of sex or gender. The revenant looked like an animated skeleton more than anything, the sharp jut of bones hidden beneath a shapeless gray cloak. Their eyes were sunken pits, glittering at her in the dark.

“A breeze where she was a storm,” the revenant said, with a dry chuckle like the rub of withered stalks.

“The cloud to her coffin. All of them have awoken, then. I remember seeing her here, in this house. I remember sensing what she would become. Walk this close to death, and you recognize its queen.” The revenant stirred, the sound of dry leaves in wind.

“She met destiny that day. Thick as syrup in the air. A fate you could breathe in.”

“Lore?” Alie asked quietly. “You’ve seen Lore?” Maybe her friend was more resourceful than she’d given her credit for. Maybe she’d somehow found a way off the Burnt Isles, away from the Golden Mount, back here to the city—

“Long ago,” the revenant said. “Before she knew what would become of you all.” The revenant sighed. “Being like this—thrown somewhere outside of mortality—makes time meld together. It’s a shore, you see, and I linger at its edge.”

“How does it end, then?” Alie whispered.

Another dry laugh. “It’s a river, not an ocean,” the revenant said. “There are many streams, many tributaries, and it flows ever on. The future is always changing. You could save the world or damn it, little breeze, and no one will know until the damning or the saving comes.”

A rustle at the door. Lilia stepped over the threshold, covered in a dark cloak. She pulled back her hood and furrowed her brow. “Were you talking to someone?”

The revenant had turned their pale face back toward the wall, back into shadow. The low light made them invisible, one more forgotten thing in this falling-apart house, lingering between life and death.

“No,” Alie said. “Let’s move.”

Lilia didn’t look like she believed her, but there was no time to waste with interrogation.

With a nod, Lore’s mother started down the hall, picking her way over piles of trash and dust from the crumbling walls.

At the hallway’s end was a gaping hole, leading into nothing but darkness.

Someone had painted a face on the wall next to it with X ’s over the eyes.

“Is that a direction or a warning?” Alie asked.

“A bit of both.” Lilia stopped at the lip of the hole. “Most people want to avoid the catacombs, but some—poison runners, mostly—use them to move undetected through the city. The rule that Presque Mort aren’t allowed to enter without priestly dispensation comes in handy.”

Alie had known that Lore’s familiarity with the catacombs went deeper than being born there, even before she’d become Nyxara’s avatar. It seemed she’d never managed to escape them.

Cool air blew from the hole, a dank scent of rock and deep places. The catacombs were safe now, no chance of leaking Mortem, but Alie still wasn’t excited by the prospect of traipsing through them.

Lilia said nothing. Just gave her an arch look and disappeared into the hole.

With a bracing breath, Alie followed.

The shadows closed around her like water over sinking stone. A moment of panic, then the hiss of a spark; Lilia had clicked on a lighter, the tiny flame wavering to dispel the shadows.

“We’ll come across torch supplies at some point,” she said. “The poison runners leave them all over.”

She turned, headed deeper into the catacombs. Alie stayed as close behind her as she could without stepping on the back of her boots.

It took hours. Alie should have expected that, probably—of course the lair of the Buried Watch and the tomb of the Buried Goddess would be far underground.

Eventually, Lilia found the materials to make a torch, and the halo of light around them grew enough for Alie to stop feeling nervous and start feeling bored.

At least, until they came to the collapsed tunnel.

“Please tell me that’s not the way to the tomb.” Alie spun Lore’s engagement ring around and around in her pocket.

“Unfortunately.” Lilia stepped forward, put a hand on one of the stones. “I’m not sure when it happened. Sometime after I left.”

Alie looked sidelong at the other woman. “Left the Watch, or left Dellaire?”

“The country,” Lilia murmured. “I made it to Balgia before I felt guilty enough to turn back. I’d told her to leave a rose if she wanted my help. But I only waited a week to see if she would.” Her fingers curled, then fell from the rocks. “I called her selfish, but she got it from me.”

“You came back.” Alie wasn’t sure why she wanted to comfort Lore’s mother. Maybe because she’d had few opportunities to comfort her own.

“I did, and it was too late.” Lilia scoffed softly. “I can’t make up for that. There’s so much I can’t make up for.”

The sentence hung like something should come after it. Nothing did.

Lilia stepped away from the wreckage, surveying the rubble with a shrewd eye. “This should be fairly simple for you, I think.”

“Maybe we can—” Alie stopped, shot an incredulous look at the former Night Priestess. “What do you mean, for me?”

“You’re the one with god-power.”

“So what are you suggesting I do? I have Lereal’s power. Air. The weakest of the bunch.” She hadn’t known she thought of it that way until she said it. And she didn’t like the way it filled her with… with resentment , as if this magic were something she wanted. As if she’d take more, if she could.

Lilia gave her a sidelong glance. “Subtlety is not weakness, Alienor. It’s a strength all its own.”

Alie straightened, flexing her hands in anticipation of weaving air threads. “This is ironic timing, certainly.”