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CHAPTER FIVE

LORE

Mutual enemies make for powerful allies.

—Kadmaran proverb

P ower still sang in Lore’s fingertips, still pulsed down her veins with every golden beat of her heart.

It would be so easy to gather up the threads of Dani’s life, wind them into herself, and leave the other woman as broken and empty as the Presque Mort on the ground.

Her fingers twitched to do it without her conscious direction, a sneer on her mouth.

Dani raised her hands in surrender. “Lore. I’m not trying to hurt you.”

“Of course not,” Lore snarled. “That would be overkill at this point.”

It was Dani’s fault she was here at all. Leading her down Anton’s path, dropping the bread crumbs that Lore had followed so faithfully, drowning before she knew she was in far over her head.

Her hands were still raised, but Dani’s shoulders relaxed. “I am sorry about that. Mostly. I was just doing what I thought I had to at the time.” Her eyes narrowed, turning her beauty to calculating angles. “You’re familiar with that, surely.”

Lore gnawed her lip. The righteous anger that had suffused her just a moment ago—the unassailable knowledge that she was right, her violence justified—bled out, just a little.

“We’ve hurt each other enough.” Dani made a rueful sound. “We’re both stuck here, and you already have one body to dispose of.”

She had a point. Lore let her hands drop. The rush of power subsided, though her awareness of Spiritum all around her didn’t fade. Gold flecked the corners of her vision, spangling like starfields when she moved.

With a sigh, Lore leaned against the rough wall of the cave. “What do you want, Dani?”

“Do I have to want something?” Dani shrugged, turning her attention from Lore to the body on the floor. “Damn. You did a number on him. Is that from Mortem?”

“No.” Immediately after she spoke, Lore clenched her teeth, as if she could bite the words in half. She shouldn’t be telling anyone that she couldn’t channel Mortem anymore. She wasn’t sure why she shouldn’t tell them, but the instinct to hold the secret coiled deep.

That , Nyxara said, is the first rational thought you’ve had today.

Lore didn’t respond. Though she did wonder at the fact that this was the first time Nyxara had spoken to her since the sun went down. Usually, the goddess was chatty after nightfall.

Dani’s eyes cut over to her, though her exact expression was hidden in the gloom. She didn’t press further, nudging the dead Presque Mort with her toe. “So. Do we bury him, burn him, or throw him in the ocean?”

The ocean won, mostly for convenience’s sake.

Lore wrapped the body in her pallet, and together, she and Dani hauled it out of the cave, sticking to the shadows of the cliff face as they made their way to an empty stretch of beach.

The Mort swung between them like a macabre pendulum, blessedly slight.

Ash coated the air, reducing visibility to a few feet in front of her, but right now, Lore was grateful for the extra cover.

The guards were busy either having lackluster sex or playing cards, and almost all the other prisoners were deeply asleep or joining them, so there wasn’t much worry about being seen anyway. Still, Lore was jumpy, flinching at every sound.

“Don’t worry,” Dani said, voice strained.

The monk’s deadweight might have been less than anticipated, but hauling him this far was still quite the task, especially on Burnt Isles rations.

“It’s not like anyone will come looking for him.

The guards don’t give a shit, and the other Mort are cowards.

I’m surprised any of them approached you. They’re usually all talk.”

“You seem to know a lot about them,” Lore grumbled, stepping carefully to find purchase on the sand.

“We stayed together when we first arrived. For obvious reasons.” Dani shrugged, as much as she could with her hands full of dead man. “But now we’ve all gone our separate ways.”

She didn’t elaborate.

Are you sure that following the sister of a woman you’re blamed for murdering into the night is a good idea? Nyxara sounded snippy.

Absolutely not , Lore replied. But I can defend myself just fine.

As long as He doesn’t try to pull it away from you again , Nyxara said, but then She fell into pensive silence.

Finally, they’d gone far enough that they were unlikely to step on a sleeping prisoner.

The moonlight reflected on the particles in the air as they made their way down the beach.

Dani nodded toward the surf when they were close enough to see it.

“There’s a sandbar that ends a few feet out.

If we take him to the end, wrap him up with a few rocks, no one will find him.

” She snorted. “Not like anyone will care, even if he does wash up. Prisoners walk into the ocean all the time.”

Lore found some rocks by the cliffs and tucked them into her pallet. She’d be sad to lose it; when she didn’t turn one in come morning, the guards wouldn’t give her another, no matter how many gold flecks she found.

When he was wrapped, they hauled the dead man into the sea. The pull of the tide against her ankles made Lore think of Caeliar. Of Amelia, killed by Bastian because she threatened Lore. Amelia, who’d just wanted to please her god.

The end of the sandbar was easy to identify, the water darker and colder as it abruptly deepened.

With a heave, Lore and Dani pushed the body out beyond its edge.

The Mort sank easily as the water soaked into his clothes, blood still leaking from his ears and nose and eyes.

It pooled beneath his skin, making it lumpen and splotch dark.

They stood there until he was out of sight, Lore with her arms crossed against a shiver, Dani with her hands on her hips. “How’d you end up here?” Lore asked after a beat of uncomfortable silence. “Figured you and yours would have enough money to stay with the rest of the nobles on the First Isle.”

“We did,” Dani answered. “But the King really, really hated us.”

Lore pressed her lips together to keep from turning them to a feral smile, her second of the day. Deciding to use her power had done wonders for her mood.

“So,” Dani said after a moment. “Did you do it?”

There was only one it she could be referring to. Lore tensed, her awareness of the Spiritum around them jumping to attention, ready to be called. “I didn’t kill Amelia.”

Dani nodded once. “I thought so. Not that you don’t have it in you. You do, clearly. But the idea that a jealous rage would turn you murderous seems out of character. You need more reason to kill someone.”

“I do prefer to keep my murders well justified,” Lore said.

Dani snorted. There were specks of blood from the Mort’s ears on her hands; she bent and washed them in the churning surf. “Now, killing Amelia for being the second coming of Caeliar… that could be a reason. Depending on whose side you’re on.”

Lore’s stomach fell to somewhere near her ankles.

Dani straightened, her gaze steady and even. “But if you’re on Apollius’s side, I don’t think you would have ended up here. Since it seems like He’s winning.”

A million questions poured through Lore’s head, but the only one that came out was “How did you know?”

“I was part of Anton’s cult, remember?” Dani’s tone said this should be obvious.

“We all knew what would happen if you didn’t die on the night of the eclipse.

That the power of the other gods would find new vessels.

The Presque Mort who were sent here, the ones in Anton’s inner circle, comforted themselves with the fact that even if you weren’t dead, at least Apollius had His new body.

Once it became clear Bastian wasn’t Bastian anymore—imprisoning people for minor infractions, sending orders not to antagonize the Kirythean ships on the Sapphire Sea—it wasn’t a logical leap that the rest of it was happening, too. ”

She turned, started slogging toward the shore.

Lore followed at a safe distance, still wary.

“As for how I knew Amelia had become Caeliar’s avatar,” Dani continued, “Apollius sent the physician who did her autopsy to the Isles the day after it happened. He fell in with the Presque Mort and told them about her cause of death. About the puddle that came out of her mouth.”

Caeliar’s swallow of the Fount, fully surrendered. Lore still remembered the taste of Nyxara’s drink, clear and cold, before she gulped it back down and took the power again.

For a little while, at least.

Amelia didn’t have to die for Apollius to take Caeliar’s magic. She’d given it up willingly. Bastian had killed her anyway.

“It was easy to put together.” Dani stopped just shy of the beach, staying in the water, the tide billowing her trousers in ebb and flow. “And that’s when I stopped believing.”

Still half convinced that this might be the kind of confession that preceded a revenge killing, Lore kept her distance, stepping around Dani and up onto the sand. She’d rather have the cliffs at her back than the sea. “Stopped believing in what?”

“All of it.” Through this whole speech, Dani had been dispassionate. But now there was a spark in her eye, the tendons in her neck going tight. “That mortals matter. That there’s any point to all of this when our gods are selfish and the world is twisted.”

Lore had spent plenty of time in the last year around every extreme, from zealots to hedonists. But this casual nihilism was far more unsettling to her than even Anton’s crazed piety.

“Maybe there could be something better.” Dani finally climbed out of the surf. If she noticed that Lore stepped back, keeping the same amount of distance between them, she didn’t comment on it. “But in order for that to happen, everything— everything —would have to change.”

She looked at Lore expectantly, as if she thought she had made some point perfectly clear. As if this were a game, and Lore had the next move.

Lore’s mouth worked a moment, unsure of how to respond. “That’s… certainly a philosophy.”

“Spend long enough thinking about it, and the entire bedrock of civilization unravels,” Dani said, warming to her topic.

“Once you get into the just because s—mortals deserve to have a habitable world just because we think we do, the gods should be revered just because they’re gods—you’ve already lost.”

This woman , Nyxara said, truly loves to hear herself talk.

The goddess wasn’t wrong. Lore could see some of the logic in Dani’s declaration, but she couldn’t buy into the whole of it.

She wasn’t a sentimental person—at least, she tried very hard not to be—especially not about human nature.

But she had to believe that the world was mostly good.

That there was something about it worth saving.

Dani sounded like she’d just as soon annihilate it and start anew.

“All that to say,” Dani concluded, trudging up toward the cliffs, “if you want to finally get to the Golden Mount and kill Apollius, I think I can help.”

Lore froze. “What?”

“His body. His second death.” Dani turned, gave a tight smile. “Cult, remember?”

His first death, technically. But Dani didn’t know that. And even once she got to the Mount and killed the body, Apollius would still be in Bastian’s head, a problem she hadn’t yet figured out how to solve.

You should keep that to yourself , Nyxara said.

Lore wholeheartedly agreed. “That’s not going to be easy.”

“Sure it is.” Dani’s tight smile expanded, became a convincing simulacrum of the real thing. “We just have to get to the Golden Mount. And I know how to do it.”