She Who Rides the Storm (The Gods-Touched Duology)
She Who Rides the Storm: Chapter 37

The moment she entered Lia’s street, Anwei knew something was terribly wrong. It wasn’t the chittering of bored auroshes needling the air or the Devoted clutching their sword hilts before the gate. It was the smell.

A nothing smell wafted from the upper windows of the house, so strong that Anwei’s throat convulsed.

“Knox,” she whispered as her partner fell into step with her, the top of Lia’s house barely visible over the wall. “Something… terrible is inside. Maybe he’s in there right now, or maybe…”

“I can feel it too.” Knox peered down the road. He’d already been tense, but now he seemed to clench together, turning from her friend into something predatory and wholly other. Anwei’s skin pebbled over at the sight, remembering his knife at her chin the night before. Whatever the sword did to him, it was inside him. She’d sensed it, like a briar strangling his soul.

He seemed normal now. But what if he changed again?

Knox looked at her, blinking as if he could feel her sudden doubt. “Remember how back at the plague house I told you the victims’ auras looked like they had wasting sickness? There’s someone inside that house with almost no aura, like she’s in the final stages. There’s only a tiny bit left of her.”

Anwei’s stomach roiled at the nothing smell washing over her. “So if the smell is the result of a shapeshifter draining someone…”

“Is it possible that wasting sickness is because of a shapeshifter? That Devoted are being killed off one at a time by… him? The snake-tooth man. Or a group of them, or…”

“That’s what shapeshifters did, supposedly. Steal power.” Anwei stared forward, everything finally clicking into place. “You said wasting sickness is killing Devoted left and right?”

He nodded.

“He drained my brother, then. That’s what I smelled that day.” Anwei shook her head. “Why would he do that? My brother wasn’t a Devoted.”

“Neither are any of the victims down in the plague house. Neither is the woman in there.” Knox pointed toward the house. “Maybe when he doesn’t have access to power from gods, he steals it from normal people, and has to take from more of them because they don’t have as much energy as Devoted.” He shook his head. “It looks like every Devoted in there has been… not diminished, but preyed on. Just a little bit from each one. Could that be why the plague house got better suddenly? He has access to Devoted again?”

“Do you think Noa could have come up here?” Anwei whispered. Noa could have done anything—she’d been face-to-face with the Warlord herself and all these Devoted the night before.

“The dig director could have too,” Knox whispered back.

The gate opened when they were only halfway to it, a man on a horse emerging from the compound, his clothes dusted in dirt. He pulled the horse to a stop and looked back. “I’m not certain we’ll be able to get the wall down before the evening drum. If we can’t—”

“That’s when she’ll be arriving, Director Van.” A Devoted stepped out into the road, peering up at him. “So I suggest you do what you can to make sure she isn’t disappointed.”

Director Van. Anwei stared hard at the man as he rode away. He smelled of nothing too.

“Did you see that?” she whispered to Knox. “I don’t understand.”

“All we can do is go to the dig, like you said. Whoever it is wants that sword.” Knox pulled out the little blowpipe he’d grabbed on the way out of the apothecary. “I’ll distract them.” He walked into the alley between compounds, fading into the shadows despite the morning sun.

Anwei clenched her teeth. Took out the bottle of venom. The distilled serum was safe in her medicine bag, ready for… whom? She didn’t even know now.

Gripping the last bottle in her fist, Anwei walked to the open gate. “Sir!” she called to the Devoted just inside. “The lady of the house, sick in her bed—I’ve just been made aware of her symptoms, and I’m afraid it may not be safe for the Warlord to stay here.”

Watching Anwei dab poison on the Devoted’s hand made Knox smile all the way back to the apothecary. Even Devoted could be distracted by a pebble to the neck.

At least, he smiled until he remembered Lia. Her aura hadn’t been inside the house.

He hoped she was safe.

Knox walked through the apothecary’s back gate, the horse they’d taken from Altahn raising his head placidly to look at him. A swaybacked old thing, suited more to chewing grass in a field than pulling carriages or wagons, much less carrying Knox on his back to watch Shale’s camp. It didn’t fit. Just like him.

Only, Knox did fit. He fit too well in this place he wasn’t meant to be. The place he wanted to be. The pain in Anwei’s face last night had left a hole inside him. She’d been clinical and cold all morning, as if their partnership, friendship—whatever it wasn’t allowed to be—had dissolved.

How will this ever be fixed? Knox thought it toward the sky as he climbed onto the horse’s back. You don’t care, so long as I dance to your tune.

For once, Calsta answered. In a voice not of scathing flame, but of soft candlelight. She loves you. You love her, too. But it is too dangerous for love right now—everything has been wrong for hundreds of years, Knox, and it is in your hands to fix it. Your tiny, insufficient, human hands.

There’s a vote of confidence.

Another war could very easily start, Knox. Or things could go back into balance. I want you and all your little human friends to be happy and stop killing one another, and I have done everything in my power to make it so. Stop wallowing and try to understand that there is an order to these things.

He stared up at the sky, anger building inside him. “Is that order that I can never have anything that I want?” he said out loud. “That I give everything to you, serve my whole life, and—”

I led you to Anwei. You love Anwei. How is that not something you want?

“You made me promise that I couldn’t love anyone but you long before you sent me here.”

There are still oaths to make, Knox. There’s more, or none of this will work. Power is not something to be given with no promises in return.

“None of what will work?” Knox stopped in the gate, the horse nipping at his sleeve. “Why can’t you just tell me what I’m supposed to do? More oaths?”

What else did Calsta want to take away from him? He’d already proved that he didn’t have what it took to be a spiriter. Not everyone could do more for Calsta. He wouldn’t have liked to live with a veil over his head, but he would have done it, because he believed that Calsta knew what was best. What would be best for him.

But it didn’t feel that way right now.

Oaths are not shackles to be dragged behind you and mourned every day. Devoted have forgotten their true meaning. Please, focus. I cannot tell you everything because I am not the only being peering into your mind right now. He might not know it yet, but our time grows small, and I can’t give him any more tools than he’s already discovered.

Knox’s skin went cold. “The nameless god? Is that what is wrong with Willow? And what happens to me? That’s him taking control of me? Trying to kill Anwei and… anyone else he can?”

Calsta was there, a tinder and flame at the back of his head, and her silence was heated. Angry, as if this were the stupidest explanation Knox could have come up with. But she didn’t answer.

Shackles. At least with shackles someone else was putting them on you. Knox had put these ones on himself, and he had to keep putting them on every day, choosing the weight, the boundaries, the loneliness.

You do not understand, Knox. But you will.

Gulya appeared in the herb room door, her ancient fingers knuckle-deep in some concoction of leaves and malt. “I have words to speak with you, thief,” she called.

Knox waved, giving the horse a kick to get him walking, but the thing only started toward Gulya’s herbs. He kicked the horse again, wishing he knew how to politely tell Calsta to get out of his head. Swearing to himself when the horse didn’t move, Knox dismounted and grabbed hold of the creature’s lead to walk it out of the gates. Oaths had never been hard before. He’d relished in the control, in his ability to go to Calsta for power. But now they felt like his own version of Lia’s veil, and he couldn’t find a way to take it off. As if he were serving a goddess who didn’t care much for him and wanted everything he had in return for her lack of interest.

The oaths were never meant to be worn like a shield between you and the world. Only to give you a way to see what you could not otherwise. Power is given to those who can see more than just themselves. It is for people who can feel pain that is not their own. Bonding is for two people who can do more together than apart. More than that, I cannot say.

Knox stopped, the horse jerking the lead in his hand and prancing back over to the herbs. A bond? Like what the masters had tried to do with Lia? All those old stories about special circumstances…

No. Calsta was responding to his very thoughts. Your old masters remember that bonds existed, but not much more. That was what the shapeshifters destroyed. And what you need to destroy in order to save your sister. Corrupted bonds.

The feeling of Anwei at the back of his head flared, her thoughts and feelings too far for him to divine. The moment down in the tomb flashed through him, when their magic had somehow twined together. In that split second he’d seen the rocks, the plants, the world, as if they had been made of flaring color. Knox’s throat squeezed tight. “Are you telling me that what is happening with me and Anwei—that’s normal? Something that happened all the time before the shapeshifter wars?”

Companions. Like the old times, before they tried to kill my love.

“Thief!” Gulya’s voice buzzed around him like a swarm of flies.

Calsta’s love? Companions? Knox’s heart sped up. “Basists and Devoted used to work together?” he whispered. “That’s what has kept us hidden? And that’s what… hides this shapeshifter? No one can see his aura because he has some kind of corrupted bond? That involves my sister?”

I cannot tell you any more, Knox. Your sister can speak to more than just you. It is only ignorance that has kept her murderer from rising like Patenga did.

Knox couldn’t concentrate on the words, extra information that didn’t make sense. I can be with Anwei and still keep my oaths to you. Is that what you are saying?

Soon— But Calsta’s voice cut off. Knox opened his eyes to find Gulya standing in front of him, her mouth pinched into a snarl.

“You are going to leave,” she instructed.

“No,” he said back, too unmoored to keep a polite, Gulya-approved tone. “I mean, yes. We are. I could never leave Anwei.” The words blistered on his tongue. Forbidden. But Calsta’s fire still burned bright inside him.

“You are a child. You think you’re in love with my Anwei? Children don’t know what love is, Knox.” She shoved something toward him, a long, thin bundle he hadn’t noticed she was holding. Knox’s mind froze, the one last pinhole Willow had through Anwei’s warmth in his brain zeroing in on the shape in Gulya’s arms. “You don’t know what Anwei could be without you. You’re dragging her down.”

You found me! Willow’s voice was suddenly too loud, battering its way in.

“No!” Knox put his hands up just as Gulya pushed the bundle into his arms, the sword’s hilt slipping free to touch him. It burned like ice, sticking to his skin.

Willow’s voice cut through everything inside his head, a cold that was somehow hotter than Calsta’s had ever been. We’ll be able to fix everything now that we’re together again.

Anwei tried to cover her nose, to breathe through her mouth, but it didn’t block out the nothing smell, so thick that the air felt like water. She’d argued with Devoted, with maids and servants, then finally with the valas himself, who turned an angry red when she listed the symptoms of gamtooth poisoning. “She doesn’t have any of those symptoms, and I do not appreciate you pushing your way into my house.”

“She didn’t at first, but in the last few days she started having a rash,” a little voice piped from upstairs, the little girl behind it fire-haired and not as brave as she was trying to appear. She shot a sideways look at the Devoted lurking at the other end of the hall. Lia had said her father was in some sort of political trouble. “If she’s got the plague from the lower cays, then you can make her better, right?”

“Fine,” Lia’s father blustered. “Fine. You think you can do better than the Warlord’s own aukincer, then go ahead.” He stomped up the stairs, gesturing for Anwei to come along. The nothing smell clotted around her as she ascended.

Anwei! a voice tore through her, stopping her feet.

It was Knox’s voice.

Panic, pure panic, welled in her mind as she followed the bond in her head to the apothecary. She could feel him there, shouting for her like that day on the wall.

“Healer?” The valas had turned to look at her. “Don’t waste any more of my time than you already have.” He walked to the first door and unlatched it.

A wave of nothing sloshed out through the door, cascaded down the hallway, and broke across her as it crashed down the stairs. But Knox. Knox was somewhere in the direction of the apothecary, the lines bonding them together stretching, turning fiery white.

One snapped. Then another. Twang, twang, TWANG.

A Devoted at the bottom of the stairs came to attention, looking around until his eyes found her, a confused expression crossing his face.

Anwei’s hands began to shake, Knox’s cry turning into a wordless roar. She couldn’t answer. She couldn’t move. The bond between them was a bundle of strings, and they were pulling free.

The Devoted’s eyes narrowed on her. Knox’s panic swirled around Anwei, joining with her own. If she was shielding Knox’s aura and he was somehow shielding her in return, then what did it mean if the bond in their heads was breaking?

TWANG. Another thread snapped.

“Healer?” The valas was staring at her too now.

“Yes. I’m coming.” She had to get out of sight. Then she had to run. Get to Knox and whatever terror was happening.

Suddenly Knox wasn’t standing still at the apothecary. He was moving fast toward the Sand Cay ferry. The wordless roar cut off abruptly, leaving Anwei feeling as if she’d missed a step. The lines between them went still. Not snapping anymore, but cold, like the night before in the tomb.

Anwei reached out to touch the valas’s shoulder as she passed him, drawing him into the room after her. If Lia was in this house, he’d know where she was, and Anwei didn’t want him randomly spewing that information until Devoted weren’t listening. The Devoted who had been at the bottom of the stairs was halfway up, following her. She closed the sickroom door behind them. “What did the aukincer do, exactly?” Anwei asked quietly.

“Made her medicine. How am I supposed to know? My wife started getting better, so I didn’t ask too many questions.”

Valas Seystone flinched when his younger daughter followed them into the room. “She got worse, though. After she got better. She sort of went… empty.”

Anwei moved quickly, touching a maid at the bed-curtains with her gamtooth venom. The Devoted she’d touched at the gate should already be showing symptoms, but she wasn’t sure if she’d touched the one coming up the stairs behind her or not. “Not all sicknesses are suited to aukincer methods,” Anwei said quietly. “And if I’m right, then you could all be in danger of—”

The Devoted slid into the sickroom just as she opened the bed-curtains. The nothing smell rushed out at her in a choking flood. The woman lying on the bed linens seemed to be made of paper and air—her humors, her energy, everything, drained to nothing but a flimsy husk that mocked life.

Anwei sank to her knees at the bedside. The Devoted hovered behind her, but she couldn’t look away from the wasted skeleton lying in the bed. Lia had said her mother was sick. That she’d need a healer to help move her. But this? A faint rash marked the hollows under the woman’s eyes and down her neck. Gamtooth poisoning, like Jecks’s family and the other Fig Cay victims. But where they had only been pockmarked with little holes of nothing, this woman was a chasm, as if her very soul had been hacked free. “She’s… she still lives?”

“Of course she…” Lia’s father trailed off when his eyes fell on the Devoted hulking in the doorway. “There is no reason for you to come in here. I’m not going to climb out the window. The Warlord will find nothing against me, and I have no reason to run. Take your hand off that sword immediately.”

“Healer.” The Devoted’s voice made Anwei’s skin prickle. “You will stand, then turn to face me. Slowly.”

Tears pricked hot in her eyes. Knox was still a web of icy strands in her head, but he was fading away, as if the bond between them was dying, its body nothing but carrion in her head. She couldn’t tell if he’d gotten off the ferry, if he’d jumped in the river, or if he was directly behind her, holding that sword of his. But she’d never find out if she didn’t get out of this room.

Anwei stood and brushed off her knees. “Bar the front doors. Don’t let anyone out of the house. This woman is very contagious.” She pointed to the door when the Devoted didn’t move, not the least bit taken in by her show of confidence. “And would you please check for symptoms among your fellows. A rash. Glassy eyes. Hot skin. Any odd, unnecessary honesty. We have to protect the Warlord. I can treat her before it spreads.”

The Devoted unsheathed his sword. “Don’t move.”

“Now see here!” Lia’s father was in full bluster, but his only weapon seemed to be his red face.

“Daddy, his hands!” The little red-haired girl scuttered back into the corner, hands over her mouth. Glancing down, the Devoted flinched. He was one of the ones Anwei had touched, a blistering rash marking the backs of both hands.

“I can help you.” Anwei whispered it, pretending she couldn’t see the sword pointed at her chest. The bond between her and Knox was still there, icy cold and biting at the back of her head—dying, but not yet dead. Didn’t that mean her aura was still protected? Whatever the Devoted had seen, it had to have been isolated to those moments when strands had broken or he’d have already run her through. “I promise, I can help you.”

As Lia’s scarf fluttered to the floor, Mateo’s eyes bugged comically, as if the sight of a girl’s face would be the reason he fainted this time. Air on her skin felt like the whole world was opening to her. Filling her lungs to their fullest, Lia gloried in the fact that nothing had sucked up against her nose or mouth. She was free.

In that moment flickers of light condensed at the edges of her mind. Pale glows compared with what she would have been able to see before, but they were there. Auras.

A maid upstairs. A cluster of hostlers just outside in the courtyard. And Mateo in front of her, his aura a pale, guttering glow that looked… wrong somehow. Not diminished, the way Devoted who had broken their oaths would be, but glassy and small. Starving, like a Devoted with wasting sickness.

There were no golden flecks in it. Not even one.

“You’re not a Devoted,” she whispered.

Mateo startled back, knocking over his chair, the half-eaten sweet roll still in his hand. “You have your aurasight back.”

“A little.” She looked sideways at him, as if a change of angle would make a difference. “How can you see auras, how can you have wasting sickness if…”

Mateo ducked down to set the chair right, something desperate in his face. “Lia, I…”

She tamped down her aurasight, remembering the way Knox’s golden glow had vanished into nothing on the wall that day. Mateo had seen her aura, something only Devoted could do. He obviously had wasting sickness. It had to mean something.

But it didn’t really matter what it meant, Lia supposed. She didn’t need Mateo anymore. And now that her family should be safely tucked away in Gretis, she didn’t need Tual either. She just needed to hide until the Warlord was gone, the way she and Master Helan had discussed, then run to Lasei. Past the northern border to Trib land. Or maybe to the Broken Isles, or to the barred lands where sailors took their empty ships and came back laden with spices, gold, and silver, speaking in tongues no one had ever heard and of gods who promised new kinds of help.

Or she could wait here. Stay. It was an odd feeling, this peace of having no one watching her, telling her what to do. “I’m sorry you’re sick, Mateo,” Lia said. “I wish I knew how to help. But it’s so good to… to see.” Laughing still felt like she was breaking some oath, as if becoming a Devoted had meant she was supposed to be sad all the time. But now she was happy, and she had her aurasight, so that couldn’t be true.

Mateo’s eyes were glued to her face once more, tracing the bridge of her nose, the line of her chin. It felt exposed, and odd—almost the way Lia thought people must have felt when she looked into their thoughts. So many years of no one looking at anything but her sword, and then only her veil, and suddenly Mateo was looking at her. As if they’d been friends for years and he’d always been able to see her face. Because that’s what normal people did. Looked at each other.

Mateo replaced the sweet roll on his plate and wiped his fingers on a napkin before offering her his hand. “You want to see something interesting about Calsta?”

Lia stared at his hand for a moment, then reached out and let him pull her up. The memory of taking off her glove to touch Ewan flashed across her mind. That touch had been a weapon. An act of violence that Ewan had taken as his own and turned on her a hundredfold.

But this felt like a choice, one Mateo wouldn’t throw back at her like a spear. Mateo helped her up, then let their hands drop as if it had been nothing—and probably had been to him. Lia followed him up the stairs and across the entryway to a door she hadn’t seen behind yet. Every step he took seemed tired, as if there were some god who took energy from people instead of giving it. Mateo opened the door, and inside were dark shelves, a desk coated in sheets of vellum and ink, and piles of dusty books, pots, herbs, and glass bottles. It smelled of spice and stale rot all at once, the dust of old pages twined together with the dead. Lia leaned on the edge of the desk while Mateo went to the shelves and extracted a heavy book, the pages inside uneven.

“This is your father’s study?” she asked lightly, eyeing the messy pile of correspondence. She moved to let Mateo slide by her with his big book. “Why did he bring all this with him?”

Mateo pushed aside some of the papers to set the book on the desk and began thumbing through it. It was full of handwritten notes, copies of paintings and reliefs, all bound together by hand. “You saw how prominently Calsta is featured inside Patenga’s tomb. Odd for a shapeshifter, wouldn’t you say? Then something my father said made me remember this.” He opened to a page with a large depiction of Calsta. Her mask was uncracked, and she held a sword in one hand and a paintbrush in the other. At her feet there was a collection of people—some bringing food to an emaciated woman with two small children in her lap, some with swords, defending an old man from what looked like a robber. One person was veiled, sitting with a group of people listening at their feet. He turned the page, and the next drawing caught Lia by the throat, her fingers clenching around the desk’s edge.

It was the nameless god, a darkness to counter Calsta’s light, vines twisting around his arms. There were people in front of him, too, growing plants in neat rows, healing. One looked as if he was mediating some sort of argument between two men with their fists raised. Mateo pushed the book toward her. “I think there’s a lot we don’t know or understand about Calsta. Maybe the nameless god, too—it is hard to tell, what with all the records about him being destroyed. Most gods—Falan, Artena, Jaxom, Castor—they are all trying to help people become something better, even if those people use their teachings to do bad things instead.”

Lia bit her lip, staring down at the earthy tones of the nameless god’s hands and feet, flowers growing from his head like hair. “Where did you find this?”

“Does it make you uncomfortable?” Mateo sat down in his father’s chair and put his slippered feet up on the desk.

She slid from the desk, looking at the painting more closely. It did make her feel a little uncomfortable. But Mateo was right—things weren’t as simple as she’d been taught. How else could Lia have her aurasight now, so far from a seclusion? How could Master Helan help her escape and still keep his power if everything were as she’d thought? Her foot knocked against something glass under the desk as she bent down to touch the painting. “Where did you see this?”

Mateo leaned back in the chair. “I copied it from a cave on the eastern coast across from Beilda. It was closed up—forgotten about, probably, long before the first Warlord began destroying depictions of the nameless god. In the original, Calsta and he are on the same wall—all of the Basists and Devoted together. He and Calsta are reaching for each other.” He flipped to the painting of Calsta, her hand outstretched with the paintbrush, then to the nameless god again, his hand outstretched and full of stones.

Lia smoothed her hand across the page. “It’s hard to know what is right and what is wrong about this.”

Mateo shrugged, looking up at the ceiling. “Not really. I think it’s more difficult to believe that people know the difference between right and wrong.” He spoke slow, as if he wasn’t sure how Lia would take what he was saying. “You thought Calsta wanted you all bundled up inside a seclusion with…” He licked his lips, the studied nonchalance in his tone giving way to something jagged. “With Ewan. But now you’re with me instead of your scary auroshe, which—can we please circle back to the fact he’s named Vivi?”

He paused, the smile returning. Lia pressed her lips together, thinking of beautiful, powerful, sunbright Vivi with Ewan’s hand yanking on his mane.

Mateo seemed to sense the change in the way she felt and hurried on. “And Calsta’s just gifted you aurasight again. So, was it her or the Warlord who wanted you to stay at the seclusion?”

Master Helan had made it clear what he thought on that point, but Lia shrugged, not sure what to believe. “Does it matter?”

Mateo mirrored her shrug. “Does it?”

All the worry Lia had been keeping bottled up about what Calsta would do to her for breaking her oaths had loosened a little with Master Helan. Now it sank to the bottom of her mind, as if she’d been moving too quickly for her thoughts to settle until that moment. It did matter. It was one thing if a person tried to make you do something and you disagreed. Quite another if it was divine mandate from a goddess and disobedience meant you’d be destroyed, now or in some afterlife.

“That is a very interesting question that I guess I need to think about some more.” Lia stood up from the desk, picking up the book. “You did all the paintings in here? And the ones there, too?” She pointed to the stacks of vellum, the top of which had a depiction of Patenga she recognized from the tomb.

He sat up, letting his feet drop. “Most of them.”

“They’re lovely. You must have spent years…” She turned the page and found a Devoted with a sword. The shadows were bloody, the lines harsh. “Wow. You don’t care much for Devoted, do you?”

Mateo’s mouth pinched shut.

“It must have been nice to walk into my father’s house and find out your father meant to marry you off to one.”

The pinched expression receded, Mateo’s face going carefully blank. “It isn’t a social call I look back on with great pleasure, I suppose.”

Lia couldn’t help but smile at his aggressively neutral tone. “You know, if I were to stay here like your father said, we could figure out some kind of middle ground, couldn’t we?” She’d follow Anwei and Knox, find her father, Aria, and her mother. Bring them back. It wouldn’t be dangerous with Master Helan pushing the Devoted away from Chaol. She shuddered at the memory of Ewan’s off-kilter fervor in searching for Knox. The way his voice had sung out threats against her, reveling in the idea of her cowering and afraid. But Master Helan had said he could stop Ewan from wanting to find her. “Some kind of middle space, one where you aren’t stuck under the Warlord’s thumb but also don’t have to marry your worst nightmare.… What are you looking at?”

He was staring at her face again. “You know, I wasn’t prepared to say it before, but it’s true. If you hadn’t been wearing a hood, I would have been at least a little tempted to let things move forward that day.”

Lia snorted. “I could kill you with two fingers, you know.”

Mateo seemed to weigh the possibility. “It’s a good thing you like me enough not to.”

She frowned at Mateo’s odd tone. He’d turned to stare at the bookshelves, his eyes darting back and forth across the titles too quickly to be reading them. “You wouldn’t consider staying here and… just seeing what happens, would you?” He still wouldn’t look at her. “I mean, we’d tell my father it’s all off and to maybe go jump in the cape while he’s at it. But…”

“But what?” Heat flushed in Lia’s cheeks and she shut the book. “I let you see my face, and now—”

“No.” Suddenly he was looking at her, his eyes focused. “I didn’t need to see your face. And I don’t mean to start anything between us now, or ever, if it never… seems like something you’re interested in.” His cheeks reddened as he grappled for words. “I already told you I like you, Lia. And I’m telling you again now, but in the most tentative, whatever-you-want-please-don’t-hurt-me kind of way.” The next words came out in a rush. “And I don’t mean wreaths or permanent… anything. I just thought maybe later when everything has calmed down…? You’re going through a lot right now and technically I’m sort of dying and now I’m realizing this was not the right time or place to say this and I’m sorry and—”

“Mateo!” Tual’s voice cracked through the air, puncturing the breath trapped inside Lia. “Mateo, where are you?”

Mateo turned toward the door with a bit too much force, accidentally shoving some of the cleared odds and ends under the desk with his feet. Something under the desk fell over and shattered, pieces of glass skittering out into the dim light. The door burst open and then Tual was there, out of breath, his hat in his hand. “We have a problem.” He pushed aside the mess of papers on the desk, sending them fluttering to the floor to make room for the roll of paper in his hand.

He glanced over Lia, his eyes catching on her uncovered face in a surprised stare. “Hello, Lia. It’s…” He shook his head. “I hope you slept well. I’m glad you and Mateo are… well, you can help us with this too.”

Lia felt as if she were moving in slow motion, Mateo’s words still hanging in the air like fireworks. He was wearing pajamas. And furry slippers. And her face was uncovered, and Ewan had attacked her what seemed like yesterday.…

There were a lot of “ands.” Maybe that’s why Mateo had said there was nothing to talk about until everything calmed down. He was now staring very intently at the sheet his father had brought, a flush in his olive cheeks that said he could feel her watching him. “What is this? A list?”

“There was another incident at the excavation. Artifacts missing. And scorch marks on the burial chamber door.”

“What? These are all the things that were taken?” Lia couldn’t help but see the way Mateo’s eyes jumped from item to item, flinching as if each loss stabbed at him. Knox and Anwei had done this, whatever it was.

“And there was damage done—the Warlord is going this evening to open the chamber and evacuate the rest of the items. She’s staying with your family, Lia.”

“My family?” Her family was supposed to be in Gretis by now. Anwei was going to help move her mother. They hadn’t left?

Tual was still talking. “The thefts and damage are definitely the work of someone associated with the dig.”

Confusion roiled in Lia’s chest as Mateo and Tual exchanged a look Lia didn’t understand. Mateo had said he and his father were after some kind of healing compound, so the damage couldn’t affect him too much once he’d gotten over the loss of art and history. Knox had said he and Anwei were only going to steal a sword.

Still, Lia couldn’t help the jab of worry at the way Mateo eyed the list, one hand to his chest.

A spider skittered out from under the table, dodging bits of broken glass, headed straight for Lia’s ankle. Tual froze, staring down at it. “Lia!”

She crushed it with her heel. It squirmed a little as it squished, as if it was still trying to bite her.

“Director Van will be a part of the evacuation, I’m guessing?” Mateo scrubbed his hands through his hair, letting the list roll back up as he looked at his father, who was still staring down at the spider. “How much time do we have before he gets there?”

Mateo kept on his father’s heels as they rode into the excavation compound, the gates hanging open. Lia sat behind him on Bella, pressed against his back as they rode. He still couldn’t believe what she’d done, taking off that scarf in front of him. It had burned through him, watching her take off each layer, baring her face to him.

That wasn’t what she’d meant by it. Mateo knew that. He’d looked away, or he’d tried. But the first sight of her face had been… right. As if he’d already known exactly who she was before actually seeing her. It really didn’t matter what she looked like, anyway.

He liked seeing her face. Liked it a lot. But he liked her more.

Mateo dismounted and tied Bella before offering a hand to help Lia dismount. She smiled, then slid down herself with a fancy kick over the pommel, but it didn’t feel like a slight. Her eyes widened as she looked past him into the compound. “Where are all the workers?”

Goose bumps erupted down Mateo’s neck as he followed her gaze. The dig was completely empty, a discarded shovel lying in the abandoned path that led to the tomb.

“Van ordered the entire compound be cleared to ensure the Warlord’s safety.” Tual strode past them, heading for the tomb opening. “Devoted will be here soon to guard the gates. I managed to delay messages so there would be a gap between shifts. We’ll be able to go in unobstructed. Unless Van is already here, trying to empty the tomb of anything he can before the Warlord gets here.”

“Is… he doing that? Why?” Lia asked.

“He’s after the same thing we are. We think. He might be…” Mateo had to look away from her direct gaze. She hadn’t said anything about the… whatever it was. Invitation? Plea for an open door? He shook the thought away. Caprenum was his best plan. His surest plan. That’s why they were here.

She hadn’t said no.

But she hadn’t had a chance to say no either.

“He might be what?” Lia asked.

“A shapeshifter.” Tual lowered his voice. “Caprenum is a substance that can be crafted only by Basists. I stumbled on hints of its healing properties entirely by accident—Basist capacity was so much greater than any healer now. We think he might know its value, maybe more of what it can do than we do.”

“You truly believe it will work?” Mateo asked. Lia stayed close behind him, her attention itching across his back. He couldn’t ask about the letter, not with her listening. “Hunting for it wasn’t you just trying to keep me busy?”

“Of course I believe caprenum will heal you.” Tual shot a frustrated look at the sky. “I mean, I’m as confident as I can be. Just because I have more than one plan doesn’t mean half of them are lies.”

“What do you need my help with?” Lia asked.

Tual didn’t look back. “You’ll see.”

When they got to the ladder, Tual gestured for Lia to go down first. Mateo couldn’t tear his eyes from the fiery warmth of her hair blowing in curls around her face as she descended. Her eyes found his just before she went under, but she immediately looked down.

Mateo went next, the darkness closing over him like water, the familiar smell of stone and dirt comforting even with the taste of poison in the air. More mirrors had been set on the floor in preparation for the Warlord’s visit, enough light beaming through the cave that it almost seemed as if the sun had followed him down the ladder. Mateo took Lia down to the statue room, the light striking across Patenga’s face in a harsh stripe. At the statue’s feet, one of the little souls had crumbled away, as if someone had purposely crushed it.

Mateo darted over to get a better look at the damage, pulling out his hand mirror to redirect the light. A bolt of fury stabbed in his chest at the broken-off stone, the little worshipper nothing but jagged edges and stone dust.

Lia’s hand touched his shoulder. “Are you all right?” she murmured, Tual still coming down the ladder.

“Do you see this?” He jabbed the mirror at the destroyed figure. “There was no reason to do this. They didn’t even try to take it with them. It’s just destruction of something beautiful for no reason whatsoever.” He flashed the mirror up the wall and found black streaks across the top of Patenga’s head. “And who would bring a fire down here? Don’t they know how easy it is for smoke to destroy—”

“We can be angry about the destruction of history later.” Tual hopped off the ladder and started toward the stairs. He glanced up at Patenga, a shadow crossing his face. “We don’t have much time.”

Lia’s head swiveled to look at Mateo, her eyebrow raised.

“Right. Yes.” Mateo turned away from the relief, forcing his anger down. “I’m fine.” He followed Lia and his father down the stairs to where Calsta and the nameless god faced each other, their little charges like children in their laps. Tual paused by the doorway, touching the rope tangled around the columns. He sighed, picking up a few uncleared rocks, and threw them across the nameless god’s carving. The ceiling, higher than the last time Mateo had been in the room, began to inch down.

“I’ll do it. You have to put weight on the column for the floor to open, yes?” Lia grabbed the rope’s end, then ran to the column rising from the nameless god’s mouth. She climbed up on top of it, looped the rope around her foot, and held on to the length with both hands. When the floor fell in, she gave a whoop that sounded significantly more like joy than Mateo thought appropriate. Once the spiked columns had crashed into one another, then ratcheted back into the ceiling, he followed his father to the edge of the hole to peer down at Lia swinging back and forth on the rope. “Are you going to come down or not?” she called.

Mateo could now clearly see the door below with Patenga’s face glaring up at them from the stone. There were scorch marks along the base, but it seemed intact. Tual climbed down once Lia had swung over to the platform. Once he was safely standing by the door, Mateo braced himself, hoping his arms were up to the job of climbing, then lowered himself down onto the rope.

“I’ve been left here to die.” A song in his head. Mateo’s fists burned on the rope, his fingers loosening as he looked down for the voice. A child, he thought. “I’ve been sick so long, and they finally left because it was too hard. Will you help me?”

A child abandoned because it was too hard to care for his sickness. Mateo let go of the rope with one hand, peering down into the darkness. “Where are you?” he called.

“They’re narmaidens, Mateo!” Lia’s voice cut through the song. “Swing over…”

A light bloomed into existence, and suddenly Tual was there, reaching out to Mateo, a lamp in his hand. “Son. You want to live. Think about that. Don’t listen to them. Think about what you want.”

“I’m alone. No one wanted me. You wouldn’t leave me here, would you?” The song slithered inside his head.

Mateo closed his eyes, trying to shut it out. I want to live. The voice in his head seemed too slow, almost going backward. But then it recited the words back to him. “I want to live. I want to live.”

“What did you…” Lia’s voice was confused. “They aren’t singing to me anymore. How did you do that, Mateo?”

Swinging his body forward, Mateo reached out to grab his father’s hand. Lia helped him onto the platform, looping the rope onto one of the rocks.

“Narmaidens behave in the right circumstances.” Tual placed one hand on the black wall, turning his head to look at Mateo. “Most things will. Come closer, son.”

Mateo couldn’t help but glance down into the darkness, wondering what his father had done. He inched over, not liking the black drop, the chorus of “I want to live, I want to live” echoing in his brain. Forcing himself to focus on the light newly burning in his father’s hand, Mateo tried to find some indignation to cut his fear. “You brought a lantern? You know how much damage that will cause.”

“We’re in a bit of an extreme situation, Mateo. We’ll just have to hope the Warlord forgives us for staining the reliefs.” His father grabbed his hand and placed it against the stone.

The rock was unnaturally warm under Mateo’s palm, the feel of it pulsing in his mind, making him feel dizzy. He snatched his hand away.

“I think you are the only way we can get in, son,” Tual murmured.

His meaning took a second to sink in. “You want me to… Father, I can’t,” Mateo hissed. “Even looking for auras breaks everything inside me. You said it was dangerous for me to try. That I’d be a drain.”

Tual patted Mateo’s hand and took a step back. “Stone doesn’t speak very loud to me. But it does to you. We’ll have to chance it this once, or risk… plan B.”

“What is going on?” The sound of Lia’s voice sent a cringe through Mateo’s gut. She didn’t know. When her aurasight had come back, she’d looked him over and found nothing at all.

Why couldn’t she see it in him? In his father? She’d said herself that Basists had something special to their auras, so where was his marker?

Why hadn’t he ever thought of that? What were Devoted looking for, if it wasn’t auras touched by the nameless god, the same way he could see Devoted shining with Calsta’s light?

He’d always thought he and his father were different somehow. Or perhaps that his father had done something to hide them. But what could he have done?

Tual had stopped the narmaidens from luring them in. What else could he do?

“What do you see, Mateo?” Tual whispered.

Mateo touched the stone. The wall in front of him seemed to push against his mind.

“Focus,” Tual breathed. “Focus on what you want.”

What do I want? It was a hodgepodge of things that didn’t fit together. They filled Mateo’s mind, for once clear of anger and bitterness. If he could get through this door, he had a chance at life. A chance for a healthy body. A chance to finally use his powers without hurting himself. A chance for his father to see him as a worthy investment, an asset. Irreplaceable. The true companion his father had been hoping for when he saved Mateo, not a stone pulling him deep into the ocean of politics and war.

And Lia. Mateo wanted her to see him as worthy too.

And this wall. He wanted it to break.

The list seemed silly, but as Mateo breathed in, the makeup of the wall began to crystalize in his head, a curtain of tiny pieces that had somehow been laced together when they shouldn’t have been, energy at each of the bonding points. Created with the nameless god’s power to form something that wouldn’t break without the right tools.

The right tool being him.

Tual stepped back from the wall, and Mateo could feel his worry and reluctance. But he put his hands on Mateo’s shoulders. “This is dangerous, son. I didn’t want to do it this way, but we’re in a bind. What do you really want? Think about that—only that—and take it.”

Mateo reached inside himself and staggered, almost losing contact with the wall. The light inside him, the understanding of the wall and all its parts, started to drain.

Tual’s hands tightened on Mateo’s shoulders. “Lia, come closer. Quickly, now.”

Mateo felt Lia’s hand on his arm, and suddenly the spinning and dizziness stopped.

“Now do it, Mateo.”

In that moment, between his father and Lia, Mateo felt… solid. Not like a butterfly caught in a gust. He finally felt like his own person with his own feet, his own lungs, his own stamp on the world.

In his mind Mateo caught hold of one of the knit strands of stone and began to pull. The knots of energy that held the stone together began to unravel, falling apart into little granules that scattered to the floor.

Lia gasped, her hand on his arm tightening. “You’re a…”

He pulled the string again, and the whole wall came undone, falling to sand from the center out like curtains suddenly opening.

“A Basist.” Mateo let his hands drop and looked at her, elation singing through him when before there had only been weakness. He’d climbed into the tomb with his feet dragging, but now he felt as if he could crash through walls with his bare hands. What had his father done to turn his sickness to strength? It seemed impossible—there hadn’t been any oaths, no sacrifices. Just wanting, and then the world had changed. “I’m a Basist, Lia.” He said it too loud, the words echoing out past the narmaidens and the chant they’d stolen from Mateo. “I want to live. I want to live.” “Both of us are.”

Lia fell back from him a step. The hand that had been touching him reached up to cover her mouth. “I would be able to see it if you were a Basist. And you could see my aura. Since when can Basists see auras?” She was choking on her words, her breaths coming too fast.

Mateo reached out to her, flinching when she recoiled. “Father has been using his magic to heal the Devoted suffering from wasting sickness. The Warlord was the one who sent us here to find caprenum. If we don’t find it, then he won’t be able to fully cure wasting sickness, and the seclusions will fall.”

“But—”

Tual pushed between Mateo and Lia to the narrow doorway, brushing the bits of sand from his coat. “We’ll explain later—just know right now that we’re on your side. We need to get the caprenum and then get you far away from here before the Warlord sees your aura, Lia.”

Lia physically wilted, a pulse beating in her throat. Her face looked altogether too pale in the mirrored light. She put a hand to her head. “I’m feeling a little faint.”

That seemed odd. Lia wasn’t really the fainting type.

“Is it really that big of a deal to you?” Mateo whispered. “I was born to see stone the same way you can read thoughts. My father was born to heal—he can see the properties of growing things and medicinal elements, of sicknesses and how to fix them.” He swallowed, watching her closely. “Meanwhile, I saw you stab a man with my drawing pencils. You’re scared of us?”

Lia blinked, her fists closing and falling to her sides. “Absolutely not.”

Mateo pressed his lips together, hating that the answer was obviously for the latter question, not the former. “I’ve never stolen a single soul. I’m not a shapeshifter.”

Lia’s aura flickered around her, stronger than the first day they’d met, threads of gold veined through it.

“It’s unfair to believe that every single person who the nameless god chooses will become a monster the way Patenga did.” Mateo willed her to listen, to actually talk about it the way they had in his father’s study. “As it is to believe every Devoted is made of gold and sunshine just because the seclusions burned Calsta’s oaths into their skin. You know that more than anyone. It’s what we choose to do with our power, right, Lia? Remember the painting?” His throat seemed to squeeze around the words. “The cave?”

Lia blinked again, the tendons in her neck taut from how hard she was clenching her teeth. A tear slid down her cheek.

“You don’t have to have anything to do with me.” He lowered his voice even further, hoping his father wouldn’t hear the raspy echo. “I’ll make sure you can get away from my father. And from me. If that’s what you want.”

One of Lia’s feet slid forward, and Mateo tensed. “You said you were scared of me earlier today,” she whispered. “You were being sarcastic, but it’s true, isn’t it? You’re scared of what I can do.”

“Of course I’m scared of what you can do. But I’d like to believe you won’t do any of it to me.”

Her hand brushed his arm, and suddenly she was only inches from him, her warmth seeping through the air to touch him. Mateo shivered. Held very still as she looked up at him, wondering if he’d been wrong to hope she wouldn’t hurt him. Maybe she’d stab him straight through with her bare fingers. She’d said she needed only two.

But all she did was nod once. “Let’s find the caprenum and go, then.” Her hand slid down his arm and she pulled him after her into the opening.

The chamber inside was narrow, the ceiling twice as tall as Mateo. A huge relief painted in bright colors covered every inch of all four walls. The room was empty—no sword, no coffin, no caprenum.

Footsteps rang out from above, filling the empty chamber behind them. The narmaidens hissed.

Mateo’s stomach contracted at the empty room. “Father, what…”

“This is just the antechamber.” Tual’s neck craned to look toward the narmaidens. “Find the door, Mateo. I’ll deal with whoever’s out there.” And with that, his father was gone.

The Warlord looked worn and shrunken inside her armor from where Anwei stood in the procession, hovering just outside the ring of Devoted Anwei hadn’t managed to poison. Knox still pulsed with cold inside her head, nearby but out of sight—the connection between them a fuzzy, many-legged thing that writhed in pain.

The Warlord stepped up to the gates, the shaved sides of her head flashing oath scars that appeared faded and old. It was hard for Anwei to look at her, the woman who’d twisted Knox all around his oaths to a goddess that probably didn’t exist. What she’d done to Lia, handing her over to Ewan like a cream-filled roll.

Not that Devoted ate cream.

Anwei inhaled, steadying herself. Grateful they were out in the open air. Now that they were away from the house and the awful sinkhole Lia’s mother had made in the air, Anwei could smell shapeshifter on all the Devoted just as Knox had said, as if he’d touched them all one by one. The Warlord herself seemed the most drained, her steps a little slow. She’d listened to the Devoted who had run panicked to the bottom of the stairs, showing her the rash on his hands. To the others running outside at the first sight of the boils, trying to protect their leader.

The Warlord had instructed him to take Anwei’s herbs without question—to test it just in case she, too, became infected, Anwei supposed. The Devoted had blinked blearily at Anwei as if looking for the darkened aura he’d seen around her, only to find it gone. He, of all the Devoted who had been poisoned, had been brought along to the tomb so that his reactions to her cure could be observed. Anwei had been brought to help just in case the Warlord broke out in a rash, but Anwei had come because of Knox.

He was close. Somehow, even with the bond a mess, she could still feel him. He was waiting for something.

Anwei followed the retinue through the compound gates. The Warlord halted just inside and gestured for her Devoted to circle around her.

“I need Tual,” the Warlord said, her voice quiet. Infused with a lifetime of being obeyed no matter how loud she spoke. “He was supposed to be here. He’s the one who found this dig and the one who told me it was his best chance.…”

Tual? Isn’t the director named Van? Anwei clenched her fists, as if holding on tight enough would stop the world from spinning around her. Shale had said the man with the snake on his tooth had been the one to bring the digging crew to Chaol.

“Are the rest of us going to wait?” another Devoted asked. The slick oil on his armor and the hint of murder in his eyes matched the smells she’d detected over the wall that day with Lia. Anwei held herself still despite the anger uncoiling inside her.

“If Tual doesn’t come, we’ll empty the tomb ourselves, and he can pick out the prizes later.”

“What about Lia?” The Devoted kept his head bowed, his voice compliant, but an ugly undercurrent pulled at each word, raising the hairs on Anwei’s arms.

“No one can hide from Devoted. We will find our runaway spiriter.” The Warlord’s pronouncement bristled with certainty. “For now, we do what we came to do.” She started toward the hole in the ground.

Anwei braced herself, ready to run. Noa’s cue to set the wall on fire had been the Warlord’s entrance into the compound, but if Noa was the snake-tooth man, Anwei wasn’t sure what to expect. The Devoted fell in line behind the Warlord, hands on their swords as if they expected some kind of trouble from a dead king and a bunch of dirt.

“Stop.” The last Devoted in line barred Anwei’s path as she tried to follow. “I don’t think any of us are going to need herbs shoved down our throats in here.”

An explosion erupted from the southern end of the compound, flames spurting over the top of the wall. Anwei’s eyes widened as the timbers immediately began to char, the barracks’ straw roofs going up in flame. Noa had done more than sprinkle oil on the wall and set it on fire. Maybe she’d kept some of the explosives Anwei had given her for the ghost distraction the night before.

The Devoted divided, some running for the back wall, some bursting back out the gates, the Warlord herself standing alone in the path that led to the tomb opening. With her hand over her shoulder, fingers grasping her sword, she looked like Knox, only years older, shrunken inside an armor of power both from Calsta and from the Devoted who followed her without question. The Commonwealth who feared the sight of her double-auroshe crest because it meant shapeshifters were being hunted in their midst.

It was fear of dirt witches that had gouged scars down Anwei’s arms and legs. Fear created by the Warlord and her Devoted and the last five hundred years of hatred for any the nameless god touched, whether they wanted him to or not. It was this woman who’d made sure Anwei would be on this hunt alone for so many years.

And now the Warlord was standing all alone too.

Anwei shoved a hand inside her bag, gloved fingers finding the calistet.

The Warlord launched herself toward the blazing wall, drawing the sword in one fluid motion. Letting the calistet and her moment of anger fall, Anwei ran for the tomb’s entrance. That was where she’d told Knox she would be, so perhaps that’s where he’d gone.

Because that was where the shapeshifter would be. Eventually.

“What is all this?” Lia looked up at the carvings that took up the whole wall. The lantern’s light flickered across an image of Patenga in a crown, his sword point through a man’s armored chest. Next to the man, a golden shield lay on the ground. Patenga plunged the sword with one hand, the other hand to his head as if he was weeping. “I thought this was where Patenga’s body was supposed to be.”

Mateo’s eyes were wide, tracing over the figures. He turned to look back toward the doorway. Over the door, Patenga stood under a trellis hung with flowers, the man with the golden shield standing across from him, their hands joined. All around them people held an abundance of fruit and baskets of grains, their paint bright. There were other paintings too: Patenga and the man giving food to hungry children. Patenga in battle, the golden shield raised by the man to protect him. The colors became darker, angrier, farther from the flower-covered trellis, paintings of hunger, famine, battle. Until it ended with Patenga’s sword through the man’s chest. Over Patenga’s head there was an eddy of golden paint swirled together with a muddy purple that seemed to be coming from the fallen man.

The shape of the sword was familiar. “It’s styled after Calsta’s?” Lia pointed to the weapon. She’d seen so many depictions of the goddess’s sword over the years—her own sword had been made with similar lines.

Mateo’s back went straight, his eyes wide. “And the haze around him. Gold. Like an aura.” He bit his lip, turning to Lia. “And he was in Calsta’s lap in the last chamber. Do you think… no, that’s impossible. Patenga was the shapeshifter.”

“What’s impossible?” Lia looked at him.

“He’s got gold all around him, Lia. Could he be…”

“Are you trying to say Patenga, the shapeshifter king, was a Devoted?” She started shaking her head. “How could that—”

“No, look. How did I not see this?” Mateo put a hand to his head, gesturing to all the carnage depicted between what looked like Patenga’s wedding day and the end with his sword through his partner’s chest. “He was a Devoted. Which means he couldn’t have been a shapeshifter, unless…”

Lia looked over the carvings, trying to find whatever it was Mateo was looking at, but his lantern light slid onto the angry swirl over Patenga’s head, the colors muddying and mixing together in a horrible storm. The shapeshifter’s face was contorted with agony, as if he’d murdered his only love. “Unless what?” she whispered.

“Calsta is holding Patenga in the room above us. His sword is styled after hers, just like you said. And here her power, the golden aura, is coming out of him to mix with—”

“A Basist,” Lia breathed, looking at the muddy purple. She’d seen auras just like his all across the Commonwealth. “His shield is in every room.”

“Patenga killed him. Power requires sacrifices.” Mateo’s voice shook. “The legends say Patenga was a Basist. But in this relief it looks like he’s stealing a Basist’s aura from the man with the shield.”

Lia licked her lips. “That’s not how it works.”

“How do you know? Basists are almost all dead because history books say they have potential to become shapeshifters, and the risk of a shapeshifter was more destructive than killing an entire segment of society. But what if that’s not what really happened?” Mateo turned toward her so forcefully that she flinched, her muscles ready to fight before her brain could take in what was happening. He stretched his arms out toward her, his voice breaking. “My father said there’s a way to bond. That if we—”

Lia shrank. “Like what the Warlord… Ewan…”

“No!” Mateo’s hands came up, as if he could push that thought away. “I would never!” He shook his head. “No. Those bonds aren’t real anyway. They break the oaths Devoted make instead of bonding them together. The bond Father was talking about was supposed to be like… in the drawing I showed you. Calsta and the nameless god working in concert. That’s why my father threw us together. He said together our powers would balance. That the bond would fix me. Like… them.” He pointed to Patenga and the man with the shield above the door. “Two halves of something whole, working as one. Until…” He looked up at Patenga’s sword sheathed in the man’s gut. “Until it wasn’t enough for Patenga. Power comes from sacrifice. What if sacrificing a person, a person you love…”

Lia pointed up toward the dead Basist in the relief, her hand shaking. “Your father wanted you to do this?”

“No.” Mateo started to laugh, a dry, useless thing that echoed all around them. “He told me to love you. And to hope…”

“So that’s what all that was about earlier? You were just trying to fix yourself?” Lia hissed.

“No. It was me telling you the truth. And hoping you would feel the same way someday. Yes, I want to get better, but I don’t have any claim on you, Lia, and I know it. No one does.” Lia stared at him in the shaking light, his face pale as he took a step toward her. “I’d hoped that maybe you’d be interested in getting to know me better. That maybe after we were friends… well, it doesn’t matter.”

Lia looked up at the carvings, suddenly seeing a ghostly wraith of Calsta in the golden aura over Patenga’s head. “We are friends. I like you just fine, Mateo.”

He let out a breath of laughter that sounded almost like relief. “That’s a lovely thing to hear. Especially next to this”—he glanced up at the painting—“rather gruesome depiction of a murder.” Pressing his lips together, Mateo put a hand up. “The power-balancing stuff isn’t important. I don’t need you. Caprenum will be enough to fix me. His sword is made from it.”

“A healing compound made into a sword?” Lia pointed at the swirl of gold above them. “It doesn’t look like it’s healing anyone here, Mateo. Devoted can’t become shapeshifters. Basists were the ones who… That’s why the first Warlord…” Her breath caught in her throat, and suddenly she wanted to throw something at the carvings, to negate what was up there on the wall. “That’s the only reason she could have had for trying to eliminate them all.”

“The only information I’ve ever found about shapeshifting oaths is that they were an abomination. That they allowed shapeshifters to wrest power from the gods and steal souls to make them stronger.” Mateo was shaking too, the light from his lantern skittering frantically across the stone. He stepped up to the carvings, hesitating before pressing a palm against the stone wolf’s paw. “I have to get through this wall. Whatever all this means, I need caprenum, and it’s inside. Maybe—”

“Wait.” A clatter of stone falling caught in Lia’s ears, her arms prickling as if she’d been stuck full of pins. She reached out with her aurasight, but she couldn’t seem to see beyond this room. Mateo was too still, as if he was about to collapse again. “There’s someone down here with us.”

Anwei stepped off the ladder, trying not to think of all that had happened here the night before. Knox had to be down here. But now that she was underground, she couldn’t feel which direction he was in, the bond throbbing soundlessly at the back of her head. Like Knox had said—these walls blocked magic. Auras. Everything. She breathed in and gagged.

The scent of the void was here. Worse, a thousand times worse than Lia’s house even. That meant shapeshifter was here, too.

Maybe.

Anwei moved as carefully as if she were walking on gamtooth web. The smell thickened, twining around her when she got down to the stairwell. The mirror light flickered in the room ahead, but there was no way to see what or who it was—she couldn’t smell anything but nothing. No rock, no ancient paint, no leftover char from torches. No metal, no glass. She was walking into an alternate world sucked dry of all life. Made of nothing.

Slipping into the room with Calsta and the nameless god, Anwei found the floor already open and the burial chamber door below ruptured, orange light leaking from its slack mouth. Anwei clutched the serum, sweat making it slick between her fingers, as the voices of two people floated out from below.

“I can’t wait,” a young man’s voice whispered. “I have to open it.” A shadow moved, and suddenly Anwei felt something about the cave change, the wall inside the burial chamber folding together in front of the young man’s hands as if it were paper, not stone. A draft of air blew up from below, and Anwei gagged again, the nothing smell drowning her. The stone around her began to groan, the floor tipping under her feet.

“I want to live,” a narmaiden’s voice sang up from the darkness, the tone jarring and wrong, setting Anwei’s teeth on edge. Even the creature sounded confused.

The walls shook again, bits of the ceiling crumbling to rattle across the floor. Anwei dodged away from the storm of stone shards even as the floor fractured under her feet. Suddenly she was falling, then flat on the ground, and everything hurt. There were stones in great heaps all around her, the nameless god’s black eyes staring at her from a slab of rock that had fallen just a few inches shy of her arm. Anwei groaned but sat up quickly when she saw lantern light overhead, realizing she was at the bottom of the narmaiden pit. A rush of water sloshed by, wetting the bottoms of her skirts as she frantically looked around, wondering where the nest was, if the mother was there. She clutched the glass tube of serum, checking for cracks. It hadn’t broken in the fall.

But as Anwei pulled herself up from the ground, something rose in the darkness to meet her, far too large to be a narmaiden. Anwei fell back a step, but not before one of the thing’s clawed hands had snagged her arm, the other hand holding a blade to her throat.

“Don’t move.” Its voice was nothing but wet leaves and scales. “Or it’ll be a dead thief instead of a live one I hand over to the magistrate.”

Mateo’s whole chest seemed to contract as he stepped through the hole he’d made in the wall. The room inside was dark, the sharp feeling of wrongness he’d felt every moment in this tomb bearing down on him. He felt strong. Stronger than he ever had in his weak fainting spell of a life. When he inhaled, the air seemed to shimmer with power.

Lia was saying something, but his mind was full of magic. Dust filtered through the air, enough to almost block the raised platform in the center of the room. Artifacts crowded around its base, and there were intricate reliefs on the ceiling and walls, but it was too dark to see them clearly.

Now Lia was tugging on his arm, trying to pull him toward the door, but the stone box on top of the dais pulled harder, drawing him in. Mateo climbed up the stairs leading to the dais to stand at the side of the box, its stone lid pushed askew. Inside was a body.

No, two bodies.

The one closest to Mateo had its arms crossed, a bronze shield over its chest that bore a symbol Mateo vaguely recognized as northern Trib. The feel of the metal rang sharp in his head, unnatural, but clean and honest, unlike the rest of this tomb—definitely fabricated with a god’s power, but it wasn’t… corrupted.

Based on the size and shape of the skeleton’s pelvis, it was male. The preservatives his clothes had been treated with had long gone sour, leaving rotted piles of fabric around him in the coffin, stuck between his ribs and spine.

The other skeleton… Mateo’s breath caught in his throat.

“Mateo!” Lia was pulling hard at him now. “Mateo, whatever is down here is coming.”

But Mateo couldn’t look away from the bones. They were wrong. Too large and too tall to be human, and yet Mateo couldn’t explain them as anything but human. There were human femurs and a pelvis, but the lower legs were elongated and warped, as if they’d been stretched and reformed to fit a monster mold. Claws jutted from the parchwolflike toes and feet, and the skull boasted a distinctly inhuman snout. The fingers, clasped across the chest, were broken, bits of bone and long claws littering the bottom of the box around the body. The skeleton was sitting slumped forward with a long, ugly sword skewered between its ribs, as if it had purposely fallen on the weapon, the hilt long rusted away. Mateo slid a hand into the coffin but couldn’t bring himself to touch it. Not without the proper equipment.

He stared at the bodies, the two skeletons practically entwined. Why would a shapeshifter king, a man who stole a thousand souls and reigned in terror until he faded away, give another person so prominent a place inside his tomb? A place of reverence. Respect. Love.

Regret?

All power required sacrifices.

“Lia, we were right. Patenga killed the person he loved most and that’s what changed him.” Mateo’s mouth was dry, full of five hundred years’ worth of rage. “Shapeshifters aren’t Basists who have gone too far. They’re… a combination of powers. A perversion that starts with murder. That’s why everything in here except the shield feels wrong. The shield was made with Basist magic, and the rest of it is corruption. Power stolen by a shapeshifter and twisted into submission.” He took in a shaky breath. “Patenga was a Devoted. But the first Warlord tried to pin all shapeshifting on Basists. She only needed one kind of magic gone, and she chose the one that wasn’t hers. Is that why she destroyed all the records, the histories, and the art? So no one would know what she sacrificed in order to stop shapeshifters coming back?”

Mateo looked up to ask Lia. “You’re a Devoted. What do you know about this?” But she wasn’t there, nothing but dusty effusions of light cluttering the air all around him. “Lia?”

Arms prickling, Mateo suddenly felt how very still it was inside the tomb.

Steel jabbed against Anwei’s throat, the scaled arm dragging her toward the open burial chamber. Jewels glinted in the beam of mirror light, Calsta smirking down from high above. The thin vial of gamtooth serum felt fragile, close to breaking in Anwei’s fist.

“You’re going to rot in prison, dirt witch.” The voice in her ear curdled with anticipation. “If you make it to prison. When Shale told me what you did with those explosives—”

Anwei tore the stopper from the vial, crushed the glass lip between her fingers, and stabbed the jagged edges into the creature’s arm. He hissed, its grip loosening long enough for Anwei to duck away, plunging one hand into her bag for the calistet.

The thing—no, the man?—swore, paint on his face smearing as he tried to wipe away the blood. He was large, his muscles bulging and his face shadowed by a hood with beads of glass sewn onto it like eyes.

The nothing had diminished enough that Anwei could smell the sour green of old palifruit, sweat, and the oily yellow of paint. The man pointed his knife at her as she drew out the calistet. There was a very thin line of nothing spiraling out of him, as if it were a wound almost healed. “Who are you?” she whispered.

“I’m…” He frowned, stumbling forward one step, his knife falling a few inches as he looked at the bits of glass embedded in his arm, the serum sticky on his skin. “I’m the director of this dig, and you have been stealing from it. Or at least, that’s what I’m going to be telling the magistrate once I’ve tied you up. You escaped last night, but—”

Something jumped down into the fallen floor with them. It ran straight at Anwei, and suddenly the nothing smell was back. Anwei threw herself out of the way, trying to understand. This man… the director… he was wearing a costume, his face painted just the way Anwei’s had been the night before when she’d been playing the shapeshifter. The new threat sprinted right at the costumed man, slamming a fist into his jaw.

It was Lia.

She spun past him, plucking the knife from his fingers to turn the weapon on its owner.

“Don’t kill him!” Anwei yelled, staggering toward them. “Are you the man who killed my brother? Show me your teeth!”

Lia fell back, holding the knife between her and the dig director as he put up his hands.

“I’m not a murderer.” He coughed, one of his hands snaking up to touch his mouth, but he couldn’t stop the words. Not with gamtooth serum from the shattered vial on his skin. “I took this job so I could steal the artifacts and sell them. I had to come up with a person to take the blame.”

“You got Shale to hire me. A thief.” Anwei let her hand holding the calistet packet fall to her side. “What was his part in all this?”

Even as the man—Director Van—backed toward the far wall, his mouth spilled open. “Shale wanted the sword. I caught him digging near the tomb to find a way in, and instead of turning him in, I came to an agreement with him. I promised to give him any sword I found in the burial chamber, so long as he found someone to take the blame for the rest of the valuables I took from the dig. Everything is so closely monitored and reported on the dig—there was no way to hide anything I found, so I had to find a way to make it look like someone else had stolen it. It was taking too long, so in the end Shale helped me dig a tunnel down to these lower rooms together so we could get artifacts out of the dig before the Warlord got here.”

“All the thefts were done by people dressed as ghosts after we dressed as ghosts at the governor’s ball.”

“Nobody even suspected me for a moment, except for those Montanne people, I guess.”

“You’re not a shapeshifter?” Lia hissed. “Mateo said they worried you were. But… you’re just dressed like…” She snorted. “What are you dressed as?”

All of Anwei’s limbs wilted. “It was you in the tomb last night, the voice and the wind and…” She touched her side where the wheal of red skin was raised from the crack of his whip. He must have planned to capture them, but she and Knox had gotten away. “You couldn’t get into the burial chamber, so you let us attempt it for you. Then, when it didn’t work, you tried to knock me out so you could blame me for everything you have been stealing?”

The director darted away from Lia’s knife, running to where the huge slabs of stone had fallen from above, propped up against the wall like a bridge. He climbed up to the upper room and disappeared behind the guttering sheet in the corner. A tunnel, he’d said. To the outside. Shale had helped him dig it.

A coat of fake scales and a hood with teeth and glass eyes, a tail trailing behind him. A costume to scare off any workers who interrupted his last bid to extract valuables from the dead shapeshifter’s tomb. Lia eased over to Anwei, her chest heaving. “Are you all right? Why are you here?”

Tears pricked in Anwei’s eyes. “I don’t—”

A liquid scream shattered the air, and Director Van stumbled out from behind the fabric to trip forward, taking the dirty sheet with him. Behind it there was a hole gouged into the stone, a passage filled with bags of jewels, painted pots, and gold.

Knox’s space at the back of Anwei’s head suddenly roared back to life, the frozen pain of it bending her forward. Anwei gasped, clutching her head in her hands.

“Anwei?” Lia’s hand was on her shoulder even as she raised the knife. Because someone was coming out from the darkness of the passage.

Knox was supposed to find Shale. And Shale was probably somewhere up there in the tunnel.

But it wasn’t Shale who came through.

It was a familiar outline, and he was holding a terrible sword.

Sᴇarch the FindNovel.net website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.