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The Arachessen could not read minds, not truly, but I didn’t need to see his thoughts. What use were his thoughts when I saw his heart?
The Sightmother told me then that it meant more to Acaeja that way. A single act can be made in impulse. It can be rash. It can be regretted. But it can never be rash to decide every day for one year to give your goddess your eyes, and mean it each time.
I had nothing to mourn. I had gained more than I had lost. This is what I would tell anyone who asked me. But secretly, in a part of myself I tried not to acknowledge, I missed being able to see it.
“You’d think that a child of your goddess would understand that the world looks awfully different depending on where you stand. Or maybe they took your eyes so you wouldn’t see that.”
his horns were… disconcerting. And the horns, I could see in the threads, were not the only part of him that had been tampered with, even if he did his best to hide the other darknesses.
“Is it really a sacrifice if it’s taken instead of offered?”
“You’re lucky,” he said, “that I have a soft spot for caged birds.”
What I offered them instead was, One day, the pain won’t matter anymore, and the power it grants you will matter immensely.
“But hey, maybe you’ll be different. You’re just his type, actually.” “His type?” Erekkus leaned forward and gave me a conspiratorial smirk. He held out a finger with each word. “Beautiful. Mysterious. Dangerous. And an obvious, clear-as-the-fucking-moon mistake.”
“I’m sorry. A woman alone in this world sometimes needs to perform to make men take her seriously.” Only a little true. Perform, or suppress. Rarely anything in the middle.
“Good to know that human kings have so much respect for life,” Atrius muttered to me, and I couldn’t help but let out a ragged laugh at that. “I’m sure vampire kings are very kind to their subjects.” His lips thinned. “Maybe kings are the problem,” he remarked.
There. I felt him. Not just my target—not just the stone, but him. Atrius. A presence so unusual I felt it from even this far.
“Atrius has an interesting moral code.”
“Well,” Erekkus said, “he’s like a cat. He doesn’t have friends. He just tolerates your presence.”
Atrius. The name was the first tangible thing that came to me.
“You might recall,” I said, “that I was an assassin for fifteen years.” Atrius stared blankly at me. Seconds passed. Then the bastard burst into laughter.
Places had souls. The Thorn Palace’s was ugly and covered in death. A place where thousands of threads were severed.
I stretched further as we reached the top of the stairs. It was far to sense, most auras distant and difficult to read. But Tarkan’s… he was easy. A shard of glass in a pile of feathers.
A suppressed smile tugged at the corners of Atrius’s mouth. Like a cat that was secretly hiding a canary in its teeth.
“Do you think I don’t see,” he said, voice low, “that the past is devouring you, too?”
Neither of us had to acknowledge it aloud. The foreboding.
There were no intersections in the threads now. Only one path forward. Inevitability. There was nothing more frightening than inevitability.
If I had been lucky, the wave of rage I’d felt in my final moments of consciousness would have been a symptom of my delirious state. If I had been lucky, I would have woken up the steadfast, calm Arachessen I had been trained to be. I was not lucky.
