The Songbird & the Heart of Stone (Crowns of Nyaxia, #3)

by Carissa Broadbent

Gods can smell fate upon a soul. And yours…” He lowered his lashes, drawing in the inhale of a summer breeze. “Yours smelled of revelation. I can still sense it there, beneath the stench of rot. One day, it will be gone, but that day has not yet come.”

But one couldn’t expect a god to love you like a mortal did. A greater gift, still, to have that love at all. And Atroxus’s, I knew, was very much conditional.

“Besides, perhaps you’re more useful here. There might be important guarding work that needs doing. Peasants that need slaughtering. Women that need beating. Royal rings that need kissing. That sort of thing.” Women that need beating. He cast just the quickest glance my way at that, tossing me a leather pack. I caught it. It took me a moment to realize that line had been referring to me. The entire string of insults, in fact, had been delivered so smoothly that it took a few seconds for them to sink in.

The most powerful of the Shadow-born were known to use their powers of compulsion to create bonds of absolute blood loyalty among their key followers. It was difficult and rare, but Raoul was certainly capable of it.

“Body, Breath, Psyche, Secrets, and Soul. To resurrect anyone else, it’s enough to merely bring together representations of each of the five elements of a mortal being. But we aren’t talking about a mortal.”

“I told you all,” he growled, “to stay on the damned path.” And then we plunged into oblivion.

“Your god doesn’t love you half as much as you think he does,” he muttered. “You burned yourself to the bone. It’s beyond me why Atroxus still allows you to use his magic, but be careful of the price you pay for it.”

“Shadowborn magic can bring the dead back to life,” Asar said. “It’s more than deceit and secrets.” I slammed my mind shut, hard. I’d sensed Asar’s presence lingering, but I’d misattributed it to the aftereffects of his magic. Stupid mistake. “Don’t do that,” I grumbled.

“The Sanctum of Body is the level of decay. It’s where the dead shed their physical forms. So, yes.”

“I told you that everyone in Morthryn deserves to be here. Her affinity to Atroxus gave her forty years of life she didn’t deserve in the hopes that she might be useful one day. Lucky for her, she was.” Forty years? Chandra looked to be in her sixties. So she had committed her crimes when she was in her twenties?

The third guardian. The supposedly dead guardian. The bird let out a terrible, wretched cry, and dove for us.

Dragging the magic to the surface of my skin was slow and painful, and as I squinted against the fire, the agonizing reward of the fresh burns on my arms had tears collecting in my eyes.

I thought I heard a voice in my head whisper, It was not always this way.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Elias muttered. “What are you going to do, slap him awake?” Spoken like someone who didn’t know how good I was at slapping people awake. Couldn’t even count the number of times I’d done it on Raihn. Blessed hands. Asar’s eyes snapped open. Immediately, his face pinched into a scowl. He sat bolt upright. “What were you about to do?” I lowered my hand. “Nothing.”

Gods. It hit me all over again that this had just been the first Sanctum. The first of five.

The parties put even vampire debauchery to shame, which was saying something. Not that I ever indulged. No one wanted to make a cuckhold of the King of the White Pantheon.

She looked at him like he was a question answered. He looked at her like she was the only one worth asking.

Two souls saved didn’t make up for the ones I had damned. The mission I was on now just might.

“Of course not,” he said. “You are mine forever.” He put down the apricot and lowered his mouth to mine, his lips still damp with another mortal pleasure.

I raised my open palm just as Luce jabbed him hard with her nose. Asar’s eyes opened just before my hand made contact with his face. It was too late to stop. “Shit,” I squeaked. “Sorry!” “Fuck,” he groaned. It was a bit satisfying to hear Asar curse.

It felt indecent to be staring at the Wraith Warden’s feet. I was in a bathtub with the Wraith Warden.

He was, I had to admit, very pretty, even by vampire standards. No, more than pretty. His features begged to be immortalized in stone or paint. Before the scars, he must have caught plenty of attention.

“The potion washes away death,” Asar corrected. “The bathtub is just a bathtub.”

You’re a Shadowborn. Use the gifts you’re made for instead of flaying yourself for the ones you’re not.” You’re a Shadowborn.

“No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m a Dawndrinker. I’m⁠—” “You are a vampire, Iliae. Not just a vampire, but one created by one of the most powerful bloodlines in Obitraes. Call yourself whatever you want, but your stubbornness isn’t worth your life.” “Stubbornness?”

“I wield the magic of Atroxus. Not Nyaxia. I have my faith, and I have the love of my god. That’s all I need.”

His thumb traced the scar on the swell of my palm. I hated that they now extended to my hands, where my sleeves could no longer cover them. “Right. Looks like love,” he muttered bitterly.

But this, with Asar, was different. It felt more like my blood was answering a mutual call rather than bowing in subservience.

“I began to hear things that no one else did,” he said quietly. “Cries that needed answering. The world is built atop the invisible, abandoned souls. They needed someone.” They needed someone.

Asar, I now understood, was like me. Not because he was related to my maker, or because he wielded a magic that spoke so innately to mine. But because he, too, was a healer.

“Do you not understand what you are? Do you not understand why we have this life at all? You are a chosen one of the sun. He chose you.”

She knew she had given her god her soul; it wasn’t until now that she realized she one day would be expected to give him her body, too.

All those people, stuck between life and death, forever? My friend, stuck there, forever? Asar’s nonanswer said all it needed to.

To Chandra, I played the role I was born for: bright, reassuring optimist, immune to all doubt. But Asar, I knew, felt my nagging unease. He squeezed once, so quick I questioned if I’d imagined it.

“A perfect corpse is still not living until it breathes, or its heart beats, or it changes with time. That’s Breath. The nature of being alive.

“I was trying to decide why this felt so familiar,” I said. “And then I realized, this is what it feels like to be Turned. You’re stuck between layers as the entire world changes. And you’re in the middle of it all, watching it happen, and yet none of it can touch you.”

A blast of darkness erupted around me, consuming my vision. The souleater let out a high-pitched wail.

The woman emerged from the darkness like she was rising from beneath the depths of an endless sea. “I knew you’d come back,” she crooned. “That’s what I always loved about you. You were always so very, very loyal.”

Asar had been right that there had been lots of wraiths here. Had been. They covered the floor like withered leaves in winter. Their bodies, or what remained of them, bled into the air like the smoldering remains of a fire. Most were motionless. A few still twitched, as if trying to drag themselves back to whatever scraps of life they’d once had.

“Ah.” Her lips brushed the crest of my ear. “He likes you. Even if he doesn’t know it yet. But don’t be fooled. He will ruin you one day, too.”

“She is very interesting. I see why you enjoy her. Another attractive curiosity. But she only knows how to love things she can fix, and there is no fixing you, is there?”

A girl who can only love broken things, and a boy so broken he can only love what he cannot have. A perfect match.”

Asar could not lie to a guardian. This was a being that saw truth.

For millennia, we have stood, it said. We grow weak. The inevitable bears down upon us. Soon, our bones will collapse beneath it, to be buried beneath the million other damned innocents whose fates balance upon your shoulders. Tell us, do you still wish to cure the incurable? Asar’s answer was immediate. “Yes,” he whispered. The panther lowered its chin. Very well.

I smell fate upon you, its voice echoed. But I also smell hunger.

“Is that what you’re dragging us to fucking hell for? For her? I should have known. There was never any quest from Nyaxia, was there? There was just you, the bastard spare prince that no one wanted, and the dead woman you can’t just let⁠—”

Asar’s left eye flashed with a violent burst of light. I didn’t even see him move. One minute, darkness enveloped him. The next, Elias went flying against the wall. “Do. Not. Touch. Her.” Unlike Elias, Asar didn’t growl, didn’t yell. His words were clear. Four precise swipes of the blade. “It isn’t her fault,” he hissed, “that you can’t handle witnessing the results of your own actions.”

“Asar Voltari, Wraith Warden, Prince of the Shadowborn, caretaker of Morthryn, I can read you like a gods-damned book,” I said.

I stared longer than I should have—not at the scars, but at the flesh beneath them. Asar caught my eye and his mouth flattened. He pushed his hands quickly into the blood, hiding his bare skin. I wanted to correct him—I wasn’t looking at the scars, I was looking at you—but the words died awkwardly in my throat.

“I help them. When I can.” “Help them?” “Sometimes, I’m able to lead them through the Sanctum back to their intended path. Help them on to the underworld.”