He was crying again. That enraged her.
“Stop!” Seraphina yelled.
That only spurred him on, and he started repeating “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” like a mantra.
“Stop! Stop saying you’re sorry!”
He cried, she yelled, it was all “sorry” and “stop”, until she heard him snatch the second dagger she’d left on the table, and then he was screaming like she’d screamed before.
Seraphina scrambled down, her cloak snagged on something, and she tumbled to the floor. Rune was wailing like someone was cutting him, and she crawled toward him on her hands and knees, and then he was reaching for her, and she couldn’t seewhat was going on because she was blind, because he had been given her eyes!
Her eyes, as blue as the clear summer sky reflected in the stillness of the sea!
Rune grabbed her by the wrist and pushed something into her hand. It was dripping, clammy... It wasn’t just one thing, there were two... Round, squishy... They were her eyes.
He’d carved his eyes – her eyes – out with her dagger, and he was giving them back to her.
Seraphina screamed.
Rune folded within himself, covering his empty, bloody eye sockets with his hands.
And Seraphina didn’t know... couldn’t... She was suffocating.
She’d always... She’d told herself, kept telling herself that no matter what, she’d always...
She sheathed one dagger, then the other, which she found discarded on the floor. They were both dripping with blood. She pushed herself to her feet, backed away, slammed her hip into the table. She reached for the walking stick, but her hand was shaking so hard, her fingers soiled with blood, that it slipped from her grip and rolled across the floor. She didn’t pick it up, she stepped over it, around Rune’s hunched body and toward the door.
There was no going back. She had to run.
But Seraphina would always choose... She’d promised...
It wouldn’t change them, they would survive this.
It all fell apart. With every step she took away from him, another promise she’d made peeled off of her soul, and another, and another.
Seraphina ran.
Epilogue
He crawled to the window and grabbed the ledge but couldn’t pull himself up. His fingers were slick with blood, they slipped on the stone, and he collapsed back on the floor, a heap of mangled flesh that should have never moved, breathed, or pretended to have a soul. Where tears had run down his face, now trails of dark blood coagulated. He’d hoped the pain in his skull would knock him unconscious, but it was subsiding instead. With the tips of his fingers, he touched the tatters of skin and muscle around his eye sockets. He hadn’t been gentle when he’d pried his – her – eyeballs out, yet it didn’t matter. The wounds were healing already.
What was he made of? Because the parts coming from dead people made sense only up to a certain point. Nothing else had been written in the ledger, no mention of revolutionary science, obscure alchemical processes, or use of relics. The ledger was a collection of entries that marked the beginning and end of each experiment, what had worked and what had failed, with dates attached, and lists of bones, organs, hulks of flesh and where they came from, in an attempt to determine what skills the revenant would have.
Revenant. That was what he was.
It came from Old French, from the present participle of the verb “revenir”. It meant to come back. To return. The root was ancient, coming from Latin – “revenire”. And Rune knew that because he knew everything the people he was made of had known.
Did this mean that they lived inside him now? That they were gone, dead, and then they came back through him, a sliver of their consciousness forced to haunt an organ, a limb, and spin fragments of memories in a loop?
Rune sunk his hands into his hair and pulled at the roots as he dug the heels of his palms into his eye sockets. He let out a guttural wail.
He’d ruined Seraphina. She thought she’d been destroyed by the men she was hunting, but Rune had destroyed her better. He’d kissed her with the lips of a criminal, touched her with the hands of her dead lover, and looked at her through her own eyes that he’d stolen from her.
He’d given them back. It had been the only thing he could do for her in the moment – maim himself to return what was rightfully hers.
He heard footsteps approaching. He kept his face covered as he rocked back and forth and breathed heavily. Light boots clicked on stone, and he sensed that the one wearing them walked with grace, nimble on their feet, though he could hear a slight hesitation, a drag, as if they were injured and recovering. This was not a soldier, this was a female.
“We must go,” she said. “Before someone finds you.”
