“I heard things. People. But... no.”
Seraphina chewed on the inside of her cheek and thought hard before asking the next question.
“Did you even know there was a war?”
He let out a heavy breath. “No.”
She shook her head. “When you say you were isolated, lived in a room and never got out, does that mean you were in a different prison, Rune?”
He stayed silent. She thought he was thinking, trying to find his words, but he remained like that, and stubbornly so, for minutes on end.
“Rune!”
“It was home,” he sighed. “They treated me well.”
“They? Who’s they?”
“I don’t know, Seraphina.”
This was the second time he’d said her name, and it confirmed that he only used it when he was starting to feel frustrated.
“I don’t know, all right? There are many things I don’t know, as you’ve gathered already. You keep pushing for answers I don’t have. And if you keep doing it, if you keep insisting, it makes me dig deeper, look harder, and I find something to tell you in the end, I do, and it’s the truth, because I’d never lie to you, but I don’t know if it’s my truth.”
She was stunned. “That–”
“Makes no sense,” he groaned. “Sometimes I feel like I contain... more than one truth, more than one life, one identity. They contradict each other, and that drives me mad, so I try not to think too much. You make me think a lot.”
She pursed her lips and said nothing. If Rune had come from the enemy’s territory, if he’d been imprisoned somewhere, tortured, made to do things against his will, then it followed that his mental state would be volatile. It was possible he himself wasn’t aware of how much he’d been affected by what had happened to him. Seraphina knew a thing or two about that. Did she want to know everything there was to know about him? Yes. Was forcing him to relive his trauma a solution? Definitely not.
She wasn’t going to do to Rune what she hadn’t let others do to her. When Sisters Hedwiga and Magdalena had found her in a ditch, covered in mud and her own dried blood, her clothes torn to pieces, they’d taken her to Saint Vivia’s, and there, while the nuns bathed her and patched her up, the Mother Superior drilled her with questions. Who was she? Where did she come from? It should’ve been easy to answer, but the words had stuck in her throat, because her own identity, the life she’d had before, felt completely detached from the battered person she now was. It took her weeks to comprehend how Seraphina Bell, oncewhole, untouched, pretty, and perfect, and loved by Matteo, was... her. Still her.
The sisters had given her time. And tea, just in case. The kind of tea that would ensure her humiliation wouldn’t take in her womb. Briar had been patient. When she was ready to speak, she told them only what she could without breaking apart.
It had taken her two years of healing, training, and Briar watching over her and talking her off the ledge, making her stronger, until Seraphina had felt sane enough to bare her soul to her friend. And then, she’d left. Because she’d had to, but also because once Briar knew, it was hard to look her in the eye.
Seraphina had learned that as difficult as it was to tell someone the truth of how broken you were, it was a hundred times more difficult to talk, look at, and live with that person after.
She wasn’t going to do that to Rune.
“The atrocities the Harvester has committed,” she said. “It’s better that you kept to the woods and fields, and didn’t see any of it. War is bad as it is, but it’s even worse when it’s fought with unsanctioned relics. I think this is where Headmaster Wolff and the Order are wrong. When the Harvester brings all the relics he’s stolen and made into battle, the resistance keeps the most ancient and powerful relics in the strongroom, protected because they’re too sacred to be used. There’s no way we can win like that.”
“Why do you call him the Harvester?”
“His followers call him the High Harvester or the Harvest Lord. He’s also known as the High Weaver because he’s the most talented weaver in history. He was trained at Krähenstein. The Order calls him the Blasphemer. I told you he stole relics, and that increased his power and influence, but still, stolen relics would’ve never gotten him this far. Apex relics are rare, greater relics do mostly good, not evil, and the lesser relics won’t everstart a war, let alone win it. He makes his own. He farms them, harvests them. Hence the name.”
“He makes relics. How? You said the three conditions are...” He paused, trying to remember. “A willing sacrifice to save another’s life, a violent, public death, and a state of innocence.”
“They can be staged.”
Seraphina heard Rune swallow, unable to find words to express his shock. The horror he felt vibrated in the air, reaching across the cell, tendril-like, to wrap around her own throat. Or it could’ve been the freezing wisps blowing in through the window. She rubbed her neck.
“Farmed relics aren’t as powerful as true relics, but their advantage is that they can be made in significant quantities.”
“By staging sacrifices.”
“Yes. The Harvester isn’t the first to have tried, he’s just the first to have succeeded on this scale. Sometimes, farming will result in the creation of a greater relic, but usually, it will make lesser relics, which will be broken into shards to make lattices. And grade A lattices built to manipulate, maim, kill, are the most terrible weapons I’ve ever seen.”
Rune was silent, digesting the information. She didn’t feel like she had more to add. She was exhausted, and a little mad at herself for telling him all that. If he’d indeed been sheltered from it all, it was enough that he was terrified of the world as he’d seen it in the few days he’d starved on the streets. He didn’t have to know it was much more fucked up than that.
