“It won’t kill you.”
“How do you know that?” I probe.
“You don’t think you were the only person your mother shared the details of her research with, do you?” he says softly, almost sadly.
I’m frozen in place. Silenced by my surprise. “She knows something. What did she tell you?”
“More than you give her or me credit for.” He chuckles softly. “I was married to her. You don’t really think I could be oblivious to the woman I spent my hours and days with? You don’t think that I—as a student of Etherlight—wouldn’t be fascinated by her theories?” His face has a genuine but sad smile. “And we both knew, the moment you were attacked and became Valor Reborn, you’d need two champions—one within the system, and one on the outside.”
I swallow hard. My throat has gone dry. “You and Mum…”
“We might have had our differences and troubles, but you, Isola, are the one thing we have always been able to agree upon.”
“All these years…you were both looking out for me?”
“All these years,” he repeats in a way that leaves no room for doubt.
“Why would you keep me in the dark?” I whisper.
“You were just a child, Isola. We told you what we could as we could, guiding you in our own ways.” Father saying to follow the vicar but never pressuring me to really take the Creed’s teachings seriously, despite him rising through their ranks. Mother educating me about her research in secret to ensure I knew the truths of our world… Suddenly, all the random points in my life align, drawing a straight line to this moment.
So many things are pulling into clarity. But there’s one thing still missing.
“I know we probably don’t have much longer, but there’s one thing I need to know, Father. Even if you can’t get me one, whatarethe tinctures?” Somehow, I feel like if I know that, then everything else will fall into place. And the way he seems to tense at the mere question tells me I’m right. “It’s my life at risk, too, and I’m not a child anymore. I need to know what’s going on if I’m going to keep myself or anyone else safe.”
“No…you’re not a child anymore.” There’s a wistfulness to his sigh, as though he’s imagining me still as the girl sitting on his lap, fiddling with the gears of the crossbows he’s working on. “The vicar intends to take your power for himself once it has fully matured.”
Like I’m some kind of incubator. I grimace. “Is that even possible?”
“He’s determined to find out. He believes he was the one destined to be Valor Reborn, and you were a…mistake.” There’s a flash of an anger in his eyes that I’ve never associated with my usually soft-spoken and level-headed father.
“What makes him think he could, though?” I keep rounding back to that question. “Even if I am a ‘mistake,’ how could he take whatever power made my eyes gold and allows me to draw on the Font without a sigil?”
“Your scar,” he says solemnly.
“What about it?” I press my hand against my chest.
“I’m not sure how it healed… But have you ever really looked at it?”
Looked at it? I can’t escape it a second of my life. “Sure. Gnarled. Twisted. Spiderwebbed. Like I’m some kind of clay doll that cracked. Ugly—”
“Don’t look at it with the eyes of society and their narrow ideas of beauty. Look at it objectively, Isola.”
I frown, and my brows knit. What’s he trying to get me to see? “Father, I know your instinct has always been to teach me through questions and probing, but now isn’t the time for it.”
“It’s a sigil.”
I inhale sharply and straighten. “A sigil… That’s impossible.” Now that I think carefully, it could look like one…
“It’s one we’ve never seen before. Not even I know what it does. My only theory is that the Etherlight you summoned was so powerful that it scorched the sigil into your flesh.”
“And the vicar knows this.” It was his curates who patched me up, after all. They would’ve seen the jagged outlines of what transformed into my scar. A sigil wrought in blood—my blood.
“I’ve dedicated my life to trying to figure out what, exactly, it does. I’ve tried to stall Vicar Darius and throw him off course, but he has so many resources. There is only so much I can do, Isola. I might be the master artificer, but there are others who are good. Maybe not as good as me, but good enough to tell the vicar if they realized I was being intentionally obtuse.” He sighs heavily.
Is that… Is that why he worked so hard to become the best artificer in Vinguard and place himself right next to the vicar as a high curate?
I throw my arms around him again, hugging him tightly. Father lets out a soft, surprisedoomphbut doesn’t say anything more. He merely embraces me just as tight.
