SÉVERIN
When Séverin turned eleven, Envy and Clotilde gave them up, and Tristan and Séverin moved into the home of their fourth father: Gluttony.
Gluttony was Séverin’s favorite father. Gluttony made funny faces and told funnier stories. Gluttony discarded garments after one day of wearing them. He threw cake with mild imperfections onto the streets. Jewels in storefronts disappeared almost as fast as he smiled. Gluttony had nothing to his name but a dusty, aristocratic title and some fallow land in the countryside. But this did not bother him.
“Aristocracy is just a fancy word for thievery, my dear wallets. I am simply embodying what I was innately born with, you see?”
He did not call Séverin and Tristan by name because he preferred to call children as he saw them. But names or no, he fed them regularly, found them tutors and even a Forging affinity specialist for Tristan. Tristan loved Gluttony, for he read him poetry at night and promised that he could reshape the world as he saw fit. Séverin loved Gluttony because he stoked a hunger within him.
The tutors may have fed him languages and history, but Gluttony taught him diction and how to recognize the accent of wealth. He taught him how to level a man with a turn of phrase, how to order dishes and send them back. He taught him about terroir in wine and the godliness of a dish that satisfied all the senses.
“It’s not just the fat, acidity, and salt, my dear wallet. It’s about devouring it with your eyes, licking flavors with your sight. And you must never underestimate the importance of presentation.”
He taught him how to eat and how to hunger for things out of reach and how to steal without ever looking like you lack for something. He taught him all his tricks and all he knew until the day he took his nightly fifty-year-old aged tawny port with a dash of rat poison. At his funeral, Séverin stole a bottle of champagne from Gluttony’s favorite restaurant and left it on his grave.
Of all his fathers, he thought of Gluttony the most.
“Half of winning, my dear wallet, is simply looking victorious.”
SÉVERIN, ENRIQUE, ANDzofia stood before the train doors. Outside the windows lay true night. Not the hesitant midnight of Paris, where gas lamps and trapped steam smudged the stars and threw the city into eternal dusk. Séverin could smell the countryside. Sweet grass and loam, the spring season too young to melt winter out of the air.
Beside Séverin, Enrique touched his false mustache.
“Am I pretty?” asked Enrique, plucking at his fake beard and patting his hands over his jowls, wrinkles, and age spots. “Be honest.”
“‘Pretty’ is a stretch. Let’s call you ‘striking.’ Or ‘impossible to look away from.’”
“Oooh. Like the sun?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of a train wreck.”
Enrique let out a woundedhmpf.
After two years and countless acquisitions, Séverin knew how his team wore their fear. Enrique wore an armor of ready jokes. Zofia wore hers with mechanical calm, her eyes roving down the train compartment one last time, probably looking for something to count. In the silence, he thought he could see all their wants stretched out and warping the air.
Three days.
Three days and they would find and secure the Horus Eye. With it, Hypnos could protect the Babel Fragment’s location—maybe even find House Kore’s missing Ring—and his inheritance would be restored. Around him, lantern light flashed against the train’s stained-glass panes, turning it a shade of molten gold. Séverin’s scar twitched. He blinked, and the image of the golden honeybee found in the dead courier’s mouth itched at the back of his thoughts.
A loud knock echoed through the compartment door. His cue to leave. Séverin touched his hat, not looking at them as he spoke.
“After midnight,” he said.
The two of them split, heading for different doors and different carriages. Their wants cast out in front of them, large as shadows.
HE KNEW HE WAS NEARINGHouse Kore when the road changed.
His father had brought him here when he was seven years old… back then, Tante Delphine—as he had known the House Kore matriarch—had taken him horseback riding. “He’s like a son to me!” she’d said. “Of course I shall teach him how to ride.” She’d held him close, his spine to her chest, her laugh in his ear. “Next summer, we’ll practice jumping. How does that sound?”
But there was no next summer. There was nothing after the day she administered the inheritance test and dropped his hands as if he were rotten fruit.
“Tante?” he’d tried, only for her to shudder.
“You may not call me that. Not anymore.”
Séverin quickly shoved down the memory. It belonged to another life.
Ahead, the road split into five lanes that looked like rivers. One lane was polished hematite that looked like a ripple of silver. One lane glowed red and looked like twisted candlelight. The other, a pale blue, looked like a sky scraped of clouds. Beside it, a lane of glass appeared dimpled as if invisible rain kept denting its surface. And last, a lane of smoke. Beyond the five lanes disguised as rivers, fog and mist stretched or pinched into fantastical shapes—three-headed dogs yawning and baring translucent teeth, gigantic hands scraping misty nails down the mountain, women wearing ragged tunics, folding in half as they wept and wept and wept. Beyond that… well. Séverin could hear the music. The laughter.
