The expression on the matriarch’s face was full of age and sorrow.
“And Iloveyou,” said Delphine. “I have always loved you, and look at what I still had to do.”
Love?Séverin hadn’t heard her say that to him in… in years.He couldn’t even mouth the word, it seemed to stick his lips together.
The matriarch removed her Babel Ring from the pillar, and the Mnemo screen showing Laila, Enrique, and Zofia went blank. And yet Séverin couldn’t unsee the sharp light of those lyre strings, or stop hearing the echo of the way Delphine had said the doctor thinksthe girl has the Lost Muses’ bloodlines.
As if she didn’t just know that Laila didn’t have that bloodline, but as if she already knew who did.
“Long ago, I made a promise to protect you,” she said. “To take care of you.”
Séverin wanted to spit in her face. “To take care of me?”
“Sometimes protection… sometimes love… it demands hard choices. Like the one I am asking of you now. I showed you this so that you would know, and that you might make your own choice… a luxury I myself did not have,” said Delphine. “The Lost Muses bloodline runs inyourveins, Séverin.”
Séverin opened his mouth, closed it. No words came to him, and all he could do was stare numbly at her.
“All these years, I have kept you safe from the people who would use it against you. Who would use you for their own gain. That’s why I had to keep you from the Order as much as I could. When we performed the inheritance test, your blood could have made those Forged objects snap in half. I had to hide you from yourself.” Delphine swallowed hard, fidgeting with her Babel Ring. When she spoke, her voice was ragged with grief. “But I tried to help as much as I could. When I saw how your first caretaker treated you, I was the one who gave Tristan aconite flowers. I thought Clothilde would mother you, but she was greedy, and the moment I found out, I had you removed from their care. I was your first investorin L’Eden. I fought for you from the sidelines. I mourned living without you every day.”
Small things clicked in Séverin’s head, but it was like a reed caught up in a river—there was simply not enough traction to let it stand and to wonder.Hehad the bloodline. He didn’t have the space in his mind to process what that meant, or rather, what it failed to mean. Inheriting his House was a dream that had dried up in his soul, replaced with a desire that spanned eternity: a dream of godhood, the memory of invincibility that he had only felt through the Fallen House. All this time, he thought he had failed everyone by failing to findThe Divine Lyrics, but the secret to its power lay in his very veins. It made him feel… absolved.
Around them, the leviathan began to list from side to side again. The sound of metal breaking and churning screeched through the silence. The leviathan was untethering. Soon, it would be fully beneath the lake, its belly full of water.
“You need to make a choice, Séverin,” said Delphine quickly. “Escape or death.” For a moment, he could say nothing, but then Delphine spoke again, and it was as if she’d peered inside his head. “You make the choice that you can live with. You do not have to like it.”
She raised a knife and cut through his bindings. His hands were free, and the choice was his.
Séverin clung to Delphine’s words in a way he had not done since he was a child. He glanced beside him to the sleeping Hypnos, and then to the silver ceiling where Laila stood with her head bowed, Enrique lay limply on his side, and Zofia stared numbly at the ice, tears streaking her cheeks. He wanted to protect them. He wanted to make impossible amends. He wanted to be a god.
What he had not considered was how a god acted, and this washis first taste—the bitter calculus of decision. Gods made choices. Gods burned cities and spared a child. Gods put gold in the palms of the wicked and left that miserable currency of hope in the hearts of the good. He could spare three and sacrifice one, and perhaps—by number alone—it held its own bloody logic. Laila would die if the lyre was played. Laila would die if the lyre was not played.
He closed his eyes.
When he breathed, he did not catch that scent of the leviathan’s metal bones or the tang of raspberry-cherry jam. His lungs filled withher. Roses and sugar, the burnished silk of her skin, the force of her smile… powerful enough to alter the course of deep-rooted dreams.
He opened his eyes, reached into his pocket, and drew out Tristan’s knife. The blade shimmering with the muted glitter of Goliath’s venom. As he turned it, the scar on his palm gleamed. Even in the dark, he could make out the faint network of his veins, and the outline of the blood running within it.
You’re only human, Séverin.
Therein lay the irony.
He didn’t have to be.
To be a god, Séverin had to divorce himself from all that made him human. All his regret and, even, all his love. Sometimes to love meant to hurt. And he would be a loving god. Séverin looked up to the matriarch and felt as if that numbing ice had once more wrapped around his heart.
“I’ve made my choice.”
34
ENRIQUE
Enrique’s ear—or what had been his ear—throbbed with pain. He breathed slowly through his nose, trying to ignore the wet slick of blood dripping down his neck and focusing, instead, on the slender moon of the ice grotto. With every passing second, it thinned. Ten minutes had nearly passed, and still Ruslan kept turning the knife. Beneath them, the packed ice floor of the grotto began to splinter. Threads of water wept from the cracks. Enrique tried to speak, but the rough gag in his mouth held fast. Every part of him screamed that this was the end. He would die here, in this cold place that smelled of salt and metal, not at all like the sunshine-steeped earth of the Philippines.
And it was all his fault.
How fitting, he thought through the fog of pain, that Ruslan would take his ear. It was his own craving to be listened to that made him share the very information that damned them all. Ruslan had seen the weakness inside him and sharpened it to aweapon. Over and over, he replayed what Ruslan had said when he dragged them to the grotto. He’d secured the gag, humming to himself. And then he’d gripped Enrique’s face, pressing their foreheads together.
“Thank you, my friend, for trusting me,” Ruslan had said. “You know, I’ve always thought that I was meant to findThe Divine Lyrics… but I now believe I needed you. And I understand with my whole heart that what I’m doing seems cruel… but I think you understand. It’s all in service to the knowledge, is it not?”
