Enrique Mercado-Lopez knew many things.
He knew about history and languages, myths and legends. He knew how to kiss well, eat well, and dance well, and though he was uncertain about many situations at the moment, there was one thing he knew without a shadow of a doubt: This was not his place.
And he was not the only one who knew it.
A few paces behind him, Zofia and Hypnos walked in weighted silence. They expected him to know what to do next. They expected him to lead, to give commands, to plan the next steps… but that wasn’t Enrique.
You wouldn’t belong, an old voice whispered in his skull.Know your place.
His place.
Enrique could never seem to figure it out. When he was a child, he remembered trying out for the school theatre. All night, he’d practiced the hero’s lines. He had propped up his toys on chairs as his future audience. He had bothered his mother until, exasperated, shegave up and helped him practice his lines by reading the script of the female costar. But on the day of the auditions, the nun running the play had stopped him after he said two sentences.
“Anak.” She laughed. “You don’t want to be the hero! Far too much work and far too many lines. And the front of the stage? It’s a place of terror, trust me… you don’t belong there. But don’t worry, I have a special role for you!”
The special role ended up being a tree.
His mother had been very proud though, and Enrique had reasoned that trees were symbolically quite important, and so perhaps he could be the hero next time.
But further attempts ended the same way. Enrique entered writing contests, only to find that his opinions had not found an audience. He would try out for debate contests, and if they didn’t dismiss his ideas outright, they would take one look at his face, the Spanish features blending with his Visayan heritage, and in the end, all the responses were the same:
You don’t belong.
When Enrique had found work as Séverin’s historian, it was the first time he had dared to believe otherwise. He thought he’d found his place. Séverin was the first to believe in him, to encourage him… to offer friendship. With Séverin, his ideas found root and his scholarship soared to the extent that even the Ilustrados and their nationalist groups whose ideas could one day reshape his country, had let him in, and though he was nothing more than a member on the fringes writing his historical articles, it was more than he had ever been given… and it made him hope for more.
A fool’s illusion, in the end.
Séverin had taken his dreams, and used them against him. He had promised that Enrique would always be heard, and then silenced him. He had taken their friendship and bent it to his needsuntil it broke, and Ruslan had picked up the pieces and fashioned it into a weapon.
All of which had left Enrique here: utterly lost in every way, and almost certainly not in the right place.
Enrique reached up, gingerly touching the bandage covering his lost ear. He winced. Since they had left the Sleeping Palace, he had tried not to look at himself, but his reflection in the lagoons of Venice found him anyway. He looked off balance.Marked, even. Before, when he was in the wrong place, at least he could hide. But his cut-off ear was a declaration:I do not belong. See?
Enrique shoved the thought aside. He couldn’t afford to lose himself in pity.
“Come on…think.”
He looked around the cemetery, frowning. The length of the Isola di San Michele cemetery was little more than five hundred meters, and by now they’d circled the perimeter twice. This was the third time they were walking down this path lined with cypress trees. Just ahead, the path would curve into a row of statues of the archangels, who would turn their Forged heads to watch them pass. On the cemetery plots, the granite tombstones stood tall and elaborately curved, many of them crowned with wide crosses draped in Forged roses that would never lose their scent or shine, while the mausoleums bore little decoration on their exterior, hardly anything that would put Enrique in mind of a god with either no head or multiple heads.
“On the island of the dead, lies the god with not one head,” recited Enrique, turning the words over in his head, “…show the sum of what you see, and this will lead you straight to me.”
“Did you say something?” asked Hypnos.
“Me? No,” said Enrique quickly. “I’m just, er, reviewing the matriarch’s riddle for clues… again.”
“You still said something,” pointed out Zofia.
“Yes, well,” said Enrique. He could feel his face start to turn red. “The interpretation affects what it is we’re looking for and such. It’s quite a vague sentence.”
“I thought we are looking for a god with ‘not one head,’” said Zofia, raising an eyebrow. “That sounds specific.”
“It still leaves a spectrum of depictions!” said Enrique. “For example, there’s the Chinese deity Xingtian who kept fighting even though he’d been decapitated. And then the Hindu celestial beings Rahu and Ketu—also decapitated—and then there are the deities who havemorethan one head, so which is it? It seems unlikely that we would find gods of eastern religions on a tombstone in Venice, so there must be something else… something hidden, even…”
Hypnos cleared his throat. “Let our handsome historian work, Phoenix,” he said. “I’m sure he will dazzle us soon with his findings.”
The patriarch of House Nyx grinned. For a moment, Enrique was tempted to return it. There was something intoxicating and dreamlike about Hypnos’s beauty and verve, the way it lulled one to imagine impossibilities within reach. Only now, Enrique felt the force of it like a dream that had slipped past his fingers.
“Thank you,” said Enrique stiffly, turning from them both.
