“The celebration is held in a place that contains the map to the temple beneath Poveglia,” said Ruslan, speaking quickly.
Slowly, Séverin lowered the knife. He felt the hot slide of blood down his throat. In his other hand, the lyre seemed to hum.
Ruslan smiled. His golden hand caught the light. “We must celebrate, for one last night, what it means to be mortal. It will be a little souvenir we can take with us when we become gods.”
PART II
12
SÉVERIN
When Séverin touched the lyre, he heard impossible things. He heard his soul stirring sleepily under his bones. He heard stars creaking overhead.
But he could not hearher, the voice of the woman he had not been allowed to call “mother.”Hervoice alone meant all hope was not lost.
He stared at his hands. They looked raw and chafed from hours spent gliding his fingers over the instrument, careful to press hard enough that he could hear the dim pulse of the universe in his skull, but not so hard that he bled.
“Where are you?” he asked. “Speak to me.”
He had been begging the lyre for a sign for two days straight. Ever since he had returned from the Bridge of Sighs, and Ruslan had finally begun preparations for Poveglia: explosives and goggles, scraps of research and plans to fetch a mind Forged mask. Séverin should have been pleased with the progress, but instead, his thoughts kept returning to the empty Bridge of Sighs.
They had left him. He had fallen too far in their eyes.
He did not blame them.
Enrique, Hypnos, Zofia… Laila. He was broken. In the new cracks of himself, he thought he could hear the lyre whispering to him. Sometimes, the voice was dark and sensuous. Other times, it was a voice of caution. He felt split and ragged, and he wondered if this was how Tristan had felt all those years. As if he were just pushing back the tide of something far worse that always lurked within him. Maybe Séverin was the same. Maybe there was some inexorablewrongnessabout him that drove away all the people he loved, no matter what he did.
His friends had offered grace and kindness, and he had repaid them with cruelty and sabotage. He told himself that what he was pursuing would excuse any pain, but that was false. He had pursued his plans without once letting in his friends, and in the end, he would have the power he sought. But at what cost?
Séverin thought of the myth of King Midas, whose wish for gold had given him a godlike touch. His food turned to gold. Then his drink. Eventually, his daughter. In the end, when he had washed his curse into a stream and sprouted the ears of a donkey, his reflection revealed what he really was: an unequivocal jackass.
Séverin knew how the old king must have felt. All that power, and still—he’d ended up alone.
Outside Séverin’s chamber door came the shuffle of boots and muffled voices. Though there were no windows in his room, he knew the hour had grown late. Soon, Eva would fetch him.
He couldn’t make himself move. For a moment, he toyed with smashing the lyre against the wall, but his hands stilled. Was the instrument even a gift of the gods… or was it a Midas curse, doomed to destroy him?
“I am begging you,” he whispered to the instrument. “Give me asign. Show me this power is real. Show me I’m on the right path… speak to me.”
For the hundredth time that day, Séverin dragged his thumb down the shining string. He winced.
One last time, he told himself.
At the back of his skull came the dim, warning pulse of the universe.Stop now, it said.Stop. Séverin pushed harder. In the Sleeping Palace, he had merely cut his hand and smeared the blood on the strings. That mere vibration of the strings had been enough to feel the divine wisp through him.
Now…
Now it was something else.
He felt the string cutting into his flesh. His skull throbbed. The music of the lyre built inside him, hungry for release. It was not a music of this world. It was the moan of falling stars and the sonorous yearning of tree roots, the exhale of the sea before it rose up to swallow a village whole—
Séverin.
His thumb stilled on the lyre. Its frantic music went silent. It was as if he had reached the threshold of something, because here, finally, he heard the voice he craved.
He had first heard his mother’s voice after he confronted Ruslan and clutched the lyre to him in the night. She had said something to him, something that conjured light in his thoughts, something that gave him hope. He had been starting to think he had imagined it.
Habibi… listen… listen to me.
