Sikras grinned an eerie grin. “I have countless safeguards in place. Time-released spells that sustain him when I’m sleeping or slip into brief states of unconsciousness, but ... one day Dionus will win. It’s inevitable. That bastard better hope it’s only because I died too, lest he wants me desecrating his temples across Siaphara.”
Helspira frowned as she poked small holes in her scarf with the tips of her already-growing claws. Ben’s admission churned within her mind. She writhed at the thought of his extended misery. Hypocritical, given that if she went through with the banneret’s plan, she might be responsible for his ultimate demise, but after his confession, she questioned how much he wished to continue living.
Still, he didn’t deserve to be duped into death. He deserved a peaceful passing, not a horrified final moment of realization that he had been tricked should anything go wrong with Vessik’s assassination. But the people of Nyllmas deserved something too—safety.
Choosing one life over the whole of a kingdom, how did Sikras make it look so easy? Helspira bunched the scarf’s fabric into her fist and bit her bottom lip. “Can I ask you something?”
“Always.”
“Everyone keeps saying you could’ve ended all this so easily. And, pardon my saying, but you chose four years of suffering for an entire kingdom instead. I know you love Ben. I know you love your wife, and there’s comfort in her continued existence—undead or otherwise—but ... how did you make that choice so easily? How did you know it was the right thing?”
A rare flicker of solemnity drove the whimsy from Sikras’s face. “I don’t know if there’s a ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ But I do know ability is not synonymous with responsibility.”
The eerie sincerity in his words sent a ripple of discomfort through her. “You could’ve saved thousands of people,” she said more shakily than she would have liked.
“By sacrificing the few people I care about.”
“But your entire kingdom needed you.”
Calm and collected, Sikras reclined on his palms. “You don’t have to tell me how you survived Chthonia.”
Helspira balked, head flinching backward. “Excuse me?”
“I know how you made yourself useful to your oppressors. Chthonia is lawless, predominantly lacking in both ethics and morals. Uninvited touch makes you uneasy. Dancing was once forcefully performative. I can put two and two together.”
The memories hit her like the hooves of an angry horse. Helspira gripped her scarf until her fingers tingled, voice cracking. “Wh—what does that have to do with anything?”
“You were a child, Hels. And even if you weren’t, just because youcoulddo those things”—anger rose in his voice, but he tempered it with a slow, patient exhale—“just because you were physically capable, and you thought they were necessary to your survival, your parents’ survival, doesn’t mean they should’ve been your responsibility. Life is supposed to be made up of choices not obligations.”
Her bottom lip trembled. A cold wind blew the fragrant scent of midnight lavender their way, but the well-known aromatherapeutic did nothing to relax her. “I did what I had to do to live.”
“That’s all any of us are trying to do. That's allI’mtrying to do. Yes, people have died. Yes, it’s selfish. But it’smylife. And without Benjamin, I have nothing.”
Helspira searched his face. Those last three words, whispered with desperate sincerity, transformed Sikras from the fabled necromancer of Nyllmas’s past. In the shadows of night, she saw him for what he truly was: not the Glowing Cat’s Eye in Death’s Darkness who wielded the full power of Enos but the broken man who had lost so much and was wholly, deeply terrified of losing what little he had left.
Why, exactly, did that make her want to throw herself at him with the full force of a two-tailed bog mongrel at the height of its heat cycle?
Claim him. Make him yours.
Her heart thundered in the same pulsing rhythm of distant, croaking frogs, loud and incessant. Damn her demonic impulses. But oh, how good it would’ve felt to just reach out, gently touch the side of his face, and—
“If I’m being honest,” he said, severing her thoughts, “it’s not just Benjamin’s life and Imri’s existence that’s stayed my hand these last four years.”
When did her palms get so sweaty? Helspira wiped them across her leather armor, nonabsorptive as it was, and steadied herself with a breath. “What else is there?”
“I don’t want to kill Vessik.”
Lust turned into confusion, and her jaw dropped. “I’m sorry, you threatened to murder innocent townsfolk for causing Ben some mild anxiety, but you draw the line at slaughtering the man responsible forkillinghim? For killing your wife? For killingyou?”
“It’s not exactly a popular stance”—Sikras shrugged—“especially with Vessik’s legion brutally murdering more civilians with each passing day, but ... as long as he’s alive, there’s hope he could change. Hope he could go back to the way he was.”
A rare bubble of fury burst inside her, and Helspira shook her head. “People like Vessik don’t change, Sikras. People like Vessik pretend to love you, and then rip out your eye when your vulnerability is lowered.”
“Cecil was a prick. Vessik was never a wicked man. He’s not evil, he’s just ... unwell.” Sikras turned away, knuckles white from how hard he gripped the scythe’s snath. “And it’s all my fault.”
She tried and failed to catch his gaze, the confession birthing more confusion than she already harbored. His fault? Impossible. Murderers were not created, they were born. Weren’t they?
“It didn’t happen all at once,” Sikras murmured into the darkness. “I’d been gone for three months fighting one of Saelihn’s wars. After I merged with the Cat’s Eye, she often contracted me out as a weapon in hopes of forming alliances, establishing relationships with more powerful kingdoms, that sort of thing. And I just left Vessik here. I shouldn’t have left him, I ... I would’ve seen the signs if I had been around. He looked out for me our entire childhood, made me better, kept me from becoming the monster I should have been, would have been, but ...” He shook his head. “I couldn’t do the same for him. By the time I returned, he was ... different.”
