“What—” Percival got out.
“What did you do?” Roy demanded again, intercepting any line of questioning Percival might drag him into. He knew that he would have to tell Percival about his scar one day—someday too soon, no doubt—but he shrank at the idea of crossing that line. He had no clue how Percival might respond, whether he would cut ties with Roy and abandon the bond Percival himself had said was there... or if he could even trust Percival with the torment he had kept quiet, kept at bay, for so long. “You say you’re human, but when you unsheathed that sword...”
Coughing into the sleeve of his tunic, Percival pointed to the sword lying on the ground, which had stopped its strange ethereal humming, and said, “The power I felt, it grew stronger as the scabbard slid off the blade, but...” He went silent for a moment, then asked Roy softly, “What did you see?”
“Visions,” Roy said. “Hundreds of them, maybe, but they went by so quickly, some of them overlapping each other, that my mind could only process eight or so.”
“And what happened in these visions?” Percival asked, gnawing at his fingernails, his elbow propped on one hand.
Roy picked at his bottom lip. “I... I was being killed—stabbed, torn to pieces, trampled by the boots of people who had some grudge against me. But sometimes, Percival...” He held a splayed hand over his mouth and spoke raggedly through his fingers. “Sometimes I was the one killing myself. Sometimes it was Gabriel and Briar, and once... once, I believe it was you.”
“Darling,” Percival murmured, rubbing at the faint purple handprint Roy had made across his throat. “You know I wouldnever—”
“I know,” Roy said, and somehow, in that exact moment, he did. Of course he knew Percival could never bring himself to inflict such fatal and irreversible harm on Roy. Nor would Briar, for that matter. But Gabriel? Even Roy himself, who had, from time to time, considered that the only conceivable way out of the terrors he’d faced was to erase himself from the equation? That sword might’ve shown him false, twisted versions of reality, but here, in the real world, his contemplations of suicide had never been false. Was that the power invested within this cursed sword? Could it infiltrate and manipulate the mind of its opponent? “I know,” Roy said again to Percival, but there was no conviction whatsoever in his voice. All he felt was an all-consuming dread.
They stared at the sword lying on the ground in a heavy, perturbed silence. Nothing about it appeared to have changed. The faintest suggestion of orchestral sound, as of angels singing, was still issuing from the blade, now bare after Percival’s struggle with the scabbard, and that strange silver light was still hovering about the metal.
No, the change wasn’t coming from within the sword but fromwithout. Color bled out of the maroon floorboards underneath the luminous length of the blade, turning them the gray of desiccated skin. It tracked across the ground, spreading from where the sword rested, near the podium upon which the harp stood, in every which way. The room, once saturated with deep browns and reds, was now slowly becoming as lifeless as the weapon that had infected it. The angelic chorus trickling out of the blade sounded different,warped, charged with some erratic and infernal energy, mingling with the familiar keening screams that Roy had heard a while ago.
He stumbled away from the desk, first scratching at his arms and then clapping the heels of his hands against his ears. A shrill whining was rising in the hollow space between, as though a gong had been struck inside his skull. Drawing in small, shallow breaths over his teeth, he tottered off the podium and then lurched over to the sword.
All the while, the room around him continued its chilling transformation. The crimson shade of the wallpaper was now drab and bleak, and the storm-blasted world out of the porthole window looked like some macabre wasteland where ash fell from chasm-black skies instead of snow. Beyond, a circular formation of dark, monolithic structures materialized, stretching higher into the thinning clouds. Roy had an idea that if neither he nor Percival did anything about it, whatever theycoulddo, the world would just keep unraveling until the sword finished its work and made those visions he’d seen come true.
Then Percival pushed Roy aside, picked the discarded scabbard up off the floor, and walked over to the sword. Its humming grew in volume and pitch, fervid in its intensity. Roy thought he might go mad from the sound of it, thought he might dig his fingers into his ears and pull out his brains just to free himself. But then the room lapsed into silence and, after a moment, slowly regained its color.
Roy took his hands off the sides of his head. There was still a ringing in his ears, and a throbbing ache had crept into his skull, but these pains were pale next to the discomforts that had nearly leeched the remaining ounce of energy from his bones moments before.
Percival rose to his full height, the sword now sheathed once more and dangling from the belt about his waist. “What do we do with it?”
Roy took a second to recompose himself, then said, “We’ll keep it in its scabbard and store it away.”
“Are youderanged?” Percival exclaimed, incredulous. “You have no compunctions admitting that the Basilica brought us to the crypt, and you can even entertain the possibility of dark magic as a crucial element of this conspiracy, andthisis where you draw the line?” He scowled. “How fucking asinine and contradictory can you be? Nothing about you makes a lick of sense.”
“Nothing about any of this makes sense, Percival! If you saw what I saw, you would understand my misgivings,” Roy said. He would’ve returned Percival’s scowl if not for the recurring memories of the harrowing things he’d seen. “But youdidn’t, Percival. You can’t scorn me for my reservations when you didn’t even see what—”
Percival gripped the hilt of the sword. He didn’t withdraw it from its scabbard, Roy knew this was only to prove a point, but it still made him flinch. “Go on, then,” Percival said with a hint of derision. “Take it. Point it at me. That’s how this blasted thing works, no? Show me, Dawnseve. Show me what you saw.”
These last words were spoken with such undeniable contempt that Roy looked down at his feet, mortified.
Percival removed his hand from the sword hilt, sighing with what sounded like resignation. “I know you’re scared, but... you don’t need to live in fear—”
Roy stilled. Hadn’t he told Percival something similar prior to their descent into the crypt? “Don’t use my words against me.”
“Not against you.Foryou. They were words I needed, even if I denied it at the time. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel like the same rules apply here.” Percival came over to Roy, brushed the back of his hand across the back of Roy’s. “We can’t turn our backs now. What you sawwillcome to pass if we stop right here.” He shook the sword emphatically. “If we stow this away, we’ve all but given up.”
“I was not born for war,” Roy said.
Percival offered him a sad, wistful smile. “Nor was I. Lifting and swinging this damned blade is the closest I’ll come to wielding one. But we were bornintowar. And we weren’t dragged here to do battle, were we?‘Poet, linger near me,’ said Peace. ‘My dark-hearted twin is not your savior...’”
“‘... for there are safer waters than these,’” Roy recited, finishing the concluding passage from Gertrude Pothel’sTroubled Kin. He swept his fingers lightly over Percival’s wrist. “But these aren’t safe waters, Percival. Not by far.”
“No,” Percival said, “but they’re waters we can navigate, and we’ll navigate them together. The going will be hard, but it won’t be impossible. My brother Edgar used to tell himself something when placed under such conditions. I never got to know him well enough to understand what had him so distressed, but I found myself saying it under my breath whenever I was swamped with readings and classwork from Rasileus Academy, and with my own personal old-world studies.”
“What was it?” Roy asked.
Percival wrapped his arm around Roy’s shoulders, and when Roy drew in a sharp breath, startled by the unexpected contact, Percival let go. But his smile was radiant as he said, “Do it, then it’s done.”
Roy almost laughed at how obvious the statement was, how clear-cut. But as he turned the words over in his head, contemplating them from new angles, he realized he felt renewed, his shoulders squared, his mind honed to a fine point.
