“Why did you help me?”
Instead of answering, the woman moved away from the crowd and nodded for him to follow her between two columned pillars. A low, thumping music with a rhythmic beat—tabors, sackbuts, maybe vielles—picked up from the other side of the cloister, and the people hiding filtered away from each other and toward the center of the main hall, where they danced. Neither the music nor the movements were like any he’d heard or seen in any tavern he’d frequented, but he felt the collective call to tap his feet, to move his body. Voices cried out between beats, “The night is ours!”
“What is this place? This music?” Jesstin whipped his head around. “Why are they dancing?”
Her fingers gripped his chin and jerked his attention back to her. She had to yell to be heard over the music. “You know this place. Why?”
“What?”
“Tell me.”
“It only looks familiar.” He was still feeling the foreign cadence of the music’s rhythm. The instruments shook the floor and drowned out most of the monsters’ roars.
“What I tried to tell you in the Nemus was that your sword will do nothing for you here. The fiends are impervious to physical harm. It will only weigh you down.”
“I asked why you saved me, and you didn’t answer.” Jesstin waited for two men to go by. The music’s strange, hypnotic bass pulsed between his ears. “You risked your own neck to help me out there.”
Her eyes creased in offense. He’d seen that same look before. “What a curious expression of gratitude.”
Jesstin relaxed. “Thank you.”
“It wasn’t random or selfless.” She stretched her shoulders back. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Jesstin inclined downward. He hadn’t heard her right over the music. “What? Waiting for who?”
“He said one would come who knew the way. Who could help her.”
Another round of The night is ours! rippled across the cloister, rolling through boisterous laughter and whoops of enjoyment, like there weren’t disturbing creatures stalking their courtyard. “You’ll need to explain this as though I’m as stupid as you thought I was in the forest.”
Her blue eyes smiled before her mouth. The way she tucked her golden-red hair behind her ears was so cursed familiar that his breathing was no longer spontaneous.
It was then he knew. Before she said it at all, he knew.
“My name is Shioven. Aelloven’s mother. Her blood-and-bone mother. You see it, don’t you? I know you do.”
“I see it,” he croaked. “Same attitude too.” He was back in the sept, watching the blood bubble from Elloven’s lips. His palms had found the truth first, feeling the beat of life within her slow and then stop as he was confronted with total defeat, a problem too far gone to solve. Her last words had been a plea for him to leave, to save himself, when he’d been too late to save her. She’d died thinking he believed she was exactly the person she’d made him promise not to see her as.
“Hateful, vengeful magic keeps me from her. Not only in that world but all worlds. Even in this world. I will never, ever see her again. She will never know the mother I could’ve been.” She closed her eyes to wait for the tears to finish spilling, then blinked them away in annoyance. “But there are things she needs to know now. Things she must know. She won’t hear them from someone she doesn’t trust.”
“Who told you I was coming?” A crash of beats and shouts made him forget what he was going to say next.
But she hadn’t heard him anyway. “You, necromancer, will deliver these truths, and when that is done, you will open the door that leads us all to our salvation... while you take another and return to the life awaiting you.” She gripped her hands in his. “But in my heart, I hold on to another hope. A hope that until tonight seemed very foolish... and yet I see that you do know this place, the stones we stand upon, the moonlight breaching the glass—which means you have visited before. In other times or iterations, maybe, but you have been here.”
“It’s not the same place,” Jesstin replied. He was only half there with her, the rest of him holding Elloven’s lifeless hand. Go. Go now. “I’ve never been here.”
“What if it is the same place? What if it is?”
“It’s impossible.” Because if no one’s there to hurt little Elloven, then who is she? Do you even know? He’d never been so cruel, never. Not to anyone. Not even to those who had deserved it.
“You being here, alive, should be impossible too, so how can you be so confident I’m wrong?”
The more he stood there, hungover from the horrors outside and in the presence of a woman he’d never met but knew all the same, the more likely it seemed she was right.
How the Night Soul and this cloister in the netherworld were connected, though, was not a question he had the energy for.
“And if I’m right, then this irrational hope may not be so irrational after all.”
“And what’s that?” Jesstin yelled over the music, his eyes pounding behind his lids. He’d done it. He’d entered Infinita Mori, was still alive, and was standing with Elloven’s mother. Her mother. He couldn’t help imagining Elloven’s endearing grin as she wiggled her fingers and whispered of fate.
