He turned and found a modest cabin. The windowpanes were clouded from age and neglect, and beyond the door was a scene of overturned chairs and undisturbed cobwebs. His boots came free with a croaky thwack, and he climbed to the safety of the splintered steps. In the distance, between two clusters of trees, were the doors. He could barely make them out, but the movement drew him into a soothing trance he had to force himself to break.
Jesstin ransacked the single-room shack, turning over the same chairs and tables already on their sides, as if Elloven might be hiding behind one. He yanked on the uneven floorboards, bloodying his nails, but there was nothing but more swamp beneath them.
She wouldn’t be there, though, would she? The Conductor would reveal her when and only when it was ready.
He’d finally stopped thinking of the creature as she. That felt like progress.
Jesstin paused in the doorframe, exhausted but defiantly resisting the call of defeat. This was not his scene to create or pattern. He could only react to what the Conductor had crafted for him.
He rubbed the sweat and grime from his eyes. When he opened them, a man stood in front of him—or what had once been a man. No, he would not, could not, even say that for the stench of a being skulking in the muck, because no man could ever have done what the beast had done to Elloven.
“Of course it’s you,” Jesstin spat. He shook his head to the side. “It’s too bad you can’t talk. But you can listen. Might as well have ourselves a little conversation while we wait for this bitch to decide what’s next. We’re overdue, I’d say.”
Fabrien glittered like dust. His features were still perceptible enough to imagine the cut of the human he’d once been, but his eyes reflected the dearth of humanity. “But I can speak, you impudent twit.” The fiend’s voice was inhuman. It was the sound of the monsters from Jesstin’s boyhood nightmares. When it grinned, black gaps appeared between his teeth, like mortar. “You’re just the first who can hear us.”
Jesstin’s hand traveled to his belt out of habit. But even if he hadn’t left his sword at the cloister in the Seventh, it had no power against such disease.
“You seem surprised, Skylark. Or is it Edevane?”
Jesstin couldn’t kill what was already dead, and there weren’t deaths enough for the creature staring at him, smiling at him. But the Conductor would expect his rage to take the reins, as it so wanted to do, and that was why he held it. “Thought there was nothing left of you, between Elloven’s justice and the whole...” He flapped a hand.
Fabrien spread his arms wide, revealing the faded livery of House Quinlanden. Time, fate, and the loss of half of his flame had tattered it, and it hung off him like loose, rotting flesh. “I’m the same as I ever was, mostly.”
“It eats you up, having no power over her.” Jesstin descended a step. He noted that Fabrien was standing atop the swamp mud, unaffected by its pull. “It eats you up.”
“Don’t I though?”
“That’s done.”
“Because she has her big, brave protector?” Fabrien said the words in a mocking tone, his face a punchable match.
“She took care of you and your mates well enough on her own. Five of you, was it? Against one tiny little woman?”
“Seven years it took her, and she couldn’t even look us in the eye. You have to wonder, don’t you, when someone with her power chooses to endure what she could stop at any time. Seven years. Did she love it? Secretly? Did she crave it?”
Jesstin’s thoughts returned to the scarred brand on Elloven’s thigh, Fabrien’s attempt to erase her identity, and he almost lost the battle. He clung to his belief that he was not there to rise to whatever challenge the Conductor had laid but to endure it. “I’ll enjoy killing you, and I won’t make a secret of it.”
“I’m already dead.” Fabrien laughed. He glanced down at his bare chest. “I could be less dead, however...”
“That flame will never be yours.”
“I’m not here for her flame. You don’t really believe that?”
Jesstin didn’t answer.
“I already have what I want, bastard-born. I got it every night she’d suckle and ration her sleeping draught to escape me. But it’s even better when she fucks you and it’s me she sees and feels. I live under your skin now too.”
Hold. It. Together. Fabrien was part of the game. The Conductor wanted him to lose.
Jesstin grinned through the strain in his cheeks. “Eternity is a long time to listen to your own nonsense.”
Fabrien took a step. It was more of a glide, the way he moved along the surface of the thick brine. “She’s not here, is she? Because it took her.”
Jesstin was momentarily taken aback at the reference. Fabrien either was the Conductor, knew the Conductor, or had been created by the Conductor. The question sat right on the tip of his tongue.
“The Overseer,” Fabrien said. “But you know it as something else, don’t you? It has many identities. It’s everywhere.”
“Illusions are only that,” Jesstin retorted.
