His heart cracked. “Don’t presume to tell me what she would want when she could be lying in rubble!” he snarled. Cassandane stumbled back, going white as sparks hissed around them.
“I’m sorry, but I’ve already made the decision. Méherre won’t return here until she’s found Sarai, alive or dead—” She froze at the knife that materialized in Kadra’s hand.
“That was not your choice to make.” His voice rose barely above a whisper, but she shrank back.
“Please, I’m not doing this without reason. Nearly two thousand fell madness-struck in my Quarter today. Inquisitor Verentia has agreed to submit Clanlady Dalvia for an Examination at the Aequitas tomorrow. If Sarai is alive, can you really have her return to a city that thinks she’s Death’s handmaiden? Let Méherre find Sarai. We’ll set these rumors to rest and ease her path home.”
His vision ran red with fury. “Tell me, when did you decide that having the Order as an ally was more useful than finding one of our own?”
“Since I saw that they were our greatest detractors last night.” Cassandane swallowed. “If they realize that Clanlady Dalvia’s wrong, we appease the people, gain an ally, and keep our seats.”
His lips curled contemptuously. “The onlyseatI have ever craved is beside her.” The jagged fragments of his heart tore at his chest. “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you now.”
Her voice fractured. “I can’t presume to know what Sarai would want. But you do. Ask yourself if she would want that.”
She wouldn’t. His soft-hearted Petitor would never abandon this land no matter how it treated her. His throat thickened.
“This city won’t survive without you,” she whispered.
“You have ten hours, Cassandane.” His voice was a scarred rasp. “I will attend your assembly. And afterward, if I am not Bridged to Komis, this city will not surviveme.”
He couldn’t return to Aoran Tower. There was too much of her there; he’d go mad. Returning to Delran Tower’s empty ballroom with his saddlebags, he pushed the double doors open into the ballroom in which he had threatened the damned Guilds only last night.
She had been alive then. Not in that liminal space between death and existence where time marked a pendulum between both extremes until it provided an answer.
He slumped against the table, head in his hands. There was so much he had meant to tell her. An entire world he had meant to lay at her feet. His gaze arrowed on one of the balconies overlooking the room. Over nine months prior they had stood there, watching the partygoers at Aelius’s convivium weave to music. Yearning had nearly brought him to his knees that night when she had defended him, smiled at him, teased him. How had she done it knowing that he had walked away from her?
He tore his eyes away and entrenched himself deeper in ice, crushing his grief to a dull ache.
A reckoning comes, he had been told. And it will force your hand between love and country.
He spoke into the ballroom’s desolate quiet. “Wrath.”
Red soaked the walls in his next breath. The room undulated and warped into the bleeding maw of an unfathomable beast. Garbled limbs reached from the pooling blood, skeletal mouths agape in suffering. At the center of it all, Wrath flicked away a grasping hand with a sound of disgust. His black robes swallowed all light.
“I did warn you that you would beg.” Four rows of fangs glistened when the god grinned.
Kadra didn’t contest the statement. They both knew it was true.
“You reek of vengeance and regret,acolyte. Was that what changed your mind?”
“A man can save a country. A god can afford to sacrifice it. The Elsar may have brought Sarai to me,” Kadra said, his tone soft and lethal, “but you will not take her away.”
Worlds crashed, burned, and rose again in the god’s eyes. “Regret that you couldn’t save her before. Regret that you can’t save her now. Regret that you can never return all she has lost. Regret at the entrance to everywhitesleep den in this city. Your life, Tetrarch, seems predicated on self-flagellation. You partake in it more than those trapped in the Hell of Whips.”
“The gods would do well to try the same.”
Wrath’s amber eyes gleamed. “We do not repent, because we do notchoose, Tetrarch. Contrary to mortal belief, the Elsar do not treat you as our puppets. We allow consequence to take its course. Many should be grateful for it.”
“Was it consequence that struck Sarai in Komis?” Ice and rage were a bitter chorus in his voice.
“It was.” A skull floated to the surface of the blood pooling around them. Wrath stepped on it absently. It cracked. “You’ll see it soon. Regret can be a dangerous thing for a mortal. It blinds them to the present while they seek out what they wish had been possible. Too much escapes you while you atone for a past you believe should have been different and force a future you want to exist. So, before I ask, Tetrarch,” he drew an unnaturally long sword from a slim scabbard that hissed as it struck the floor of flesh below them, “will you regret this too?”
“No.” He would enter any abyss if it restored her to him.
Wrath’s blade carved a wide circle arc into the ground, cauterizing the flesh it tore. Tinny screams echoed from the rift. “Then, step inside.”
Kadra walked across the pulsing floor to the Elsar. Face-to-face, the god’s features were a study in madness. Unnaturally sharp, inhumanely bright, Wrath was all teeth and plunder.
