Page 129 of The False Vow

It felt like a loose end. And the man I’d come to know did not leave those.

Sure enough, Bastian sighed. “Perhaps,” he replied. “Perhaps not. I hadn’t decided.”

His attention drifted, his gaze fogging over once more. Maybe it was just the setting, but he seemed grayer than when I’d last seen him—diminished, as if in the days we’d spent apart, age had finally begun to catch up with him.

“You know, when I was a boy, I used to crush moths which landed too close to me,” he resumed abruptly after a beat had passed. “It was my instinct. And yet I felt so guilty once they were gone.”

His mouth twitched. I tracked the motion, then spoke. “First I was a wolf; now I am a moth. What are you?”

Bastian chuckled. “I am the old racehorse,” he replied grimly. “And I sense my first loss is near.” Inhaling, he angled himself back toward me. “You may ask me, you know.” His tone was prompting.

Instinctively, I tightened my grip on the pistol. “When did you sense it?” I asked. I did not clarify beyond that—I knew he’d understand what I meant.

Sure enough, Bastian smirked. “That you truly meant to kill me?” he asked. “That it was not merely some scheme you were indulging my son in—that you’d made up your mind?” He waved a hand. “Oh, after we talked, when you came to my study to announce that you’d found Miss Dabos’s murderer. Though, in the name of honesty, I’ll admit I agreed to her mother’s deal prior to that. I assume Eliot Lear filled you in on the particulars.”

He had. I lifted the pistol. “And if I’d felt differently,” I said. “If I had agreed to work with you, rather than against you. Would you have betrayed me anyway?”

I didn’t understand why I was so desperate to know. If I’d learned anything in the time since I’d met him, it was that everything Bastian Alaire said was a lie. He was like a beetle in its carapace, closed to the outside world. The only truths he told were ones he spoke to himself.

And yet, I couldn’t forget the question he’d posed to me: Do you want a cause…or do you want a family? The uncertainty which had plagued me just afterward, when I thought he might truly mean to make me his daughter.

The Weaver King was not my family. But the way he thought, the way he was…

Sometimes it felt like I was a lonely animal, and he was a creature of my own kind.

Bastian’s features turned sorrowful. He did not seem all too concerned with the gun currently leveled at his head, though I was sure with his gift, he could sense that I intended to use it. “I like to think not,” he answered to my surprise a minute later. “I like to imagine there was a future where you and I could have stood together. I dashed it, but still, it exists—like an echo on the wind.”

His throat bobbed. Then he drew a breath, and all fell back into order.

“What is your father’s name, Miss Lovett?”

I blinked but did not lower my pistol. “Eben.”

“Eben.” Bastian repeated the name, as if examining the feel of it on his tongue. “Mine was named Alder. We never got along—when I was growing up, I used to think he despised me. It was only after I married my wife and gained her power that I realized that it was not hatred he felt toward me at all, but fear. My birth signaled his end.”

Bastian’s hand drifted toward the ring on his left finger: Mariéprix, glinting wickedly in the twilight. “The first time I put on my seal, I felt like a god,” he said. “To parse the thoughts of men, to see their secret desires—it was, I thought then, the gift of a deity. But I have realized now that power makes you its soldier. You bind yourself to it, and then all your life you must defend it. You kill for it. You lie for it. A lucky few die with it in their grasp, but still it flees before their corpses have grown cold. The only way to keep it for oneself is to make a new body—to mold, while you are still alive, an heir, to live for you once you are gone.

“Since he was young, I knew that man would never be Noé—not truly,” Bastian continued. “I thought, for a while, Eliot Lear could fill the role in his stead, but I was wrong there, as well.” His eyes found mine, focused. “All along, the son I was searching for was you.”

I stiffened. “I could never follow you.”

Bastian only smiled. “Sons do not follow their fathers,” he replied. “Sons usurp them.”

It was then that I felt them—the tendrils of his power, sunk deep into my mind. They spidered like a root network over the curve of my brain, vaster and more complex than I’d ever encountered before, thinner, like vines twining through rock. With each breath I drew, they seemed to flex gently, a hand lightly gripping my skull.

My pulse skipped. He’d been using my anger, I realized—hiding behind it like a shield to disguise his own movements.

And this was the result.

At once, the tendrils speared down. The pain was unimaginable—a heated knife, cleaving my mind in two. Behind my eyes, strange images appeared, pulsing against my skull:

A flock of crows, red-eyed and screaming. They were crowded together, beating their wings in a black cave—it took me a moment to realize it was my own head they were trapped in.

A field of mice, flooding out of a dead sun. Below them, a yellow forest spread out, sulfur plains.

Dark water, filling up my lungs. There were forms moving within it—ancient fish, as long as my arm and sharp-toothed. One tore into my heart—

I screamed. Altogether, it was less than a minute before I dropped the pistol.