The Lion & the Deathless Dark — Chapter 38

C HA P T E R T H I R T Y-E I G HT

y prince,” a frantic female voice said. “Septimus. Wake up!”

My eyes fluttered open.M No, perhaps fluttered wasn’t the right word. A better one would be “dragged.” I had been having the strangest dream—a dream of what Hegaella must have been like when it was attacked by the Shadowborn— and my exhaustion still pulled me back down.

A deafening bang shook the floor.

Then another followed from below, a rumble like building thunder.

No, not below—above?

I realized this was not a dream.

My head lay against Septimus’s shoulder. I had fallen asleep on the couch beside him, a book open on his lap, our shared reading having lulled us both. His head leaned against mine. Alric was gone. Our bodies were curled around each other, and even though we were fully clothed, I still felt instantly, terribly exposed.

The two of us blinked blearily at the woman who leaned over us. It took me a moment to recognize her—Septimus’s guard. Her jaw was set and eyes sharp in a way that made it instantly clear that something was wrong.

“Ilia.” Septimus rubbed his eyes, forcing himself to attention. “What’s happening?”

“The Nightborn are here,” Ilia said. “It’s like the bastards know you’re

back.”

My heart fell. I got to my feet.

Septimus sat upright, though the movement was clumsy. His exhaustion was all over him like sweat. He looked around, and then said, with a note of

fear, “Where’s Alric?”

As if summoned by the sound of his name, the boy appeared in the

doorway, rubbing his eyes.

“What is that noise?” he asked.

“They’re dropping Nightfire over the city,” Ilia barked, following Septimus as he stood. “We don’t have eyes on all of them yet. They’re using the cloud cover. But there must be thousands.”

I stumbled to the window and drew in a gasp at what I saw. Gods fucking help us.

I had thought that the Nightborn were terrifying when I had seen them descend upon the House of Shadow. But that had merely been a few hundred of them—this was thousands. They flew through the misty clouds, reducing the sky to a writhing mass of wings. The Nightborn bore the power of stars, the most explosive magic of the vampire kingdoms. Over the last ten years, Acaeja’s sorcery had helped them refine that magic, weave it into their weapons. The blue-white light cracked and burst in the night like sparks in the wake of fireworks, stretching all the way across the horizon, giving the impression that the entire sky was blanketed in

lightning.

BANG.

Another explosion shook the castle.

“What the hell are they thinking?” I blurted out, spinning back around.

“They’d just invade the capital of the House of Blood like this?”

At the look Septimus gave me, I felt very naive. Somehow, it had not occurred to me that even vampire kingdoms were not safe in a world in which everyone was at war.

“They likely have intelligence,” he said. “They know we’re planning something, and they’re thinking this is their chance to act.”

“Who knows what that Shadowborn bitch has been feeding them,” Ilia muttered.

Understanding fell over me. Septimus had intentionally let the Nightborn see where he was in order to create a distraction big enough for us to escape the House of Shadow. He’d used the Nightborn as a weapon against his own ally. Queen Egrette hated him, and though she couldn’t move against him directly, she certainly could plant all the seeds that would help their shared enemies to do it instead. Some might even call that fitting payback. And the Nightborn would have every reason to make their move

now. They, too, had their experience meddling with the powers of gods.

They would recognize that Septimus was doing the same.

“You have to go while you can, my prince,” Ilia said. “We’ll hold them off. It isn’t the first time they’ve come for Vaktrana, and we have always survived it.”

The grim look on Septimus’s face made me wonder the cost of staving off those previous invasions. The memory of Erekkus’s body pinned to the wall, succumbed to his curse, flashed through my mind.

“Go with Ilia,” Septimus commanded Alric. “She will take you to those rooms in the basement. The ones we built for you. Remember?”

The boy nodded, eyes wide and uncertain. “The one with Mother.”

This tiny piece of information, coupled with what Septimus had told me of his parents’ state, made me vaguely nauseous.

“Yes,” he said. “With Mother. The safest place in the House of Blood.”

BANG. Somewhere outside the chambers, a window shattered. A smattering of distant shouts rang out. Septimus was already turning away, moving to the door, but Alric grabbed his sleeve. “Wait. What about you?”

Septimus paused, turned back. He kneeled before the boy. That ever- present smirk curled one corner of his mouth. “You know me. I’ll be here and there. Always work to do.”

But the boy didn’t let go of his sleeve. The look on his face went far beyond his years. The kind that cut right through bullshit.

Septimus’s expression softened.

“Don’t be lazy while I’m gone,” he said. “I expect you to have those spells mastered for me when I see you again.”

A pang twisted in my chest.

Alric’s tension dissipated, replaced with relief. He nodded seriously, a

little smile at his lips. “All right.”

Septimus returned it. “All right.”

He rose and turned to me as Ilia swiftly ushered Alric away through the back door.

“Come on, Vindica Ultis,” he said. “Let’s get your sword. Looks like our rest is over.”

What a laughable sentence. The two of us looked like garbage and felt even worse. But I just nodded and tried to swallow the lump that had risen in my throat.

Because I recognized what Septimus had said to his brother. They might as well have been the same words I had given Valentina the last time I saw her, when I’d had no intention of coming back.

I didn’t have any intention of coming back tonight, either.

“Looks like it,” I said, and flung the door open.

ZEFIAH WAS A HEAVY SWORD, heavier still when my body was rebelling against me, and she was heaviest of all when she was doing absolutely nothing to help support herself with her magic. True to her word, she was silent when I grabbed her from my room. Now, I attempted to hold her with one hand as the other buttoned the final clasps on the leather fighting jacket I had hurriedly thrown on, with limited success. Septimus still wore his white suit—ever committed to impracticality—and packed light, a single bag of supplies slung across his body. Still, there was something about that clean, polished appearance that felt false, now. I could see the bruises and burns all over his hands. His fingers twitched incessantly, though he shoved them in his pockets as if to hide them. His shirt was buttoned higher than usual, and I wondered if that was an intentional decision.

The sick-sweet scent of Nightfire now permeated my every breath, and though I couldn’t see any of it, I had no doubt that it was now in the palace somewhere, and likely lots of it, if we could smell it all the way down here.

I wondered if the warriors had managed to breach the walls.

“They won’t get through,” Septimus muttered, as if he was entertaining the same thought. “The Bloodborn army is the best in the world.”

Yet, I still heard that note of fear in his voice.

We looped down another staircase, this one passing a sheet of windows.

They revealed a breathtaking view of the snow-covered hills and the cliffs beyond them. In the distance, at the wall that surrounded the castle, lines of soldiers in red Bloodborn uniforms launched bolts from great crossbows into the sky. With every command to fire, winged figures tumbled from the

sky, leaving bloody smears in the snow.

I tore my eyes away.

“Where are we going?”

“The aethergates are beneath the castle. The seers built one to take us

where we need to go.”

“To Hegaella?”

“To where Shiket fell. Yes.”

Another loop of stairs. Another glance at the window, and the carnage beyond. I flinched as an explosion of white light outside was powerful enough to crack the glass. We staggered away from them, though our steps

didn’t slow.

“Are you sure—” I started.

“The best thing I can do is leave.” He said it quickly, as if he had already been having this argument with himself and was not fully convinced of the conclusion. “Once they realize I’m not here, they’ll chase me instead, and by then, we will have taken our shot at Nyaxia.”

The idea that we were so close to this goal now seemed surreal to me.

Still, I worried it wouldn’t be so simple. Srana still loomed over us. And I had the distinct suspicion that the Nightborn were not the only ones attempting to track us.

The staircase narrowed, the windows disappearing as we continued to the basement. The explosions and shouts from above were now muffled, though there were more of them, merging to a persistent roll of thunder. The blasts of Nightfire had been so bright that now my eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness below ground. When I finally blinked away the ghosts of the explosions, we had reached the end of the stairs. Septimus held his palm against a heavy stone door, which pulsed a red glow and then sprang open.

The smell of iron hit me like a wall. I expected Zefiah’s wave of displeasure, then was thrown by its absence. Like reaching for a missing limb.

Septimus continued through the door, and I followed.

Dripdripdrip, dripdripdrip.

The thick patter of liquid dribbled in sporadic beats, like the forest after a heavy rain. The air felt that way, too—thick and humid, but rancid instead of fresh. I pressed my fingertips to my mouth to keep from vomiting.

It was like what we had seen in Estrys, where Erekkus had died protecting the harp from Kajmar’s hunters. But worse. So much worse.

The walls here had once been white. No longer. Webs of black-red hung over the ceiling, crawled up the walls. They wound around marble columns,

and over the arches of five doorways, each bearing shimmering grey mist within.

Septimus turned to the far end of the room.

“This was a temple once,” he said. “The ancestors of the Bloodborn, before Obitraes became Nyaxia’s territory, had believed that the holiest

places were below ground.”

I turned, slowly, to follow his gaze.

A gasp caught in my throat.

A beautiful mosaic stretched from floor to ceiling on the far end of the room—countless colors, all creating a silver arch stretching up the wall, in a way that reminded me of the great stained-glass windows in temples of the White Pantheon gods. But I could not tell what it depicted, because a person —or what had once been one—was up against it, at the center of all those ropes of blood.

A man. His face was distorted, as Erekkus’s had been—gaunt and angular in an exaggerated fashion, his ears pointed, his teeth too long. And yet, his resemblance to Septimus was so strong. He had white hair that fell past his shoulders, then wove into the web of red. The scant remnants of what had once been perhaps Bloodborn finery—a white and red jacket embroidered with silver—hung from his emaciated form, barely visible under all the blood, ripped and threadbare. But the crown on his head was still gleaming. Bright gold, as if someone had taken the time to polish it

every night.

I did not need to be told who this was.

“Best to stay back,” Septimus said. “He’s nothing but instinct now, and you’re human. God-touched, besides.”

The Bloodborn king stirred against the wall, his slitted nostrils twitching. The web shivered, delicate threads of red peeling from the web and reaching for me. It reminded me of the way Septimus’s eyes looked when the rings of red appeared, every thread crawling to the center.

“Easy, Father,” Septimus murmured. “We’ll be going soon. And she is here to help.”

He laid his hand across his chest and dropped into a kneel.

“Watch over them,” he said softly. “And soon you can rest, my king.

Soon.”

Then he stood. The threads of black-red reached for him, too slowly, as he strode away.

“This is another insult of the curse,” Septimus said. “The more it takes from you, the more powerful you get. Most Bloodborn are put to death when their curse takes the most of their faculties. But my father chose to be put down here. My mother, on the other end of the castle. As long as they must live this way, they provide protection and power.”

He looked to the doors. These, I could tell just by looking at them, were more advanced than the other common aethergates I had seen, even if I couldn’t quite identify what made them so. The frames were more ornate, the mist within them shimmering with a faint rainbow glow.

“What are these?” I said.

“Look closer,” Septimus said. I squinted into the mists. In one of them, I could make out the outline of silver domes and rolling dunes of sand. In the next, the knifelike peaks of the House of Shadow. Another, the blocky stone fortress of the Salt Keep. And finally, a temple forever seared into my memory. Hegaella.

All places Septimus had gone in pursuit of this mission.

“I’ve needed aethergates to important, inconvenient locations. It took a lot of work from the seers to build them.” He nodded to the fourth gate.

“That one’s ours.”

And then he raised his hands, and ropes of black-red burst through the bandages. The bloody web above contracted violently, sending a fresh dripdripdripdrip patter over the floor.

Red flooded the carvings that adorned the frame of the first door, then the second, then the third. Crimson mist pumped up from the floor, consuming the rainbow mist within. Septimus’s jaw was tight, his hands trembling, sweat beading at his temple.

I didn’t know what he was doing, but one look at him, at the red and black on his hands, told me it was taking him great effort—perhaps more

than he had to spare—to do it.

“What are you doing?”

I had to raise my voice as another explosion rocked the castle.

“They won’t breach the walls,” he said through gritted teeth, without looking at me. “But if they do, they cannot find these gates. No one can.”

Septimus’s father let out a feral hiss. The webs on the wall swayed and groaned.

One door crashed to the floor, and then another, and another.

“Go!” Septimus said, jerking his chin to the final door.

I stood at that last wall of mist. Within it, the faintest silhouette was visible of the temple where my god had died. Where my god had failed me, and I had failed her.

The last gate split with a deafening crack. Fissures spiderwebbed through the frame of the one before us. And then Septimus was beside me, shoulder against mine. He shot me a wry glance.

“Ready to fly?” he murmured.

A humorless smile twisted my mouth at the echo.

“At least I have a working sword arm this time,” I said.

He smirked. “For now.”

But as flippant as we sounded, my fingers wove through his, and we squeezed each other’s hands so hard they trembled.

And then, together, we fell.