Page 99 of The Mask Falling

“Paige, know this: I would never swear an oath that endangered our trust again. But I did,” he said, “and once made, it could not be undone. I am Ranthen. Terebell is my sovereign-elect.”

“And I was your Underqueen. When we struck this alliance, I trusted you all to be honest with me,” I said. “Instead, you conspired to keep your human associates uninformed, so we couldn’t even ask questions.”

He had the grace not to contest me.

“You broke your word once—to Nashira—because you knew it was the right thing to do,” I said. “You could have done it again.”

“It is of no import if the blood-sovereign calls me an oathbreaker,” he said. “If my Ranthen-kith had, I would have been locked out of their affairs, and unable to advocate for your interests.”

“You defied them in other ways.” Suddenly I felt too drained for inhibition. “Every time you were alone with me—every time you touched me—you risked their suspicion and anger, but you still did it. For me.”

Both our stances were rigid, our gazes in a deadlock. “I made no oaths on that front,” Arcturus said quietly.

“You didn’t need to. It’s implicit.”

“The taboo of flesh-treachery is Sargas doctrine,” came his reply. “Even if many of the Ranthen have chosen to embrace it, I will never consider it to be unspoken law among us.”

I lifted my chin.

“Even if I saw the bread crumbs,” I finally said, breaking the tense silence, “maybe I didn’t let myself follow them, because in spite of everything, I chose to trust you. And now we—”

Before I could finish, a razor blade seared under one breast. My vision bleached. Pain gored between my ribs, all the way through to my back, deep inside me, reaching places it never had before. As I tried to cushion my chest, Arcturus came to my side.

“Paige.”

I shook my head. There was nothing he could do. I bent at the waist, holding myself, and waited for each excruciating jolt to pass. By the time the pain ebbed, my face was bathed in sweat and tears.

“I refuse to prove Terebell right,” I said, once I could breathe without agony. “I need a bath. Then we’re going to talk this out, put it behind us, and get on with the jobs we need to do. More lives than ours depend on it.”

Arcturus watched me rise, his face as closed as I had ever seen it. I brushed past him without another word.

14

Necessary Truths

Even though the water troubled me as much as ever, I sat in the hot bath for a long time, my knees drawn up to my chin. The steam eased my breathing. I stared at the wall and thought back over the last year.

I knew how hard Arcturus had worked behind the scenes in London. It was because of him that I’d had the money to feed and house so many voyants, because of him that Terebell had kept backing me financially even after I botched the raid on the warehouse. Perhaps he really had believed that if he broke his oath, he would forfeit that power.

Harder to absorb was the fact that he had gambled with our hard-won trust. Our alliance had always been fragile, and by sitting on a secret for so long, he had risked shattering it.

I got out. When I had dried off, I wiped the steam from the mirror. My lips were always dark, but they were also smudged with gray now, like my fingertips. I had overused my gift.

My fresh bruises had ripened to plum. I dabbed the scrape on my thigh with antiseptic, pulled on a nightshirt, and attempted to untangle my curls, giving up when the comb snapped clean in half. All the while, the pain rose in my chest and made it difficult to breathe.

There would be time enough to rest. For now, I had to seal this fracture in our friendship.

Arcturus waited for me in the parlor, nursing a large glass of wine. I lowered myself on the other side of the couch.

The rain had turned to hail. By now, it was late in the afternoon, the sky like charcoal.

“As you know,” Arcturus said, “Rephaim are not born. We emerged from the Netherworld.”

“Yes.”

“We did not all emerge together. There were waves of creation. Not long after the Netherworld began to fall into decay—the event that started our war—there was one final wave, the equivalent of a death throe. The Netherworld created not Rephaim, but Emim. Not many, to be sure, but we were ill-prepared, and already riven into two factions. Many were turned.”

In the quiet that followed, I eased onto my right side. Breathing hurt a little less.

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