Chapter 13
"Silas!"
I dropped my weapons, lunging forward to catch him just as his knees buckled.
He was heavy, slick with fresh blood that felt scalding against my hands. I dragged him back toward the altar, out of the light of the flames, lowering him onto the steps of the dais.
"Look at me," I pleaded, panic seizing my throat with a fist of ice. "Silas, stay with me!"
Blood was pumping rapidly from the right side of his neck, welling up from beneath the heavy, sweat-darkened leather collar that buckled tightly around his throat—an antique, reinforced gorget he had worn since the day I first caught sight of him in the northern wastes.
The soldier's blade had sliced deep into the junction between his neck and collarbone. It was an arterial nick. If I didn't pack it immediately, he would bleed out in three minutes.
"Hang on," I stammered, my hands shaking violently as I reached for my knife. "I have to cut the collar off. I have to compress the artery."
Silas’s eyes fluttered, glassy and unfocused, his head rolling back against the stone. "No... Lucian... don't..."
"Shut up! You're bleeding to death!"
I shoved the blade beneath the thick, stiffened leather of the gorget, sawing through the heavy brass buckles that held it fused to his frame. The leather was ancient, stiff with years of dried sweat, salt, and blood, sewn with tight, archaic cross-stitches that seemed designed never to be removed.
With a final, desperate twist, my blade severed the last strap.
I peeled the heavy iron-reinforced leather away from his neck.
The torchlight from the burning oil pool flickered across the exposed skin.
My breath stopped.
The knife slipped from my numb fingers, clattering uselessly against the stone flagstones.
The world ceased to turn.
Beneath the collar, hidden beneath ten years of grafted scar tissue and flayed skin, the flesh of his upper chest and collarbone was a canvas of deliberate, horrific mutilation.
The skin on his face had been altered, tailored to resemble the butcher of the northern rebels. But here, untouched by the reconstructive butchery of Vane’s surgeons, lay the truth.
Burned deep into the flesh just above his sternum was the bronze signet brand of House Vance—the twin falcons bound by chain. My family's crest. The brand given only to the sworn blood-guard of the inner household.
And directly below it, carved into the very periosteum of his left collarbone, raised in pale, ragged keloid scars, was a sequence of intricate, geometric runes.
My runes.
The unique scribe-cipher I had invented when I was nineteen years old, sitting in the dusty archives of my father’s estate, giggling like a child as I carved my secret signature into the wooden desks, the leather bookbindings, and—on one drunken, reckless midsummer night beneath the blooming apple trees—traced with ink onto the bare skin of the boy who had sworn his life to protect me.
The boy whose name wasn't Silas at all.
*Julian.*
Julian Thorne. My father’s young master-at-arms. The boy who had held my hand in the dark when my mother died. The boy who had kissed me behind the armory stacks and promised that no blade would ever touch me as long as he had breath in his lungs.
The boy who had disappeared the night of the fire, whom Vane told me had been butchered by the nameless rebel known as "Silas."
He hadn't been murdered.
He had taken the butcher's name. He had let them carve the butcher's face into his own skull. He had used my own forged manifests—the very documents I had carelessly penned to expose corruption, which Vane had twisted into treason—to offer himself as the scapegoat to save my neck.
He had worn my cipher, my curse, carved into his very bones, while I hunted him across an empire like a rabid dog.
"Julian..." The name tore from my throat, barely a whimper, a broken sound of absolute, incomprehensible horror. "Julian... what did they do to you?"
Julian’s half-lidded eyes opened slowly.
The glaze of death was in them, but beneath it was that same unbearable, infinite warmth that had haunted my entire life.
With an effort that seemed to cost him the last remnants of his soul, he raised his blood-stained, trembling right hand. His calloused fingers reached up, curling gently around the curve of my cheek, his thumb catching a falling tear.
"Kill me now, Lucian," he whispered, his voice cracking on the long-dead name only one man in the world had ever used for me. "Kill me now... or they will read what your own hand wrote into my bones."
Far down the subterranean corridor, a long, mournful brass blast shattered the subterranean night.
The Grand Inquisitor's war horn. Vane had arrived at the iron door.
