Cruel Beauty(11)

Some people distrusted the Resurgandi’s secrecy, the way that dukes and Parliament consulted them; they whispered that the Resurgandi practiced demonic arts. In a way, that was true. By dint of long study and careful calculations, the Resurgandi had come to believe that while the bargains of the Gentle Lord were accomplished by his unfathomable demonic powers, the Sundering was different. It was a vast Hermetic working, whose diagram was the Gentle Lord’s house itself.

This meant that somewhere in the Gentle Lord’s house must be a Heart of Water, a Heart of Earth, a Heart of Fire, and a Heart of Air. If someone were to inscribe nullifying sigils in each heart—so the theory went—it would disengage the working from Arcadia. The house of the Gentle Lord would collapse in on itself, while Arcadia returned to the real world.

The Resurgandi had known this for nearly a hundred years, and the knowledge had availed them nothing. Until me.

“I know you will not fail her,” said Father.

“Yes, Father.” I looked out the window, unable to bear that calm face a moment longer. I had spent my whole life pretending to be a daughter glad to die for the sake of her family. Couldn’t he pretend, just once, to be a father sad to lose his daughter?

We were driving through the woods now as we began the slow ascent up the hills atop which sat the Gentle Lord’s castle. Between the tree branches, I could glimpse scraps and pieces of the sky, like shredded paper tossed among the leaves. Then we suddenly drove through a clearing and there was a great foolscap folio of clear sky.

I looked up. Father had installed, on account of Aunt Telomache’s claustrophobia, a little glass window in the roof of the carriage. So I could see the sky overhead and the black, diamond-shaped knotwork that squatted at the apex of the sky like a spider. People called it the Demon’s Eye and said the Gentle Lord could see anything that passed beneath it. The Resurgandi officially scoffed at this superstition—if the Gentle Lord had such perfect knowledge, he would have destroyed them long ago—but I wondered how many secretly feared that he might know their plans and be drawing them into one of his ironic dooms.

Was he watching me now from the sky? Did he know that fear was swirling through my body like water running out of a tub, and was he laughing?

“I wish there had been time to train you more,” Father said abruptly.

I looked at him, startled. He had been training me since I was nine years old. Could he possibly mean that he didn’t want me to go?

“But the bargain said your seventeenth birthday,” he went on, so placidly that my hope wilted. “We’ll just have to hope for the best.”

I crossed my arms. “If I try to collapse his house and fail, I’m sure he’ll kill me, so maybe you can marry Astraia to him next and give her a chance.”

Father’s mouth thinned. He would never do such a thing to Astraia, and we both knew it.

“Telomache told me that Astraia gave you a knife,” he said.

“She has only herself to blame for that,” I said. “Or was it your idea to tell Astraia that story?”

I still remembered the day that Aunt Telomache told us about the Sibyl’s Rhyme—Astraia’s muffled sniffling, the hard ache in my throat, the sudden stab of wild hope when Aunt Telomache said that I might not have to destroy my husband by trapping myself forever with him in his collapsing house. That I might kill him and come home safe to my sister.

It can’t be true, I had thought. I know it can’t be true—and yet that night I had still nearly wept when Aunt Telomache told me it was a lie.

“She was a child and she needed comfort,” said Father. “But you are now a woman and know your duty, so I trust you have already disposed of it.”

I sat up a straighter. “I’m wearing it.”

He sat up too. “Nyx Triskelion. You will take it off right now.”

Instantly the words Yes, Father formed in my mouth, but I swallowed them down. My heart hammered and my fingertips swirled with cold because I was defying my father and that was ungrateful, impious, wrong—

“No,” I said.

I was going to die carrying out his plan. Against that obedience, this little defiance could hardly matter.

“Are you actually deluding yourself—”

“No,” I repeated flatly. That had been another part of my education: the history of all the fools who tried to assassinate the Gentle Lord. None succeeded, and all died, for even if they stabbed the Gentle Lord in the heart, he could heal in a moment and destroy them the next. I had long ago given up hoping that any mortal weapon could kill a demon.

“I don’t believe in the Rhyme, and even if I did, I wouldn’t bet our freedom on my skill with a knife. You trained me too well for that, Father. But this is the last gift my only sister ever gave me, and I will wear it to my doom if I please.”