Igniting Darkness (Courting Darkness Duology #2) - Robin LaFevers Page 0,65

“For the most part. As I told you, it is a useless gift.”

“For the most part?”

I pause in my packing. “Once I heard a heartbeat. It was the one that led me to the dungeons in Cognac when I first discovered the prisoner. It was the strongest I had ever felt.” I pause, remembering the way the heartbeat reverberated through my body, up through the very ground itself. “But the prisoner wasn’t dead, and I never learned the source of the heartbeat.” I shrug again. “Other than that one time—”

“Wait!” Sybella’s eyes are narrowed. “When was that?”

“Around Saint Martin’s day.”

“No, when precisely?”

I stop packing and count back in my head. “It was four days after Saint Martin’s day.”

Sybella’s intrigue becomes awe. “You felt it. You felt him.”

“What are you talking about?”

She picks up one of my shifts from the bed and smooths it. “Remember when you offered to help me with Monsieur Fremin, I told you that the nature of Mortain’s marques had changed?”

“Yes. Then we were interrupted, and you never did explain to me how.”

“Well, what I did not get the chance to tell you was that the nature of Mortain himself has changed.”

I frown, not understanding.

“You said you were so surprised to learn of the marriage agreement between the duchess and the king. You were not alone. That was not expected by anyone, least of all the king.”

“But the duchess knew to expect it?”

Sybella shrugs. “She did not know to expect it so much as hope. It was a final, desperate effort to prevent Brittany from being engulfed by yet another war. It was an opportunity born of the Nine.”

“The Nine?”

She looks at me then, spearing me with the intensity of her gaze. “It was Arduinna’s last arrow. Hidden away at the convent of Saint Mortain for centuries. Guaranteed to ensure the love of whomever it struck. And the duchess had one shot. Or rather, one person who could make such a shot.”

“You?” My voice sounds breathless to my ears.

“No. Our convent sister Annith.”

“Annith. The perfect one. Of course.”

“Don’t say that!” Sybella snaps. “There is far more to her story than you can even guess at.”

“Then tell me.”

“It is not my story to tell. But on this day—four days after Saint Martin’s day, with the armies of France encamped before Rennes, the Nine came to the duchess’s aid. The Arduinnites, the convent, the hellequin—”

“They are real?”

“Even the trickster god Salonius had a hand in that day.” Her voice grows distant with remembering. “But in order for Annith to take that shot, the king had to be lured onto the battlefield where she could reach him. That is where the others came in.”

She sets my carefully folded shift back on the bed. “And so, with the Arduinnites on the battlements to cover them with their arrows, they rode out of the gates of Rennes, the hellequin and the Breton armies, led by Mortain himself.”

My mouth drops open, and every word I know leaves my head.

“We were victorious, else we would not be here with the duchess, now the queen, but our losses were great. Including Mortain.”

“But he is a god. Surely he cannot die.”

“He can if he inserts himself into the affairs of man. And so he did. While he did it because it was what was best for his people, I think it was also because of Annith.”

“He did it for one of his daughters?”

She cuts me a sideways glance. “That is one of the things about Annith you do not know. She is not one of Death’s daughters. That was a subterfuge her mother pulled in order to find a safe home for her.”

So many questions crowd onto my tongue that I do not know where to begin. “How did they not find out? Surely the nuns would know. The abbess?”

“Ah, well, you see. That was the clever part. Her mother was the abbess.”

My head is well and truly spinning now. I sit down on the bed.

“But that is not the point of what I am telling you. The point is that Mortain died on the battlefield that day. The god Mortain,” she corrects herself. “For as we learned then, the gods’ first death results in them becoming human, their second is when they truly die.”

My head cannot contain the enormity of what she has just said. I close my eyes, willing the world to make sense again.

“So you see, your mistake was just one in a long line of mistakes and random turns of events. If