“Good, good,” Pièrre said. “He’s quite the artist, and this shouldn’t affect your arts as much as the last one did.”
A chill settled so deep in me, I was sure that winter had come. I lowered myself to my knees, mud seeping through my clothes. The flies, gilded from feeding on noonday artists’ flesh, crawled across my cheek. I did not want to watch this.
This is your cost, Emilie des Marais, and it is your duty to pay it. Power demands sacrifice.
I gathered a few small strands of the noonday arts not quite pulled into Pièrre’s gathering yet.
The hack was breathing and aware, but he couldn’t move. I could feel his panic rapping against his chest. He could feel—Pièrre’s hands along his ribs, the knife beneath his skin, the pull of power hooking in his bones—and couldn’t do a thing about it. Pièrre and his apprentices set the work above him.
They removed his bones, his muscles, the threads of his nerves, and the little strips of yellow fat. They broke him down piece by bloody piece and built up the healthy tissue inside of His Majesty the king.
And the hack felt it. I felt it, my right arm burning.
I snapped the nerves in his spine, let my power eat through them as he breathed out. The panic softened.
I yanked myself out of his consciousness with a heavy cough and slapped my hands over my mouth. Eventually, Pièrre’s apprentices carried out the hack’s body and threw it into the dark, steps from me. There was nothing left of his arm, and the skin of his chest and shoulder had been worn away by the noonday arts. The bones they hadn’t removed were nothing but dust, his common body broken to support a noble one. A slow, unsteady thump echoed in my head.
His heart—it slowed and stuttered and stopped.
I tried to channel the noonday arts through me, tried to restart his heart and dive back into his mind to keep him awake. Blood could be regenerated so long as bones were intact. But his were hollow.
Channeling power allowed an artist to control it, to use it as they wanted. By running it through their veins, it became a part of them, and it wore them down. His Majesty shouldn’t have been able to channel the power he had today. But he had.
We are not our own.
They had undone the damage done to His Majesty’s body, the damage that was irreversible after so much had been worn down, by replacing parts of His Majesty’s body with a hack’s. This was what Pièrre du Guay had been researching, had been testing, and they must have thought Laurel knew some part of it, so they needed a distraction. They had gone to war rather than let people find this out.
Laurel hadn’t gathered enough help yet, but if people knew this, no one would serve the king again. Everyone would have backed Laurel.
And now I knew.
Sixteen
Annette
I got more sobbing than scrying done the next few days in Estrel’s office. I slept there that first night, the dam of my heart open and me drowning. Estrel wrapped me in an old, worn quilt and brought Vivienne to see me. They spoke in hushed tones, Estrel telling her that I’d revealed the traumatic event I’d seen the first time I’d ever scryed and that was why I hated the midnight arts, and Vivienne had wrapped me in a gentle hug. She smelled like ice and mint, and she muttered that it was all right. I shook my head when she asked if I had ever told my mother.
Maman knew, but I had never told her exactly what I had seen.
I couldn’t live with it. How could she?
“Can I stay here?” I asked. I couldn’t let the others see me like this. Isabelle was already too worried about her brother, and Coline was busy with the other girls, organizing letters and plotting how to sooner warn the soldiers we weren’t given orders to divine for. They’d bigger things than a decade-old death to deal with. “I don’t think I can sleep.”
After Vivienne had left, commanding Estrel to let me take it easy, I’d lifted my head and said, “Teach me to divine. Please.”
Estrel had sat next to me. “You need to deal with your grief as well. You can’t just work through it. Trust me—it catches up with you eventually.”
I wasn’t running away. This was my normal run, and Alaine was right beside me.