The Songbird and the Heart of Stone (Crowns of Nyaxia #3)

Chapter 4

CHAPTER FOUR

“ L ook, Mi.”

My head lay in Saescha’s lap. She let me sleep this way, I knew, because she wanted to watch over me. But I liked it because her skirt still smelled like home—damp soil and the salty ocean. When we got to the Citadel of the Destined Dawn, they would make her wash her clothes and the scent would be gone, along with everything else of our former life.

I was exhausted from weeks of travel. My lashes fluttered. But she shook my shoulder gently. “Look.”

I blinked away the gritty remnants of sleep to see her, bathed in light, smile wide enough it seemed to wash away the dirt on her face.

She pointed, and I followed her gaze.

The sun was a splash of pure gold, smearing the horizon with brilliant pink and orange. It was nestled in the valley between two distant mountains, which framed the rays of brilliance as they spilled over the forest and the sky and the stone alike.

My sister surely hadn’t slept for more than a few hours at a time in weeks. But despite the shadows beneath her eyes, she now looked downright giddy.

“The Lord of Light is on our side, Mi,” she breathed. “Look at all that a sunrise can mean. We survived another night. And no matter what, the dawn will always come for us. Never forget that.”

I knew this was true because my sister never lied to me. I watched that precious sunrise, and I nestled into those two embraces: my sister’s and the sun’s. Eternal. Warm.

So warm it was…

It was…

The heat intensified, smoldering, burning ?—

Pain ignited me. I gasped and leapt up. “Saescha, help me! Help me!”

My skin cracked. Flames burst through the open tears. But I looked to my sister and my cry of horror was louder than the cry of pain.

Her face was pale, her eyes empty, her throat an open mass of torn flesh.

“Saescha!” I screamed—or tried to, but the name drowned in my throat beneath a tide of blood. I tried to spit it out, but it filled my lungs. Distraught, I turned to the sun, calling for my god to save me—to save my sister, because she deserved it more than I did.

But I was too late. The blood poured from my mouth. The sun beat me down.

And it was the fire that took me, in the end.

I awoke with a start, my sister’s name on my lips, the afterimage of her corpse burning behind my eyelids. My gaze settled on my hands—fingernails covered in black blood—and I let out a hiss of pain as I rolled over. I’d been scratching at my burns, the freshest ones now open and seeping. Any other wound and they would’ve been gone by now. But vampires did not mix well with the magic of the sun. They would take a long time to heal.

The dreams had followed me since I was Turned. For a while, during my years with Raihn, they weren’t too bad—or maybe they just felt more manageable when I’d had someone else fighting his nightmares right alongside me. But they’d roared back with a vengeance ever since the Kejari—ever since the attack on the Moon Palace, when Atroxus had finally taken away my magic for good. They were so vivid now. It took me a few long seconds to shake away the breath of a ghost on the back of my neck.

My joints groaned in protest as I sat up.

I was surrounded by…?nothing.

Endless nothingness.

No walls. No bars. No guards. No windows. Not even a horizon line, a sky, a ceiling, a floor.

Just nothing.

“Hello?” I called out.

Hello? my voice answered in a distant echo.

The hair prickled at the back of my neck. That little shard of humanity at the center of my heart—that piece of my flesh that was still as vulnerable as ever—shivered in fear.

Morthryn was a god-touched place. Some said it stood at the edge of the mortal world. The House of Shadow, like all vampire kingdoms, guarded their secrets carefully. Little information existed about Morthryn other than whispers and legends. But I could feel the truth in those legends here, in a way that defied logic.

Raihn had often teased me for taking mythology so seriously. To him, the Moon Palace was a fancy house. Morthryn was a fancy prison. The Kejari was a tournament full of magic tricks. A prophecy was just a nice poem that seemed reasonable in hindsight. The gods were angry and fickle, and we couldn’t attribute their actions to more than whim.

I understood why he felt that way.

But I also knew he was wrong.

Some things were fated. Some things were divine. The gods were playing a bigger game than any of us could see. And Morthryn, I knew—unmistakably in this moment—was far, far more than just an old castle.

I stood up. I was still wearing that white dress from the party. It was stained with my blood and singed a bit at the end of the left sleeve from my ill-fated attempt at escape.

I relived the echo of Atroxus’s voice:

Wait for me.

Wait for what?

I turned slowly, eyes straining, and then stopped abruptly.

I wondered if I was imagining things when I saw the skull floating in the darkness.

It appeared to be that of a fox, maybe—two large, empty eye sockets, a delicate, long snout, and glistening teeth. I tentatively stepped closer, and then I could make out the rest of it: a body like a wolf’s, but daintier, the legs long and slender like those of a deer, the movements smooth and silent like a panther’s. The body didn’t seem quite solid, at least not compared to the gleaming bronze of its skull face. The color seemed to change every time I looked at it, shades of black and blue and green, which shifted independent of light and shadow.

It was incredible. I’d never seen anything like it.

I sank down on my heels as it approached, as if not to threaten it—which, rationally, was probably a little silly. As if I could pose any threat to whatever this was. It was the biggest dog I’d ever seen—nearly as tall as me.

Still, I gave it a smile and held out a hand for it to sniff. As a child, I’d prided myself on my ability to make dogs love me immediately. Gods, I’d missed dogs. There weren’t many domestic animals in Obitraes. Vampires didn’t usually like to keep pets, unless they could provide some useful function like tearing the faces off their enemies.

Maybe it was a sign of dog-starved desperation that I thought this one still looked a bit cute, skull face and all.

“Hello there,” I said softly. “What’s your name?”

It stopped just short of me. Though its eyes were empty, I still got the impression it was offended by my cloying tone.

I didn’t hear the word so much as I felt it, slithering straight into my mind:

Follow.

I blinked, unsure if I’d just imagined the voice.

My arms itched. I glanced down to see two tendrils of darkness wrapping around my wrists, and when I raised my gaze again, a doorway stood behind the wolf. It was made of simple gold, with one eye—the mark of Alarus, god of death—at the apex of the arch.

Follow, the wolf insisted, tilting its head in a way I understood was intended to show off its impressive fangs.

I should have been more afraid than I was. Phantom wolves. Mysterious doorways. God-touched prisons. But maybe I was still riding the euphoria of Atroxus’s voice, because it fascinated me more than anything.

I stood, raising my palms. “All right. All right. I’m following.”

The wolf let out a grunt of satisfaction, then turned to the door. But I let out a chuckle under my breath that earned another wary glance.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just, it’s a bit funny that I’m the one jumping when the dog says ‘come,’ isn’t it?”

Follow, the wolf deadpanned, its answer to that question obvious.

It was funny, I decided.

I hesitated at the door. It was only a freestanding frame, revealing no glimpse of what lay beyond, but?—

Follow, the dog insisted. And with a firm push from its bony snout, I stumbled through the arch—straight into the halls of Morthryn.

It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen.

I stood in a long, winding hallway. The floor was mirrored, like the smooth surface of a still pond. If there was a ceiling, it was so high above us that it disappeared into ghostly mist. Balls of light hovered above us like little moons, casting silver and gold across ivory walls and golden columns, which curved and arched in a shape that was eerily reminiscent of ribs. Intricate carvings crawled up each one, quivering under the flickering light. Thorny vines cradling blood-tipped leaves encircled the columns, increasingly overgrown as they climbed and eventually disappeared into the mist. The walls were lined with arches like the one I’d just come through, though each was bricked over with stone. The door I’d just stepped through was now the same, framing a flat wall.

I took a few amazed steps, taking it all in. The black ink floor rippled beneath each one, though my feet remained dry.

“Holy gods,” I whispered.

I’d spent most of my life traveling. And I’d seen some truly stunning things—the greatest works of mortal hands in art and architecture, the greatest works of the gods’ hands in natural phenomena.

This trumped them all. The most stunning of both.

The wolf, which had walked several paces ahead, looked back.

“I know, I know,” I said. “I’m following.”

I tried to keep track of our path at first, but that quickly proved pointless. The hallways twisted in ways that defied mortal logic, just as tangled as the vines that covered their walls—and somehow, I was certain, just as alive. The ivy wrapped around arch after arch, eyes of black stained glass sitting at each apex. Gentle waves of mist rolled over the floor and floated up the walls, making the prison feel as if it went on forever. Ahead, the wolf’s silent footfalls left bloody prints in the mirrored ground, starting off bright and slowly fading. I peered over my shoulder and saw them falling behind us like a trail of discarded rose petals.

Eventually, we reached a doorway different from those we’d been passing—instead of an empty frame, this one held two heavy oak doors, an eye of Alarus carved upon each.

The wolf nudged them, and though it was barely a touch, they swung wide open. The wolf stepped aside, staring at me expectantly.

Foll—

“I know,” I said. “I think I’ve got it by now.”

I stepped through, my spectral guard at my heels. The doors slammed behind me, loud enough to make me jump. Then it was silent, save for the tick tick tick of a clock that seemed just a little fast.

I spun around slowly, taking in the room. My eyes grew wider and wider.

Everywhere I looked, there was more to see. It was unbelievable. It was gorgeous .

The roses were more plentiful here, trampling each other as they coiled up bookcases that stretched so high they disappeared into the silver fog above. A neglected fire languished near death in a grand fireplace to the left. Before it, a massive desk sat in foreboding watch, a faded, black velvet chair askew behind it. Open books and papers covered the mahogany surface, wet ink still gleaming on one sheet, as if someone had just stepped away mid-thought. Yet, even so, it was all meticulously neat—every piece of parchment aligned to the edge of the desk, every little trinket artfully arranged.

But the shelves—gods, the artifacts ?—

I just kept turning and turning. Every time I considered stopping, I found something more to see.

I’d spent decades in libraries across the human nations and beyond. But two minutes in here and I knew that this had to be one of the most impressive collections of magical relics that existed in the world.

The shelves were divided into sections.

Here, bones—a small horse skull with a twisted silver horn protruding from its forehead, a carefully reassembled skeletal hand with claws longer than its fingers, a lower jaw with jagged teeth that extended several razored inches.

There, a series of glass flasks holding what I recognized as various types of blood arranged by color. The red of human, the black of vampire—then several types I didn’t recognize: gold, indigo, a strange silver that gave off waves of light.

Then, weapons. A broken sword pinned to the wall by an invisible force, shards painstakingly arranged to the shape of the blade with only a few pieces missing. A double-ended polearm, one blade curved and one straight, delicate carvings etched down the length of its golden handle. A black rapier that glowed purple, its handguard forming silver flower petals around the hilt.

At that, I gasped.

It couldn’t be what I thought it was. There was no way it was what I thought it was.

I reached out before I could stop myself?—

A growl rang out behind me. I peered over my shoulder to see the wolf glowering disapprovingly.

“Sorry.” I tucked my hands behind my back. “I was just admiring. Your master has an impressive collection. Is this—was this Nyaxia’s ?”

The wolf growled again, though it settled tentatively back onto its haunches, satisfied with the space I’d put between myself and the shelves.

A thump came against the wall, making the glass vials rattle. The wolf’s head snapped up. I spun around.

I hadn’t noticed the door because there was so much else to look at. It was small and tragically unassuming. Now, it creaked as it swung open a crack. Red light seeped from beyond it.

I’d never been very good at controlling my curiosity. I stepped closer?—

The wolf leapt to its feet. A bark split the air.

I raised my hands. “I wasn’t going to?—”

“I wasn’t expecting you yet.”

I turned to the door and stumbled backward.

Asar stood in the frame, blocking my view of the inside. He—unsurprisingly, from what I knew of him so far—looked irritated.

He was also half-naked and covered in blood.

He leaned against the door, one hand up against the top of it as if to keep it from opening any more than it had to. Drips of red rolled down his forearm, tracing over ropey cords of muscle. Human blood, I knew immediately—the smell hit me with ferocious force. He angled his body away from me, but my eyes still fell to his bare torso—to the black and purple scars gouging across the defined panes of his abdomen like the ivy over Morthryn’s walls.

How much of him did they cover, I wondered? How had he gotten them? Definitely no typical wound?—

“Excuse me. Up here.”

I blinked and pulled my stare back to his face, where he scowled at me, eyes narrowed.

With a powerful wave of embarrassment, I cleared my throat. “I was just?—”

“I’ve long ago stopped being sensitive about being stared at, Dawndrinker.”

I was glad he cut me off because what was I going to say? I wasn’t looking at you in a lecherous way, I was looking at you in a curiosity-in-a-museum way. Which was worse?

He ducked behind the doorframe, then reappeared wearing a plain, wrinkled black shirt, pushing past me and closing the door behind him. He shot the wolf a look of mild annoyance.

“You brought her early.”

The wolf let out a low whine, and Asar sighed, rubbing his temple.

“It’s fine, Luce,” he muttered. “Just lost track of time.”

“Luce?” I repeated. “It—” I glanced at the wolf, then corrected myself. “Her name is Luce?”

“Yes.” He sat behind the desk and motioned for me to take the seat opposite.

“Huh.” I perched on the chair and craned my neck to watch the wolf, instantly at ease now that we were in Asar’s presence. She had settled into a graceful lounge, front paws crossed.

“Is that…?surprising?” Asar sounded like he was already regretting asking this question.

Yes.

“No,” I said. “It’s a nice name.”

It was a nice name. I decided it suited her.

Asar opened a drawer and withdrew a neatly folded handkerchief, which he used to wipe the blood from his hands. I watched, unblinking, as the cloth turned red.

My stomach twisted painfully.

Stop staring, I told myself. I pulled my eyes away, too late.

“You’re hungry,” Asar said.

“Me? No.” I laughed brightly. “Don’t have much of an appetite, all things considered.”

He stared at me in a way that made me feel like he was peeling my clothes off. “You’re lying.”

Well, he was a mind reader, so that wasn’t fair.

Instead of responding, I gave him a cheerful smile and gestured to the shelves. “Your collection is incredible. I’ve never seen so much?—”

“That won’t work.”

He was now flipping through the papers on his desk, head bowed.

I blinked. “What won’t work?”

His gaze flicked up. That white left eye nailed me to the wall like a butterfly ready for hanging in the rest of his archives.

“I have been the warden of Morthryn for more than a century. I’ve dealt with better liars, more charming manipulators, and more beautiful women than you. So don’t bother.”

“More beautiful women?” I repeated.

I wasn’t sure if that was an insult or a backward kind of compliment.

He set down the parchment, squaring it to the edge of the desk. “So. Mische Iliae.”

He broke my name up into five pointed, deliberate syllables— Meesh-uh Il-ee-ay . Involuntarily, my body tensed at the sound of it. I hadn’t heard my own surname spoken in decades. How had he learned that? Even Raihn didn’t use it.

Mische Iliae was human. Mische Iliae was one of the most revered acolytes of the Order of the Destined Dawn. And Mische Iliae had a sister who shared that same surname.

That name didn’t sit right on my shoulders anymore.

“How did you—” I started.

“You were born human in Slenka. You were eight years old when you traveled to Vostis and joined the Order of the Destined Dawn. You served as a crusader for a decade or so. You journeyed to Obitraes when you were nineteen, where you were Turned by my beloved late brother, Malach.” His voice dripped with venom around the name as he flipped a page. “Then you befriended Raihn Ashraj. Competed in the Kejari. Helped him overthrow a kingdom. Murdered Malach—a great service to us all, so thank you for that. And now, you are here.”

His eyes flicked up to me, impassive. “Did I miss anything?”

Hearing my own life read back to me with such stripped-down factuality made me nauseous. Traveled to sum up weeks barely evading death when I was just a child. Served to mean offering my entire life to Atroxus. Journeyed to describe a sacred mission.

And Turned —that horrific, gods-damned word—to sum up the night that a stranger had pinned me down and ripped away my humanity with his teeth buried in my throat. A violation so great I didn’t even remember it.

I swallowed thickly.

“I wasn’t a crusader,” I said. “I was a priestess. A missionary.”

Am a priestess, I corrected myself.

Asar let out a scoff. “See those?” He pointed his quill tip to a row of humanoid skulls upon one of the shelves. “Those are all that remain of one of the oldest Shadowborn bloodlines after some Dawndrinker missionaries were done showing them the path of the light .”

My gaze settled on the smallest of the skulls—so very, very tiny—before I yanked it away. “Not me. I was more of…?a scholar.”

I wasn’t lying. But a long-neglected memory of chains spattered with black blood flitted through my mind, and I swallowed the sour tang of dishonesty.

He didn’t believe me, and he didn’t bother hiding it. “I don’t particularly care, Iliae. Because you ended up here, in Morthryn, and everyone within these walls deserves to be here. I do better research than my sister, and I’m less impulsive than my father, which is why I understand that you’re far more useful here than butchered up and shipped back to the House of Night. Everything else worth knowing about you, I’ve already figured out. Except for one thing.”

He tapped his pen impatiently on the parchment, leaving a cluster of messy ink.

“The fire.”

I resisted the urge to touch my burns, instead clasping my hands together.

“I am an acolyte of Atroxus,” I said. “You knew that already.”

“There,” he said, pointing the tip of his pen at me like a blade poised at my throat. “ Am. Not was . Countless acolytes of other gods have been Turned over the years, and the gods of the White Pantheon have abandoned them all for it. But not you.” He eyed my arms—covered, but I still felt his stare on my scars. “Even if, it appears, you had to sacrifice to keep those gifts.”

Sacrifice. I wanted to laugh at him. He had no idea the things I’d done to keep Atroxus’s love. And was any of it enough? Sure, Atroxus let me keep the flame—for a while. But it was hard to put any other word but abandonment to that night in the Moon Palace, when the demons had closed in on me and I’d heard nothing but my god’s silence as I begged him for help.

I smiled and shrugged. “I’m just special.”

He cocked his head slightly. “Special,” he repeated.

I stared back at him, peeling back his layers as he attempted to peel back mine. He looked different here than he had at the party. He didn’t fit in there. Everything from the clothing to the lighting to the smooth faces of the vampire nobles around him had served to highlight his differences, and I could tell that he’d felt every one of them.

But here? The lines of his face that had seemed too severe out there now verged on majestic, just hard enough and sharp enough to survive such a dangerous place. Even those scars seemed natural, like moss crawling over the trees.

He stood abruptly and walked around the desk. I pulled away as he approached me.

“What are you?—”

He gripped my shoulder, gentle but firm, and placed his hand flat over my chest. I tensed at it—bare skin against bare skin, just above the neckline of my dress. I drew in a sharp breath. A shiver rolled over me, a visceral reaction to his touch. Like it was dragging something up from deep inside myself.

Wriggling clusters of shadow wrapped around his fingers. They collected at his palm, building where his skin met mine. And then, in a sudden burst, they fanned out like a star exploding, black lines etching into me. Darkness welled up in my heart, the sensation as terrifying as staring over the edge of a cliff into oblivion.

I clapped my own hand over my chest without thinking—covering Asar’s. My eyes snapped up to meet his. The swirls of light in his left eye seemed restless, like a brewing storm. For a strange, disorienting moment, an innate connection bonded us —I could feel his emotions, just as tangled and nonsensical as mine, curiosity and anger and determination and fear.

Smoothly, he slid his palm away and released me.

My chest throbbed with the aftershock of his spell. It didn’t hurt, though. The unpleasantness came from exactly how much it did not hurt .

Just like it had felt when—when?—

“An anchor,” he said. “It’ll make sure you don’t get lost on our journey.”

I knew what an anchor was, gods’ sake. I’d been the best magic user in the Citadel, and anchors were practically amateur spells by their standards. But I barely heard him anyway.

I blurted out, “It was you. The night before your father’s party. You helped me.”

Maybe I imagined the brief pause as he stacked his parchments up again, refusing to look at me.

“My sister likes to play with her food a little too roughly. You were going to die, and you’re too useful to kill.”

I opened my mouth, questions pooling on my tongue. But I wasn’t sure how to put them into words.

What I wanted to ask was, Why does it feel like that? So…?intimate?

But even acknowledging that question was too awkward, putting a name to things I’d rather ignore. So instead, I settled on, “I didn’t know that Shadowborn magic could be used to heal.”

“All forms of magic are just tools.” Asar stood, slamming his drawer closed. “Anything that can be used to destroy can be used to create, too. I’m surprised that a scholar such as yourself doesn’t know that.”

I scowled, but he didn’t give me a second glance, instead gesturing to the door. “Come. I need your help.”

I was much more curious than I was offended. I jumped up and followed Asar to the door.

He swung it open, and I stopped short, hand going to my mouth.

“Holy fucking gods,” I breathed.

It took me a moment to recognize exactly what I was looking at.

The room was small, circular, with no windows. It was plain compared to the rest of this place, free of decoration or glamour. But the mirrored floor had been painstakingly covered in spell-work—glyphs running in circles from the outer walls, spiraling to the center. I knew how to recognize skillful craft, and this was meticulous. So flawlessly done that those glyphs alone rivaled the grand elegance of the rest of Morthryn’s halls.

And there, at the center of all of it, lay the corpse of a middle-aged woman, wrapped in white silk.

I knew what this was, even if I’d never witnessed it myself. I whirled to Asar, eyes wide.

“You’re a necromancer.”