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

Chapter 7

CHAPTER SEVEN

F or the second time in a single day, I found myself speechless. My lips parted and no words came out.

I will kill a god.

I could imagine that Raihn or Oraya might be capable of killing a god. They were the kind of people who would look very good immortalized in tapestries and paintings, wielding their fancy magical blades.

Not me. I was a priestess. A scholar. A bringer of the light.

For some reason, Asar’s sneer danced through my head: crusader .

I managed to get out, “No mortal has ever killed a god.”

“Alarus’s state will be greatly weakened in the aftermath of his resurrection.” Atroxus spoke like he was offering reassurance to a nervous child. “His flesh will be tender as a mortal’s. His heart soft as a human’s.”

I will kill a god.

“Nyaxia’s necromancer will need to travel through the five Sanctums of the Descent between the mortal world and the underworld. He will need to recover a relic from each, placed there by Alarus before his death. I could not tamper with my brother’s magics, but I did what I could to lock them away in anticipation of these very events. The necromancer will need the magic of the sun to claim them.”

Hence why Asar was collecting followers of Atroxus. Because he knew that the relics he’d need for the resurrection ceremony had been barred by the magic of the sun.

But my head spun around these logistics. I couldn’t think about the how . I was still stuck on the what .

I will kill a god.

“You will find a weapon within the Descent that will have the power to pierce a god’s flesh,” Atroxus went on. “You will know it when it presents itself to you. But the less I tell you now, the better. You must guard your thoughts against the necromancer. You must ensure that he sees as little of your truth as possible.”

Because thought was a vulnerability in the presence of a Shadow-born.

I imagined myself standing before Alarus. I imagined myself plunging a sword through his chest.

I will kill a god.

Oh, gods. I was going to vomit.

“I—I?—”

The words I can’t danced on the tip of my tongue. They were dirty words, never to be spoken. They could especially never be spoken to Atroxus.

I forced myself to my feet. Forced myself to meet Atroxus’s gaze once more. He was fading more now, the brilliance of his light wavering, his body slightly translucent. But still, he was so painfully beautiful.

I thought of my offering day—my wedding day, in all the ways that mattered. I’d been wearing such a gorgeous dress, so heavy with beading and embellishment that it physically dragged me down before the altar. When Atroxus had appeared to me to accept my vows, I’d thought that at sixteen, I was already the luckiest woman in the world.

I had promised myself to him that morning. I’d promised him my body, my love, my loyalty. I had promised him both my life and my death. And I had promised him that I would devote my eternal soul to bringing the light to the edges of the horizon, no matter what it took.

Because I was special. Not because I was born special—I wasn’t, I was nobody—but because he had made me special by choosing me that day. Choosing me over my sister, even though she’d deserved it more.

And what had I done with that gift?

It was impossible not to think about the last time he’d stood before me like this, entrusting me with a task. So much had changed.

He watched me, solemn. “You are afraid.”

A painful lump rose in my throat, a knot of all the questions I was so afraid to ask.

“Why are you trusting me with this?” I said. “After…”

“After you failed.”

I flinched.

He said it so simply. And yes, failed was such an ugly word. But it was also far too light for the truth of what had happened. Failure wasn’t powerful enough to describe the images that haunted me in the darkness—darkness I could no longer escape at all.

I blinked away the unwelcome memories. A pretty boy’s face with a missing jaw. My sister’s body lying in the dusty dirt, throat open, blood crusted on torn flesh.

Failure.

“Yes,” I said softly. “After I failed you.”

Because he had sent me to Obitraes to spread the light. And I’d been so gods-damned arrogant.

He stepped closer, his light burning my cheeks. He looked at me with a shade of pity.

“Tell me, a’mara, why did I choose you all those years ago?”

I asked myself that question so many times.

A tear slithered down my cheek.

“I don’t know, my light,” I admitted.

I almost said, Maybe I did a long time ago.

But that would’ve been a lie, too, and I couldn’t lie to a god. Even when I’d shone brightest, at the height of everything I’d once been, I’d never known—really known —why Atroxus had chosen me that morning. Every time I thought I did, I’d look at Saescha and doubt it all over again.

He touched my face, as if surveying a piece of fruit. “I found you amusing, yes. But there was more, too. Gods can smell fate upon a soul. And yours…” He lowered his lashes, drawing in the inhale of a summer breeze. “Yours smelled of revelation. I can still sense it there, beneath the stench of rot. One day, it will be gone, but that day has not yet come.”

He pulled back, his eyes meeting mine. I wanted to look away. I wanted to hide myself.

“I sent you to Obitraes to be the force of that revelation I sensed upon you,” he said. “You brought your fellow acolytes with you to help you fulfill it. Your mission is not yet over. Your entire life has led to this. The lives of your parents and grandparents. The lives of your ancestors. Do you not want your redemption?”

My parents had been poor farmers in a country half a world away from the Order of the Destined Dawn. They’d been casual worshippers of Vitarus, god of the harvest, as most farmers were—or at least, that’s what Saescha told me of them, because I didn’t remember them myself. When I thought of the home I’d had before the Citadel, I thought only of Saescha. Saescha had her makeshift altars for a god that no one else in our town worshipped, Saescha and her commitment to a cause that everyone else rolled their eyes at. When things had gotten bad, Saescha had said that the light would save us, and she had been right.

Atroxus spoke to me of fate and prophecy; he spoke of the things priests bellowed in church services every dawn. He spoke of purpose . The kind of purpose that any acolyte of any god would lay down their lives for.

And yet, I wasn’t thinking of my parents and grandparents and ancestors, or prophecy, or my name upon the scriptures of the Citadel.

I thought of my friends, who would be ripped apart in the jaws of a war between gods.

I thought of the people who had trusted me, who had followed me on this cursed mission to begin with, and who deserved to die for a greater purpose than the one I’d given them.

Do you not want your redemption? he asked me.

I didn’t care about my redemption. But gods, I would give anything for theirs. To make it all worth something in the end. To finish the holy mission that I’d started with them.

“Yes,” I whispered. “I do.”

His approval fell over me like the final warm rays of waning dusk.

“You have always amused me so,” he said. And for just a moment, the way he looked at me seemed almost like the way a mortal husband might look at a mortal wife. I fought the sudden urge to embrace him, let him wrap me up in his arms like the sun against the bleached white sands.

But of course, we didn’t have that kind of marriage, and that wasn’t the kind of comfort he offered me. Our binding ceremony was more about faith than love, the night after it more of a physical offering than a lovemaking session.

Still, a piece of me longed for that—for what Oraya and Raihn shared when I watched them laughing together in the halls of the Nightborn Palace, or the way they held each other after their nearest brush with death.

But one couldn’t expect a god to love you like a mortal did. A greater gift, still, to have that love at all. And Atroxus’s, I knew, was very much conditional.

The dream had begun to disintegrate around him, the rays of light around his form dyed red like the blood of a future that hadn’t yet come to pass.

A future that, I vowed, wouldn’t come to pass.

“This task is the most crucial of your life, a’mara,” he said. “Speak of this to no one. I cannot follow where you go. But know that my light is with you.”

There was no question, no Do you accept? But why would there be? It wasn’t a choice.

Atroxus reached for me as he faded, and I fell to my knees before him.

“I won’t fail,” I whispered. “I promise.”

And I pressed my mouth against his outstretched hand, the kiss scorched upon my lips.