Mortal

CHAPTER NINE

EIGHT HOURS HAD PASSED since Feyn had woken to find her world completely changed. And although she knew precisely who she was, in some ways she didn’t know herself at all.

The face looking back at her was not her own. Familiar, yes. So pale. Skin to set the standard of beauty for the world. And right there-the dark vein beneath her temple. So dark. It had been blue before. And her eyes had been palest gray. They glittered now, like faceted onyx.

Feyn turned her head, considered the inky veins spreading up over her cheek like the branches of a winter tree… the tributaries of a black river. A river with a single headwater.

A face appeared beside hers in the mirror.

“You’re beautiful, my love.”

Saric.

Feyn considered him in the glass. The strong line of his jaw, broader than she remembered it. The neatly trimmed hair beneath his lower lip, precise as she remembered it.

“Am I?”

“Yes.”

His voice filled her with strange warmth.

He reached around her and unfastened the top of her gown. Pulled wide the broad neck, bearing the scar that crossed from her sternum almost to her waist on the other side.

She flinched-not at the sight of it, but at the sudden memory of the sword. Flashing down, light glinting off the blade. A scream in her ears-her scream as she held her arms wide. She had opened herself to the slashing blade. Given herself to it.

She had died that day.

Feyn clasped the front of the gown, pulled it closed. And then his hands were on hers and pushing them gently away, fastening the hooks up the front.

“Don’t worry, my love. I will remove the scar. I’ll see it gone from you. Nothing will mar your beauty or remind you of that day. Nothing except the fact that it brought you to me. That would please you, wouldn’t it?”

She lifted her gaze to his in the mirror. “Yes.” And then: “Thank you.”

He smiled. “Wait here.”

Her brother stepped away, and she turned to watch as he moved toward the chest in the corner. Her jewelry chest. Here, in her chamber.

She glanced out toward the broad windows at the tumultuous sky, churning beyond the curtain of heavy velvet drawn back on each side. At the dressing table with the large, round mirror. At the bed, too big for one person, or even three. Up, to the vaulted ceiling overhead.

Saric was back, holding up a pair of dangling sapphire earrings.

“You never wore these before. A state gift, I believe, of Asiana on the occasion of your inauguration the day you were taken from me. You always insisted on such simple baubles. But the time for those childish days is over, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it is,” she said, as he slipped them through her earlobes.

The old Keeper had said she would not die. That she would sleep for a time… and would live again. And he had been right, in a manner of speaking.

He had been wrong, too.

It had not been sleep.

And now there was Saric, the face she remembered, peering at her distantly, as though from another life.

She didn’t remember him being so muscled, or even quite so tall. She didn’t remember the curve of his mouth when he smiled as he did now.

There had been pain. Pain, worse than the wound that had killed her. She had no doubt now that she had been dead.

Had she been in Bliss, then? She had no memory of fear. Of the eternal torment of Hades that one goes to when one fails the known bar of Order, wherever it might be set, that day, and for that person. And on the day she’d died, she had renounced Order and changed the course of its succession.

How strangely it had all worked out.

“Tell me, sister, did you dream?”

He wanted to hear that she had. She saw it in his eyes.

She smiled slightly.

“But of course you did,” he said in a low, soothing voice. “Of me, I’m sure.”

Her mind drifted to the scene at the senate. Like a dream, but real, alive. Every eye, staring at her. She had been naked, but it hadn’t mattered at first because she was still in the dream, and in dreams fear always manifested as nakedness. A fear that the world would see the dreamer as they really were. That they were never what they pretended to be.

“Of course,” she said, smiling again. She wanted to see him smile. Had Saric been quite so gentle with her before? Or as beautiful? Had he changed as much as it seemed?

Or was it her, only now seeing him for who he was?

The flush of warmth again, this time, as he took her hand. He had chosen her rings, her gown, even put her shoes on her feet. With great care, he had drawn back the sides of her hair into a sparkling diamond clasp.

“You smile, sister,” he said. “For love, yes? For me. For your master.”

“Yes,” she said. And her confession brought her more comfort.

The door to her suite opened. Several of Saric’s servants came in, the ones he called Children and sometimes Dark Bloods. They were setting the table there in the dining room.

“Do you think you can eat? You must make yourself take normal food, not only what I feed you.”

“Why do I feel this way?” she said, looking up into his eyes.

“What way, my love?”

“I… I don’t feel myself. Something has changed.”

He tilted his head. “How do you feel?”

“I don’t feel the same fear I once did.”

“Tell me more.”

“I… feel pleasure. At the way you look at me now. At the way you smile. Seeing it. I want very much to see you pleased.”

“The thought of my pleasure pleases you, then.”

“Very much,” she said with some wonder. “And there’s more. I feel…” She couldn’t fully express the emotions flooding her mind and heart. She wasn’t sure where they lived in her, only that they had somehow come from Saric.

“Joy?” he said. “Love? Peace?”

She nodded. “Yes. Yes, I think so.”

She’d felt this way once before. One beautiful day in a meadow where she had learned a truth that had changed the course of her dead life…

And brought her, ultimately, here.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because. You are alive.”

“Alive.” Her heart tripped once in her chest. So he’d found the serum and come to the life she herself had once known? Had the Keeper fulfilled his promise?

She felt herself weaken at the beauty of the thought. Saric’s hand was instantly under her elbow.

“Yes. Alive.” He turned her toward him. “Full life. My life.”

Her heart stuttered. “Yours?”

Why did that set her instantly on edge, as though she had bitten down on metal?

“Not like I had before. Forgive me for my former indiscretions, my love.” He took her hands. “I was weak then. A lost soul desperate to find truth. I have realized it is my destiny to know and experience the purest kind of life-and now, at last, I have found it. There is no life greater than that which now flows through my veins. Now I truly love as I could not before. And now you serve me as you’ve wanted to, often without knowing it yourself. I have liberated you from the Order of death and all of its rules.”

She tilted her head. “You have?”

One of the Dark Bloods appeared in the doorway and Saric glanced up. “Ah, good. Come, my dear. You will eat now.”

He slid her arm through his and led her into the front room. She studied the Dark Blood as he held out a chair for her at the table. He was broad and well-muscled like the two exquisite creatures she’d seen earlier in the senate. His eyes were black, his skin like marble veined with ink-like hers-but a warrior like the others.

“Janus, how is your mate?”

The Dark Blood glanced up as he came to the side of the table to pour wine into the goblets before them.

“She’s very well, my Lord. Thank you.”

The table was filled with an entire array of food so delicately and painstakingly prepared that Feyn couldn’t remember seeing a meal quite as inviting. Fish. Roast. Quivering eggs, poached across the top of the filet. Color everywhere-from the vegetables to the flowers on the sides of the plates. And in the middle of their two settings, a bowl of pale rock salt. She glanced at Saric. His eating habits had changed.

He took his place, adjacent to her at the table, reaching over to shake out Feyn’s napkin and drop it into her lap before doing the same with his. “I envy you, Janus. She’s lovely.”

Janus hesitated, the pitcher of wine in hand.

“She could be yours if you so desired, my Lord.”

Saric glanced up at him. “No, no,” he said with a slight smile. “I only want to see you happy.”

“Thank you, my Lord,” Janus said.

Saric touched the knife with a forefinger before lifting it from the table. He looked at Feyn deliberately, seeing into her in a way that unnerved her, if only every so slightly.

“If she ever displeases you, Janus, you’ll be certain to tell me,” he said, eyes fixed on Feyn.

“Of course, my Lord.”

“On that day I wouldn’t hesitate to have her killed.”

Feyn glanced up.

Janus paused. “Thank you, my Lord.”

“Leave us now.”

The Dark Blood dipped his head and left the room.

Feyn studied Saric as he cut into a piece of meat, laid it onto the center of her plate. The smell of it briefly threatened to turn her stomach, unaccustomed to food for nearly a decade as it was.

“You would kill his mate?”

“Yes.”

“Is she also one of your children?”

“Yes.”

“But you say you love your children.”

Saric glanced at her sidelong, thoughtfully licked off the edge of the knife, and then delicately, precisely, set it down parallel to the fork on the edge of his plate.

“I would kill Janus, too, if he failed to serve me,” he said simply.

“You would kill your children? Those you call your own?” she said very carefully.

She could not tear her gaze from his face. The simple tilt of his head. His lips, without tension. The cast of his gaze, as quiet and as heavy upon her as a vise.

“You don’t understand the power of the Maker? Does he not torture and send to Hades even those he once loved because they failed to love him the way he wished? Is that not the way of the highest power?”

She blinked.

Bliss. Hades. The two destinies of the deceased. Eternal freedom from fear. Eternal fear, bound in wailing and the gnashing of teeth. It was taught from birth. It was the way.

“Yes,” she said.

Should she tell him that in her death, she had seen nothing of Bliss or Hades? That it had been filled only with nothingness?

Again, she was aware of her strange desire to please him.

Was this love, then, as she had known it once?

Perhaps.

Loyalty?

Yes.

Freely given?

Given.

“And so you see,” he said with a slight smile, “I, too, am like that one. That Maker.”

“Yes, you are.”

“I am. And you will serve me, my love, as my Sovereign.”

“As your Sovereign,” she said.

“You will rule the world as I say.”

She dipped her head. “As you say.”

He held out his hand.

“You will obey me as your Maker.”

She lifted the napkin from her lap and laid it on the table. Slipped from her chair, to a knee between them. Lifted his hand, turned it over.

“As my Maker,” she said, laying a kiss against his palm.