Chapter 143 The mark of the faithful
Chapter 143 The mark of the faithful
“Everything Corvin Dray recorded before he died,” she said. “My grandfather kept it, and his father before him, each one adding a little, each one too frightened to either destroy it or finish reading it properly.
There’s a section near the back about a group my family always referred to in the margins as ‘the Faithful’ people who believed the vault shouldn’t stay sealed at all. People who think the Heart of the Curse isn’t a monster to be contained, but a god that deserves to be freed and worshipped instead.”
Aurelian had come in partway through, still moving carefully, the shadow fully retreated back beneath his skin now but his color still wrong, his winter eyes shadowed with exhaustion.
He picked up the ledger and turned to the marked page, scanning it with the particular stillness of a man reading something he already half-suspected.
“There’s a list,” he said quietly. “Names. Most of them coded, single letters and old house sigils instead of full names...except one.”
He turned the book so I could see it.
A single name, written in full, in ink gone brown with age, sat circled twice at the bottom of a page otherwise covered in careful, frightened code.
Garrick.
“That’s not possible,” Selyne said, though her voice had already lost the conviction to argue with what was right in front of her. “Garrick has sat on the Council longer than I’ve been alive. He’s the one who first named the prophecy out loud, the one who pushed the chamber to even consider that the Crown might have chosen correctly…”
“He pushed the chamber to believe the Crown chose Caelum on purpose,” Aurelian said slowly, like a man rebuilding a wall he’d thought was solid and discovering it was hollow all the way through. “He was the first person in that room to suggest the prophecy meant what it apparently meant.
He made it easy for everyone else to believe.”
“Because he already knew,” I said, the cold certainty settling into my chest alongside the fresh wound the Heart had left there. “He didn’t guess what the Crown was doing last night. He already knew, because he’s been waiting for it.”
A knock interrupted us sharp, urgent, the kind that had stopped meaning anything good since the night before.
A young guard stood in the doorway, pale and out of breath.
“Your Majesty. My lady.” His eyes moved between us, uncertain who outranked the news he was carrying. “It’s the old steward. The one from the lower kitchens...Master Hollis, the one who’s overseen the slave quarters for thirty years.”
My stomach went cold before he even finished the sentence. Hollis had raised me. Hollis had told me, when I was small enough to still ask, that it was kinder not to know about my mother.
“He’s asking to see the Luna-elect,” the guard said. “Alone. He says it’s urgent. He says…” the guard hesitated, glancing at Selyne’s ledger still open on the table between us, “…he says he knows who you used to be, and he’s run out of time to keep pretending he doesn’t.”Hollis was waiting in the small stone room off the kitchen stairwell where he’d always taken disobedient kitchen girls to be quietly disciplined, and the sight of him sitting there now old, hunched, his hands folded tight in his lap like a man bracing for a blow he believed he deserved made something in my chest twist between old fear and new, unfamiliar pity.
“You shouldn’t have come alone,” he said, the moment I stepped through the door, his eyes flicking nervously past me toward the empty corridor. “They watch who visits me. They’ve always watched who visits me.”
“I’m not alone.” Aurelian’s voice came from just behind my shoulder, low and final, and Hollis flinched at the sound of it the way a man flinches at a sentence he’s already been told is coming.
“Speak, Master Hollis. Quickly.”
The old steward’s hands were shaking. “I didn’t choose any of this,” he said. “You have to understand that first, my lord, my lady whatever I tell you, I want you to understand I never had a choice in any of it.”
“Tell me about the mark,” I said, because something in his frantic apology told me there was one, and there was when he rolled back his sleeve with trembling fingers, a faded brand sat just above his wrist, a crown split through with a cracked line, smaller and duller than the one glowing on my own chest, but unmistakably, horribly the same shape.
“You’re one of them,” I said. “You’re one of the Faithful.”
“I was born into it,” he said, and there was real desperation in his voice now, the kind that comes from a lifetime of small, cowardly compliance finally catching up all at once. “My mother served them. Her mother before her. We don’t choose our gods in this family any more than you chose yours, my lady, we simply inherit which door we’re told to guard.”
“What did they have you do,” Aurelian said, his voice gone dangerously quiet.
“They knew,” Hollis said, his eyes finding mine, wet with something that might have been genuine, useless guilt. “They knew, decades ago, that the Crown would eventually choose again, and they knew it would choose based on something older than bloodline.
They’ve been watching every orphaned, nameless child born into the lower city for a hundred years, waiting to see which one the moon would eventually want back.” “And when they found me.”
“They had me placed in the slave quarters to raise you,” he said. “To keep you close to keep you hidden, fed, alive, and most importantly unaware.. because a willing key is so much more valuable to them than a frightened one, and they could not risk you growing up with enough freedom to ever learn to want anything for yourself, in case it made you harder to convince when the time finally came.”
The room felt suddenly very small. Ten years of small kindnesses from this man extra bread on hard winters, a soft word when the overseer’s switch came too often rearranged themselves in my memory into something colder, more calculated, the long patient grooming of livestock rather than the rough mercy of a guardian.
“You raised me to be a sacrifice,” I said.…