Chapter 608: Pieces

Soren stayed quiet for a long moment, watching the candle flame flicker in the draft from the balcony. He was trying to find a place to start that wouldn’t bring the smell of the pit into the room."I found the mages," he said, his voice dropping low. "What was left of them."

Eris went perfectly still against his ribs, her fingers stopping in his hair.

"Thirty of them," he went on. "In a hidden pit below the dungeon floor, right beneath the place where the chains were anchored. They were killed down there and left in the dark."

"My father," she said. It wasn’t a question.

"Yes."

Her face didn’t break into tears. Her eyes just went flat and dark, the cold look she used when she was remembering the red halls of her childhood.

She had known what King Aureth was long before she ever met Soren, and the news of another grave didn’t surprise her, even if it sat heavy on her shoulders.

"He was a greedy man," she said, her voice even as a stone wall. "He believed that if he turned me into a weapon, he could rule every fort from here to the sea. He was delusional enough to think the world would let him keep it, and practical enough to build the trap anyway."

She looked back out at the moon. "He killed them because dead mages cannot teach another king how to undo the knots. He killed them to protect his secret, and his weapon, which happened to be his daughter."

She spoke without any tremor, the old horror long since chewed and swallowed over twenty years of lonely nights.

Soren watched the light hit her white hair, the image of the little girl on the stone slab still burning in his head. He could still hear the wet sob she had made when her father turned his back.

"I saw it happen," Soren said.

Eris didn’t move. "How?"

"One of the mages encoded a memory into a silver pendant before the guards finished them," he said. "I found it in the dust. When I touched the metal, the spell opened. I saw everything, Eris."

The silence came down on the room like a heavy blanket.

"Everything?" she asked.

"Yes," Soren said. The word held the whole memory, the small iron bands on her wrists, her thin voice begging the king to stay, the great obsidian bulk of the god being dragged out of the hole, and the terrible scream that had torn her throat when the fire poured in.

Eris looked at the moon for a long time, her hand resting flat against her stomach. "Then you know."

"Yes."

She gave one slow nod. She didn’t turn her face away, and she didn’t hide her eyes in his coat. She simply leaned back another inch into his chest, letting her whole weight rest against his shoulder.

"It was a long time ago," she whispered.

Soren’s arms closed tight around her, his fingers bunching the silk of her dress. "It does not feel like a long time ago when you watch it happen."

Eris let out a tiny sound from the back of her throat, not quite a laugh, more like the dry click of a pebble. "No. I imagine it doesn’t."

They sat together in the silver light while the candle burned down to the tallow. Soren didn’t move his hand from her belly, his own magic drifting slow and deep through her wool skirts.

It was the simple, steady cold that kept the fire from cooking her from the inside out, a constant ice that cost him nothing to give and gave the three children beneath her skin a few more hours of quiet sleep.

Under his palm, the small kicks stopped, the triplets settling into the dark. Eris let out a long, slow sigh against his neck, her breathing turning deep and regular as she finally closed her eyes.

"There is something else," Soren said after the moon had passed the center of the window.

Eris stirred against his shoulder, her eyes opening. "Tell me."

"I saw the entity again," he said. "The one from the void. It was standing in the courtyard of the temple on my way out."

Eris didn’t look up, but her shoulder went tight. "What did it say?"

"It spoke more plainly this time," Soren said, his eyes fixed on the dark beams of the ceiling. "It said it was one of many who keep the laws under which the worlds run. It told me our world was designed for a specific purpose, and that the unravelling.. the cracks in the earth and the sky, is just the world trying to force things back into the old groove."

He paused, his jaw setting. "I have been through every old scroll in the north since I was a boy. I have never read an account of anything that lives outside the world and guides it like a puppet play. There is nothing in the books."

He turned his head to look at her profile.

Eris was staring straight at the open balcony doors, her mouth shut tight.

"You know something," he said quietly. "Don’t you?"

She stayed still for five breaths, the silence between them turning heavy and sharp.

"What makes you think that?"

"The way you are refusing to look at my face," Soren said.

The corner of her mouth pulled up in a dry, humorless smirk. "There are some things that a man has to find for himself, Soren. I think you already know more than you realize. You just haven’t put the pieces on the table yet."

Soren studied her eyes. Her words weren’t a denial; they were an admission wrapped up in a warning, a signpost telling him to stop digging in that particular patch of dirt tonight.

She knows, he thought, a cold sweat breaking out under his collar. She knows something about all of this.

He decided to let the line go. He wouldn’t push her, not while she was resting against his chest with his children under her hands.

"When you are ready," he said.