Page 114 of These Divided Shores
The song ended in lines about the Pious God’s mercy, his welcoming embrace, how he would make the transition to the afterlife smooth and safe. When was the last time Vex had remembered anythinggoodabout the Pious God? Elazar had warped every part of him, but the Pious God that Rodrigu had worshipped had been the one in this song—kind and compassionate.
Ben and Vex finished the hymn, and the Tuncian drummer ended, too. Silence rolled in, heavy in the rush and heave of people gasping around him.
Vex couldn’t open his eye to see how many people were glaring at him and Ben. Everyone who’d died had beenkilled by an Argridian defensor—how dare anyone sully their memorial with an Argridian song?
Vex squeezed Ben’s hand. “We should go,” he whispered.
Ben returned his squeeze. “I think she wants you.”
That made Vex open his eye. Ben was looking behind them, through the crowd.
Vex followed his gaze to see Lu, standing at the very back of the swaying people, her face fading in and out of the shadows.
By the time Vex got through the crowd, his whole body was trembling like a tuning fork gone to humming, but it had nothing to do with his Shaking Sickness.
Lu didn’t move, her arms clasped before her, her eyes on him.
“Where were you?” Vex asked, his cheeks stiff from dried tears.
The back of the crowd was only a few paces away. The darkness of midnight blurred all around, flickering lanterns casting shadows.
She shrugged. “I couldn’t—” She stopped. “I was working on another cure for you. It’s done. I can give it to you.”
Vex stared at the ground. Another cure. Would it work?
And what then? What would he do once he didn’t have Shaking Sickness as an excuse?
He looked at Lu. There was something else in her eyes, something pleading for him to let her do this. To focus onsomething small and easy in a world of funeral songs and war.
Vex nodded. “All right.”
Lu might not have gone to the gathering, but she had heard it. Bent over the small fire in the hut, she had listened to the wailing, the drumming, the chanting—and Vex, singing with Ben.
That hymn still saturated her heart. All of it, really, every expression of melancholy from that square had been different yet similar, and Lu hoped Nate, Pierce, and Rosalia felt the same welling of unity that she did.
But beyond that, part of Lu had heard Vex’s singing and come undone. She hadn’t known he could sound like that, his voice shaky from nerves but still strong and rich, sculpted for grand Argridian cathedrals that would rebound the noise and build it higher, louder. It was what had pulled her out of the hut instead of crouching in the darkness, each crooning word sliding hands against her back until she had found herself standing behind him in awe.
Why did you go?she asked herself now.The war may have changed. But you have not.
Lu had found Drooping Fern in the ruins of the sanctuary. She wouldn’t give Vex another tonic to induce his memories about what the Church had given him, but Drooping Fern was the counter plant to Awacia, the plant used to keep people awake. The Church had loved givingAwacia to its victims, to torture them with sleeplessness, so Lu had made a concentrated dose of Drooping Fern to counter it.
The hut Nayeli had let Lu use as a laboratory was mostly intact, aside from one bashed-in window—and the now-broken chest of drawers where Lu had stored one of the two remaining vials of permanent magic. Ben likely still had the other one; she, Rosalia, and Nate were living embodiments of the final three.
Did Elazar have the one Tom had taken? What magic had implanted itself in him? Or was he holding off on taking that potion, instead letting Tom subject Teo to more tests, trying to break magic out of his blood and bones? Was Teo locked in a sticky, cramped cell in New Deza?
That Milo was no longer a threat to Teo offered meager relief. The lack of release in knowing he was dead continued to shock Lu. For so many years, she had thought that she would be able to breathe again over his body. That at the very least, knowledge of his death would free her from the memories he had left, the scars he had inflicted, the pain he had caused.
But his death felt all too similar to the realization she had had about herself, how horrible things would happen regardless of whether she committed them. Milo was a tool, as she had been. He was, in his own way, meaningless.
The only thing that could be done was to prevent more atrocities from happening. To do that, Teo needed her toact, so she put her questions and worries in a box deep in her mind. Every twitch of pain, every flex of strength it took to keep that box shut—she would use it all when she came face-to-face with Argrid.
Lu led Vex inside the shack and closed the door, blocking out the drumbeats. Someone was singing again, faster now—everyone was strung too tight from grief. They needed to expel it, the holes in their hearts begging them tostop, just for an hour of healing.
Coals glowed in the center of the shack, the only light source, making the small room shadowed and unsteady. Lu moved to the table and picked up the vial she had made for him. She heard a soft thud and turned to see Vex slumped on his knees next to the firepit, staring into the coals, pinpricks of orange reflected in his dark eye.
“I saw the flame Gunnar lit,” Lu whispered. She couldn’t make herself talk louder. “Edda would have liked that, I think.”
Vex flicked his gaze up to her. He grinned, but it was frail. “She’d have been a sobbing mess for all of it. She hid it most of the time, but damn, that woman was the most sentimental person I’ve ever met. Thought she’d lose her mind when Teo became part of our crew—”
