Page 110 of The Thirteenth Child
Without thinking, I’d picked up one of my spare tapers. Without reasoning and fretting, I’d known what I was supposed to do.
This was the right answer. This was the only answer.
I only needed to find the king’s candle.
I roamed the aisles, my eyes darting over each flame. There was enough godsight left to let me see the life each one represented, see the world each person was a part of. I saw wedding days and first kisses, smiles given and hands shook. I saw arguments and deep conversations, tears and embraces, laughter and music, and so many moments of inconsequential ordinariness. I saw how thousands of lives were playing out at that exact moment and wanted to cry, struck dumb by how beautiful these perfectly normal lives were.
Calamité had said Merrick arranged the candles by the circles mortals kept in their real lives, so when I spotted a glimpse of Aloysius chastising an errant footman, I knew I was close.
Marnaigne’s candle was in the center of his table, surrounded by tapers that looked identical to his. Without the godsight I never would have known who he was, what power he held. His was just a simple white taper, nothing more and nothing less than any of the other millions of candles in the cavern.
In his flame, I watched him as he sat slumped over in the bathtub, utterly motionless. It was a wonder he’d not yet drowned.
I plucked up his candle, then knelt, placing it upon the most level patch of ground I could find.
“Bless me with good fortune, Félicité,” I prayed before raising my taper. I kept my free hand ready, poised to snuff out the king’s old wick just as the new flame caught. It danced and writhed in the still air of the cavern, looking very much like a living thing.
Suddenly the risk of everything felt too great, impossible to take on. Could I really do this? I would be going against Merrick’s orders, against the deathshead, against everything I’d ever been taught. My hand trembled so badly I dropped my candle, and the taper rolled beneath the nearest table.
“You’re doing the right thing,” I whispered. “You’re doing this for Châtellerault, for peace, for the whole country, for even the world, maybe. You’re doing this for Euphemia.”
I let out a quick breath and retrieved the fallen candle before my guilty conscience could stop me.
The new wick caught.
The old wick twisted out.
I had just enough of the godsight left to watch Marnaigne’s new candle, to see him give a strange little shudder, as if a sudden chill had crept over him while in the bath. The water around him jostled and I saw his chest rise and fall.
I breathed a sigh of relief and placed the new taper in the center of the table, leaving the old one behind.
From the far side of the cavern came a terrible clattering crash, like the crack of thunder on a muggy summer afternoon, heralding the storm that would rip the sky apart.
The black smudge of Merrick loomed tall, unfurling in the cavern like a bat spreading its wings. He was bigger than I’d everseen him, a dark, smoldering shadow vibrating with rage and retribution.
He crossed the cavern with single-minded fury, faster than my eyes could take in, skittering directly toward me.
When he spoke, it was in the voice of my worst nightmares, the voice of hot embers, of brimstone and sulfur, molten tar and venom.“What have you done?”
Chapter 39
“Merrick, I can explain, Ican—”
I never did get to say what I could do because he lashed out and I was suddenly flying backward, through the candles, through the length of the cavern itself, until I struck a stone pillar on the far wall. I hit it with enough force to shatter every bone in my body and crack my skull, but I miraculously, horribly, did neither.
“What have you done?” he demanded again, before me in a flash, picking up my crumpled form from the floor and holding me aloft by my neck.
I felt the Divided Ones’ necklace snap and fall to the floor, lost to the darkness of the cavern as I squirmed and kicked and gasped for air. I searched for the right words, the words that would somehow get me out of this, the words that would not come. Black stars danced before my eyes and I could feel my muscles grow weak and limp, but before the blessed darkness could take me, Merrick cast me aside with a snarl of disgust.
“I’m sorry,” I cried, trying to break an opening in the wall of fury he’d built around himself. “Merrick, I—”
“You saw the deathshead,” he snapped, cutting off my pleading, and I shrank back into the ground, wary of being struck once more.
Mutely, I nodded.
“You saw the deathshead and yet you went and didthat.” His arm flew back toward the king’s new candle, once again lost in a sea of flickering flames. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
Knees pressed into the rocky ground, I shook my head, tightening every muscle in my body as I tried to make myself as small and inconsequential as I could.
