Six Scorched Roses (Crowns of Nyaxia)

I really didn’t mean to sleep.

I didn’t have time for it. I never did—maybe that was why my body forced it upon me. One moment, I was allowing Vale to hold me. The next, I was blinking blearily into the shadows of his bedchamber. I hadn’t spent much time in this room. It was just as cluttered as all the others—full of books and weapons and mismatched artifacts, like he’d just run out of space to put the vast quantity of things he’d collected over his long life and just shoved them wherever he could.

The smile came without my permission.

Vale. Someone who collected knowledge just like I did. I felt like a failure of a scientist for not realizing what I was seeing the first time I came to this house. I thought it was just full of clutter. But no, all these things had touched him in some way. He was careful about what he kept.

He slept now.

I knew that before I even looked at him. I could feel the steady rise and fall of his chest beneath my head. It was a deep sleep. Good. He needed it.

I didn’t want this moment to pass.

I blinked away sleep and stared into the room. The blue light of white flames now flickered alongside a warmer accent. My eyes fell to the windows. Dim light seeped beneath the curtains. Daylight from an overcast sky.

Daylight.

“Shit,” I hissed.

How? How could I have slept so long?

When I pushed myself up, a wave of dizziness greeted me. My whole body protested. The hard realities of our situation crushed me one after the other.

The dead priests I had burned.

The medicine.

Vitarus.

Time. We didn’t have time.

And I had let myself fall asleep.

Shame flooded through me. Embarrassment, that I’d let myself be distracted for so long—that I’d let Vale see—

I stood abruptly, ignoring my shaking knees and the sway to my step as I crossed the room.

I heard rustling fabric as Vale stirred behind me.

“Where are you going, mouse?”

His voice was weak and sleep-slurred, and I heard those things before I heard the joking lilt to his tone. He was still injured.

“I slept too long.”

He laughed. “I already know you well enough to know that is never true.”

It was true right now, when the world was falling apart. I went to the curtains and peered through them, careful not to let sunlight fall over Vale’s bed.

The window overlooked the back of Vale’s estate grounds. The charred remains of the bodies I had burned were a smear of ashy black bones.

I raised my gaze, and my throat closed.

No.

My knuckles trembled around the handful of velvet curtain.

Vale said, after a moment, “What is it?”

I didn’t even know how to answer him.

The end. That’s what it is.

I had seen once before what the sky looked like before a god appeared. I knew in that moment, all those years ago, that I would never forget the sight. And I knew it now, too, that I would never forget this one.

It wasn’t overcast, like I’d thought. The light had seemed strange because the sky was warped. Sunlight hit the ground in mottled, jerking flecks. Clouds circled in unnatural swirls in the distance, drawing tighter and tighter, and though the thickening mist at its center seemed like it should be dark, like storm clouds, instead it cradled distant fragments of bright yellow light—like little shards of lightning, floating suspended in the air, moving in slow ripples rather than jagged cracks.

The center of it was not over this estate.

No, it was miles away. One look, and I knew it hovered over the town of Adcova.

I couldn’t move. Panic settled deep in my bones.

“Lilith?”

Vale rose and approached me. I felt his warmth behind me, even though I couldn’t turn to look at him. He peered through the curtain, staying away from the light, and released a long exhale.

“I had hoped…” he murmured, and then let himself trail off. Because we had both hoped the same thing—that Vitarus had long ago decided he didn’t give any care to Adcova, and he’d continue to ignore us. Any encounter with the gods was a gambling game, and we had lost.

Of course he didn’t listen to decades of prayer and pleas for mercy. Of course he didn’t listen to dozens or hundreds or thousands of sacrifices in his honor.

This. This is the thing he would notice. What a cruel, ridiculous joke.

Our sins had not escaped Vitarus, and they would not go unpunished.

I closed my eyes for a long moment.

“You should leave now.”

My voice sounded strange when I said it. The words hurt more than they should have.

“I’ll go with you,” Vale said. “Help you.”

“You can’t help. It would make everything worse.”

“And what do you plan to do?”

My lips parted, but I tripped over words I didn’t have. What did I plan to do? What could I do?

“I don’t know when you were planning on leaving, but make it now. Right now.”

“Lilith.”

He didn’t say, “Look at me,” but I heard him ask for that in his tone of voice. And despite my better judgment, I turned.

Vale looked… sad.

I expected frustration. The same expression I was used to seeing on the faces of the people unfortunate enough to love me. But Vale… he just looked resigned, like he knew why I was doing this and that he couldn’t stop me.

“I need you to know—”

“I don’t have time for this.”

“Listen.” His hand fell to my arm—holding me gently. Did he know that it was the same place he held me down last night? “I know you, Lilith. I know that no one can make this decision but you. But let me give you all the information to make it with.”

I should have stopped him, but I didn’t.

“You could leave with me,” he said.

I knew he was going to say it. But it still ached to hear.

“If we run now,” he went on, “you will be gone by the time Vitarus shows his face. We could draw him away.”

I swallowed thickly. “To Obitraes?”

“Anywhere. Everywhere. It doesn’t matter. None of the gods of the White Pantheon can touch Obitraes. But if you wanted to go somewhere else, we could do that, too.”

There was nowhere one could hide from a god.

And it was foolish and naive to think that Vitarus wouldn’t destroy my home, a town that had already earned his ire, out of nothing more than petty boredom, whether I was there or not.

Vale knew this just as well as I did.

“You aren’t a stupid man, Vale,” I said quietly, and he winced.

“No,” he said. “Just a desperate one.”

He stepped closer, his body now flush to mine. His hand released my arm and moved to my chin—touched it more gently than he had last night, but the grip seemed just as inescapable as he looked into my face, our noses brushing.

“You do not have to do any of this alone,” he said.

It wasn’t the first time someone had said that to me. But it was the first time I really wanted—needed—to hear it.

“I don’t want you there,” I said. “It would be dangerous. You’re one of Nyaxia’s children. Any god of the White Pantheon would hate you for it, including Vitarus. The best thing you can do for me is get far away from here and never come back.”

My words were sharp and clipped and cold. The same voice I would use when I told Mina I could not stay with her or sent away Farrow when he asked too many searching questions. Hard as iron.

That tone would usually send them away with a scoff and a shake of the head.

But Vale didn’t let go of me.

“It must be hard,” he murmured. “To bear the weight of so much affection in a life so short.”

My eyes burned ferociously. I had to squeeze them shut, had to clamp down on my sudden shuddering inhale.

No one had ever seen that before. The love in my cold absence. And it was always so easy to just let them believe I didn’t feel it.

All this time I thought I had been studying Vale, but he had been studying me.

For one horrible moment, I clearly saw exactly how precious this… this thing we had built was.

I would never meet anyone like Vale ever again.

Stay, I wanted to tell him. Stay with me. I don’t care if it damns us both. I don’t care if it damns my entire town. Stay, stay, stay.

But I pulled away from him and went to my pack, which was now discarded at the foot of the bed. The rose was a little crumpled, the petals squished to one side. I owed him two. I only had one today, this ugly thing, lopsided and deformed, but still—always—living.

I hated these roses. I hated them so much.

Vale reached for me, but I only pressed the rose into his hand.

I met his amber eyes.

Stay, my heart begged.

“Go,” I said. “I’m leaving, and you should, too.”

Vale knew me better than Farrow. Better than Mina.

To his credit, he did not ask me not to go.

You can feel it in the air, when a god is near. It breaks and shivers, like invisible lightning hanging in your breath, cracking over your skin.

It felt exactly the same as it did that day all those years ago.

I rode as fast as my poor exhausted horse could carry me. The beast was near collapse by the time I arrived back in Adcova, already nearing sunset. I practically flung myself off him when we reached my cottage, throwing open the front door, calling frantically for Mina.

I checked my study, her bedroom, the kitchen. The house was empty.

I wanted to believe she just went to town. But the hairs on my arms stood straight upright.

Maybe a part of me knew what I would see when I opened the back door, the one that led to the fields.

The door opened, and for a moment I was a child again, standing in this doorway, watching my father on his hands and knees in those wretched fields, feeling this same horrible sensation of divine dread.

Mina was out there in that exact same spot, her back to me, surrounded by wild rosebushes.

The air was still. Silent.

She held herself upright for the first time in months. There was no dusting of ivory skin in the dirt around her.

“Mina,” I called out.

My voice wavered. My steps did, too, as I approached.

Mina didn’t turn. Her head was tilted up.

Above us, the clouds circled, circled.

And there, at their center, was Vitarus.