Cruel Beauty

Blue eyes looked back at me. As if that gaze were the key, the next instant the garden was gone and so was my body, swept away in a whirl of light and images. The visions streamed through me, burning like fire, and each one replaced another of my memories. I tried to fight, to cling to my memories and myself, but I had no fingers to grip them, no skin to separate me from this.

Helplessly, I saw a castle, and forgot my father’s house. I saw a garden, and forgot my Hermetic diagrams. I saw a blue-eyed boy, and forgot Astraia. They swept through me until I forgot to fight, forgot that I had ever been anything but a palimpsest of memories overwritten by visions.

I saw the Sundering. And I forgot that I existed.

When I finally came back to myself, I was collapsed at the edge of the pool, the edge of the marble rim cutting into my cheek, dust in my mouth and half-dried tears itching on my cheeks. My teeth ached and I tasted blood.

But I was real. And alive.

And I finally knew the truth.

The sparrow stood beside me on the ground, and though a bird has no expressions, I could have sworn there was compassion in its tiny black eyes.

Go, said the sparrow. Go. You cannot bear this much reality.

The air burned in my lungs.

Go, said the sparrow again, and everything frayed into light.

When I woke, at first I noticed nothing except a bird and the throbbing pain in my head.

After a few breaths, I realized that the bird was woven into the lace curtains of my bed. I could just make it out in the flickering candlelight that—dim as it was—stabbed through my head. I moaned softly, shifting, and realized someone was huddled against me. Ignifex.

In a moment he was sitting up, leaning over me, crimson eyes wide with worry. There must not have been quite enough candles in the room, for the darkness nibbled at the edges of his face, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“Nyx,” he said. “Can you hear me?”

And I knew. In that moment, I knew his name and the knowledge set my heart hammering.

“You,” I whispered. “I was—and you were—”

“I got you out. Away from him.” He growled the last word.

“Shade.” The name came out like a sob.

His hand ghosted over my face. “I’m going to kill him.”

“Don’t,” I said fuzzily. “It’s not—he’s also—” But my tongue wouldn’t move anymore and I sank back into sleep.

18

When I woke again, it was daylight. Ignifex was no longer huddled against me but sat on the side of the bed, his arms crossed. When I moved, he raised an eyebrow.

“Feeling better?” he asked.

I sat up. My vision swam a moment and I took a slow, deep breath. Ignifex reached for my shoulder but I swatted his hand away.

“I’m all right,” I said. My head would stop hurting eventually. “What happened?”

Ignifex’s mouth twisted. “That thing—” He paused. “Shade tried to kill you. I found you screaming. He’s locked up now.”

I blinked at the blue ripples of the coverlet over my legs. “No,” I said, because that story wasn’t right. Something more had happened.

“He took you to the Heart of Fire.” His voice was a stone, shattering my thoughts. “That place is not meant for humans, and he poured its power into your head.”

You looked on the Children of Typhon and survived. Shade’s voice echoed in my head. You are our only hope.

“No,” I said again, because I remembered more than fire and death; I remembered a blue-eyed boy, a lid slamming shut, and a bird—

“He boasted that he did it before.” Ignifex sounded sick.

“I’m all right,” I snapped, because the demon whom I meant to defeat was not allowed to be upset for me.

The long-lost prince was not allowed to try killing me, either. But I knew that Shade had been trying to do something more; I knew that he had succeeded, but the burning visions had left my mind so hazy that I couldn’t remember.

“I woke up earlier. What did I say?”

“You babbled.” Ignifex leaned forward. “And then you slept, or I’d have tied you down. You’re still not allowed out of bed, by the way.”

He would clearly never tell me what I had said—most likely he did not remember—and maybe I had not said anything comprehensible. But the first time I woke, I had known. I remembered that, but I couldn’t remember what I had known.

I had seen the Sundering. I knew that much: I had seen the moment Arcadia was ripped away from the world and trapped beneath a parchment dome. But I could not recall what it looked like. What had happened.

You cannot save anyone unless you know the truth.

Ignifex wiped my cheek with his thumb. I realized I had been crying.

“I won’t let him hurt you,” he said quietly.

“I hate you,” I said through my teeth.

He laughed and went to get me breakfast. I waited until the echo of his footsteps had died away before I broke down sobbing, partly for the horrible truth I could not remember, but mostly for the man I had trusted.

For the next three days, I recovered. Though Ignifex stopped telling me to stay in bed after I threw a water jug at his head—I missed, but on purpose—I mostly obeyed the command anyway. Even a little movement left me exhausted and gasping for breath; if I tried to keep going, I would start to feel hot tremors across my skin and hear a faint crackle of flame in my ears.

Ignifex prowled my room like a cat kept indoors by the rain. He brought me food; every time he offered to spoon-feed me, and every time I smacked his nose with the spoon. He also brought stacks of books from the library—not the histories, which had the most holes burnt in their pages, but books of poetry and, once he learnt that I liked them, volumes of lore and scholarship about the gods.

“There was a country where they burned their children before a bronze statue of their patron god Moloch, whom this scholar suggests is another form of Kronos.” Ignifex turned a page. “There’s a picture too.”

“You always find the most charming stories,” I said, though truthfully he seemed to be fascinated by any tale of foreign lands. Perhaps in nine hundred years, he had started to grow bored.

“The country’s name was Phoinikaea. Do you know where that is? Or was, I suppose, since Romana-Graecia burned it down and salted the earth. Here’s another picture.”

Yes, definitely bored.

“How should I know?” I frowned at a book of children’s rhymes. Several of the pages had been burnt to tatters, though I could not imagine why the Kindly Ones would care about it. “You sundered our world, remember?”