Which was just as well. Because when Bastian reached for Spiritum, nothing was there.
Lore and Gabe called it channeling-space, that grayscale place he slipped into right before calling magic. That seemed a bit overwrought to him, so he’d just never referred to it at all. But now he couldn’t find that invisible door in the aether that let him through, couldn’t veil the colors away so that the threads of the world shone bright. There was no magic anymore, not for him.
He should be upset by that. Instead, Bastian felt the lifting of an incredible weight.
“Well,” he said, lowering his hand. “If I want to kill him, I suppose it will have to be bloody.”
Jax breathed in a way that didn’t quite show relief. Alie bit her lip.
Bastian sat down slowly on one of his spindly wrought-iron chairs and looked at Alie, his every muscle feeling like a wrung-out rag. “Apollius is gone.”
“Good.” Despite the circumstances, a sunny smile broke across her face. Her hands came together at her chest, as if she would clap them like a pleased child, but she just gripped them there like the moment was something to cling to. “Thank all the gods.”
“Or don’t. As it were.”
“Figure of speech. Those are harder to get rid of than I thought.” Alie rushed forward, Jax forgotten by the door, tipping Bastian’s head up and turning it this way and that, like she was afraid Apollius might be hiding somewhere instead of banished. “How did you do it?”
“That’s the thing.” Fear wasn’t a new feeling, but to have it suffuse his whole body like this, to know it was his and not shared by a god, nearly made him weak-kneed. “I didn’t.”
Alie’s dark-green eyes narrowed. “You mean…”
“He just went away,” Bastian said. “And I don’t know where He went. But I can imagine that it isn’t back to the Shining Realm. Not when everything He wanted was right in His grasp.”
“No,” Alie agreed, stepping back and letting her hands fall away, convinced now that the god was gone. “No, that seems unlikely. If He went elsewhere, it’s because wherever He went was closer to His goal.”
“Into someone closer to His goal,” Bastian amended. “Since His body wouldn’t hold.”
As if they’d both had the same thought, Bastian and Alie turned slowly to Jax.
It took a moment for the Emperor to figure out what their gazes implied. When he did, he stepped back, hands held up. “It isn’t me.” Bastian didn’t know the man well, but he knew that this uncertainty, this wide-eyed guilelessness, was unlike him. “Alie, I swear to you—”
“Stop.” Alie held up a hand. Bastian noticed, distantly, that it trembled. “I know it isn’t. If Apollius could have you, He would have taken you in the first place.”
There was something in her tone when she spoke to the Emperor. Something soft that Bastian didn’t like.
He arched a brow at the other man. “But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t lock you up. It sounds like war is coming; no further reason for diplomacy, is there?”
“That would be fair of you.” Jax had regained his regal air, recovered from the moment he let it slip, when he thought it might affect Alienor. Even now, when Bastian was threatening him with imprisonment and bodily harm, his eyes kept going to his betrothed. “But I propose a compromise.”
“I’ve broken the habit of compromising with Emperors,” Bastian said.
“I want to help you, Bastian.” But Jax was still looking at Alie. “The idea of a Holy Empire… I thought it was a good one. I thought it was a way to bring peace. But that was foolish; I understand now.”
“Convenient, to understand under the shadow of a noose.”
“Nothing I say will convince you,” Jax said. “So let me show you. I have a private ship currently docked in your harbor, crewed by men who know how to keep their mouths shut. It can be ready in an hour to sail to the Burnt Isles.”
Thatgot Bastian’s attention away from nooses. Lore. Seeing her. Saving her. The last memory he had of himself in his own body was lying beside her that night she left. Knowing, somehow, that the beginning they’d just had was also an inevitable end.
And now Apollius was gone. Now, Bastian was almost certain, Lore was in even more danger than she had been before.
“That’s a start,” he said, after a moment of quiet. “But you’ll be on it, where I can keep an eye on you.”
“I will be, too.” Alie crossed her arms.
But Bastian was already shaking his head. “Absolutely not. The last thing we need is—”
The door burst open. On the other side, Sophie, one of the Presque Mort, her eyes wild. “Report,” she wheezed, catching her breath from what appeared to be a dead run up the stairs. “Caldienan ships on the horizon.”
