Saved by a cage.
Alie got up off the couch arm, turning to her kitchenette. “Do you want coffee?”
Jax seemed surprised. “Please.”
The motions of gathering the supplies gave her time to collect herself. This certainly wasn’t ideal, but as long as Apollius had need for Gabe and Malcolm, they were relatively safe. If one of them would fuckingdream, she could warn them. The last two nights she’d been alone on that beach.
Alie brought the tray over to the fireplace, which Jax had graciously lit. She hung the pot over the glowing coals. “I assume trying to talk Apollius out of this is pointless.”
“He doesn’t listen to me,” Jax muttered, sitting forward and resting his forearms on his knees. A strand of dark-gold hair fellover his forehead. “I suppose it’s some kind of blasphemy, trying to direct a god.”
She said nothing to that. Alie made the coffee, poured the milk. Sat back down on her couch like this was a perfectly normal thing.
“Do you have any idea of when?” she asked.
“No.” Jax sat his cup—mostly untouched—on the table and watched the steam curl from its lip. “Though I can’t imagine it will be long.”
The silence that gathered around them wasn’t comfortable, but neither was it awkward. Alie pulled her knees up into her chair and sipped at her coffee, painfully aware of Jax doing the same. Going back and forth on whether there was a crack here she could widen, a string she could pull.
“It seems Apollius isn’t very interested in cooperating with you,” she said finally. Quiet and introspective, as if she were just sharing an idle thought. “I suppose He didn’t realize that becoming flesh meant He would have to listen to someone other than Himself.”
That last part was risky. But Jax just shifted in his chair, staring at the embers in the fireplace. “When you’re used to absolute power, having to temper it does not come easily.”
She supposed he would know.
Jax stood. “I apologize for intruding on you so early. It was rude of me. I just… I didn’t know where else to go.”
Alie didn’t say anything. She nodded.
With a stiff bow, Jax left the room.
She sat there for a long time, her second cup of coffee forgotten in her hand, watching the coals go cold.
Alienor Bellegarde had never missed a First Day prayer. Every day from her infancy, when her mother brought her to the Churchwhile Severin glowered from another aisle, she’d been in the North Sanctuary just as the sun was beginning to blush the sky.
The day after Jax appeared at her door, she got there even earlier. Alie dressed herself in the dark, having told her lady’s maids not to bother attending her today. It was an uphill battle to get them to agree; ever since Alie had been revealed as an Arceneaux, technically a princess, her staff had been overly attentive. She stepped into a midnight-blue gown, simple silk, and gathered the cloud of her white hair into a puff on top of her head, letting a few curls hang artfully against her temple. Then she was out the door, into the green, up the path to the Sanctuary.
The North Sanctuary had been rebuilt in a hurry after Lore tore it down. The resulting building looked enough like the old so as not to be obvious, but there were subtle differences. The archway over the door wasn’t carved. The rosebushes by the pathway that had been flattened in the collapse had never been replanted. Inside, the braziers were clunky constructions, nothing like the sleek containers of before. It pleased her that the Sanctuary had been left marginally uglier.
Jax was already there, the only person present other than a couple Presque Mort. He always arrived early. The monks set up the platform for service: lighting the candles, sweeping the floor, coaxing the coals in the braziers to bloom red.
She recognized one of the Presque Mort. Alexis. They gave her a surreptitious look as they lit tapers, as if they wanted to speak to her but knew now wasn’t the time.
Alie wasn’t sure what to make of the Presque Mort who were still in the Citadel. After Bastian came to power, he’d banished all those who were loyal to Anton. But no such action was taken after Gabe left. Either Apollius didn’t care to clean house, or all the monks left were faithful enough that He didn’t think it would be a problem.
But the look Alexis gave her seemed heavy.
They disappeared into one of the side doors while the otherPresque Mort, a woman with a thick, runneled scar across her throat, carefully scattered perfuming herbs over the brazier coals. Alie couldn’t see the braziers without thinking of Anton, his burn scars and his prophecy.
His murder had been chalked up to Gabe, when the second Arceneaux brother was found beheaded in the greenhouse. But she didn’t believe it. She thought that violence much more likely to be Lore’s.
Jax sat in the front pew. Silently, Alie sat down next to him.
“You couldn’t sleep, either?” he asked quietly.
Alie had slept just fine, actually. Another night on the beach alone.
But she nodded, building one more tenuous bridge. Jax sighed and marginally slumped in his seat. The movement made his posture nearly match that of a normal man.
