Reign of the Shattered Throne: Even Gods Must Kneel

Chapter Five: The Oracle Who Stopped Seeing

She found him three weeks after the vault, in a granary loft on the edge of a town too small to have its own crier, and the first thing Kael understood about her was that she'd been looking for exactly him, specifically, for some time.

He heard her on the ladder before he saw her—a controlled, unhurried step, nothing like the scrambling panic of someone who'd stumbled onto a fugitive by accident and he had the knife off his belt and his back against the grain bins before her head cleared the top rung. She stopped there, hands visible, and looked at him the way a woman looks at a debt she's finally found the person responsible for.

"You're smaller than the description," she said. "That's usually a good sign. Men who match their own wanted posters exactly are the ones who've started believing them."

"Who are you?"

"Someone who's spent the better part of a week finding you, on top of two more figuring out I needed to look at all." She climbed the rest of the way up, unhurried, and sat on an overturned crate a careful eight feet from him, close enough to talk, far enough that his knife wasn't an immediate concern, and Kael noted with the flat professional interest of a soldier that she'd chosen that distance on purpose. "My name is Serai Voss. Three weeks ago I was an oracle bound to the Judge-God's domain. Now I'm not bound to anything, because whatever you did in that temple broke something in every oracle sworn to that god across the entire district, and I would very much like to know what, exactly, that was."

Kael didn't lower the knife. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"You do. You're just deciding whether telling me is a bigger risk than not telling me." She said it without heat, the way a woman states a fact she'd already worked out days ago and was only now getting around to saying aloud. "I've had two weeks to think about the timing. The Sanctified Court doesn't invent a first-degree charge from nothing, and it doesn't happen to land the same hour every oracle in the Judge-God's service loses their sight. Either that's the largest coincidence in the district's history, or you're the reason I can't do the only thing I've ever known how to do."

He watched her for a long moment. She didn't flinch under it, which told him something too.

"What do you want?" he said finally. "If it's the bounty, you're already up here; you could've brought men."

"If I wanted the bounty, I'd have sold what I know to the Court two weeks ago and been three hundred crowns richer with both my eyes working." Something crossed her face, brief and unguarded, gone before he could name it. "I want to know what happened to me. And you're the only person left alive who was standing in that room when it did."

He told her more than he'd intended to, in the end not everything, not at first, but enough. The vault. The paralysis. The name he'd spoken and could no longer remember the shape of, already worn smooth in his memory the way a coin wears smooth in a pocket. The flinch. He did not, at first, take the shard out of his coat, and she did not ask him to, and for a while they simply sat in the dim loft light with the story laid out between them like something neither of them fully wanted to touch.

It was Serai who finally asked. "The thing you took. May I see it?"

"No."

"I'm not going to steal it. If I wanted to rob a heretic in a granary loft, I'd have picked an easier one." A ghost of dry humor there, quickly suppressed, as if she'd surprised herself by reaching for it. "I want to look at it the way I used to look at things. Whatever's left of that in me, anyway."

Something in the way she said it—not pleading, not demanding, just laying the request down plainly and letting him decide what to do with it made Kael reconsider. He'd spent three weeks alone with something he didn't understand and no one to test his own read of it against. He took the shard out slowly, held it flat on his open palm rather than handing it over, and watched her face while she looked.

Her expression changed in stages. First the ordinary curiosity of someone examining an unfamiliar object. Then something sharper, a narrowing of focus he recognized, distantly, from watching hunting dogs catch a scent they hadn't expected on a wind that shouldn't have carried it. And then, last, something that looked almost like fear, except fear generally made people pull back, and Serai Voss leaned closer instead.

"I can't see anymore," she said quietly. "You understand that. Whatever, let me read a future in someone's palm; it's gone. It tore loose the same hour you did whatever you did. But this isn't Sight. This is just looking, the ordinary kind, and even ordinary looking is telling me something I don't have a category for." She raised her eyes to his. "That isn't holy. Whatever that is, it was never holy. It's older than holy."

"Older than the gods."

"I don't know what's older than the gods. I was taught nothing was the same as you were," she said it flatly, without the tremor he might have expected from a woman describing the collapse of everything she'd been raised to believe. "But that thing in your hand doesn't feel like something a god made. It feels like something a god was afraid of. There's a difference, and until three weeks ago I would have told you that difference couldn't exist."

They didn't decide to travel together that night. Kael would think back on it later and be unable to point to the exact moment the decision had actually been made; there was no formal agreement, no handshake, and nothing so clean as either of them saying the words out loud. It happened the way most necessary things happen between two people with nowhere better to be: she didn't climb back down the ladder, and he didn't ask her to, and by the time the granary's high window had gone from black to grey with the coming dawn, they had simply, wordlessly, become two fugitives instead of one, sharing a loft and a silence that had stopped being hostile sometime around the third hour without either of them announcing it.

"I want to be clear about something," Serai said, once the light was strong enough to see each other properly for the first time. "I'm not doing this because I've decided you're some kind of liberator. I don't know what you are yet. I'm doing this because whoever did this to me is connected to whatever's in your hand, and you are currently the only thread I have that leads anywhere at all."

"That's fair," Kael said. "I'm not doing this because I think I'm one either."

"Good. That's the first thing you've said that I fully believe."

He almost smiled at that; the closest thing to it he'd managed since the vault and then the shard, still resting where he'd left it in his open palm between them, pulsed once, warm and deliberate, as if it had been listening the entire time and had, at last, heard something worth responding to.

Neither of them said anything about that. But neither of them looked away from it, either, and outside the granary's high window, the sun came up over a district that had spent three weeks looking for both of them without once suspecting they might already be sitting in the same small room, quietly deciding to survive whatever came next together.