He paused, turning around to grab something lying on the ice. Séverin’s stomach turned. It was Ruslan’s hand. Or, rather, the hand of the real patriarch of House Dazbog.

“Slap them in the face with this,” said Ruslan. He started laughing and then turned to Laila and Eva. “Truly? No laughs?”

Eva looked stricken.

“Perhaps I’m no dab hand at humor,” said Ruslan, punctuating the word with a shake of the severed hand. “But hear me well, for I mean it, my dear. I’ll even demonstrate on our good friend who wants to be listened to so dearly. I’m sure he’ll appreciate the sentiment more than most.”

He stalked toward Enrique. Too late, Séverin saw a flash of metal slice through the air. Enrique cried out, blood running down his neck …

Ruslan had sliced off his ear.

Laila shrieked, straining against her bonds, but Ruslan ignored her. Enrique fell to the floor, writhing painfully.

“An ear for an ear? Is that not a phrase?” mused Ruslan, kicking Enrique’s severed ear across the ice. “Pity. Anyway.” He turned to Laila. “You have ten minutes to make your decision. Time starting … now!”

Séverin jerked back from the matriarch’s hold, catching his breath.

“We have to go,” said Séverin. “We have to save them.”

The matriarch watched him sadly. “There’s nothing you can do for them. You cannot rush up the leviathan and free them. The leviathan can barely be held in one place with those broken tethers. Can’t you see I’m saving your lives? We’re leaving right now, through that pod—” she said, gesturing to the podlike device at the narthex. “From there, we can get to Irkutsk, and I can call for help. It leaves just enough time while he fools around thinking that girl has the Lost Muses bloodline.”

But they could not do that in ten minutes. Which meant that Enrique, Zofia, Laila … all would die.

“You want me to let her die?” asked Séverin. “But you … you like her.”

The expression on the matriarch’s face was full of age and sorrow.

“And I love you,” said Delphine. “I have always loved you, and look at what I still had to do.”

Love? Séverin hadn’t heard her say that to him in … in years. He couldn’t even mouth the word, it seemed to stick his lips together.

The matriarch removed her Babel Ring from the pillar, and the Mnemo screen showing Laila, Enrique, and Zofia went blank. And yet Séverin couldn’t unsee the sharp light of those lyre strings, or stop hearing the echo of the way Delphine had said the doctor thinks the girl has the Lost Muses’ bloodlines.

As if she didn’t just know that Laila didn’t have that bloodline, but as if she already knew who did.

“Long ago, I made a promise to protect you,” she said. “To take care of you.”

Séverin wanted to spit in her face. “To take care of me?”

“Sometimes protection … sometimes love … it demands hard choices. Like the one I am asking of you now. I showed you this so that you would know, and that you might make your own choice … a luxury I myself did not have,” said Delphine. “The Lost Muses bloodline runs in your veins, Séverin.”

Séverin opened his mouth, closed it. No words came to him, and all he could do was stare numbly at her.

“All these years, I have kept you safe from the people who would use it against you. Who would use you for their own gain. That’s why I had to keep you from the Order as much as I could. When we performed the inheritance test, your blood could have made those Forged objects snap in half. I had to hide you from yourself.” Delphine swallowed hard, fidgeting with her Babel Ring. When she spoke, her voice was ragged with grief. “But I tried to help as much as I could. When I saw how your first caretaker treated you, I was the one who gave Tristan aconite flowers. I thought Clothilde would mother you, but she was greedy, and the moment I found out, I had you removed from their care. I was your first investor in L’Eden. I fought for you from the sidelines. I mourned living without you every day.”

Small things clicked in Séverin’s head, but it was like a reed caught up in a river—there was simply not enough traction to let it stand and to wonder. He had the bloodline. He didn’t have the space in his mind to process what that meant, or rather, what it failed to mean. Inheriting his House was a dream that had dried up in his soul, replaced with a desire that spanned eternity: a dream of godhood, the memory of invincibility that he had only felt through the Fallen House. All this time, he thought he had failed everyone by failing to find The Divine Lyrics, but the secret to its power lay in his very veins. It made him feel … absolved.

Around them, the leviathan began to list from side to side again. The sound of metal breaking and churning screeched through the silence. The leviathan was untethering. Soon, it would be fully beneath the lake, its belly full of water.

“You need to make a choice, Séverin,” said Delphine quickly. “Escape or death.” For a moment, he could say nothing, but then Delphine spoke again, and it was as if she’d peered inside his head. “You make the choice that you can live with. You do not have to like it.”

She raised a knife and cut through his bindings. His hands were free, and the choice was his.

Séverin clung to Delphine’s words in a way he had not done since he was a child. He glanced beside him to the sleeping Hypnos, and then to the silver ceiling where Laila stood with her head bowed, Enrique lay limply on his side, and Zofia stared numbly at the ice, tears streaking her cheeks. He wanted to protect them. He wanted to make impossible amends. He wanted to be a god.

What he had not considered was how a god acted, and this was his first taste—the bitter calculus of decision. Gods made choices. Gods burned cities and spared a child. Gods put gold in the palms of the wicked and left that miserable currency of hope in the hearts of the good. He could spare three and sacrifice one, and perhaps—by number alone—it held its own bloody logic. Laila would die if the lyre was played. Laila would die if the lyre was not played.

He closed his eyes.

When he breathed, he did not catch that scent of the leviathan’s metal bones or the tang of raspberry-cherry jam. His lungs filled with her. Roses and sugar, the burnished silk of her skin, the force of her smile … powerful enough to alter the course of deep-rooted dreams.

He opened his eyes, reached into his pocket, and drew out Tristan’s knife. The blade shimmering with the muted glitter of Goliath’s venom. As he turned it, the scar on his palm gleamed. Even in the dark, he could make out the faint network of his veins, and the outline of the blood running within it.

You’re only human, Séverin.

Therein lay the irony.

He didn’t have to be.

To be a god, Séverin had to divorce himself from all that made him human. All his regret and, even, all his love. Sometimes to love meant to hurt. And he would be a loving god. Séverin looked up to the matriarch and felt as if that numbing ice had once more wrapped around his heart.

“I’ve made my choice.”

34

ENRIQUE