Read Novel Full Chapter 1878: Shaken Conviction
Chapter 1878: Shaken Conviction
Count Corvane’s scream still hung in the smoke of his own burned record-house, the words he had saved for the very end and thrown with everything left in him: that Damian Ravenclaw had died in his sister’s place, and that he had died for nothing at all.
The whole hall watched them hit.
Iris stood at the head of the reading table, her hand frozen above the ledgers, and for once the guard failed her. She couldn’t keep it off her face, because there are wounds that never close, only wait.
She had carried this one since she was two years old, and every horror that came after, the cage, the basement, the dying scum, had been stacked on top of it until the carrying became the whole architecture of her.
And the man in chains had just reached in with one filthy hand and torn every year of it open at once.
Her face emptied.
The color drained out of it, and her hands, her terrible hands, the ones that had cracked flagstones, began very finely to shake.
’He was a baby.’
The thought didn’t arrive as words. It arrived as the thing she had been too young to remember and had built anyway, night after night, year after year: a small chin lifted in front of large men, a voice that had barely finished learning its sentences spending them on her.
’He was a baby, and I hunted a shadow half my life, and the whole time it was this. A monster’s appetite. One night. A box carried to our own door.’
Her breath had stopped being automatic. She was doing it manually now, one in, one out.
’They didn’t even write his name down. He wasn’t worth ink. He was worth one night, and I...’
The shake climbed from her hands into her arms.
Felicity was tearing up.
She had both hands clamped over her mouth, tears cutting clean lines down the ash on her face.
She had begged her father for this posting to help her friend find her answers, and no one had warned her the answers would be like this.
Iris’s whole guarded, cursing, unreachable self was a wall built around a small grave, and Felicity had to stand in a burned hall in armor and watch it dug up to a laugh.
Ayame stood with her eyes on the count and her thumb on her blade’s guard. The tease and the tilt had burned out of her hours ago. What remained was a samurai livid beyond words.
Black Fang watched Iris.
Only Iris. The count had stopped existing for her entirely, dropped below the threshold of things she deigned to see, and her whole attention rested on the shaking of those two clenched fists.
Quinlan stood.
He had not said one word through any of it.
He had listened to all of it, standing quite still in the middle of the hall he had taken, and the soldiers nearest him had drifted back off him one instinctive step at a time.
He crossed the hall to Iris, put his arms around her, and pulled her in tight.
She didn’t fight it.
For the first time, instead of shoving him off or turning it into an insult, she let herself be held, her forehead against his collarbone, her fists caught between them, shaking.
The hall looked away. Even the ones who didn’t know why.
"> <Quinlan.>
Her voice arrived over the link as it never sounded out loud, young and stripped, holding on to its own steadiness with every fiber of her being.
"> <Tell me something... I don’t care what. Everything in my head is his voice and I need... I need one thing in there that isn’t.>
Quinlan closed his eyes.
"> <I’m afraid now’s not the time to escape reality.>
Iris went rigid against his chest.
"> <I lived every hour you lived until the tragedy, so the thing I’m about to say is what my observing eyes have told me.>
"> His arms tightened around her. <He wasn’t taken from you, and he wasn’t tricked into it. He looked at the worst thing that had ever walked into your home and chose it, so it would leave without you. Three years old, and braver than every soldier in this hall. That was Damian Ravenclaw.>
A sound came out of Iris then, once, very small, muffled against his chest.
Quinlan’s voice over the link stayed level, and underneath the level, far down, his fury lay absolutely still.
"> Her shaking wouldn’t stop, so Quinlan hugged her fragile frame even tighter. <There’s one thing I can say with absolute certainty. It’s the single fact I believe with my entire existence.>
Hearing Quinlan’s deep, certain voice, Iris couldn’t help but look up into his face. Her big, teary red eyes were awaiting his words with desperate need.
He spoke them hard, with no smile anywhere in him, because he believed his next words truly and fiercely.
"> <He’d do it all over again without blinking and without having regrets. That is who your wonderful brother is, the little hero who earned more of my respect than any living creature ever had and ever will.>
The shaking stopped all at once, like a bell gripped mid-ring.
For a long moment she stayed exactly where she was, her eyes on his face, and when her voice crossed the link again it had found a floor to stand on.
"> <You’re right.>
Then she came off the link and gave her words to the hall.
"He didn’t die for nothing. But he didn’t die for me either."
It left her quietly and arrived everywhere, iron under every word, a voice that reached the farthest wall of the record-house as though she stood beside every man in it.
Heads came up all along the walls. The last working clerk stopped writing.
"He died because this world is rotten. It lets beings like that foul thing live in it, grow old in it, prosper in it. It let a coin buy my brother, and it went back to its supper. It has done the same in ten thousand halls like this one, and it has never once been made to pay."
Quinlan had lived every hour of that basement from the inside of her skin.
Of every soul alive, only he carried what she carried, the same years in the dark, the same brother, and all night his half of the fury had lain still under its inch of ice.
"Damn right..." The words rose out of him instinctively, unnaturally deep. His half of their shared fury rose to meet her words as she spoke them.
Fire lit between Iris’s shoulder blades. It ran the length of the Bloodfather sigil sealed down her spine, every line of the mark waking at once, and against her fists, through the cloth, the hollow above Quinlan’s heart kindled in answer. She felt all of it happening to her, and she did not stop.
Neither of them had chosen it. The bond had measured the two furies, found them identical, the same grief in two bodies, and drawn them into one.
"I now know what I want from this world. What I’ll do after my vengeance is complete."