Chapter 10 — Stolen Knowledge
In the wreckage of the soul-room, Spark sat on his velvet cushion and did something Kael had never seen him do.
He trembled.
'Spark?'
"Don't," the rabbit said.
'You just watched two demon kings fight inside my head. One of them turned into a seven-headed apocalypse. I think I get to check if you're okay.'
"I said don't—" Spark stopped. The storm-light around him flickered, guttered, steadied. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet in a way it had never been. "That thing. The primordial form. I have lived a very long time, meat-sack, and I have never once seen him wear it. None of us have. The other monarchs whisper that he can't anymore — that the seven heads split because he divided, that the power scattered and he's just the black head with delusions of the whole body."
'But you saw it.'
"I saw it," Spark said. "All seven. Crimson, azure, orange, gold, violet, white, and that... thing in the middle." He shuddered. "If the other six knew he could still wear their faces — if any of them knew — the plains would go to war tonight."
Kael let that sit.
'There's something else,' he said. 'Void said you'd lie to me. That you're already deciding what I'm too fragile to know.'
The cushion was very quiet.
"That shadow," Spark said, "is a parasite wearing a crown, and I would not take career advice from him."
'That's not a no.'
"It's not a yes either. It's a 'not now.'" The rabbit's red eyes lifted, and for once there was no joke in them at all. "You just survived what no human has survived in a millennium, and in the same breath you were made a battlefield, a doorway, and a prize. You get one night, Kael. One night where the truth you've already got is enough. Tomorrow I'll answer any question you ask. Tonight—" the storm-light softened, "—tonight, let yourself be the boy who lived. Your mother's downstairs burning breakfast in celebration. Go be her son. Be glad."
And Kael — who had been about to push, who had been about to demand every answer in the rabbit's ancient skull — stopped.
Because through the floor of the soul-room, faint as light through water, he could smell it. Burning eggs. His father laughing. His mother's voice, scolding, alive.
'One night,' he agreed.
He was almost out of the room when Spark spoke again, very quietly, like someone confessing to the ceiling.
"For what it's worth. I didn't come to the dead zone to provoke the Slyth." A pause. "I was thrown there. Exiled. There's a difference, and someday I'll tell you what it was for, and you'll be furious, and I'll deserve it."
Kael looked back.
'You told him it was because you were bored.'
"It WAS because I was bored," Spark said. "Of being punished." And then the cushion's light dimmed to a violet ember, and the rabbit curled into himself, small and white and centuries old, and said nothing more.
---
Downstairs, in the world, the morning smelled of smoke and eggs.
Kael sat at the crooked table and ate burnt food and listened to his father tell the story of the Rite to absolutely no one — "—and then my son, MY SON, gets up off the platform like it's a BUS STOP—" — and for the length of one meal, everything was fine.
That was the thing nobody told you about miracles. They didn't feel like miracles from the inside. They felt like your mother's cooking, slightly burnt, and your father's voice, slightly too loud, and the ordinary miraculous fact of sitting in a chair in your own kitchen, alive.
'Enjoy it,' said Spark's ember, from the back of his mind.
'I am.'
'Enjoy it harder,' said the rabbit. 'Tomorrow the world comes knocking.'
He was right. The knocking started at dawn.
Not the door. Not at first. The first sign was the birds — every bird in the settlement, rising off the rooftops at once, a black roaring cloud of them, wheeling away north. The second sign was the radio. It switched itself on in the middle of a static shriek, and a voice came through that Kael didn't know, tight and official and repeating one sentence over and over:
"—confirmed. First Curse-brand contract in one thousand and forty-seven years. Confirmed. Kael Vance, age eighteen, of the settlement — confirmed alive. All Conclave divisions, priority one. Repeat, priority one—"
His mother stopped washing the plate.
His father stopped mid-story.
The radio kept talking. The birds kept flying. And down at the end of the settlement's one main street, beyond the bend, engines were coming — many of them, moving fast, in the particular synchronized growl of vehicles that belonged to people who had never once in their lives been told to wait.
'Priority one,' Kael thought, looking at his parents' faces.
Spark was right. The world had come knocking.
It had brought the Conclave.