Helena eyed him appraisingly as they walked. “You don’t care?”
He didn’t look at her. “I was commanded to marry her, so I married her. I was never commanded to care.”
Helena stopped in her tracks. “You sound as enslaved as I am.”
He paused and turned slowly to face her. “Are you trying to provoke me? Or sway my allegiance?” He gave a dark chuckle. “How terribly audacious of you.”
“You’ve already thought it,” she said, relishing how clearly she was able to think when she wasn’t overcome with the need to scan and watch for every shadow, when she wasn’t perpetually suffocating. “If you hadn’t, you’d be offended right now.”
He seemed momentarily impressed by her drug-induced bravado, but then glanced dismissively away. “It’s a pity the way you wasted yourself.”
She wasn’t sure she followed the line of thought but responded anyway. “Luc was worth it.”
“Why?”
The question caught her off guard. She shook her head. “Some people just are. You look at them, and you know it.”
“Blind adoration, then,” he said, turning to walk away.
“It wasn’t blind. I chose him,” she said.
He stepped back, and something about his expression sharpened. “Did you? Remind me, how many other choices were there?”
Her hand curled into a fist, the scars in her palm pressing against her fingertips. “Not many, I admit, but I knew whose fault that was.”
He began circling her idly. “You think the guilds invented the divide between us and the Eternal Flame? The Holdfasts claimed all their preferences were divinely moral and treated any concessions as a violation of their consciences; where exactly did that leave the wants and needs of the rest of us? When anything we wanted became a sin or form of vice simply because it inconvenienced them for us to have it? All we did was become what they’d already convinced themselves we were. Ignoble and corrupt.” He stopped, hands clasped behind his back. “You think it was an accident that we hated sponsored students like you? If we hadn’t, how would they have kept you so lonely and desperately grateful to them?”
She shook her head. It wasn’t true. The guilds were the ones who’d started it. Luc had always tried to see the best in everyone. To him, his family’s responsibilities were a weight he’d had no choice but to accept for the sake of everyone else. He’d tried to solve the problems that plagued the city, but none of the solutions were ever good enough for the guilds.
Ferron was a snake, trying to present himself as though he were on Helena’s side. As if her morality were dictated based on who was nicest to her.
She looked at him in disbelief, but after a moment the vague emotion faded, her attention drawn away by new questions. Staring up at him, she couldn’t help but wonder again at what he was.
He would have been sixteen when he murdered Principate Apollo. Something like that should have been enough to become one of the Undying, but Ferron did not look sixteen.
Overlooking his colouring, his general appearance was that of someone in their twenties. Yet if his ascendance was so recent, he should look more aged by the years of war. He was almost pristine, as though all the death and destruction he’d caused had never touched him. The only sign that he’d even seen battle was his eyes: There was a hollow rage lurking behind them that she’d only ever seen in those who’d spent a long time at the front lines.
As if Ferron had any reason for that kind of anger.
Even locked out from her emotions, the hatred Helena felt for him was an inescapable structure in her mind.
Why do any of it? He didn’t seem to find any enjoyment in what he did. There’d been many sadistic Undying who fought in the war; Helena had cared for their victims. Ferron seemed devoted to brutal efficiency and yet seemed to derive neither pleasure nor benefit from it.
As High Reeve, he was merely a weapon, not permitted the prestige of his abilities. He was the only anonymous figure; no one else was kept hidden behind a title.
That must chafe, particularly when the rest of the Undying were filling their days with debauchery while Ferron still lived at the beck and call of the High Necromancer. Obedient as a dog.
What did he gain from it? Surely he was too intelligent to be so void of ambition. He had to be playing a long game. And if Helena could only deduce it, that would give her leverage, a means of manipulating him.
Or perhaps that was merely Helena’s vanity distorting her assessments—needing her captor to be cunning, because how pathetic was she, as his prisoner, if he was not?
She opened her mouth, wanting to prod, but reconsidered.
He smirked. “Analysing me again?”
Before she could reply, the sharp click of hurrying heels echoed down the hall. Helena moved to disappear, but Aurelia had already swept around the corner, her expression eager until she caught sight of Ferron.
Her eyes instantly narrowed, her lips pursing as she drew up, looking accusingly at them. The ringlets framing her face trembled.
“Are we all socialising together now?” she asked, her voice like sweetened arsenic.
“Just touring the house,” Ferron said, gesturing idly around the large hall, which was full of dusty portraits and busts of men who’d presumably been important members of the family.
Aurelia’s lips pressed together, turning white.
“I thought you had business today. You said your afternoon was quite full when I asked you to stop by the fundraiser.” She tossed her head, the perfect curls bouncing like springs. “And yet”—she was speaking through clenched teeth—“here you are, ‘touring the house.’ I thought we weren’t beholden to the Eternal Flame anymore.”
Helena stood very still.
Ferron’s eyes flicked upwards for a moment. “The High Necromancer was quite clear that this assignment takes precedence over everything else. Those are my orders.”
Aurelia gave a sharp, shattering laugh. “But you’ve already killed the rest of the Eternal Flame, so why does she matter?”
“Whatever the High Necromancer wishes to be done, I fulfil,” Ferron said with the impatience of someone who’d had this argument many times already. “If he wanted handmade paper clips, I’d do that with equal devotion.”
He wasn’t even looking at his wife anymore. His gaze passed over Aurelia’s head, staring at a mirror that reflected himself and Helena.
“Ah, and that’s supposed to explain why you spend so much time with her. And when you’re not, it’s the thralls following her.” Aurelia scoffed. “As if she’ll disappear otherwise.” She cast a hateful glare at Helena. “There’s no need to act as if she’s anything precious. I asked Stroud, and she told me: She was a nobody. No one’s coming for her, but you’re still hovering about like you’re hoarding her.”
Ferron gave a dark laugh, and a glint entered his eyes as they dropped from the mirror to Aurelia. Uncertainty flashed across her face, as if she was caught off guard by the weight of his attention.
“I thought you didn’t want to lay eyes on her, Aurelia.” The way he said his wife’s name was unnervingly intimate.
Aurelia flushed, the colour rising from her neck and staining her cheeks.
Ferron stepped towards her. “If you feel that I’m hoarding her, keeping her all to myself, perhaps I should include you more. She could have dinner with us. I could move her into our wing of the house, bring her when we visit the city. Perhaps we should have included her in that solstice photo that you bought.”
Aurelia was turning paler and paler.
“The world already knows she’s mine,” Ferron said, his words pointed, “but if you’d like, I can remind them. I wouldn’t want you to think I’m hiding anything, my dear.”
Aurelia trembled as if on the verge of imploding.