Children of Fallen Gods (The War of Lost Hearts Book 2) Carissa Broadbent (best book recommendations txt) 📖

And Sammerin nodded, his face pinched with a resigned dread that told me he already knew what I was about to ask.

I didn’t want Sammerin to do this.

I told him so, when I asked him if it was possible. Let us find someone else with a mastery of flesh to do it. Or let us find some other fresh body. Yes, the idea had come to me here, at Eslyn’s deathbed, but that didn’t mean that it had to be executed under these circumstances.

Sammerin had given me this pitying look, like the proposal was that of an innocent child. His gifts were incredibly rare — it would take weeks, potentially, to get someone else with his skills in Korvius. Eslyn was the right age, shape, size. The stars had aligned, he told me, flatly. We might as well take advantage.

I was grateful that the corpse had not yet begun to smell. It was one less thing to find horrifying as we hacked off Eslyn’s head at the throat. Ariadnea helped us do it, to my horror. When Sammerin and I tried to tell her that we didn’t need — didn’t want — her help with this, she merely gave us a flat, eyeless stare and said, “The Syrizen have given her body to this purpose. It’s my job to do it.”

It shouldn’t be, I would have said, but Ariadnea turned away before I could argue further. Still, I felt her presence acutely as we cut off Eslyn’s head, a process that took agonizingly longer than I would have expected it to. Then Sammerin took Eslyn’s decapitated head, and began to — there was no other way to describe it — sculpt it.

I wondered if I would ever stop finding Sammerin’s abilities shocking. By now, I had watched him heal wounds and illnesses and broken bones more times than I could count. This, though, was something else completely. Sammerin placed his hands on either side of Eslyn’s face, and her flesh responded to him as if it were nothing but clay. He started with the bones, which produced terrible cracking and grinding noises that even made Ariadnea flinch. First the jaw, which he made longer and softer. Then the cheekbones — raised — and the eye sockets — further set apart. The nose, he made flatter and wider. And then, the muscle and fat in her face shifted, like thousands of ants were crawling beneath her skin, as he rearranged muscle.

Finally, he pulled out several small bottles that contained thin, greenish liquid.

“The coloring won’t be perfect,” he said. “That’s harder for me to change. But it will be good enough to pass.”

Sammerin brushed the liquid over parts of Eslyn’s face, leaving others untouched. And then he placed his hands on her again, closed his eyes, and slowly, the color began to sap from her skin, and chunks of her hair — leaving behind patches of white hair and grayish, colorless flesh.

The grayish, colorless flesh of a dead Fragmented Valtain.

The whole process took nearly two hours. When he was done, Sammerin gently set the head down on the table and looked at me. Then it. Then me.

“I think,” he said, “it is passable.”

It was better than passable. I was looking at my own corpse. Certainly, someone who had never seen me before with their own eyes would have no reason to question it.

“It’s…good,” I said, though giving it any compliment seemed… strange. Sammerin himself stared at it not with pride but disgust. I hoped that however Ariadnea “saw” the world spared her from how we had defiled her friend.

But her head tilted towards it. “The eyes,” she grunted. “You’ll have to do something about that.”

It was the only thing missing.

“I can,” I said, and reached out to Eslyn’s smooth, eyeless sockets. When I touched them, the flesh began to rot beneath my fingertips, flesh shriveling. When I pulled my hands away, the head was left with two empty black pits for eyes, rotted out in decay — as if “my” eyes had been pried out before death, and the remaining ruined flesh left for the maggots.

The Zorokovs would appreciate the extra cruelty. Removed eyes were an especially favored punishment of the Threllian Lords.

We all stared at it.

“I think that is enough,” I said.

Enough. What a word. It was such an imperfect plan. Enough to buy the slaves in Threll some time. Enough to appease the Zorokovs, if only temporarily. It was better than the plan that I had three days ago, which was to say, no plan at all. Something was better than nothing. This one act might save the lives of dozens of slaves, or more.

Still. I felt sick when we began to return to our room. Sammerin’s silence was not his typical thoughtful quiet, but one heavy with shame. I cast him a sidelong look as we walked together, remembering our discussion from weeks ago — how he had sounded as he told me how difficult it had been to claw his way out of using his gifts for terrible things.

Was this a terrible thing?

“Thank you, Sammerin,” I said, quietly. “I’m—I’m sorry you had to do that.”

Sammerin gave me a tight, humorless smile. “At least she was already dead.”

I failed to find this especially comforting. And something told me that Sammerin didn’t, either.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Max

My back hurt. And my legs. And my left arm, which I’d pulled something vicious the day before. I hurt more or less everywhere.

But none of those aches and pains measured up at all to the one that pounded on the inside of my skull as I watched Zeryth, wearing a crown and sitting at what used to be my father’s desk, lean back in his chair and smile.

It was a grotesque expression, absent of Zeryth’s usual lazy charm. Actually, everything about the way Zeryth looked right now seemed grotesque, like a poor mimicry. He had lost a shocking amount of weight since I’d last seen