Chapter 6 Walking Chaos

Lirael's POV

Three days into my new life as personal maid to a god and I had learned exactly three useful things.

The first was that the manor was enormous in a way that stopped being impressive and started being genuinely annoying the moment you had to navigate it alone.

The second was that Xalric was almost never where you expected him to be and almost always somewhere you didn't.

The third was that the handful of maids who moved through the corridors were quiet, efficient, and completely uninterested in making conversation with me, which I understood but found unhelpful.

So I explored.

I told myself it was strategic. Mapping terrain, understanding my environment. It had nothing to do with the fact that sitting in my room meant thinking about Seraphina, and I couldn't afford that. Not yet. I needed to stay sharp. Grief was a door I was keeping closed for now.

I moved through the east wing first, then the upper corridor along the back of the manor, then down a staircase I hadn't noticed before that emptied into a quieter section of the ground floor. Fewer soul orbs here, darker and cooler, the kind of stillness that meant not many people came this way. I followed the corridor until I reached a set of heavy double doors, dark wood and old iron, with a faint hum behind them that raised the hair on my arms.

The library.

I reached for the door when footsteps sounded behind me. I turned and Dela was coming down the corridor with folded cloth stacked in her arms, eyes down, moving with that quiet efficiency she applied to everything.

I pushed the door open and slipped inside before she could see me.

It was a door I hadn't known existed before pushing it open.

That was when I heard the voices.

There was another door on the far wall, slightly open, and voices were leaking through it. The first one I recognized immediately. Xalric. But the second one made every thought in my head stop completely because I knew that voice too and the last time I heard it, it had been dissolving into mist while my sister screamed.

Chaos was alive.

I moved along the shelves slowly until I was close enough to hear through the gap without being seen.

"You should not be here," Xalric said. He didn't sound surprised. He sounded like a man confirming something inconvenient he had already expected.

"And yet." Chaos's voice was different. Flatter. Less like something that bounced off walls and more like something that had been put back together slightly wrong. "I reassembled myself. Most of me. It took longer than I expected."

"What do you want."

"I don't know." A pause. "That's actually why I came. When the spell was taking me apart, when I was just pieces, I felt something. And it won't go away. I don't have a name for it and it's been driving me mad."

"Chaos."

"I keep seeing her face," he said. "The sorceress. Seraphina. I keep seeing her face and I don't know what to do with it. I have broken things. I have tried to shake it off. Nothing is working."

"Forget it," Xalric said. "Forget her. She's gone."

"I know she's gone," Chaos said, and his voice dropped. "That's the problem."

I shifted my position slightly and through the gap in the door I caught a sliver of Xalric's profile. And for three seconds, just three, his face did something I had never seen it do. Something moved across it, real and unguarded, and it hit me immediately what it was.

Grief.

It was there and then it was gone, his face closing back into its usual cold arrangement, but I had seen it. And right behind that realization came another one that hit me like a bombshell.

Chaos was alive.

My sister had died for killing someone who was standing in that room right now, talking about her face.

I was moving before I had finished the thought, pushing off the shelf, heading straight for that door, because I had things to say and I was going to say all of them right now, starting with the fact that he had stood in front of me and told me Seraphina was dead and used it as a chain around my neck for three days while the man she supposedly killed was walking around reassembling himself.

A hand grabbed my arm from behind and yanked me backward so fast I made no sound.

I spun around and Dela was there, one finger pressed to her lips, her eyes wide and urgent. She still had my arm and she was already pulling me toward the main library door with a grip that had no business being that strong on a woman who carried folded cloth for a living.

She got me into the corridor and pulled the door shut behind us without a sound.

I opened my mouth.

"Whatever you heard," she said, her voice so low it barely existed, "you didn't hear it."

"My sister is dead," I said, keeping my voice down with tremendous effort, "for killing someone who is in that room right now having a conversation about her face."

"I know."

"He told me she died by his hand. He said it to my face and I believed him and I have been sitting with that for three days and Chaos is alive."

"I know," Dela said again.

"Then you understand why I need to go back in there."

"No." She said it simply and with enough weight behind it that I stopped. "You go in there now, angry and showing everything you know, and he will use every piece of it against you. You are new here. You don't understand yet how he thinks. The only thing you have right now is that he doesn't know what you know. Don't throw that away today."

I stared at her. She looked back at me, steady and sorry.

Behind the library door Chaos was still talking in that flat voice about my sister's face.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to walk back through that door and burn every word I had down to the ground in front of him.

Instead I breathed. Once. Twice.

"Fine," I said.

Dela nodded, adjusted the cloth in her arms, and walked away down the corridor like nothing had happened. I stood there for a moment and then turned and walked the other direction.

But I kept every word I had heard. Every single one.

He had lied to me. Chaos was alive and my sister had paid with her life for it and Xalric had used her death to keep me in place. I had no power. I had no weapon. I had no way out that I had found yet.

But now I had something.

And I was very good at making something out of nothing.