Chapter 10 Twelve Heartbeats

Six days.

Six days since the fire, and I still couldn't sleep without counting.

Not the passing of time.

Other people's heartbeats. The pendulum at the market several miles away, swinging its steady irrelevant rhythm. The different pitches of birds greeting dawn. The scratching of rats beneath the floorboards of the palace.

The village had become unbearably loud.

The High Priests had gathered three times since the fire. No announcements. No explanations. Only locked doors and the particular silence of men deciding something they won’t announce.

I had not been invited.

I had simply heard them.

Even through stone.

So I came to the river. The same river at the edge of Ashalon where everything had begun. I wanted silence. I wanted to remember who I had been before the Cave.

I tossed my clothes aside and went under.

The cold wrapped around me instantly. And for one perfect breathless second, there was nothing. No heartbeats. No pressure. No voices. Only the indifference of moving water — the first thing in six days that had not responded to my presence, that continued its ancient business as though I were nothing remarkable.

I stayed beneath the surface until my lungs demanded otherwise.

Then I surfaced.

And found a stranger staring back at me.

My skin had darkened unevenly but deliberately, as though something had decided which parts of me needed hardening first. My face was leaner. Not starved like I had been in the Cave. Carved — the way a weapon is carved, for function rather than appearance.

My hair hung heavy on my shoulders, the curls weighed down by water. The silver strands at my temples stood out against the black.

The same silver I had seen on Gaela.

I held that thought for a moment. The same silver. The same gold now spreading in my iris. As though whatever she carried is continuing its work on me from wherever she has gone — marking me from the inside the way she was sent to mark the world from the outside.

I lifted a hand to my face.

My left eye stared back from the water. Blue at the edges. But a quarter of the iris had turned luminous gold.

I had stopped being surprised by it.

That bothered me more than the eye itself.

I waded from the river and sat at the edge. My ribs — cracked in the fight, cracked further in the Cave — were completely healed. Not scarred. Not tender. Rebuilt.

Unfamiliar markings covered the skin where the damage had been. Snake-shaped, intricate, tracing the line of my collarbone down across my ribs. Ancient. Deliberate.

They grew a little further every morning.

I had not chosen them.

They had chosen me.

I pressed two fingers to the one that began at my sternum. It shifted beneath the contact — not painfully, not violently. Deliberately. The way something moves when it becomes aware of being touched.

I held my fingers there.

Neither of us pulled away.

That was the part I hadn't told anyone. Not the movement itself. The quality of it. The recognition in it — as though whatever was mapping itself across my body knew me better than I knew it, and was in no particular hurry.

"Oh."

I looked up.

Vesenya stood at the edge of the trees, her white robes almost luminous in the morning light, her silver scarf moving in the wind.

For a moment, neither of us spoke.

I let the silence ask the questions I couldn't.

She stepped forward. Then stopped. Her eyes moved over me — the silver strands, the changed eye, the tattoos tracing my ribs — and something tightened in her expression that wasn't fear. It was recognition. Which somehow felt worse.

"This is where priestesses shouldn't be," I said.

"I know."

She didn't leave.

"You've used up the one night that belongs to you."

"I know."

I reached for my shirt and held it. Didn't put it on.

"I haven't seen you since the fire."

Silence.

"Have you been avoiding me?"

"An Arrow Priestess has duties."

"That isn't what I asked."

Her eyes dropped to the tattoos before she could stop them. Whatever she read there confirmed something she had been hoping wouldn't be confirmed.

"Oh, Enzo," she said softly.

Not a greeting. A reckoning.

"Why are you here?" I pressed.

Her jaw tightened. She was deciding whether to answer honestly, and I watched her decide.

"I hate to say it," she said quietly. "But I came for you."

Something inside me eased. 

"You miss me?"

She didn't answer. Her gaze dropped to my hands instead, studying them the way she studied everything — the way she had studied the future and the space between what was and what was coming.

The silence between us was not empty. It was crowded with everything neither of us had been permitted to say since the night that technically never happened according to every law governing her life.

She moved closer. Close enough that I could smell lavender. Close enough to see the uncertainty living underneath her composure, separate from it, kept carefully below.

Her hand rose.

Not touching. Hovering. Following the path of the tattoo from my chest toward my throat without making contact, the way you trace something sacred.

The marking shifted beneath the skin anyway.

Toward her fingers.

As though it knew she was there.

We both saw it. We both went completely still.

"It is alive," she whispered.

"Yes."

Her eyes lifted to mine. For a moment the world narrowed to the space between us — the river, the wind, the village, all of it receding — and behind her composure I saw the two things she was holding simultaneously.

Terror. And something she was not permitted to want.

She withdrew her hand slowly. Then she stepped back — sharp and sudden, as though the almost-touch had finally registered what it was.

"A priestess cannot be touched."

"Vesenya—"

"Touching you is touching the god." Her voice was controlled in the way of something being controlled with effort and at cost. "You carry it now — the blood of the Ancients. Not diluted as ours is. When I touch you, I don't touch Enzo." Her jaw tightened. "I touch something I'm not permitted to approach."

The pain that moved through my chest was specific and physical. I let her see it. I didn't apologise for letting her see it.

Her eyes returned to my ribs. To the tattoos. To everything that had changed beneath the skin that used to be mine alone.

"You understand what is happening."

Not a question.

"I understand it is happening," I said. "I don't understand where it stops."

"It won't. Not until it has finished."

"What do I become when it's finished?"

Silence. The river moved around us. Birds called in the middle distance. She said nothing for long enough that the nothing became its own answer.

Finally: "Have you been using it? The things you felt in the Cave."

"I hear heartbeats when I sleep," I said. "Every person in this village. Awake, asleep, afraid. The pendulum at the market. The birds. The rats." A pause. "I count them without meaning to. I have counted them every night for six days and I cannot stop."

Her eyes closed briefly.

"Then stop listening."

"I can't."

"Enzo." The sharpness in her voice wasn't anger. It was helplessness that had been sitting long enough to develop an edge. "If you allow what is inside you to grow unchecked — if you surrender to it rather than directing it—" She held my gaze. "The prophecy is not a celebration. I need you to understand that. I have seen the visions. I have heard the voices."

She paused. What came next cost her something to say.

"It does not celebrate what you become. It warns of the destruction that comes with you."

The warning moved through me differently than I expected. Not like a threat. More like a confirmation of something I had already begun to suspect in the moments when the tattoo shifted under my own fingers and I had not pulled away.

"Then what do I do?" I said. "Tell it to stop?"

She looked toward the river. Toward anything that wasn't my face.

Then she stopped choosing and told me the full truth.

"I saw your father. In a vision. Three days ago."

My hands went still.

"His throat was opened." Flat. Declarative. The register of someone who has already processed the horror and moved past it into what must be done about it. "Blood on his purple cloak. The priests stood in a circle around him. And watched."

A pause.

"I don't know when. But I saw it clearly. No ambiguity. No symbols. You know what it means when a vision has nothing left to decipher."

I did. The clearest visions were always the worst ones.

"The priests are the reason it happens," she continued. "They have met three times since the fire. I have listened from the temple walls." Her hands tightened at her sides. "They do not want a god they can see and touch. They do not want living proof that strips their authority and makes them administrators of nothing."

"Then let them come."

"Enzo." The force of her voice startled even her. "They will kill your father. And you do not know what the priests carry — the old powers, the things that predate the Codex, the empire, all of it."

Something broke through her composure briefly — real, unmanaged. "I love your father. I believe he is the greatest chief this land has known and the most vital thing standing between Ashalon and what comes next. I do not want him dead."

Her eyes found mine.

"I do not want you dead either."

"I am the sole heir," I said. "I cannot simply leave."

"Then find a reason. Build one. Lie if you have to."

Every hint of steadiness left her voice. "I cannot lose you."

Neither of us moved.

Neither of us spoke.

The river continued its endless indifferent journey to somewhere neither of us would ever go.

Then she drew herself back together — the composure returning the way a tide returns, not dramatic, just inevitable — and turned toward the tree line.

"Vesenya—"

She didn't stop. Perhaps she couldn't.

I watched her go. And felt the riverbank become a different kind of place once she had left it.

Then I heard them.

Twelve heartbeats moving through the trees.

I had spent six days cataloguing the rhythms of this village until I knew every one of them the way you know a language you were born into. Soldiers had a discipline in their pulse — trained men who had learned to carry their fear in a specific place and keep it there.

These were not soldiers.

These heartbeats were elevated. Nervous. The particular rhythm of men who had decided they were righteous and were moving toward something they believed was necessary.

The priests.

Not approaching. Positioned. Hidden among the trees the way hunters position themselves before the moment they've chosen arrives.

They weren't only coming for my father.

They were coming for me.

I sat at the water's edge and listened to their heartbeats and did not move.

Because here was the thing I had not yet told anyone, including Vesenya: twelve elevated heartbeats, coming for me with the confidence of men who believed they knew what they were hunting —

They sounded afraid.