House of Boreal: After-Credits Scene

Marek dragged his heel backward through her circular doorway. Like the hair knotted at his nape, his panic lit a scarlet match against the blackened framing. The captaen-turned-elder grimaced. His sky-blue eyes had moored onto his haidren.

Luscia did not shutter her gaze. Nor did she offer him any comfort.

She’d none left to spare.

“Escort everyone outside, Elder Bailefore. Ensure that even the housekeeper is out of earshot,” Dmitri requested gravely from under the fur blanket held taut around his frail shoulders.

“Wem, My King.” Inclining his head, Marek closed the door after himself.

Phalen offered him an uneasy wave goodbye before it latched. Then, across the table, Luscia’s brother drummed his soot-stained fingers atop a chair back. He was standing. He’d meant to leave, too.

But his young life was about to change.

Inasmuch as their king’s was ending.

A chill swept in through the broken window, ushering a reluctant cough from Dmitri. She listened to it rattle the hollows of his chest. Luscia looked up as Phalen swerved his ear away from the outdoors.

He’d heard it too.

Silence replaced death once more. Luscia’s stare resettled onto the charred table while they waited for the minutes to pass, long enough for Marek to escort her najjani guard, the other haidrens, and Zaethan Shà away from her father’s treetop manor—her manor, now, she then realized. Grief cut another groove against her soul and slowly she blinked at her surroundings as if seeing them afresh.

“They are gone,” her brother told Dmitri.

“It’s best you sit, Phalen.”

Ash coated the entire dining room, blanketing the place he ought to occupy at the head of the table, much like the seed they’d just spread upon his grave. Luscia warmed the same seat where she’d been taught most of her lessons. The mighty Orien Darragh used to instruct his children each night between hearty mouthfuls. Or in long, unhurried discussions over mulled wine. No matter the season, no matter the hassle, he always ate with them. Why had she not granted him the same upon returning home? She should have hung on his every word—should have cherished every note in his steady voice. Why had everything else become that much more important? When with him gone, not one of those things seemed so very important anymore.

Luscia studied her father’s chair emptily.

He would never sit in it again.

Lethargy reclaimed her limbs and she let her lashes sink lower until darkness hid the room. She was numb. Aksel scooped her limp hand over his muzzle where he whined in her lap. With the other, Luscia palmed the cold, rough wood.

A prickle nipped her flesh.

Then another.

She cracked her eyes ajar.

The Sight welcomed her in, revealing tendrils of lumin as they caressed her knuckles. Luscia’s glance followed the trail as it skated between the abandoned goblets and across the table toward a bundle of light inhabiting the vacant chair. There, weaving in and around itself, the lumin clustered in thick, brilliant, opalescent bands. Another identical cord was reaching for her brother in the manner of an outstretched arm. Luscia’s neck slunk to one side. Barely sixteen, Phalen could not yet see the threads.

And though he knew it not, he’d been flicking his fingertips with their calming coaxes.

“Forgive me, Luscia, but are you…” Someone’s hand gently took hers. “Are you ready to begin?”

She reluctantly turned to her left.

Dmitri tried to smile but the edges of his lips faltered.

“Wem.” Luscia cleared her throat. “Though I will let you begin, as it is alone your story to tell.”

Phalen’s translucent brows piqued at her phrasing, and sitting back, he folded his weathered hands across his abdomen. Curiosity animated his boyish features as their king started to speak about their aunt, when Dmitri was merely a boy. About a time when he could still run and play.

A time before Thoarne’s private retreat, tucked away in the royal gardens, had become filled with tiny tombstones.

Her brother’s curiosity sputtered into apprehension. Apprehension melted into shock. Shock into devastation. And devastation, as it always did, bled into fear.

The king of Orynthia was dying. They knew no way to save him.

Not even Alora—Orynthia’s queen of lies.

“I should not have to tell you the power of this information,” Dmitri said to Phalen as sternly as he could between his weakening coughs. “Once in the hands of my enemies, they will surely come for the kingdom. My body their final stepping stone.”

“Which is why I should stay by your side.” Luscia entreated him once more.

But her king shook his head, the motion hardly more than a shudder. “The Obscurer doesn’t need my throne if he can annihilate everyone around it, Luscia.”

She knew he was right, rebutting her argument before it began a second time. The Obscurer’s creatures were born from the defiled blood of cross-castes and Boreali breakaways—each a mere duskling, like she who came before—not by the blood of Tiergan.

Empowered with that, there would be no limit to the Obscurer’s destruction.

“Shores of Aurynth.” Phalen kneaded his forehead as the gravity of everything finally set in. “If you are the final heir of Thoarne,” he said to Dmitri, “then marrying the princess of Razôuel—”

“Is vital.” Their king held Phalen’s gaze overtop his coat of fur. “After extracting your aunt from that monster, this is the realm’s deciding factor: No heir, no Orynthia.”

“So… why am I hearing this? I’m not haidren—I’m not even of age,” her brother asked, fidgeting in his chair like a boy who’d suddenly grown too big for it.

Dmitri’s stiff joints popped when he leaned forward. The blankets swallowed the table edge whole. “Because once deprived of your sister, we’ll need you to keep me alive.”

Phalen’s mouth slackened. The whites of his eyes haloed his mismatched irises as Luscia reached under her skirt and produced their mother’s consort dagger.

She pinned Ferocity’s tip against the wood and recited Alora’s instruction aloud as her blade etched the same into their father’s ruined table. Boreali script marred the burnt surface. Yet fresh, unharmed oak shown through the cuts.

Stilling upon the final letter, Luscia flicked her eyes up at her brother.

He did not breathe.

“Five drops,” she warned him. “No more. No less.” She knew the questions bubbling through his mind, for she’d once harbored them too. “Do you understand?”

“Aniell’silaem.” Phalen gave his confirmation on a windy exhale. “Wem, meh Ana’Sere.”

“Waedfrel. Find parchment and copy this down. Burn the table. Memorize the instruction, then burn that as well.”

Scooting back his chair, Dmitri struggled to rise. Luscia offered him help and he did not refuse it.

Cupping her hand over his forearm, their king asked in a soft voice, “You will conjure more before you leave?”

“To my own detriment, as many vials as I can spare,” she assured.

Nodding, Dmitri directed Phalen to the door and followed him toward it. His wheeze loudened with each step.

Concern plucked her brother’s countenance as he grasped that he was meant to lead the way. “I’ll head to Ana’Mere’s cottage to grab the eüpharsis, and whatever else I can pillage in from the debris—”

Dmitri whipped his cane out in front of Luscia as Phalen progressed, talking to himself. Blocking her from the threshold, he used the tip to creak the door shut. He stood there like that for many moments, as if making up his mind, and then finally turned on his heel.

Dark, loose curls bounced over his depressed brow when he looked at her intently. “This is a life-or-death expedition, Lady Boreal.”

“This I know…” she replied, her voice just above a whisper.

Dmitri matched it. “There may come a moment in Pilar where you must make a very devastating decision.”

A knot cinched in her belly, and the birdsong creeping in through the broken window seemed to disappear until all Luscia heard was the thunder of their heartbeats. Retracting her fingertips, she pressed them over her stomach. Nausea caked her throat as she said, “I will sacrifice who and what I must to keep her out of the Obscurer’s grasp.”

“You mistake me, Lady Boreal.” Having slid a hand into his pocket, she heard something crunch within his grasp. “If ever you are forced to choose between your aunt’s life and that of Zaethan Shà, I command you to save him. His life comes before anyone else’s—even your own. Promise me that. Promise me, Luscia.”

She stepped back from the intensity of his stare. It raised the veins from his gaunt cheeks, turning the skin beneath his eyes into bottomless plum pits. “Dmitri, I know the love you carry for him is immense, but…”

He snatched her hand where she’d lifted it to his face, holding it snug in his usually weakened grip. “I have no Orynthia if he’s not in it.”

“You profess that no one man is more valuable than another.”

A flippant sound escaped his pallid lips. Tightening his fist, were she not a child of Boreal, Dmitri’s hold would have been painful. His welling tears pained her more.

Yet it was the fever behind them that caused her to fear.

His tenor became gravel and as low as the earth. “I will hold your family responsible for every single scratch upon his head. With my dying breath, I shall see that you pay for the harm done him. Kill him, Luscia, and you kill me. Now kneel,” Dmitri ordered and pointed his byrnnzite cane at the charred floor. His entire body trembled though his words did not betray him. “Kneel and make this vow to your king. Vow that Zaethan Shà must live.”

The air left her.

The king who so often rejected his crown had never struck her with it. Her knees folded beneath her and Luscia lowered her weight to his feet in shock. Luscia swallowed the quaver on her tongue.

“I vow to you, my sovereign Dmitri Korbin Thoarne, king of Orynthia, that if forced to make the choice, I will give my life for his.”

“And that you’d sacrifice hers. Say it.”

Luscia choked on an unexpected emotion—gagged by the prospect of permitting a daughter of Tiergan to be slain. “And Alora’s.”

His neck fell back upon his shoulders, and he slunk against the door. Panting, Dmitri let go of whatever he’d been clutching in his pocket just to catch the knob. Holding himself upright, he released a sob of relief as he cast his shattered gaze down over Luscia.

For the first time since their meeting, the king’s parting words came in his language rather than hers. “Thank you.”