A House Divided (Astoran Asunder, book 1)

by Nicole Ciacchella

  And it was. Within months Kila's form had improved to such an extent that even his mother had grudgingly admitted that perhaps Sylosh had been onto something, and that maybe she should have listened to him. His father had pretended not to hear and had made her repeat herself four times, until all three of them had dissolved into laughter.

  For many years Kila had cherished that book, and then it had become an object of pain to him. It was no use denying that when he had given Miss Wyland the book a part of him had hoped it was the last he would see of it. To study those pictures, to let his eyes travel over the attentive lines his father had drawn, to imagine the day his father had given the precious book to him, were memories too painful for him to bear at that time. He had arrived in Cearova with wounds barely scabbed over, and that had been a large part of what had prompted him to take Miss Wyland under his wing. Yes, he had been caring for her, helping her, but she had cared for him and helped him as well, even if she hadn't known it.

  Perhaps that's why you're willing to grasp at the possibility that Toran might have been murdered. Perhaps you will never be able to accept that someone would be so selfish as to take their own life, despite all your personal evidence to the contrary.

  Rolling over in his bed, Kila refused to let it occupy his thoughts any longer.

  When he woke the next morning his mind was buzzing, telling him it had been hard at work during the night, his subconscious busy sorting and storing the information he had gained from Miss Wyland. He had no new insights as of yet, but he had to admit that the manner in which the pieces were beginning to fit together did point at something strange going on within the Houses.

  Could Burl have helped Moiria Stowley and the Staerleigh Elders stage her husband's death as a suicide? The suicide letter could have been a forgery. Were Burl a highly gifted Enforcer, someone with gods-granted skill at noticing the finest of details, replicating handwriting would pose no real challenge for her.

  Kila thought again of the handkerchief Miss Wyland had given him, a handkerchief redolent with the stale tang of sophoria. Had the sophoria belonged to Toran Stowley as Moiria had claimed, or had Elder Borean procured a more potent concentrate for her? It would have been a simple matter for Moiria to slip it into her husband's tea and then set the vial on his desk after the fact, lending credence to the claim that he had dosed himself.

  It would explain the lack of signs of struggle as well. Toran wouldn't question his wife's bringing him his evening tea, would he? It appeared he had been keeping his suspicions about the House under wraps, which meant he would have had to feign normalcy around his wife. Even if he had suspected her of something, would it have ever entered his mind that she might be capable of murdering him?

  The scenario was straightforward and possible, with or without Burl's involvement. Yet House Staerleigh would have known they would be taking a risk, if they had orchestrated Toran's supposed suicide. They would have known that the high-profile nature of the incident would have required Chief Flim's presence. Had they murdered Toran, they would have wanted to ensure that no one would be able to prove that it had been a murder, which made Burl the obvious suspect, as far as collaborators went.

  As luck would have it, he got his chance to observe Burl in action later that day. A shop owner had been murdered, and Kila and Burl were up on the rotation.

  The beat officer who had been on patrol greeted them when they arrived, leading them back to the body. The shop owner's neighbors had heard a loud dispute and the sounds of a struggle, and they had summoned the officer to the scene, but he arrived after the murderer had fled.

  "No weapon in sight," he said, filling them in on the details as they walked. "Chief Anatomical Examiner says it was an axe, though, and he'd know, wouldn't he?"

  "A weapon of convenience, perhaps," Burl said.

  Kila nodded his agreement. Axes weren't hard to come by, and every peasant in Cearova owned one so they could split the wood they used to heat their homes and shops.

  "Murderer probably fled with the weapon in his or her possession," he said.

  "In a panic, if nothing else," Burl agreed.

  "Officer Burl, Officer an Movis," Krozemund greeted them. He was squatting next to the body, but he rose to greet them.

  "What do you have for us?"

  "A single blow to the temple followed by a second strike. The victim appears to have dodged the initial attack, with the result that the side of the axe hit him with a glancing blow. Second strike got him square, though."

  Judging by the man's split head, which was oozing blood and brain matter, he surely had been gotten. The temple Krozemund had indicated was discolored.

  "Defensive wounds?" Kila asked.

  "Several. This man didn't go down without a fight," Krozemund responded. Squatting next to the body once more, he picked up the man's left hand, and Kila and Burl squatted on either side of the victim, Burl next to Krozemund. "Torn nail here, along with some scrapes and abrasions." He put the hand down and picked up the right, showing them the injuries. "More damage here, indicating the shop owner was right-handed."

  "That's consistent with what the neighbors said when I arrived," the beat officer told them. "Said there was a horrible racket, shouts and screams and things being thrown about."

  Debris littered the floor, and Kila felt a wave of despair. All that hard work, all those careful calculations as to how much stock to buy, what price to sell it at, and the man ended up here, lying in a pool of his own blood. Sometimes he felt like his abilities were more curse than blessing, and he wondered if he would have chosen the life he had, had he been given a choice. Would he have wanted to wallow in the sordid details of the terrible things people did to one another?

  "My guess is the attack began while the owner was behind the counter, and he crawled over here," the officer said, indicating the mess behind the counter.

  "No," Burl said, rising and walking over to the counter, her face creased in concentration. "The assailant did this. He or she must have been searching for something. The attack started there." She pointed to a staircase that led up into what Kila had surmised was a stock loft.

  At first he didn't see what had tipped her off. After a moment of scrutiny, though, he caught it: a small nick on the side of the staircase, the color of the splintered wood far lighter than the smoke-stained surface of the stairs.

  "He was coming down from above when he was attacked," Kila said, looking at Burl.

  "There were three blows, not two. The attacker took the shopkeeper by surprise, and the shopkeeper tried to dodge the first strike. Stunned by the blow to his temple, the shopkeeper fell down the stairs as the attacker swung again. The attacker missed, nicked the stairs, and then struck the fatal blow once the shopkeeper was on the ground." Walking over to a sack near the base of the stairs, Burl indicated a depression in it. Studying the body and then the depression, Kila saw that she was right. The man's head had crushed the sack when he fell, his shoulder making a dent in it when he rolled and tried to get up.

  Burl was good, perhaps even better than Kila himself, leaving no question in his mind that she would have been well-equipped to advise House Staerleigh on how to deceive Enforcement.

  "Neighbors have any idea of who might have done this?" Burl asked the beat officer, whose embarrassment at being corrected by her showed. She hadn't been rude about it, just her usual blunt self, but her matter-of-fact explanation of how the crime had occurred had made the beat officer's inferior abilities glaringly obvious. If Kila had to hazard a guess, the man would be walking a beat for a good, long time.

  The beat officer filled them in on what he had learned, and then Burl sent him off to interview whoever else he could find while she and Kila searched the shop. Their search unearthed a ledger that revealed the shopkeeper was in debt to the tune of an eye-wateringly high amount of gold.

  "That would be our motive, I think," Burl said.

  Kila agreed. "It'll be a matter of tracking down which of his creditors was
owed the most or stood to lose the most if he or she wasn't paid."

  "Looks like you have a ledger to study," Burl said, slapping the book against his chest with a thump. A faint smirk lifted the corners of her mouth.

  You have no idea, Kila thought.

  Chapter 19

  Weeks passed, and still no one spoke to Lach about returning to sea. Cianne was surprised. She had long suspected Lach was happiest when he was being thrashed about by the waves, but he gave no indication that he had any desire to return to his post. Listlessness had settled over him, alarming his mother to the extent that she had all but begged Cianne to look after her son.

  "I must return to my duties, but I know if anyone can help him, it is you," Moiria said, and there wasn't the slightest trace of disgust in her words, of disdain in her tone. She was so desperate for her son to be well again that she was willing to countenance even Cianne's interference.

  "I'll do what I can," Cianne promised.

  She too was anxious about him. This new Lach wasn't her spirited best friend, always up for a laugh or an adventure. He had become a man who had ceased to find any pleasure in life, whose grief threatened to drag him down into the darkest depths.

  "She wants to go through his things, you know," Lach said, startling her as he entered the room in his mother's wake. He must have been hiding around the corner, waiting for Moiria to leave before he came in.

  "Lach, you frightened me," Cianne said, pressing a hand to her chest and turning to him with wide eyes.

  He lurked in the doorway, blinking. Pale spring light flooded the sitting room, Moiria having decided days ago it was time to start opening the drapes again. The room was opulent, the floors covered in thick, forest-green Shaper-woven carpets, its walls paneled with rich, dark wood bearing a burnished gleam. The furniture was dark, heavy, buffed to a high shine, its cushions intricately embroidered in navy and emerald tones. Daylight highlighted the richness of the colors and the quality of the workmanship, creating a pleasant effect, but when the light was low the room had always struck Cianne as oppressive. It felt even more so when Lach strode over to the window and yanked the drapes closed with a vicious snap of his wrist.

  "That infernal light gives me a headache." He slumped into a chair, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes.

  Her brief glimpse of his features had been ghastly. She had known he wasn't faring well, but the dim light had concealed the deep hollows in his cheeks, the waxy cast of his skin, the plum-colored shadows under his eyes. His once handsome face had become cadaverous, his eyes sunken, lips chapped and flaking, as if he had gone weeks without food.

  Come to think of it, he had. Cianne couldn't remember the last time he had eaten, and the realization prompted her to ring for tea.

  "You have to eat, Lach," she said, in response to the way his lip curled at her action, his face spasming with revulsion.

  "I can't eat. I can't sleep. I can't do anything until I know the truth," he said, his voice harsh, scratchy.

  A twinge of guilt ate away at her. Here she was investigating the circumstances of his father's death, and yet she wouldn't tell him a word of it. He was living in torment and she wouldn't do anything to ease his pain.

  "The Elders have asked her to go through your father's things, you know that, Lach. They have to know what the state of his affairs was. It concerns the House as a whole," she said, trying for a reasonable approach. She thought he might respond to it, given the many times he had tried to get her to see what he insisted was reason when it came to the House.

  Turning on her like a rabid dog, he snapped, "She wants to move on."

  "Lach, your mother… She and I have had our differences, that's no secret, but she did love your father. You know that as well as I. You're hurting, and I understand that, but you know she grieves in her own way, just as my father grieved in his after my mother died."

  He turned his head away. She had him there. He could hardly argue with her that his mother's behavior was an indication that she didn't care about her husband's death. She wore her emotions on her face much more readily than Cianne's father ever had, and there was no doubt in anyone's mind that the loss of Toran had torn Moiria apart.

  "Are we to erase him, then? Remove all trace that he ever existed?" Lach whispered.

  Cianne stood to go to him, but someone knocked on the sitting room door, interrupting them. It was a servant with the tea tray, which Cianne took, and by the time she returned to Lach he seemed to have collected himself.

  "I'm sorry," he told her in a broken voice, wiping at his cheek. "I know I'm not myself. I don't mean to lash out at you."

  "I'm worried about you," she said. Pouring a cup of tea, she added some sugar and cream to it, hoping that if he wasn't going to eat she could at least get some sustenance into him that way.

  He accepted the tea but set it beside him, immediately forgetting it. "I can't accept that he's gone."

  "I know, Lach, I know. Sometimes in the morning when I wake I still expect to hear my mother's voice, scolding me to get out of bed, chiding me for being so lazy." Fresh pain washed over Cianne even as she smiled, and she could feel tears rising to her own eyes.

  "Oh, Cianne. No one understands what this is like the way you do," he said, reaching for her hands.

  He had said the same thing many times over the last few weeks, and each time he said it Cianne's guilt and discomfort increased. He was enclosing them in a bubble she feared she wouldn't be able to pierce without lacerating them both.

  "No, Lach," she said, making her tone as gentle as she could. "Don't do that. Don't deny the grief that others are feeling. Don't deny that your mother is in pain too. I made that mistake, and I don't want to see you make it. Your father was her life partner. Do you think it a simple matter for her to get over his death?"

  Releasing her hands, he sat back in his chair and stared off into the distance, separating himself from her. She let him. She wasn't certain whether it was wise to continue to indulge him as she was, but she was at a loss as to what to do. The hope that he would pull himself together hadn't dimmed, despite his continued distress, and in the meantime she felt all she could do was wait and ride it out with him, as he would ride out a storm at sea.

  Except that he could control storms at sea, could bend the water to his will courtesy of Cearus's grace. His grief, however, was a tide he couldn't turn, no matter how hard he tried, and Cianne had never before realized how helpless this made him. Unlike her, he didn't know what it was like to be battered about by the winds of life, to learn to endure.

  "She goes out, late at night," he said, sounding as though he were in a trance.

  Leaning forward in her chair, Cianne stared at him. "What do you mean?"

  "She goes out, late at night," he repeated. His eyes focused and he returned her stare, his gaze burning with intensity. "She thinks I'm asleep. I've heard her do it twice since my father— She did it in the past too, before."

  His voice trailed off, but Cianne knew what he had been about to say. Since her initial conversation with Kila about the dates of Toran's entries, she had gone over her own notes, stashed at various safe locations throughout the city. She had discovered that Moiria hadn't gone out just the one time she had recalled, but had done so several times over the course of the last two years. In fact, by studying her notes, Cianne had realized that the only House members who had gone outside of the enclave on these secretive nighttime excursions had been Moiria, Daerwyn, Elder Borean, and Elder Vorfarth. The other three Elders had been present at clandestine meetings held on enclave grounds, but they hadn't ventured beyond the walls like the others. Since they were very elderly, their age may have been a factor, but Cianne had the distinct impression that whatever was going on between them was being orchestrated, for the most part, by her father, Moiria, Elder Borean, and Elder Vorfarth.

  She hadn't thought Lach knew a thing about it, as he had been away at sea for a good number of the meetings, but he was apparently more perceptive tha
n she had given him credit for being.

  "Perhaps she's taking walks, trying to clear her head," she said. She wanted to know more, but if she started questioning him directly he might get suspicious. How would another House member react? Wouldn't they try to placate, believing him overwrought by his grief? She thought that was how she ought to play it.

  "When has my mother's head ever been anything but clear?" he asked with a snort. His attitude toward his mother was shocking. Though she had gotten under his skin in the past, he had behaved with a great deal of indulgence toward her, as if she were a well-meaning child who didn't know any better. Cianne hadn't imagined he felt any scorn for his mother, let alone that he would express it so openly.

  "Very well," she said, stiffening her spine as if feeling rebuked. "Why do you think she goes out, then?"

  "I don't know," he said, shoving a hand through his hair. "Sometimes she goes to see the Elders, which is strange, but other times she leaves the enclave. What reason could she have for doing that?"

  "Lach, are you certain—" she began in a delicate tone, but he cut her off.

  "Cianne, come on," he said, the words exploding out of him. "I know you're not as dense as the House members make you out to be."

  She didn't need to pretend to stiffen her spine; she was well and truly offended. She stood, fighting to contain her anger. "As you said, you're not yourself. I think it best if I go."

  "Cianne, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," he moaned, burying his face in his hands, his tears starting afresh. "How could I? You don't deserve that. There's no excuse for me to— Not when I—"