It was largely untouched, but for a bright red mark stamped upon the door. Every building had one, now, to show it had been searched. Standing on the roof, Sen and Gellick looked out over a city swathed by a low hanging pall of smoke, as if the Bodyswell corpse fires had expanded to cover the city entire.
"We need to write about this," Sen said. His jaw was tight and his fists clenched and unclenched at his sides. "The Saint has to say something."
Gellick left those words hanging for a long time. They were both exhausted from the long day and night, from all the horrors they'd seen. Steadily he moved over to stand beside Sen. Now there were intermittent wails rising from the neighboring districts, of grief and pain.
"We have no paper left, Sen."
Sen gritted his teeth. They'd used up the last of their supplies for the second edition. They had hardly any paste or ink left, and they'd both clearly seen the King's writs slapped up in the Carroway night markets and all along the Haversham, the docks, and across Grammaton Square.
Paper would no longer be sold in the city. Ink would no longer be sold. Even paste, and cans, and brushes were embargoed at the docks. Any ship caught smuggling those materials in would be burnt in the harbor with all hands aboard.
"We should have bought more," Sen said dully. "Before we ever posted."
Gellick laid a hand on Sen's shoulder. "We didn't know. The King is mad."
"We should have known," Sen said. This was another mistake, an underestimation of how much control mattered to Aberainythy. But to back down and stop posting now would be a total defeat. It wouldn't matter that the Molemen couldn't catch them. It was enough that The Saint was stopped.
"There's another way," Gellick said. "Other ways."
Sen snorted. Of course there were other ways. They all required money, and infrastructure, and power, and faith. They required enough trust to overcome the blood and horror the King could enforce at any moment he wished.
"You know," Gellick said. "You know she can help."
Sen's fists tightened. Of course he knew. But he'd meant never to see her again, despite what his mother's prophecy said. He'd had enough money, and all the skills he would need, but now the King had done this.
He had to swallow his anger, and his pride, and go to see her again.
Feyon, of the Roy Gravailes.
* * *
Feyon had wanted him to suffer.
It was over half a year ago now, but still she was the one suffering. The memories of that hideous morning haunted her, and she relived it both day and night, always hoping for it to end a different way, but it never did.
It began with her rage. That he had treated her so callously, and with such disrespect. That he had spoken of her life and her family as if they both meant nothing. A lie, he had called her. A fake. And then he had stolen that kiss…
After she'd reported him at the Haversham, she rode in her brougham at the back of the Adjunc herd feeling so very righteous. She was a lady of the House Gravaile, and this was a just recompense for the offenses he'd committed against her.
The Abbey gates had gone down in moments, and her Adjunc flooded in. They beat down doors and dragged Sisters out into the dawn, wherever she pointed them. They stripped off their holy cassocks in search of scars, they beat down the Abbess when she refused, they bit off her antennae to silence her.
It was only then that the thrill of it changed for Feyon.
She had only ever had the utmost respect for the Abbess. A Sectile of her caste and with her depth of faith was rare and precious. Feyon had grown up witness to the hushed awe her parents felt toward the Moth Abbess, and could not help but share it. The Abbess herself had come to see her since she was a babe, speaking blessings over her even as she spoke blessings over her sister. She had come with every changing of the season thereafter, speaking kindly to Feyon, and telling her of the great things she would one day do.
She had not thought that calling the Adjunc on her Abbey would lead to this. As she watched the Abbess stagger for balance, she realized what a horrific, arrogant mistake she had made.
She tried to call the raid off, but it was too late, and her cries were muffled by the screams. The raid went on, and she watched as a sickening numbness sank into her belly. She saw blood smeared across the Adjunc coming out of the chancel, and knew someone had died. She saw the Induran Deadhead and the Spindle staring at her while they were stripped naked on the grounds, like this was her fault, like she had meant for this.
She began to grasp the enormity of what she'd done. This was real, and it was her fault.
The Abbess came to her when it was all over, stumbling even with one of the Sisters propping her up. She only looked into Feyon's tear-reddened eyes and said one simple sentence. "Remember what you did here, Feyon."
Then at last her parents were there, carrying her back to the Roy in a brougham, but there was no reassurance in their pale, terrified faces. In the days that followed Adjunc came and went from their house freely, searching for the boy with the scars that they hadn't found.
She said it was all a lie. She told anyone who would listen that she'd made it up for attention. In the doll room she held on to her sister's likeness, stroking its scar, and understood what Sen had meant. Her sister was not gone for adventures in some far away land. She had died just as Sister Henderson had died, with just as little grace.
What she'd done made her ill. She could not sleep or eat. At night her father the Duke locked the door to her room.
"For your own sake," he told her. "For all of us."
She sat night after night on her bed, too wracked with guilt to sleep. All the things that had once mattered to her were wrong. All her fine clothes, the paints for her face and bells for her hair, were just a symptom of the deeper lie.
One night she destroyed them.
She pulled the clothes from their wardrobes and ripped them apart. She tore up her dolls, she broke her mirrors and threw all her makeups and jewelry at the walls until she was exhausted and sobbing in the wreckage.
When sleep finally came, she dreamt again of the look on Sen's face as he rejected her, and the heat as he kissed her, and the taste of his lips red as Sister Henderson's blood. Then when the kiss was over, he drove a slim black spike through her heart, and she welcomed it. She opened herself to it gladly, because this was more than she deserved. This was a mercy she had not afforded to him.
He did not come the next day though, nor the day after that. Instead, it took the best part of a year.
* * *
Sen arrived outside the gates several hours before the dawn. All of the night he'd spent working a route into the Roy, using paths he'd never taken before. There were Molemen guards in the sewers, forcing him onto the Gutrock obtrusion, into the sumps and weirs, using bi-rail tunnels. Numerous times he had to backtrack, waiting for patrols to shift and pass by, clinging to shadows like they were armor.
Even the Roy had burnt, in the King's response to The Saint. Glimpsing the streets of the Diamante, jewelers that had once displayed their most resplendent works in their windows now appeared to be entirely shuttered. Burnt husks of desks and machinery lay on the flagstones like worm casts on the beach, scattered round with ashes and in places, bodies.
Perhaps they had held copies of the Saint. Perhaps they had run secret print shops. Or perhaps they had simply held assets the King wanted, and the covering chaos had proved a chance for him to take what he wanted.
If the Saint could not keep pressing, then King Aberainythy had won.
He approached the gate to the Gravaile mansion in shadow and silence, to the gatehouse where a broad-shouldered Malakite strode to meet him, apish muscles bulging under his smart black uniform. He was as big as Gellick's father, but coated with simian hair.
"State your business," he said.
"I've come to see Feyon Gravaile," Sen answered.
The Malakite looked him up and down; a hooded figure in the small hours of the night, come with no announcement a
nd no brougham carriage, with no servants and bearing no coat of arms, in the midst of a crisis in the city at large.
"You're not wanted here. Move along, beggar."
"I have come from the Moth Abbess of the Abbey of the Heart. Feyon will see me."
The Malakite chewed on that for a long moment, and Sen felt the uncertainty building in his small mind. A moment later he strode back to his guardhouse, where he spoke into a metal tube. Sen watched through the iron gates. The Malakite came back and held out one barring palm.
"Wait."
Sen waited. Time passed, and the stars shifted overhead. In the shadow of an elegantly wrought oft tree, its branches twisted in intricate patterns, he watched the constellation of Lord Quill pass behind the fullness of late summer leaves. On the eastern horizon he looked out to where the first stars of Saint Ignifer climbed into the sky, soon to be chased by the sun.
Some time later the central door in the Gravaile house opened, and a man emerged in the orange glow of revelatory light. He was dressed in gold-pleated jodhpurs and vest, sported an ornate white wig over a very severe expression, and tapped a cane smartly on the white gravel as he walked toward them.
Sen remembered him from his first visit to this place. The Duke Gravaile, Feyon's father. At the gate he waved the Malakite away with his cane, beckoned Sen near, and spoke in a sharp, clipped tone.
"I remember you, boy. I am sorry for what became of your Abbey, but you are not welcome here. I ask that you leave at once, for all our sakes."
Sen studied the intensity of feelings rising off the older man. There was anger on the surface, but beneath that lay a deep, lapping ocean of fear. "You greeted me more civilly last time," he said calmly.
"Those were more civil times," the Duke replied, "before my daughter's action brought the Adjunc down upon us all."
Sen nodded. It made sense that Feyon's parents would be under greater scrutiny now. He looked past the Duke and to the house, where a new light had gone on in one of the upper floor windows.
"Does she know I'm here?"
"That is not your concern. Now go, before I lose my patience."
Sen felt the waves of fear thicken, though the Duke's face was a mask of formality and his tone spoke only of accustomed command.
"You're afraid," Sen said.
The mask slipped for a moment, and in response the Duke slid the first inch of a steel sword out of its cane sheath. "Watch your tongue here, boy."
"Afraid not of what I might do, I know that," Sen said, then took one step backward, and pointed at the flagstones at his feet. "But of what I might bring."
"Be plain, and say what you mean to say."
Sen looked up. "Was it here, in this spot, that they skinned your eldest daughter?"
The Duke blanched white. His mouth opened and closed. The fear rose up like a great wave, threatening to swallow them both now. "How dare you?"
Sen nodded calmly, taking his reaction as confirmation. "It was here. You barely survived it, then. Now imagine what the Adjunc will do if they see me." At that he reached up and lifted off his balaclava, revealing his scars.
Naked terror flashed in the Duke's eyes. "Are you mad?" he hissed. "Cover yourself at once, child."
"I need to speak with Feyon. I was your guest before, I hope to be so again."
The Duke sweated, looked rapidly from side to side, then unlatched the gate and swung it open.
"Be a guest then," he said through gritted teeth, "and welcome."
* * *
Her room was gray. For a long time they had repaired and replaced all the dolls and clothes that she destroyed, as if it could all be covered up like the dress over her sister's scar.
It couldn't. She tore her finery into pieces that couldn't be repaired, until one day her father stopped replacing them. Then she had lain awake in her empty room thinking of nothing but how she deserved to die for what she'd done. It was only rarely, at the great insistence of her medicians and with the assistance of their forced therapies, that she ate or slept. The rest of the time she wasted, becoming a skeletal thing in the darkness, sick with guilt.
She saw the Abbess, when she came, several months after the Adjunc. Whatever punishment she would receive, she was willing. But the Abbess was not angry, only sad.
"Is this how you use your life, child?" she'd asked. "Is this your atonement, and what Sister Henderson died for?"
That night she tried to kill herself, slashing a shard of mirror across her throat. She would have died, had her father not tasked their servants to spy on her through hidden glass slits in the walls. One came in at once and bound up her throat with her fine dresses. The Bodyswell were called. The medicians were summoned.
Feyon drifted throughout. Her mother wept and her father roared. People came and went. When at last their work was done, and darkness reigned and she could finally sleep, she dreamed of Sen.
She woke to the tear-stained face of her mother begging her to live, not to leave her as her sister had. She reached her fingers up to the throat, where the stitches were still in, and the outline of her very own scar was taking shape.
From that point on, the guilt eased its terrible grip slightly. There was no forgiveness, no happiness, simply an acceptance of what she'd done. She started to eat again. She asked for paper and quill, and began to write.
At first she wrote out the events of her life, as far back as she could remember. Sheets piled like snowdrifts in her room, from her earliest memories with her older sister, both of them playing round the gardens in frilled dresses and curled red hair, to the times with Sen and the others in the Abbey, to the moment she called down the Adjunc. She tried to understand how all the pieces fit together.
When the past was fully remembered, she moved to the future, writing Sen's story going forward, imagining where he had fled to and what he was doing now. She wrote about the others as well, the lives she envisaged for them. When she had seen them all through to their deathbeds, she began inventing new stories, about her sister and how she might have lived if the Adjunc hadn't come.
Cherlyndra. She was stronger and braver than Feyon, an adventurer who traveled across the oceans in a boat that was a giant green leaf, kept company with a funny little caterpillar. In writing she no longer felt so broken, surrounded by a world of others who had made mistakes also. Her mistake was truly a terrible thing, but now it was only one of many things she had done, or imagined doing. There were stories where she'd never met Sen, never kissed him, never gone to the Adjunc, all of which could have happened with the slightest of changes. She lived a hundred lives from the darkness of her gray room.
Then her father came to her early one morning, pale-faced and afraid, and told her Sen was in their home and waiting to speak to her. Oddly, she was not surprised. It didn't seem real, seemed only another variation of the stories she had written.
She went to him. He was sitting in the peacock room, dressed all in black with his gloved hands on his knees. He looked older, thinner in the face and stronger too, his scars still swirling around his gray eyes.
She began to weep.
This was real. He had truly come, and it didn't matter what the reason was. She knew at once that she would do anything imaginable to earn his forgiveness. To have him see her anew, as she now wanted to be seen.
She dropped to her knees before him, hands clasped to her chest, and spoke the halting words with all her heart.
"I will do anything that you ask."
She couldn't look at him. She couldn't look to the side, at her parents as they stood in shocked silence. She just knelt and waited, feeling the anger burning off him even now.
"Thank you," he said, at last.
* * *
She sat at the table and looked at the wood while they argued.
Hours had passed, and the arguments had only grown louder. Her father resisted. Sen insisted. Her mother tried to reason with them both.
She hadn't written any story quite like this.
In some
Sen came and brought with him the gift of death, while in others he came and stole her away to a life of adventure, in others still he gave her the forgiveness she so craved with a kiss. In none of them had he come in and argued about paper.
Paper, and ink. She didn't understand about The Saint, having never heard of it. She'd been vaguely aware of the increased Moleman presence on the streets outside, but had never questioned this. It didn't matter to her, in her little sad world.
Now they were arguing about routes into the city. They talked about HellWest and the land roads from the Sump, and smuggler's covers in from the sewers, and the special knowledge her father held as a Duke and head of a standing army of three thousand.
"Are your men loyal?" Sen asked, in various different ways, at different times through the conversation.
"Some," her father answered. "To some degree."
"And those with faith? Those who share a love of the Heart, and the Saint? How many are they?"
"Five. Ten. A dozen perhaps."
"And you have ships. You have the King's writ. It can be done."
"I tell you, it cannot!"
On they argued. The sun rose high and Feyon just listened, beginning to catch some scope of what was at stake. Sen had started printing a newspaper, and the city was in uproar. Her father was afraid and excited by what it might mean. Hadn't they been waiting for such a moment all their lives, a chance to serve the Heart in a meaningful way? Hadn't that been the reason they'd sent her to the Abbey in the first place, for the secret strength it would grow in her breast?
What had become of that secret strength, she wondered.
"Do it," she said, barely a whisper, but nobody heard. They continued arguing over their maps, their papers, until she stood and said it again, now looking at her father.
"Do it," she said sharply, and he stopped arguing. His face seemed to melt, the anger slipping away, replaced with something like pity.
The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1) Page 34