by T L Greylock
Eska brought him the reliquary. “I expect you to have it open by the time I return,” she said with a smile. Perrin laughed again, a touch louder and stronger than before, and waved her away.
While Rosina stoked the fire outside the back door, Eska hauled buckets of water up from the stream until she had filled a copper laundry basin. By the time the water had begun to steam, Gabriel appeared.
“They’re ready,” he said.
“And the skeleton?” Eska had asked Gabriel to leave the bones, along with her chest of tools. The mystery of their identity and how they had come to be buried among Onandyan refuse still captivated her, and while she waited for news from Arconia and Toridium, she had nothing but time. If nothing else, examining the skeleton might prove to be a welcome distraction should the reliquary’s secret continue to elude her.
“In the library, as you asked.”
Eska nodded and accompanied the engineer to the stable yard where her seven crewmembers waited alongside one of the wagons. Horses, saddled and loaded with packs, stamped their feet in the dirt, sensing the impending journey. Bastien, Eska noticed, stood near the back of the group, his gaze fixed on the ground and his hair falling across his forehead to hide his expression. Eska could guess it well enough.
She smiled at them all. “Thank you. Thank you for giving more than I have a right to ask of you. Thank you for your patience and loyalty. Thank you for seeing this equipment safely back to Arconia. In addition to the contracts you signed for the excavation at Toridium, compensation for which you will receive in full despite the work being cut short, you will receive bonus pay for the additional time and travel to Cancalo, as well as hazard pay for the risks to which Firenzia Company has exposed you.” She saw Bastien’s head come up, but it was Nahia who voiced words of protest first.
“My lady, I will accept no bonus pay. We all know what we signed up for, we all know the dangers we might encounter.”
Eska shook her head. “I will not accept your refusal. My decisions and my conduct have not been in the best interests of the Company—and therefore not in the best interests of its employees.”
“My lady,” Bastien broke in, “you could not have known what would happen in Toridium or Cancalo. There is no blame at your door. “
“You may argue this point until we both die, Bastien, but I will not yield. The company is responsible for all of you. You signed contracts with us, but we also signed contracts with you, and those contracts state that we must compensate each of you in cases of excessive and unreasonable endangerment. While your stubbornness is appreciated, this is not an argument you can win. I’m afraid the law is on my side.”
The silence that descended on the crew was edged with tension. Gabriel spoke up. “Lady de Caraval has asked this of you, and we dishonor her and ourselves if we undermine the very loyalty she has praised us for. This is our duty, as much as it is our duty to dig in the earth.”
Eska glanced at Gabriel and knew he understood her expression of thanks.
“My lady.” It was Inevra who spoke. “I beg to ask one thing of you.”
“Ask, Inevra.”
The young woman looked steadily at Eska, her deep brown eyes radiating confidence and wisdom greater than her years. “You speak to us of dangers. Do not forget, those dangers can touch you, too. You are not impervious to them.”
Eska smiled. “I will try to remember.”
And with that, Gabriel gave the order for the crew to depart. They mounted horses or clambered aboard the wagon. Cosimo lingered to squeeze Gabriel’s hand, then climbed into the driver’s seat. With a flick of the reins, the wagon lurched forward and lumbered through the stable yard, the riders falling into place behind and to the side. Several twisted in their saddles to look over their shoulders and wave farewell as they passed through the gate and onto the path that would take them west, through the valley until they could turn to the north, to Arconia. It was Bastien’s face Eska saw last.
“Well, Gabriel,” Eska said, as she turned back to the house, “those who stay behind are required to play nursemaid.”
“I’ll wager my tincture administering skills are better than yours, my lady. And I’m very talented with a bed pan.”
Eska laughed. “Thank all the dead librarians we haven’t had cause to employ one of those yet.”
Together Eska and Gabriel lugged the heavy copper basin up the stairs and into the master chamber. Perrin had drifted to sleep, the reliquary—still shut—in his lap, but he woke as they sloshed their way into the room.
“Now, Perrin, it’s the moment you’ve been waiting for,” Eska said as she added several pinches of soothing salt to the steaming bath water. “Take off your clothes.”
Perrin pretended to consider his options. “I don’t know that you’re ready to see this bag of skin and bones.”
Eska winked. “Oh, I know a thing or two about bones, young man.”
Perrin laughed, but Gabriel, to Eska’s immense amusement, grew red in the face and busied himself shifting the copper basin minutely here and there until it was just so.
“Come now, nursemaid,” Eska teased. “A little humor is good for the patient.”
Gabriel straightened but still wouldn’t look Eska in the eye.
“No gallows humor just yet, though,” Perrin said. His voice remained light, but a tightness appeared around his mouth.
Gabriel and Eska stripped Perrin out of his clothes, keeping the blankets pulled over his lower half to prevent a chill, and Eska soaked a soft cloth in the hot water, twisted the excess out, and began to wipe down Perrin’s torso, first one arm and then the other. Gabriel, after asking Eska if she needed anything else, moved quietly out of the room.
“I see you’ve made considerable headway on the reliquary,” Eska murmured as she rinsed and wrung out the cloth again, then shifted her attention to Perrin’s chest.
“Yes, I slept on it. Solved it entirely while snoring.”
“Delightful,” Eska said, laughing. “We’ll examine it again after I’ve finished.” She continued to smooth the cloth over his body, his skin prickling slightly as the water cooled in the air. With her help, Perrin shifted onto his left side, allowing her access to his back.
“I feel like a child,” he said quietly, his face close to her lap. “My mother used to sit with me when I was sick.”
“What was she like?”
Perrin was quiet for a long moment. “She wasn’t a very good parent, it turns out,” he said at last. “Of course I worshipped the ground she walked on when I was too young to know any better.” Eska soaked the cloth again and continued down his back. “She was too tolerant of bad behavior. I think because she wanted us to love her more than my father. But in trying to earn our love, she became more like a child herself, letting us splash through pans of paint when work was being done on the house, encouraging us to hide our father’s belongings, insisting we gorge ourselves on sweets before going to bed.” He closed his eyes and went quiet again and Eska waited, not wanting to interrupt. “I used to love her laugh. Even once I began to understand what kind of person she was and the poor influence she had on her children, Victor most of all, I still clung to that idea of her laugh—because then I could pretend she was happy. A happy wife and mother.” Perrin shivered—not, Eska thought, because of the air or the water. She drew the blanket up to his shoulder. “But her laugh was the last thing I heard from her, the last thing she did before she abandoned us. She told us she would be back—that she would return with money and powerful friends, that we’d have our life back.” Eska rested her free hand on the back of Perrin’s and his fingers sought hers, entwining them together, a subconscious, desperate grasp for human connection. “I think I knew before either Manon or Victor that she wasn’t coming back. I think I knew before I could even put it into words.” Perrin opened his eyes and looked at Eska. “Perhaps in some ways that made it easier.”
Except there was no ease in his eyes, only long-subdued heartache. And then even that
was quickly replaced by something Eska recognized as shame. Perrin abruptly released Eska’s hand and he rolled onto his back, his gaze anchored to the ceiling by his invisible burdens.
Wordlessly, Eska shifted the blanket up around his torso, exposing his lower body. She soaked the cloth and went to work.
“I wouldn’t expect you to understand.” Perrin broke the silence after Eska had finished cleaning his left leg and moved on to the right.
“I would never expect to understand another family’s complexities,” Eska said. “That doesn’t mean I can’t listen.”
“You are a good listener,” Perrin said, his earlier playfulness maneuvering its way back into his voice. “Probably because you have two parents who love you.” His voice caught then, stumbling over those last words. He took a deep breath, steadying himself. “I don’t begrudge you that.”
“I know.”
“Manon might,” he said, something less than a laugh breaking free from his chest.
Eska smiled. “I think I know that, too.” She patted his knee and rearranged the blanket so it covered him fully. “All done. I thought you might like to soak your feet in the basin.”
“Sounds like the most excitement I’ll have all day.”
It took some effort—the talking had worn him out, Eska could see—but she was able to sit him up and swing his legs over the side of the bed. He sighed when his feet hit the water, and Eska settled behind him to serve as a backrest, her shoulder holding him upright.
Reaching across the bed linens, she pulled the discarded reliquary back toward her and then handed it to Perrin. “Go on. You’ll have to earn your keep somehow.” She explained how the legs had moved on the first reliquary—and her subsequent opening. “It stands to reason that each is a different sort of puzzle.”
“Perhaps the stag is the key,” Perrin mused. “The four feet belong to predators. The stag is their prey?”
“Imaginative. But I’ve never seen a boar eat venison. Have you?”
“True. Then maybe it’s the flowers. This one looks like a bellflower. And this one could be mistaken for a bleeding heart.”
Eska smiled over his shoulder as Perrin continued to amble his way through theory after theory, each outlandish and ridiculously endearing. She helped him into fresh clothes, and then they made the slow journey to the second floor privy closet so Perrin could empty his bladder.
By the time they returned to the bedchamber, Perrin was exhausted and Eska moved quickly to help him back to the bed. But she froze before they reached it, her gaze fixed on the reliquary.
“Perrin,” she said, her voice quiet and hesitant. “Does it look different to you?”
He shifted next to her. “The flowers,” he whispered.
His words confirmed what Eska had not dared believe. Two of the bellflowers had grown, for lack of a better understanding of it, and now stood higher than the rest of the golden garden surrounding the stag.
Together, they hurried the final steps to the bed and Perrin sank down onto it as Eska reached for the reliquary. Her fingers brushed condensation on the telltale flowers, and she pulled back.
“The steam,” she said, glancing at the bath water. Her mind whirred, setting the pieces of the puzzle in place—and then came to a sudden halt thanks to an obstacle the size of Lake Delo. “But it was already wet,” she murmured. “Underwater.”
“But not salt water,” Perrin said. The wonder in his voice almost masked the weakness.
Eska shared a glance with him, then grabbed the box with both hands and submerged it in the copper basin.
For a moment nothing happened, and Eska had the sudden fear that her rash decision would result in the destruction of a priceless object—but then the reliquary began to change.
More golden flowers pushed their way out of the lid until they protruded significantly above the surface of the box, and then the stag began to do the same, emerging from its bed of ivory and twisting until it stood nearly upright, prancing just like its woodland cousin.
When the golden pieces ceased to move, Eska plunged her hands into the water and pulled the reliquary out. She turned to Perrin, rivulets of water streaming down the box and through her palms to pool at her feet. Perrin stared, apparently just as unable to form a coherent thought as Eska.
Eska’s hand went to the stag’s back, sure it served as a handle for the lid, but then she stopped and smiled. “You open it. It seems only right,” she said. “I would never have thought to bathe it in salt water.”
Perrin smiled sheepishly as she put the box in his lap. His fingers grazed the golden flowers, then tested the stag. Nothing happened as he tugged upward. Eska frowned, but Perrin seemed unconcerned. As though by instinct, he turned one of the flowers, the one underneath the stag’s raised hoof, clockwise, and Eska thrilled to hear a hidden mechanism clicking quietly with each rotation until the flower would turn no more. Perrin hesitated, then put two fingers under the stag’s belly and lifted.
Eska’s heart skipped faster as she caught her first glimpse of the telltale bronze, the grooves stained with black. This god disc was larger than the first, she realized, larger than her palm, and its markings, its pattern of lines and dots, seemed more erratic, less deliberate.
Eska glanced at Perrin, who was staring at the disc as though looking at his own reflection in a mirror, his brow creased with thought, his lips slightly parted.
“Watch this,” Eska said.
She picked the disc up by its edges. The reaction was instantaneous. The bronze folded into itself, crumpling as easily as discarded paper.
Perrin blinked, his jaw dropping slightly. He laughed softly, the sound infused with delight. “What is it?”
Without a word, Eska stood and completed the demonstration. She stepped back from the bed so Perrin could see, placed the ball of bronze on the floor, and, a childish grin of anticipation creeping onto her face, brought her heel down hard on top of it.
The bronze went flat under the pressure and weight of her boot, a disc once more.
“I begin to understand why you put up with the dirt and the dust and the pieces of broken pottery,” Perrin said softly, his face suffused with wonder.
Eska smiled. “Believe me, there is a lot more dirt and dust and broken things than mysterious, ancient artifacts in my line of work.” She glanced down at the disc. “But, yes, there is always something to discover, even if I’m the only one who finds it interesting.” She looked around the chamber, her gaze lighting on a small iron figurine. As expected, when she held the little iron ship over the disc, it leapt into the air, the metals clinging to each other. Eska returned the disc to the reliquary. “You asked what it is. The truth is I don’t really know. But I suspect it is one of six, just like the Alescuan reliquaries, only it comes from a time long before that dynasty was born, long before the Seven Cities were the Seven Cities, long before the first people to hunt and farm and raise children on these lands journeyed from the east and chose to call them home.” Eska looked at Perrin and then back at the bronze disc set in red silk. “I mean to find them all, if I can, and study them. I could not begin to recite to you all the questions I have about them—but first and foremost in my mind is why the Alescuan kings and queens were collecting them. I can only imagine what purpose they were meant to serve.”
Perrin, his face a study of concentration, raised his hand as though to touch the disc, then thought better of it. He closed the lid.
“The reliquary itself is just as fascinating. I’ll have Gabriel look at it,” Eska mused. “It seems the salt triggered some sort of valve that released the mechanism. But I can’t imagine exactly how.”
“I also begin to see that you are incapable of looking at a thing without demanding understanding of it,” Perrin said. He leaned back into the pillows. “I, for one, would like to enjoy the mystery of both the box and its contents.” He closed his eyes. “Some things are better when left unexplained.”
“Then I promise I won’t reveal all the secr
ets of the disc once I discover them,” Eska said, laughing.
Perrin grinned, though his eyes remained closed, but as Eska left him to rest, she saw him looking over at the reliquary, at the golden stag standing proud over its treasure, saw his features grow serious with contemplation, and knew the enigma of the Godforged pulled at something within him just as it did her.
Chapter Thirty-Four
“Please.”
As though their success had imbued him with hidden strength, Perrin’s health improved steadily after he and Eska solved the riddle of the reliquary. Two days passed before he could join Eska in the library, but he made the journey there largely under his own power, halting twice on the stairs and a third time in the middle of the entry hall. He wavered then, the nearest object that might support his weight—a statue of a thoughtful-looking, long-dead philosopher—too far out of reach to be of us. Eska took his hand, steadying him more than supporting him, and he took several deep breaths, then nodded at her and continued on his own.
“I do hope this is worth it,” Perrin said as he lowered himself into a plush chair near the empty fireplace. Eska had promised to share a discovery she had made about the skeleton—only if Perrin could make his way to the library. To her delight, curiosity had spurred him out of bed—though he had grumbled about it.
“I have a confession,” Eska said. “I told you I made a discovery this morning about our friend here,” she went on, gesturing to the array of bones scattered on a large sheet of linen on the floor. The library was decidedly out of sorts, furniture pushed haphazardly out of the way, tools lying in wait to trip up the unsuspecting traveler. “It wasn’t this morning. It was yesterday. I didn’t say anything because I wanted to make sure the news got you out of bed.”
Perrin put a hand to his chest and adopted a wounded expression. “Your duplicity is truly unconscionable. Vengeance will be mine—by not listening to a word you say.”
Eska smiled wickedly. “Then you don’t want to know who this is?”