by Kerstin Hall
“Is Hayder asleep?” she asked Osan.
“As far as I know, yes.”
“Good. You should be too.” She hefted the bag higher on her shoulder. “Raughn, a word? In private?”
“Of course.” I got to my feet. “Is something wrong, Commander?”
“It’s just a personal matter.”
“In that case, I’ll head back to my room.” Osan stood up. He moved far slower than before, and the image of the bolt protruding from his shoulder flashed through my mind, the blood soaking his back. “Good night to both of you.” He wavered, and then added. “Elfreda … I owe you one.”
“For what?”
He trudged out of the kitchen. “For staying by my side last night.”
So that was it, the source of his new awkwardness. I wanted to tell him not to be stupid, anyone would have done the same, but he was already in the corridor. Asan picked up the lamp from the table.
“Let’s talk in the central conservatory,” she said. “No chance of being overheard, and it’s a little more comfortable.”
The mansion, I discovered as I followed her through a sumptuous sitting room filled with upholstered chairs covered in pale dust sheets, was grander than my guest bedroom had suggested. The furniture gleamed in the shifting lamplight, polished hardwood and gold finishes, embroidered velvet and silver piping. Opulent, certainly, but the whole place possessed a curious air of sterility—as if no one had ever really lived here. Which I suppose was true, if the Reverend who owned it resided outside Ceyrun.
The conservatory was ensconced between two wings of the house, shielded by double-storey walls on two sides and adjoining the main foyer to the south. Through dusty glass roof panels, the thin moon shone like the edge of a knife. Bright-leafed creepers ran up elegant trellises on the walls; pomegranates and grapes, flowering sweet peas. A line of low couches ran beside stone-topped cabinets. It was warmer in here; sunlight had soaked into the marble floor tiles during the day, and now the heat gently radiated up from the ground.
Asan walked over to a cabinet and crouched before it. I trailed after her. She rummaged around and pulled out a dark bottle from the lower shelf.
“Probably shouldn’t mix alcohol and medication, but after the week you’ve had…” She proffered a metal tumbler. “Hold this.”
I took it from her uncertainly. She returned to searching the cabinet.
“I figured we probably won’t have many opportunities to talk,” she said. “Celane’s increased the number of people tailing me. Real fucking pain in the ass. It’s almost impossible to slip away during the day now.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“What can you do?” She found a corkscrew and jammed it into the top of the bottle. “You seem much better. That’s good.”
“May I ask a question?”
She pulled out the cork. “Sure.”
“Why aren’t you martyring me?”
She snorted.
I kept my voice measured and calm. “Rhyanon said that you don’t intend to harm me, and I believe her. I’m just not sure that your decision makes much sense.”
Asan motioned for my tumbler. I held it out, and she filled it.
“Sit,” she said.
I lowered myself onto one of the couches. The Commander remained standing. She had not poured a drink for herself.
“When we brought you here last night, your eyes were bloodshot,” she said. “You seemed severely dehydrated, and when I spoke to Osan, he mentioned that you were feverish and weak before the attack. You told him it was heatstroke.” She sat on the edge of the cabinet. “That was a lie, wasn’t it?”
I shook my head.
She sighed. “You started bleeding while you were unconscious.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You have terrible timing, Raughn. Not that you could have known.” She finally filled her own tumbler. Drank. “Kamillian Vidar helped you get hold of the remedy, didn’t she? No one would ever sell it directly to a Sister.”
“There was no remedy,” I snapped, my voice too loud. “Leave Millie alone.”
Asan nodded to herself. She drank again.
“You’re probably aware that I don’t have a daughter.” She set down her tumbler. “That’s always been a blot on my reputation. The old guard love it—my barrenness as a sign that I’ve offended the Eater. You must have heard that?”
I gripped the tumbler tightly within my fist and said nothing. Asan could play whatever games she liked; I wasn’t going to betray Millie. She seemed to read that from my face; she smiled slightly and shrugged.
“You have,” she said. “Sisters talk; it doesn’t bother me. But what you might not know is that I did have a son.”
I tensed.
“Very briefly, of course,” said Asan. “I never even got to hold him.”
“I—”
“And after that experience, I vowed never again,” she continued. “So I took steps to make sure of it. At first, only the emergency solutions. Then a more permanent one.”
I looked down, shaken. “You should not be telling me this.”
“You’re supposed to be dead, Raughn. Who are you going to share my secrets with?” She looked aside. “Listen, we never need to talk about what you did. That’s absolutely fine. But if you should want to, I might just be the only Sister who understands. No judgement, no repercussions.”
I turned the tumbler around in my hands.
“Does Rhyanon know?” I asked.
“She does.”
I should not say anything. I had promised Millie. But there was a hard ache in my throat, and all my feelings were pressed up so suffocatingly tight, that I could not quite help myself.
“Was it the right choice?” I asked. “If you could go back, would you have changed your mind?”
“Never.”
I raised my eyes. Asan met my gaze evenly.
“I can only speak for myself,” she said, “but if I think about what I lost and what I gained? It was right for me.”
She wore such a serious expression and spoke so directly that I could not doubt her. I lowered my head again.
“I see,” I said.
She gave me time to think, letting the silence stretch. Imagining Asan as an Acolyte, as someone who had faced the same fears and made the same choices, brought me an odd kind of relief. She might have been far stronger than I was, but perhaps strength could be learned. Perhaps I could be that sure of myself one day.
Eventually, Asan sighed. She stuck her hand into the pocket of her uniform and took out a vial.
“This is for you,” she said. “Osan told me that you were out of lace.”
The sacrament glistened dark red.
“Who does that belong to?” I asked warily.
“Which martyr? My mother.”
“I can’t accept it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She pushed herself off the top of the cabinet and held the vial out to me. “Do you want to face another attack without the means to defend yourself? No? Then take some basic precautions.”
“But it’s yours.”
“I doubt this will make you feel better, but I recently consumed a huge amount of lace that ‘belonged’ to Jiana Morwin’s daughter.”
I swallowed.
“Consider it recompense for failing to reach you before last night’s attack,” she said.
I took the vial unhappily. “Thank you.”
“It’s nothing. Hopefully you won’t even need it.”
“Commander?”
“Yes?”
I felt apprehensive about broaching the topic, but she had alluded to it herself.
“Rhyanon told me that she realised I was the Renewer at Geise’s Crown.” I quickly pressed on, my words coming out in a tangled rush. “I just—what did she mean? How did she know?”
Asan grimaced. “Ah.”
“I understand that you probably don’t want to talk about that night.”
; She made a dismissive gesture. “It’s fine, this is just a very ugly affair all round. We knew it was you because of the way the Haunt behaved in the basement. They always target whoever has the most lace. That one never took its eyes off you. I’m sure you noticed.”
“I did.” I shifted on the couch. “So that was it?”
“Seems too easy, doesn’t it?”
I didn’t know if I would have described anything about that night as “easy.” “Which meant that Morwin would have realised too. That I was the Renewer.”
“Yes.” Asan smiled without a trace of humour. “Joining the dots, Raughn?”
I thought of the book I had read in Celane’s library. Thought about her reading it. All the marked pages.
“A Haunt, that mature?” Asan took another drink. “It planned. It knew to wait until its friend showed up so that our forces would be divided. It knew to use Hayder as a lure. It anticipated us, and we waltzed right into its trap. That’s not typical Haunt behaviour; they aren’t supposed to strategise.”
“A new intelligence emerges in the absence of the old,” I murmured. Pieces slid into place. “The Order should have found that Haunt sooner. If it was so far gone, it would have attacked someone long before the symposium.”
“Exactly.”
“Unless it could be contained.” My voice dropped. “Locked away and kept secret. Somewhere out of the way, somewhere private and secure, where it could develop unnoticed.” I clenched my fists. “Like Verje’s barn.”
Asan spread her hands in acknowledgement. “Like Verje’s barn.”
My mouth twisted. I had missed it. All along, I had missed that Verje was concealing a monster, even though it had been right in front of my face.
“Hide away your Haunts until they’re fully turned.” Asan leaned back. “Then, under a reasonable pretext, gather both your enemies and the two Sisters most likely to be the Renewer. Release the monsters, watch who they run to, let the carnage unfold. Snatch your prize out of the Haunt’s claws at the last moment.”
“After you and Rhyanon are dead.”
“It’s a very convenient tragedy, and almost impossible to link back to the perpetrators. Celane wasn’t even there, so her hands stay clean. Luckily for me, Morwin miscalculated when she tried to force her little accident.” Asan shook her head bitterly. “Clumsy, really. With that much lace at her disposal, she could have pushed much harder.”
I remembered the look on Morwin’s face when I had stopped her lace. She had not believed it would take more power. Why should she? Asan had made a point to tell Herald Lien that she had not performed the rite recently. The Commander should have been defenceless.
“You made sure that Morwin would underestimate you,” I said.
Asan sighed. “To be honest, I thought Jiana might try to knock me off the roof. I wanted to force her into the open before the Haunt demanded my attention.”
“You had a protective net in place the whole time?”
“Only on the roof. After that, I was, well, distracted. Hayder says that you shielded my back in the basement. Thank you for that.”
“But … but did she really think she could hold off both Haunts on her own?”
“Raughn, you need to understand—the lacework that Sisters currently wield? Pathetic, compared to the works of our predecessors. But gorging gives you a glimpse into what’s really possible with sufficient raw power. It’s…” She paused. “It’s completely different. Frightening, but the sense of invincibility is more than a little intoxicating. I mean, just consider the fact that, all those centuries ago, the Eater lifted all of Aytrium into the sky. Imagine having that kind of power, imagine what you could—”
She noticed my expression and stopped talking. The fervour faded from her face.
“But then there’s the cost,” she said softly. “And the question of who must pay it.”
I smiled thinly. “From what I can gather, payment is the Renewer’s responsibility, Commander.”
She pressed the back of her hands together in the gesture for vow-taking, a sign usually reserved for commitments to the Eater.
“Not while I have anything to do with it,” she said.
I was too taken aback to react, then quickly gestured negation. “There’s no need for that, I was only joking.”
She reaffirmed the gesture, then lowered her hands.
“I will not see you martyred, Raughn,” she said. “Not just because it would be a terrible and cruel waste, but because it goes against my most ardently held principle.”
“What principle?”
Asan smiled wryly. “That we can be better than this.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SIX DAYS. I did not see Commander Asan again during that time, although I knew that she had visited at least twice at night. She left food in the kitchen, and once woke Osan to check his stitches and replace his wound dressing. He was recovering well; he moved more easily and appeared cheerful enough, although I suspected that some of his good humour might have been put on for my benefit.
I, on the other hand, could not keep Finn from my mind.
“Saskia is doing what she can,” said Rhyanon, not taking her gaze off the balance sheet in front of her. In the early hours of the morning, Asan had delivered a stack of files from the Civil Obligations offices, and Rhyanon had been scouring them for suspicious activities in Reverends’ financial affairs, any evidence that could be used to incriminate Celane or her associates.
“But on what grounds are they still detaining him? It doesn’t make any sense.” I stood up. We were in the western study, a light, airy room on the second floor of the mansion. Through the windows, I could see the long sweep of the yellowed lawns, the red-brick perimeter wall in the distance. “And Millie was supposed to be here already.”
“I’m sure both of your friends are fine.”
I paced to the windows and back again. “And you’re certain the Commander didn’t say anything else?”
“Only that the inquiry is moving slower than she expected. Celane and Verje are being obstructive.”
You told me that they would be too afraid to cause any trouble. I drummed my fingers against my thigh. As uneasy as I felt, I didn’t want to drive Rhyanon away. It hadn’t escaped my notice that my visions had been absent since the attack, and I suspected that the lull was mostly due to her company. She made me feel safe.
I mumbled something about stretching my legs, and left her to work.
Outside the study, Jaylen sat cross-legged on the floor. She had been intently focussed on a math problem written out in her notebook, and jumped when I opened the door.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
She blinked at me owlishly. For a ten-year-old, Jaylen didn’t speak much, although I had the distinct impression that her silences weren’t a product of shyness. She just seemed very self-contained, as if she preferred to keep her thoughts to herself.
“Did your mother set you that work?” I asked.
She nodded. “If I improve my mathematics, she said that I might be able to help her with the ledgers.”
“That seems reasonable.” I crouched. “May I check your calculations?”
She handed across the notebook. While I scanned the page, she fidgeted, pulling on the end of her plait.
“Do you know how long we’ll have to stay here?” she asked.
“I don’t, although you could try getting an answer out of Commander Asan.” I pointed to a subtraction error. “That’s close, but check it again.”
She took back her book and peered at the numbers. I thought of Rhyanon crying over her crib, the taste of caramel sweets. Jaylen carefully crossed out her answer and corrected it.
“That’s better,” I said, and was rewarded with a hint of a smile.
It was sometime past seventh bell. I wandered down a corridor of the mansion, restless and unsettled. Through the windows, the sun beat down. The weather had grown even hotter, although the temperature remained
bearable inside the house. Bad news for the harvest. I wondered how Food Management was coping with the situation, whether they had appointed a new Sister to my position yet. The idea of being replaced brought me a strange pang of sadness. My old life, my time as Field Researcher Elfreda Raughn, was over. Whatever plans Rhyanon and Asan had for me, I knew I could never go back. It would be a tough blow for the department to lose two Sisters within the space of a month. Reverend Somme would take it hard.
I reached the end of the passage and gazed out of the bay windows at the parched garden. Had anyone at work discovered that civilians were breaking the meat embargo? I could alert the Commander, ask her to pass it on. Not that I wanted the street vendors to get in trouble with the Order, but if the merchant guilds were behind it—
I squinted. Someone was climbing over the property’s locked gate. The intruder struggled to scale the high metal bars, almost toppling. With a rush of dread, I recognised her.
“Oh no,” I whispered.
I flew down the stairs and through the passage, across the living room and into the sweltering heat of the conservatory. From somewhere behind me I heard Rhyanon calling my name, but I did not stop, I raced through the rows of sunlit plants and into the foyer. The front door leapt open for me.
Millie stumbled up the path to the house. She was deathly pale, her expression wild.
“El!” she gasped. “You have to stop it. He confessed.”
I reached her. Millie’s clothing was doused in sweat, her hair plastered to the sides of her face. She was shaking. I gripped her by the arms.
“Confessed to what?” My pulse raced. “Millie, what’s going on? What did Finn say?”
“He told the Council he murdered those Sisters.” Her voice cracked. “El, he told them that he killed you.”
For a brief moment I could not make sense of her words, and then they hit me like a blow to the chest. I released Millie and took a step backwards, shaking my head.
“They’ve taken him to the execution grounds.” She swayed. “El, you can’t let them do this. Oh Eater, please don’t let them do this.”
“Why would he say that?” I whispered.