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moth-and-raven · 3 years

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CHAPTER FOUR

The rest of the day passes in a haze. Loud cheers met Nadia’s announcement and Portia slipped into the rush just in time to board the carriage, tear-stained but determined to fight through it.

I must have been imagining things. I don’t want to think poorly of Julian, but I have to face facts: people will do and say anything to keep themselves off the gallows. He’s smart. He’s charismatic. He knows I’m working with the Palace. I can’t help but think he was just trying to endear himself to me, taking advantage of how obviously attracted to him I am. I can’t blame him for that. It’s my own fault for chasing what was a pathetic pipe dream from the start.

I retreat to my room after we return to the palace. It’s not unreasonable, considering I haven’t slept much in the past few days. From my bed, I watch spots of sunlight creep across the ceiling until I fall asleep. At least it’s dreamless this time.

Portia comes to get me for dinner in the late evening, when the sky’s turned purple. She’s itching with curiosity, peeking at me from the corner of her eye the whole way to the dining hall. Before we enter, she clears her throat.

“So, um.”

“It was nothing.” If I keep telling myself that, maybe it’ll hurt less. “Did you—?”

“Safe and sound. At least as much as he can be.”

“How long had it been since—?”

She pulls her bottom lip between her teeth just like he does. “Ten years, give or take. The last time I saw him was right after his apprenticeship. He came back to Nevivon for a few months while he was figuring out what else to do. I was only sixteen, so he must’ve been… twenty-five?”

The same age I am now. I didn’t realize he was that much older than me, though I suppose it makes sense. He’s lived quite a life. Yet more reason for him to see nothing of interest in me.

Portia pushes on: “What will you say to—?”

“I’m not telling her anything.” I shake my head and look away. “I don’t have anything to tell her anyway.”

That’s not a lie. I may know more about him now, but nothing pertinent.

“She’ll ask.”

“I know.”

I must not be doing as good of a job hiding my sadness as I thought I was, because Portia rests her hand on my shoulder and squeezes gently. I don’t have it in me to say that whatever she’s imagining isn’t true.

I can’t do this.

“Could you tell Nadia that I—” Humiliated, I choke on my tears. “I'm— I’ll be in the library.”

I’m already around the corner by the time she agrees. I don't know what I’m going to do there, but at least I’ll be alone. Again.

I may not remember beyond the last three years, but I know in my heart that I’ve never been loved like I am in my dreams. I probably never will be. With all the beautiful people out there, who would choose me, the fat twenty-five-year-old virgin so gullible she falls for every man who looks at her twice? What could I possibly offer someone like him?

Nothing.

Painful, empty nothing.

I end up at the library eventually. At least I can navigate the palace better than I could the South End. My tears have almost stopped before I feel the metal arc of the crescent moon still hanging around my neck and break apart again. I manage to reach an armchair, nestled in an alcove near a half-flight of stairs, and curl up in it as best I can to weather the storm.

I’m so ugly when I cry. Thank god no one can see it. No one ever should.

When the waves settle and my breath doesn’t feel so foreign in my lungs, I press my palms to my eyes and sigh heavily. I have a headache now, as I always do after I cry like that. I know I should be hungry, but I’m not. I don’t know what I am.

But I made a promise. To Nadia and to Julian. Even if I never see him again, I’ll help him as much as I can. And with all of his research, all the palace staff who knew both him and Lucio, all the magic echoes swirling around waiting for someone to hear them, I think I can help him a lot.

------

I was always more comfortable at night. I sleep a little bit, curled up in the armchair, but it’s not very comfortable and I wake up sore. I’m glad I came to the library, though: Julian’s desk is a mess of torn papers and marked-up books, underlines and strikethroughs and question marks in the margins, and I have so little time to piece it all together. If I hadn’t slept yesterday away… yesterday. I shouldn’t be thinking about yesterday. It was nothing. It is nothing.

He’ll be nothing if I can’t figure this out.

Portia brings me something to eat in the very early hours, right before dawn. Without saying a word, she draws up another chair and starts sorting through things too. She can read his handwriting much more easily than I can.

And Count Lucio’s name shows up. And again, and again. Lucio’s temperature rising. Lucio says wine tastes metallic. Alchemical fluid in Lucio’s prosthetic turned red, wouldn’t survive replacement. Observations in clipped clinical speech, but scrawled with ever-increasing desperation. Lucio spitting up blood. Lucio not sleeping, complaining of bad dreams. Lucio too weak to eat, still alive.

Notes on the dissection of a beetle, a cross-section of a human brain, a map of the palace with large red Xs over half the rooms in the east wing. Peeking over my shoulder, Portia points at them.

“That’s the Count’s Suite. He had the whole wing, actually. No one goes up there anymore.”

I straighten up, my joints crackling from the hours I've spent hunched over. “Why?”

She shrugs. “Nadia had the whole thing blocked off. It’s really dirty, from the— all the ash and stuff. And people say it’s haunted.”

“By Lucio?”

“I guess. One of the other housekeepers swears they saw the ghost of a weird guy at the top of the stairs once. That it looked right at them with spooky red eyes. I think they’re full of shit, but maybe it’s worth a look?”

There could be a thousand things worth a look. If I had more time… “I don’t know. I have a couple spells that might be able to pin down a ghost, but I’ve never actually tried them.”

“If it is Lucio, though, wouldn’t he be able to say who killed him?”

“Hm. That’s true. Is the wing locked?”

Portia grins and fishes in her pocket. “Not if you have keys.”

The main staircase is close to the library. I feel the air get colder as we approach, and the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck start to stand up even before Portia unlocks the corridor that leads to Lucio’s bedroom. It’s eerily quiet, all gray and black, luxury gone to ruin in the wake of a disaster. I’ve seen reproductions of burned-out buildings that look like this, after heavy battles. It crosses my mind that destruction of that caliber had taken extremely powerful magic to accomplish, not the actions of a single man weakened by pressure and long hours in the midst of a plague. Julian can’t even do magic. He said as much during our long conversation at the Raven. I can’t imagine anything else that would do this much damage without bringing the entire palace down.

Interesting.

Cinders crunch underfoot. Charred paintings watch us pass. A primal fear creeps along just behind us, whispering then asking then screaming at us to flee. I can feel my heart in my throat and adrenaline in my blood, every sense heightened. Tattered curtains move at the corner of my eye: I’m terrified to look and even more terrified not to.

But I can tell without bringing magic to my hand that there’s nothing here. At least nothing that wants to make itself known. There’s just a spark of pure rage somewhere deep inside the wing, but it doesn’t want to be seen. No ghosts, no goats, no ghost goats. No spooky red eyes. Just soot and smoke stains and three years of neglect. The fear lurking in the back of my mind isn’t supernatural, just the normal human mistrust of the dark and abandoned.

We go all the way to the end of the suite to no avail. Part of me thinks I should stay, but I’m getting tired now and the idea of sleeping in these rooms isn’t appealing. Portia takes my sigh as an admission of defeat and pats my arm. It was a distant hope anyway.

Near the end of the corridor as we leave, a small glimmer catches my attention. If I hadn’t been looking that way to start with, I never would’ve noticed it.

“Hey Portia, what’s in there?”

She lifts up the lantern and peers into the room. “Bath chamber, I think.”

We see it at the same time, as the light catches the red gleam again: falling from the sink are drops of blood. More of it trickles across the floor. The walls are stained from it, up to the window.

“What the fuck?”

My sentiments exactly. What is this? It can’t be actual blood, can it? This is the top floor of the palace. Is it bubbling up through the plumbing?

“Nadia’s gonna want to know about this,” Portia says in a small voice.

“Wait. Let me check it out first.”

She turns to look at me, pale in the lantern’s glow. “This is way beyond whatever my brother might have done. It could infect the whole palace!”

“Do you think it’s infectious?”

Portia frowns. “Did you… Were you in Vesuvia back then? During the Plague?”

There’s no point in lying. “No.”

“Neither was I, but I heard about it. Before I left Nevivon, some sailors docked and told everyone what they’d seen. People died so quickly, there wasn’t space to keep their bodies. And they were all red, their eyes and their fingertips, everywhere you could see veins.” She shudders. “I can’t believe Ilya worked with it and… and…”

She must’ve been so scared, knowing that he could die any day.

“You know that big ugly crematorium out in the bay?” she asks.

“The Lazaret.” Everyone knows about that. You can see it from shore, a jagged silhouette reminding everyone of the toll the Plague took on the city. I don’t like looking at it: it makes my heart ache.

“Yeah. Even with that, there were too many bodies. So many people… There was a rumor that the Palace stored the extra ones, until they could be burned.”

“Where would they have been able to keep them?”

“Dunno. But there’s a huge tunnel system under here, all the way down into the cliffs. And the dungeon’s really big.”

I’d wondered how Julian could escape the prison cells, when the only way out was through the palace itself. Tunnels would explain that, I suppose. “So do you think there’s still something tainting the water?”

Her eyes are wide in the dark. “There might be. Kinda like here, no one’s been in the dungeons for ages. Probably since then.”

I frown. It’s unlikely, but I can’t deny the evidence right in front of me. I take another step into the washroom and trace the flow towards the wall. Some of the stones are loose now, after years of water damage. There’s more than enough room for it all to drain away between them.

Weak dawn sunlight floods the horizon as I stand up and glance out the window. I can see most of the city from here, out across the harbor to the Lazaret and down through the South End and directly into the lush gardens below.

And beyond the gardens, flowing from the palace along the channel of an aqueduct, is a stream of blood red.

------

Nadia scowls at the dripping red water, then summons her bodyguard to her side and dispatches them with a whispered order. Both Portia and I follow her out of the wing, but Portia splits off at the base of the stairs to see to her duties while Nadia invites me into the dining hall for breakfast.

A massive, gaudy painting hangs over the table, eyeing us as we pick over the array of egg dishes and sliced fruit. It depicts a celebration scene, I think, presided over by a muscular blond man with his arms spread wide over a crowd of adoring citizens. Nadia notices me looking at it and chuckles.

“Admiring my late husband’s art sense, are you, Reyja?”

I don’t want to offend her, but I think Count Lucio should’ve stuck to partying. “It’s, um, very vibrant.”

“That was typical of him,” she laughs. “Ostentatious to a fault.”

People don’t talk about Lucio much, unless they’re cursing his name for all the damage he did to the city with his warmongering and overspending. I’m trying to solve his murder, but now that I think of it, I don’t know much about the man himself. “What was he like?”

Nadia grimaces. “Much as you’ve heard, I expect. Loud, brash, insolent. Committed to his life of luxury. I would not have married him, had I been sober when he proposed.”

She must catch my surprise, because she fixes me in her dark eyes and raises a brow as if daring me to judge her.

Of course I won’t. “How did you two meet?”

“He was visiting Prakra,” she says. “To present himself to Empress Nasrin, my mother, as the Count of Vesuvia. He had been in power for some time by then, as I recall. I believe he told me that he’d first come to this city nearly twenty years before, on a mercenary contract.”

“He wasn’t from here?”

“No. He was of the Southern tribes.”

That’s confusing. “How did he get to be Count?”

“The former Count grew quite fond of him. Lucio was named his heir shortly after he arrived, and took the throne shortly after that. He spoke often of the battle in which he lost his arm—” She points at the painting. Lucio’s left arm shines, gilded in gold leaf. “—the same in which Spada was killed.”

Lucio may have been bloodthirsty, especially fond of the fights to the death at the coliseum Vesuvia used to be famous for, but everyone knew his roots as a successful mercenary. Even in his forties, when he died, he was strong and virile.

Which was why his death came as such a shock. Who would’ve thought such a man would die in his bed, ravished by sickness and weak enough to fall to an unskilled assassin?

“What about the Plague?” I ask quietly. People talk about Lucio a little bit, but no one discusses the Plague at all, as if the mere mention of it will cause its return.

Nadia nods. “It appeared nearly overnight, five years ago. No one had seen its like before. To my knowledge, nothing like it has been seen since, either.”

“Do we know where it came from?”

“I’m afraid not. Little is known of it, save that it killed thirty thousand of my people in two years.”

Her people. Nadia may have been Prakran by birth, but this was her city now.

“I had been visiting my sisters when it struck,” Nadia continues, gaze unfocused as she looks back through her memories. “As such, I was forbidden from returning until we were certain it had passed.”

I remember the parade that welcomed her back, but I didn’t realize she’d been gone that long. It’s been less than a year: she must be so busy, trying to pull Vesuvia together again. No wonder the search for her husband’s murderer hadn’t been her top priority until now. “I’m sorry.”

She tilts her head, looking at me. “Understand this, Reyja: if the Plague has not truly left the city, and what you and dear Portia discovered today is proof of that, then the search for Doctor Devorak must be set aside. I am eager to see justice done, but one man’s life, when weighed against the lives of thousands, will not tip the scales. I hope I may rely upon your services regardless of that outcome.”

Her visit to the shop feels very far away. I’m attached to this now, however big it gets. “I’ll be here.”

“Thank you. I have sent Yazakh to fetch an expert on the Plague from their estate. I hope they will return soon, but in the meantime, I urge you to rest. We may have much to consider in the coming days.”

I take a small pastry with me when I leave the table and make my way back to my room. I don’t doubt that she’s right, but even with this additional set of problems, I can’t keep my mind away from Julian. Thoughts of him cloud my head as I lay down for a nap and they’re still there when I wake up. My stomach isn’t happy with me, swirling with guilt and humiliation and anxiety, but I don’t know what to do about it.

The expert still hasn’t arrived when I go up to Lucio’s suite to check. I pass the library on the way back and my fingers fly to the silver moon pendant still around my neck, following the divot Julian’s own nerves wore in the metal. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to look through his notes while I wait, if I can concentrate enough to get anything useful out of them.

I can’t.

When the sun sets again, I give up. Another day gone, and I’ve only discovered more things to do. I need something to focus on, something with a solution, something… something that might distract me from the fact that I’m no closer to clearing Julian’s name.

I can follow that water, if nothing else. I don’t know where it’s coming from, but maybe I can learn where it’s going. And I can get out of the palace, maybe work off some of this nervous energy. And I won’t be surrounded by pieces of him, distracting me from my mission. It’ll be perfect.

---------------

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