Painted Devils, page 13
“Saints and martyrs, it’s Friday. I keep forgetting.” I rub my eyes. Followers of the House of the High worship the Low Gods as facets of a single High God, and most observe a daylong sabbath at the end of each week. I see some of the other diners excusing themselves too, a few slinging prayer cords around their shoulders on their way out. I have to make this fast. “You and Vikram are … more than professional partners?” At her nod, I try to sort out my question and find it’s so simple, it can’t be put delicately: “How do you do it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re prefects. You don’t get to—to be wrong,” I babble. “So do you just agree on everything? What if one of you makes a mistake? Or if you have a fight? How do you keep your job out of your … life?”
“‘How do you have a relationship with a prefect’ seems to be your question,” Mathilde says shrewdly. “I’ll be honest, I have no idea how it works when only one of you is part of the Order. We both love what we do, and we both know when we need a break from it. When we disagree, we talk through it, and if we don’t have time to talk, we just trust each other until we can make time. The hardest part was waiting out the first journeyman year after we were fully ordained. We already knew how we felt by then, but…”
I give her a blank look.
Mathilde’s eyebrows rise and quickly flatten. “Oh. Er. Journeyman prefects are expected to remain single and childless for the first year following their ordination, at minimum. It’s so we can get a full sense of the work and can judge for ourselves whether we are willing to pursue relationships and families outside the demands of the Order.”
A year?
I feel—I feel like I’m lying under the sheet again, and those cold shears are creeping much, much too close to the scars.
I’ve shared parts of myself with Emeric that I wasn’t even sure I could share with another person. I got a root-bind to share even more of myself. And when this case is closed, and he’s fully ordained … none of that will matter. He will move on alone.
Tentative, Mathilde asks, “Conrad hasn’t mentioned it?”
“No,” I answer distantly. “He didn’t say a thing.”
Mathilde shakes her head, pushing back from the table. Sunset-gold light is seeping through the window; her time’s up. “Then this is your chance to practice the talking part. That’s how you build trust for when you can’t talk. And if you want to make it through that year, you’re going to need it.”
CHAPTER TEN
RISE AND SHINE
I make a quick visit to the Book and Bell’s utilitarian bathhouse, scrubbing off the accumulated grime like it’ll clear out my doubts and pores alike. Helga catches me on the way out to tell me to be ready first thing in the morning. She’s tracked down the Golden Bine, and we’ll be going there to badger Dieter Ros into contributing his drop of blood.
Emeric’s not in our room when I return. I light a candle, change into my nightshirt, and climb into bed, resolved to wait up for him. Mathilde’s right. If we want to make it through this, we need to talk.
Unfortunately, the moment I lean back against the pillows, I pass out.
I’m the kind of tired that doesn’t allow for the delineation of dreams, only soft dark shadows that swallow me whole. I don’t know when Emeric gets back, just that the stillness shudders, and then there’s a weight beside me, somehow comforting, somehow unsettling. I slip under again.
Then—
I’m standing in the Library of the Divine.
The chandeliers are lit, the tables and the chairs of the rotunda restored to their neat array. There are no scattered papers, no abandoned dolls.
There are, however, ghosts.
Or shades, rather: indistinct blurs of people poring through tomes, scouring shelves, depositing a heap of books at a desk. My sight goes briefly gray, and then a broad back materializes before me, shrinking as the shade strides away. It walked right through me.
“You.”
I whirl around. Behind me is the foyer of the library. The friar statue is, bizarrely enough, staring at me. No, not a statue—he seems to be flesh and blood, and there’s no pedestal in sight.
I’ve heard that voice before. And as I take in the coarse weave of his robes, I abruptly know where.
“You,” I stumble, “you’re the poltergeist.”
A terrible look crosses his face: not anger but … sorrow. “Please,” he says. “I know what you are. And only you can help me.”
“Pass,” I say darkly. “You threw a table at me.”
The friar bobs his head, sheepish. “I am not myself without the goblet.”
I look around for a door. Unfortunately, in the dream-foyer, there’s solid stone where the entrance should be. That only vexes me more. “Correction, Sextus: You threw a table at me so hard it broke my entire body, like a little twig, on the spot.”
“That seems improbable,” he says meekly, “and my name is not Sextus. We don’t have much time; it is a great strain to speak to you this way, while I am sundered thus. You must understand, my very ashes were melted into the crystal of the goblet and mixed with the mortar of the pedestal. I chose to remain bound to my library to guide and protect it, but the goblet and the pedestal are the binding, and without the goblet, I am … undone.”
I catch myself pinching my nose like Emeric does and have to brush off the pang in my chest. “Wait. Hold on.” I think of the statue pedestal’s plaque that read THE FOVNDER, and of the one on the reliquary, too, and of the other unanswered question: why the library’s guardian spirit let the poltergeist in to begin with.
It didn’t. Of course. He had been there all along.
“You’re the Armarius,” I say slowly. “That’s why Emeric couldn’t banish you. You’re already where you belong.”
“Correct.”
“But that’s Saint Willehalm’s goblet. So…” I swallow. “You’re Saint Willehalm the Scribe. And this is your library.”
The friar pushes his hood back, revealing a lined pale face and a scraggly white beard. He offers a weary smile. “I must confess, I’ve not heard that name for a long, long time.”
I’m still less than awed. “Sadly, Sextus—”
“Not even close,” he says gently.
“—this all sounds like a personal problem,” I finish. “And I count at least three prefects in this town who are a lot more qualified to handle it.”
The smile fades from Willehalm’s face. “They cannot help me, God Daughter. I came to you for a reason.”
All this is weird enough that I don’t think too hard about why a saint is calling me his goddaughter. Instead, I’m stymied by a peculiar feeling blooming in my chest.
For most of my life, I’ve held to a theory I call the trinity of want. It states that people are desired for three reasons: power, pleasure, or profit. If you provide three of those, others serve you. Provide two, they see you. One, they use you.
This came from my life as a servant, where people didn’t want me, they wanted steady hands, a sturdy back, and a closed mouth. The von Falbirgs were sound of body and mind; they could have laid their own rushes or emptied their own chamber pots. They just made me do the things they didn’t want to.
But I am a stranger to being … sought.
Saint Willehalm continues, encouraged by my pause: “The prefects are an axe. Their justice falls absolute and irrevocable, and so they must take the time to be sure of every strike. But there is more to justice than an axe; sometimes it calls for leaving no trace but a mending. Sometimes justice must be a needle.”
I drag a long breath through my teeth. “Great metaphor, perfect, comprehensible, ten out of ten. Just for fun, let’s pretend I didn’t understand any of it. What do you want from me?”
The old saint lets out a bemused chuckle. I realize his outline is growing dimmer, blurring along with the rest of the dream-library. Our time is coming to an end.
“I’m glad this is funny to you,” I grumble.
He shakes his head. “I just think I’ve been very clear. The years will do that, I suppose. Again, God Daughter, I know what you are. What do I want?”
The world melts into shadow, Saint Willehalm last of all. His final words ring my skull like a belfry.
“I want my damned goblet back.”
I sit up with a gasp.
At first I don’t know where I am. Then I hear an indistinct mumble at my side. Emeric’s asleep on my left, the wall is on my right, the room itself is still heavy with dark. I seem to be cocooned in an unnecessary number of blankets—and then I realize I’ve hoarded them in my sleep again, as Emeric is shivering under a thin sheet.
I carefully extract myself and redistribute the bedding more equitably, then lie back down, staring at the ceiling. Unless I’m horribly mistaken, a saint just quested me to retrieve his relic.
No, not just retrieve. He said he knew what I am; he said this called for not an axe but a needle. Slight enough to leave no trace, sharp enough to pierce deep.
He wants me to steal it.
He wants me to steal it.
He wants me to steal it.
And I can say, with an equally horrible degree of confidence, that the prefect aspirant in my bed right now does not.
* * *
When my eyes open again, it’s to the pale glow of a plaster wall in morning light. And for a heartbeat, everything is perfect: the warmth where my back is pressed to Emeric’s chest, the snugness of his arm tightening around my waist, even the scratch in his voice as he sleepily mumbles into my shoulder, “Morning.”
I can’t remember why I was mad at him. Then, with a sting, I do.
Emeric goes still as he feels me tense. “What’s wrong?”
It would be so, so easy to lie to him, to say it’s nothing and try to stretch the cozy peace as long as I can. But it wouldn’t be real. I would still know.
So I make myself roll over, try to quell the fear that only feeds my anger, and face him. “Why—” My voice cracks. Emeric turns, reaching for a cup on the nightstand. His hand closes around it just as I say, “Why didn’t you tell me about the first year?”
BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG. Furious pounding rattles our room’s door on its hinges. Emeric knocks over the cup, swearing.
“Get up!” Helga barks from the other side. “I’ll be back in five minutes!”
“Why,” Emeric wheezes blearily.
“Scheit, I forgot.” I climb over Emeric’s legs and lever myself off the bed as Helga’s footsteps fade down the hall. “We’re going to meet with Dieter Ros. Forget it, we can talk about this later.”
He pauses mopping up water with what appears to be his own nightshirt. “No, I don’t want you to think—I wasn’t trying to hide anything from you—”
“Right.” I yank open my traveling pack a little too hard.
“It just doesn’t matter.”
I stop in the middle of pulling out a kirtle, trying to wrestle my squirming anxiety into words, and surface only with “It matters to me.”
“That’s not…” Emeric removes his spectacles and rubs his eyes. “That didn’t come out right.”
“No, I get it,” I say, turning away as I pull the kirtle over my head. A bitter note seeps in. “But it would have been nice to know you were planning on ditching me after you’re ordained.”
There’s a startled silence. The hurt in his voice makes me want to shrivel when he asks, “Is that really what you think of me?”
That’s when I feel it: the vertigo of losing the high ground. I can’t make myself face him this time, so I just try to focus on the kirtle ties. “What am I supposed to think?”
Another beat passes. Then the bed frame creaks, and Emeric says exhaustedly, “I don’t know what more it’s going to take for you to trust me, Vanja.”
I haul on a stocking, trying to work through the tears I feel burning behind my eyes. Every answer I scramble for slips into a sinkhole I can’t patch over: I don’t know either.
The cold truth is, some part of me is always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
And it’s for no good reason other than the truth beneath, colder still: Even after everything we’ve been through, I still know myself. And deep down, I cannot believe someone would want me, without agenda, as I am.
Before I can scrape together an answer, Helga’s thunderous knocking erupts once more. “Time’s up, let’s go!”
“In a minute,” I snap as I shove my feet into my boots, absolutely certain that five minutes have not passed. The irritation pushes my anger with Emeric from simmer to boil. “You know what would help me trust you? If, at any point in the past week, you had actually told me—”
“When?” His voice rises. I look up from my bootlaces and find a flush staining his face, his hands fisting in the sheets. “When was a good time, Vanja? When we were stuck in a carriage for four days? When we were in a cave, parsing out how your cult is going to feed me to a hellhound? Was that a good time?”
He’s not really asking, so I just grab my satchel and cloak. My jaw is clamped so tight, it aches.
Emeric keeps going. “Or how about earlier? How about January, when you said you’d meet me in Helligbrücke? Would that have worked for you? Because for someone who’s so afraid of being left behind, you had no problem leaving me.”
I—I have no answer, because he’s right, damn him, but it still cuts, hearing it out loud—
“Thanks,” I hiss, “but I didn’t need another reminder that I’m not good enough for you.”
Emeric looks as stunned as if I’d slapped him.
I should feel relieved to air the words, triumphant to have shocked him into silence. Instead, I only feel worse.
Helga’s knocking starts up again just as I wrench the door open. It’s humiliating, but I know she can see the tears in my eyes, so I don’t even bother trying to hide them. “We’re in the middle of something.”
Helga, for her part, is clearly totally unprepared for what she’s walked into. She looks from me to Emeric, back to me, drags a hand down her face, then seizes me by the elbow and steers me out. “Not anymore, you aren’t. There’s a cute little garden park by the Golden Bine. You two can sort this out over lunch.”
“Wait—” I hear Emeric get to his feet.
“Be there at noon,” Helga flings over her shoulder as she hustles me down the hall.
She doesn’t say anything else until we leave the Book and Bell, the cool morning air stinging against my hot cheeks, and start down the street. Then she offers me a hankie, uncomfortable. “Sorry for the rush. But whatever that was … you weren’t talking, you were just hurting each other.”
“He’s the one who—”
“Ah-ah-ah.” Helga holds up a hand. “Not getting involved. I don’t do relationship drama, I don’t do teenage drama, and I especially don’t do teenage-relationship drama. Work it out among yourselves. I got you out because our best chance of catching Dieter sober is before breakfast. Come on, hurry it up.”
The brisk walk does help clear my head, or at least dulls the hurt. And it’s a decent walk: The Golden Bine is past the prefect outpost, planted right on the shore of Wälftsee, adjacent to the grounds of the royal hunting lodge itself. There’s even a rather gaudy painted wooden statue posted in front of the beer hall: a towering nobleman in old-fashioned robes whom I suspect to be Prince Nibelungus von Wälft. The Golden Bine has the same florid embellishments as the architecture that the prince commissioned to win back his ex-wife, though mercifully it seems to have been completed before his vengeful gothic rampage. Ornate lattices of dark timbers crisscross the plaster, vivid murals are painted on the whitewash, and a man is perched on a ladder by the double doors, applying a fresh coat of golden paint to the trim.
“Morning,” Helga calls up to him as we approach. “Dieter Ros in?”
“In a devil of a mood, more like.” The man spits off to the side, then jerks his thumb at the doors.
Helga curses under her breath and pushes inside. The interior is even more of a visual assault than the façade, every wall painted with gilded portraits of House Wälft and scenes of nobles hunting and fishing, apples being gathered by buxom and impractically dressed maidens, and so on. By contrast, the long pine tables are mostly empty. A handful of people are trying to enjoy what looks like a decent breakfast; this requires them to steadfastly ignore the slurred ramblings of a young man huddled at the end of a table beside a lute, his head cushioned on an outstretched arm, fairly surrounded by empty sjoppen. Some are lying sideways on the table, dribbling out the last dregs of beer.
Helga’s long sigh comes out like a wordless grievance. She stalks over and seizes the man’s ear as he emits a bawl of protest. “What is this, Dieter? Are you trying to lose another job?”
Dieter Ros swats her away. “Nothing matters,” he hiccups. “I had one chance, one single chance to make it big, and I just—it just slipped—” He bangs his fist down on the table so hard, all the sjoppen jump. “And now I’ll never play for the prince and never make it out of this backwater town and never win back Betze and—” He dissolves into furious groans, his head in his hands. An older Sahalian merchant sitting nearby picks up his breakfast and moves a few seats farther away.
I have the strangest feeling, like I’ve seen Dieter Ros before. I can’t quite place it, though I see the resemblance between him and Helga. His hair is redder than hers, and right now, so is his face, but they have the same sharp eyes, and the only difference in their narrow jaws is the goatee carving out a bleak existence on Dieter’s.
Helga passes me an empty sjoppen. “Can you go get some water?”
“Nooo,” Dieter groans.
She presses her lips together and hands me another. “Two waters.”
The barkeep obliges me with an irate sneer on his face, though it’s directed primarily at Dieter. When I return, Helga empties a little packet of herbs into one sjoppen, mumbling a charm under her breath; I see traces of witch-ash on her fingertips.
Then she empties the other sjoppen over Dieter’s head. He splutters, shocked. She shoves the herbed drink into his hands. “Here, it’s your favorite.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re prefects. You don’t get to—to be wrong,” I babble. “So do you just agree on everything? What if one of you makes a mistake? Or if you have a fight? How do you keep your job out of your … life?”
“‘How do you have a relationship with a prefect’ seems to be your question,” Mathilde says shrewdly. “I’ll be honest, I have no idea how it works when only one of you is part of the Order. We both love what we do, and we both know when we need a break from it. When we disagree, we talk through it, and if we don’t have time to talk, we just trust each other until we can make time. The hardest part was waiting out the first journeyman year after we were fully ordained. We already knew how we felt by then, but…”
I give her a blank look.
Mathilde’s eyebrows rise and quickly flatten. “Oh. Er. Journeyman prefects are expected to remain single and childless for the first year following their ordination, at minimum. It’s so we can get a full sense of the work and can judge for ourselves whether we are willing to pursue relationships and families outside the demands of the Order.”
A year?
I feel—I feel like I’m lying under the sheet again, and those cold shears are creeping much, much too close to the scars.
I’ve shared parts of myself with Emeric that I wasn’t even sure I could share with another person. I got a root-bind to share even more of myself. And when this case is closed, and he’s fully ordained … none of that will matter. He will move on alone.
Tentative, Mathilde asks, “Conrad hasn’t mentioned it?”
“No,” I answer distantly. “He didn’t say a thing.”
Mathilde shakes her head, pushing back from the table. Sunset-gold light is seeping through the window; her time’s up. “Then this is your chance to practice the talking part. That’s how you build trust for when you can’t talk. And if you want to make it through that year, you’re going to need it.”
CHAPTER TEN
RISE AND SHINE
I make a quick visit to the Book and Bell’s utilitarian bathhouse, scrubbing off the accumulated grime like it’ll clear out my doubts and pores alike. Helga catches me on the way out to tell me to be ready first thing in the morning. She’s tracked down the Golden Bine, and we’ll be going there to badger Dieter Ros into contributing his drop of blood.
Emeric’s not in our room when I return. I light a candle, change into my nightshirt, and climb into bed, resolved to wait up for him. Mathilde’s right. If we want to make it through this, we need to talk.
Unfortunately, the moment I lean back against the pillows, I pass out.
I’m the kind of tired that doesn’t allow for the delineation of dreams, only soft dark shadows that swallow me whole. I don’t know when Emeric gets back, just that the stillness shudders, and then there’s a weight beside me, somehow comforting, somehow unsettling. I slip under again.
Then—
I’m standing in the Library of the Divine.
The chandeliers are lit, the tables and the chairs of the rotunda restored to their neat array. There are no scattered papers, no abandoned dolls.
There are, however, ghosts.
Or shades, rather: indistinct blurs of people poring through tomes, scouring shelves, depositing a heap of books at a desk. My sight goes briefly gray, and then a broad back materializes before me, shrinking as the shade strides away. It walked right through me.
“You.”
I whirl around. Behind me is the foyer of the library. The friar statue is, bizarrely enough, staring at me. No, not a statue—he seems to be flesh and blood, and there’s no pedestal in sight.
I’ve heard that voice before. And as I take in the coarse weave of his robes, I abruptly know where.
“You,” I stumble, “you’re the poltergeist.”
A terrible look crosses his face: not anger but … sorrow. “Please,” he says. “I know what you are. And only you can help me.”
“Pass,” I say darkly. “You threw a table at me.”
The friar bobs his head, sheepish. “I am not myself without the goblet.”
I look around for a door. Unfortunately, in the dream-foyer, there’s solid stone where the entrance should be. That only vexes me more. “Correction, Sextus: You threw a table at me so hard it broke my entire body, like a little twig, on the spot.”
“That seems improbable,” he says meekly, “and my name is not Sextus. We don’t have much time; it is a great strain to speak to you this way, while I am sundered thus. You must understand, my very ashes were melted into the crystal of the goblet and mixed with the mortar of the pedestal. I chose to remain bound to my library to guide and protect it, but the goblet and the pedestal are the binding, and without the goblet, I am … undone.”
I catch myself pinching my nose like Emeric does and have to brush off the pang in my chest. “Wait. Hold on.” I think of the statue pedestal’s plaque that read THE FOVNDER, and of the one on the reliquary, too, and of the other unanswered question: why the library’s guardian spirit let the poltergeist in to begin with.
It didn’t. Of course. He had been there all along.
“You’re the Armarius,” I say slowly. “That’s why Emeric couldn’t banish you. You’re already where you belong.”
“Correct.”
“But that’s Saint Willehalm’s goblet. So…” I swallow. “You’re Saint Willehalm the Scribe. And this is your library.”
The friar pushes his hood back, revealing a lined pale face and a scraggly white beard. He offers a weary smile. “I must confess, I’ve not heard that name for a long, long time.”
I’m still less than awed. “Sadly, Sextus—”
“Not even close,” he says gently.
“—this all sounds like a personal problem,” I finish. “And I count at least three prefects in this town who are a lot more qualified to handle it.”
The smile fades from Willehalm’s face. “They cannot help me, God Daughter. I came to you for a reason.”
All this is weird enough that I don’t think too hard about why a saint is calling me his goddaughter. Instead, I’m stymied by a peculiar feeling blooming in my chest.
For most of my life, I’ve held to a theory I call the trinity of want. It states that people are desired for three reasons: power, pleasure, or profit. If you provide three of those, others serve you. Provide two, they see you. One, they use you.
This came from my life as a servant, where people didn’t want me, they wanted steady hands, a sturdy back, and a closed mouth. The von Falbirgs were sound of body and mind; they could have laid their own rushes or emptied their own chamber pots. They just made me do the things they didn’t want to.
But I am a stranger to being … sought.
Saint Willehalm continues, encouraged by my pause: “The prefects are an axe. Their justice falls absolute and irrevocable, and so they must take the time to be sure of every strike. But there is more to justice than an axe; sometimes it calls for leaving no trace but a mending. Sometimes justice must be a needle.”
I drag a long breath through my teeth. “Great metaphor, perfect, comprehensible, ten out of ten. Just for fun, let’s pretend I didn’t understand any of it. What do you want from me?”
The old saint lets out a bemused chuckle. I realize his outline is growing dimmer, blurring along with the rest of the dream-library. Our time is coming to an end.
“I’m glad this is funny to you,” I grumble.
He shakes his head. “I just think I’ve been very clear. The years will do that, I suppose. Again, God Daughter, I know what you are. What do I want?”
The world melts into shadow, Saint Willehalm last of all. His final words ring my skull like a belfry.
“I want my damned goblet back.”
I sit up with a gasp.
At first I don’t know where I am. Then I hear an indistinct mumble at my side. Emeric’s asleep on my left, the wall is on my right, the room itself is still heavy with dark. I seem to be cocooned in an unnecessary number of blankets—and then I realize I’ve hoarded them in my sleep again, as Emeric is shivering under a thin sheet.
I carefully extract myself and redistribute the bedding more equitably, then lie back down, staring at the ceiling. Unless I’m horribly mistaken, a saint just quested me to retrieve his relic.
No, not just retrieve. He said he knew what I am; he said this called for not an axe but a needle. Slight enough to leave no trace, sharp enough to pierce deep.
He wants me to steal it.
He wants me to steal it.
He wants me to steal it.
And I can say, with an equally horrible degree of confidence, that the prefect aspirant in my bed right now does not.
* * *
When my eyes open again, it’s to the pale glow of a plaster wall in morning light. And for a heartbeat, everything is perfect: the warmth where my back is pressed to Emeric’s chest, the snugness of his arm tightening around my waist, even the scratch in his voice as he sleepily mumbles into my shoulder, “Morning.”
I can’t remember why I was mad at him. Then, with a sting, I do.
Emeric goes still as he feels me tense. “What’s wrong?”
It would be so, so easy to lie to him, to say it’s nothing and try to stretch the cozy peace as long as I can. But it wouldn’t be real. I would still know.
So I make myself roll over, try to quell the fear that only feeds my anger, and face him. “Why—” My voice cracks. Emeric turns, reaching for a cup on the nightstand. His hand closes around it just as I say, “Why didn’t you tell me about the first year?”
BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG. Furious pounding rattles our room’s door on its hinges. Emeric knocks over the cup, swearing.
“Get up!” Helga barks from the other side. “I’ll be back in five minutes!”
“Why,” Emeric wheezes blearily.
“Scheit, I forgot.” I climb over Emeric’s legs and lever myself off the bed as Helga’s footsteps fade down the hall. “We’re going to meet with Dieter Ros. Forget it, we can talk about this later.”
He pauses mopping up water with what appears to be his own nightshirt. “No, I don’t want you to think—I wasn’t trying to hide anything from you—”
“Right.” I yank open my traveling pack a little too hard.
“It just doesn’t matter.”
I stop in the middle of pulling out a kirtle, trying to wrestle my squirming anxiety into words, and surface only with “It matters to me.”
“That’s not…” Emeric removes his spectacles and rubs his eyes. “That didn’t come out right.”
“No, I get it,” I say, turning away as I pull the kirtle over my head. A bitter note seeps in. “But it would have been nice to know you were planning on ditching me after you’re ordained.”
There’s a startled silence. The hurt in his voice makes me want to shrivel when he asks, “Is that really what you think of me?”
That’s when I feel it: the vertigo of losing the high ground. I can’t make myself face him this time, so I just try to focus on the kirtle ties. “What am I supposed to think?”
Another beat passes. Then the bed frame creaks, and Emeric says exhaustedly, “I don’t know what more it’s going to take for you to trust me, Vanja.”
I haul on a stocking, trying to work through the tears I feel burning behind my eyes. Every answer I scramble for slips into a sinkhole I can’t patch over: I don’t know either.
The cold truth is, some part of me is always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
And it’s for no good reason other than the truth beneath, colder still: Even after everything we’ve been through, I still know myself. And deep down, I cannot believe someone would want me, without agenda, as I am.
Before I can scrape together an answer, Helga’s thunderous knocking erupts once more. “Time’s up, let’s go!”
“In a minute,” I snap as I shove my feet into my boots, absolutely certain that five minutes have not passed. The irritation pushes my anger with Emeric from simmer to boil. “You know what would help me trust you? If, at any point in the past week, you had actually told me—”
“When?” His voice rises. I look up from my bootlaces and find a flush staining his face, his hands fisting in the sheets. “When was a good time, Vanja? When we were stuck in a carriage for four days? When we were in a cave, parsing out how your cult is going to feed me to a hellhound? Was that a good time?”
He’s not really asking, so I just grab my satchel and cloak. My jaw is clamped so tight, it aches.
Emeric keeps going. “Or how about earlier? How about January, when you said you’d meet me in Helligbrücke? Would that have worked for you? Because for someone who’s so afraid of being left behind, you had no problem leaving me.”
I—I have no answer, because he’s right, damn him, but it still cuts, hearing it out loud—
“Thanks,” I hiss, “but I didn’t need another reminder that I’m not good enough for you.”
Emeric looks as stunned as if I’d slapped him.
I should feel relieved to air the words, triumphant to have shocked him into silence. Instead, I only feel worse.
Helga’s knocking starts up again just as I wrench the door open. It’s humiliating, but I know she can see the tears in my eyes, so I don’t even bother trying to hide them. “We’re in the middle of something.”
Helga, for her part, is clearly totally unprepared for what she’s walked into. She looks from me to Emeric, back to me, drags a hand down her face, then seizes me by the elbow and steers me out. “Not anymore, you aren’t. There’s a cute little garden park by the Golden Bine. You two can sort this out over lunch.”
“Wait—” I hear Emeric get to his feet.
“Be there at noon,” Helga flings over her shoulder as she hustles me down the hall.
She doesn’t say anything else until we leave the Book and Bell, the cool morning air stinging against my hot cheeks, and start down the street. Then she offers me a hankie, uncomfortable. “Sorry for the rush. But whatever that was … you weren’t talking, you were just hurting each other.”
“He’s the one who—”
“Ah-ah-ah.” Helga holds up a hand. “Not getting involved. I don’t do relationship drama, I don’t do teenage drama, and I especially don’t do teenage-relationship drama. Work it out among yourselves. I got you out because our best chance of catching Dieter sober is before breakfast. Come on, hurry it up.”
The brisk walk does help clear my head, or at least dulls the hurt. And it’s a decent walk: The Golden Bine is past the prefect outpost, planted right on the shore of Wälftsee, adjacent to the grounds of the royal hunting lodge itself. There’s even a rather gaudy painted wooden statue posted in front of the beer hall: a towering nobleman in old-fashioned robes whom I suspect to be Prince Nibelungus von Wälft. The Golden Bine has the same florid embellishments as the architecture that the prince commissioned to win back his ex-wife, though mercifully it seems to have been completed before his vengeful gothic rampage. Ornate lattices of dark timbers crisscross the plaster, vivid murals are painted on the whitewash, and a man is perched on a ladder by the double doors, applying a fresh coat of golden paint to the trim.
“Morning,” Helga calls up to him as we approach. “Dieter Ros in?”
“In a devil of a mood, more like.” The man spits off to the side, then jerks his thumb at the doors.
Helga curses under her breath and pushes inside. The interior is even more of a visual assault than the façade, every wall painted with gilded portraits of House Wälft and scenes of nobles hunting and fishing, apples being gathered by buxom and impractically dressed maidens, and so on. By contrast, the long pine tables are mostly empty. A handful of people are trying to enjoy what looks like a decent breakfast; this requires them to steadfastly ignore the slurred ramblings of a young man huddled at the end of a table beside a lute, his head cushioned on an outstretched arm, fairly surrounded by empty sjoppen. Some are lying sideways on the table, dribbling out the last dregs of beer.
Helga’s long sigh comes out like a wordless grievance. She stalks over and seizes the man’s ear as he emits a bawl of protest. “What is this, Dieter? Are you trying to lose another job?”
Dieter Ros swats her away. “Nothing matters,” he hiccups. “I had one chance, one single chance to make it big, and I just—it just slipped—” He bangs his fist down on the table so hard, all the sjoppen jump. “And now I’ll never play for the prince and never make it out of this backwater town and never win back Betze and—” He dissolves into furious groans, his head in his hands. An older Sahalian merchant sitting nearby picks up his breakfast and moves a few seats farther away.
I have the strangest feeling, like I’ve seen Dieter Ros before. I can’t quite place it, though I see the resemblance between him and Helga. His hair is redder than hers, and right now, so is his face, but they have the same sharp eyes, and the only difference in their narrow jaws is the goatee carving out a bleak existence on Dieter’s.
Helga passes me an empty sjoppen. “Can you go get some water?”
“Nooo,” Dieter groans.
She presses her lips together and hands me another. “Two waters.”
The barkeep obliges me with an irate sneer on his face, though it’s directed primarily at Dieter. When I return, Helga empties a little packet of herbs into one sjoppen, mumbling a charm under her breath; I see traces of witch-ash on her fingertips.
Then she empties the other sjoppen over Dieter’s head. He splutters, shocked. She shoves the herbed drink into his hands. “Here, it’s your favorite.”
