CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Shironne hid in the far corner of her mind, in a cage built within her focus. It wasn’t the real focus, but the one she’d created in her mind, a crystalline hall not unlike that alleyway in Mikael’s dream, unclear because it was merely a place to hide, not a place to be. She was afraid to have Mikael learn what she’d done and what she was.

The priest had touched her, sifting through her mind as he’d done with Mikael, with David Aldassa, with Paal Endiren. He had peered into every secret she had, drawing out what he willed, from her most private memories to her vaguest childhood recollections. She had clutched her secrets close, but he’d mocked her inability to stop his invasion of her thoughts. He wanted to know exactly what she was, something even she herself didn’t understand.

The priest now knew her more intimately than anyone else alive did, and she felt unclean. He’d called her cousin, recognizing within her common blood their common powers. He’d wanted to take her with him, not just as a hostage as Mikael feared. He’d found her interesting in many ways.

From far away she felt Mikael’s touch, reassuring her, needing her to come back to him.

She couldn’t go back.

It had taken only a second to make the leap from recognizing what the priest did to her to understanding how he did it. She’d simply not been trying hard enough. She could have anything out of Mikael’s memories she wanted, and that was unfair. Not just Mikael either—anyone she touched.

That ability had lain disguised, explained away as touch-sensitivity. Surely her father had known, though, from the first, what she could do. That was why he’d never touched her save with a gloved hand. He’d known what she was because it was what ran in his family.

It had taken only a second more to turn her newfound knowledge back on the priest.

Now she knew Gajaya Ramanet, the High Priest of Farunas, far better than anyone else ever had. She had riffled through the leaves in his mind, able to pick and choose among his memories, reading what she wanted.

She didn’t know which was worse: to have run her fingers through his mind or to have done exactly what he had done to others. She felt corrupted, as if she’d submerged her hands in the foulest water of the river near the sewage outlet.

Mikael’s call continued. I don’t care what happened. I want you to come back. I need you. I’m losing time and I need you to help me now, because every minute Elisabet gets closer to death.

Mikael didn’t even know the truth about why.

She ran her hands through his memories and saw that Elisabet hadn’t told him everything. It didn’t upset him when she did that, because he had nothing to hide from her.

Eventually, he told her, you’ll know all my secrets anyway. I don’t care.

She didn’t frighten him. He would forgive her for what she was.

She knew then exactly what bound meant.

Shironne made herself feel again, forcing herself outside of her hiding place. She felt his cheek pressing against hers, warm in the chilly air, perspiration on his skin and a fine grit of dust from the rooftop where he’d wiped a gloved hand across his face. A faint roughness told her he hadn’t shaved. A hint of soap clung to his skin. He smelled of wool, starched linen, perspiration, and lemon again. The wind carried the scents of horse and dirt and the taste of coming rain.

The aftertaste of blood floated on the air, sharp and metallic in her mouth. She felt it on her legs, Tova’s blood on her borrowed trousers, soaking through to her skin. Blood—so much more personal than almost anything else. She could bear it, but only just.

His arms tightened around her, trying to reassure her. She turned her face into the wool of his coat, hiding her tears.

“It doesn’t matter,” he murmured next to her ear. “I trust you. That’s the difference. I trust you.”

That was the hardest part, to know that he trusted her. Tova was dead, and Mikael still trusted her. “I shouldn’t have led him here,” she whispered into his jacket.

“No. Kai shouldn’t have asked. Tova should have stopped him. It’s not your fault.” Mikael set his hands on her shoulders, holding her back so he could look at her. His dusty fingers brushed across her cheek, wiping away her tears. It merely left other dust behind, but he didn’t truly understand that. Not yet.

His mind said he would have liked to stay this way, with her held comfortably in his arms, for the remainder of the evening, only he had to go after Elisabet, and he had no way to know where to look if she didn’t, and he could only hope that she did, because Elisabet’s time was running out.

“He meant to take her to the river,” she said.

“Where on the river?” Mikael asked, his voice betraying his urgency now that she’d chosen to rejoin the hunt.

She’d been through the priest’s mind. She had a vague sense of him moving slowly through the city. She raised her hand and pointed the direction. “He knows I’ve been in his head, so he’ll change where he’d planned to take her. We’ll have to follow him.”

Mikael pushed her up to her feet, then rose himself. He led her down the steps to the edge of the street. A man spoke to him—a policeman, she knew from Mikael’s mind—and Mikael answered, bidding him to send the bodies back to the fortress.

He hailed a cab. When one stopped, he lifted Shironne into it and settled across from her. It smelled, the straw on the floor sticky under her boots. She could feel Mikael’s foot on the edge of the bench on which she sat, bracing him as the cab began to move.

She heard the mechanical sound of Mikael checking his gun. He had more than one, she decided as a different sound, a clicking one, heralded a second weapon.

“Can you hold the rifle?” he asked.

She wanted to wipe her face, but this took priority, so she extended her hand. He placed the barrel of a rifle in it, held perpendicular to the floor of the cab. Heat clung to the weapon, and a very fine burned dust. She realized this must be Elisabet’s, not his—Mikael wasn’t partial to rifles. He didn’t like guns at all, although if he had to kill someone, that was his first choice.

“Are we still going in the right direction?” he asked.

She nodded and heard him shift, the sounds of fabric moving. His mind whirled; he was counting cartridges, not getting stuck on five this time.

“Yes.” She didn’t know what to do. She was worse than useless.

“We need to head for Miller’s Point,” Mikael yelled out at the driver. He turned back to her. “How is killing Elisabet going to set things right?”

“It’s because he didn’t kill her before,” Shironne said, trying to sort through what the priest had in his mind. Even at the best of times, motives were never entirely pure. She’d looked into enough people’s minds to know that. “He thinks that spoiled all the sacrifices afterward, and that’s why his god allowed Elisabet to kill his father.”

“I don’t understand,” Mikael insisted. “She wasn’t there.”

“Yes, she was. She was the first.”

Mikael stilled in his preparations. “What?”

“They sacrificed her first.”

•   •   •

Mikael looked up from the pistol to Shironne’s pale face.

“Elisabet was one of the sacrifices? How could she have survived that?” He recalled that she’d said something about lying on her back the day after the massacre of her family, but it was amazing that she’d survived. She had to have lost a lot of blood.

“He didn’t know. Paal Endiren didn’t either, but he knew Elisabet had the scars. Paal knew that about her. That’s how the priest found out she was still alive.” Her face had a perplexed expression, as if she was searching through the corners of her mind, trying to locate the facts she wanted. “He questioned Paal when they captured him. That’s why Ramanet came hunting Elisabet. He didn’t know she’d lived until he touched Paal, and then he figured he knew why his father failed. He blames her for making everything in his life go wrong. He wants to make sure she dies this time. Part of that is to fix the magic that went wrong, but a large part of this is just about revenge.”

That didn’t surprise him. “You got all of that when you touched him?”

“I know . . .” Her chin quivered, but she pressed on. “I know how to do it now. I could do it before, only I didn’t really know I was doing it. I thought I was just . . . doing the other . . . the touch-sensitive thing.”

What runs through the mind of the corpse?

Deborah had suspected this. That was why she’d given him that book—to warn him about Shironne’s abilities. Shironne looked upset when he thought that, as if she feared he would run away from her.

“I don’t care,” he reassured her.

She clung to the rifle as if that alone kept her upright. She hadn’t had much sleep the night before either, he knew.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “He thought his god was pleased, letting him find me. That it was a sign of his approval. That he’s chosen the right path. He meant to take me with him.”

Mikael wiped his hand on his sleeve and then reached across to touch her cheek. Redness showed where the other man had slapped her, overlaying the fading bruise. “How, exactly, do you mean that?”

“He wanted to collect me, like a pressed flower.” She shivered when she said that.

He thought of those menageries from the book. If they still existed, someone would surely want her. “I won’t let them take you.”

“He noticed you in the dreams through the victims, only he couldn’t talk to you. You weren’t listening to him in the dreams. That’s why he had to find you in person and figure out what you knew. That’s when he learned about me. He wanted to capture me, because he would get a lot of money for me and . . .” She drew a shuddering breath. “He knew that I had to be related to him, and he thought he might even get to . . . keep me. He thought . . . he thought he would get you too, because he thought you would follow him if . . .”

“I would have.” Mikael knew that much was true. He wished calm at Shironne, assuring her, “Anyone takes you, I’ll come after you. I promise.”

He stuffed Elisabet’s pistol into his sash next to his own—one cartridge in each and a handful in his pocket.

“Here, give me that rifle,” Mikael said. She held it out to him.

The driver hit a bump and Shironne tumbled onto the dirty straw on the floor of the cab. Mikael helped her back onto the seat, guiding her gloved fingers to a hand strap. He lifted the flap on the window and saw they’d reached the end of the warehouse district and were heading toward the river. The driver started bringing the horses up to speed.

“Can we beat them there?” Shironne asked.

“No.” He’d spent too much time dealing with Kai. Mikael braced a foot on the opposite bench again and inspected the rifle, uncertain about using Elisabet’s weapon. It had an unusual double-barreled, double-trigger design. It must be particularly true or Elisabet wouldn’t have kept it. Both barrels were loaded; she must have reloaded while coming down from the roof.

He had four shots without reloading, then, and no spare cartridges for the rifle. He’d left his sword sitting on the hotel’s rooftop. He cursed inwardly. He was going to have to rely on his marksmanship, not one of his stronger skills. He would have felt a lot better having the sword even if he didn’t get the chance to use it. As he was struggling out of his overcoat, he asked, “Are you certain we’re going in the right direction?”

She shook her head. “It’s not like with you. I knew exactly where you were, but I only have a vague sense of where he is.”

Mikael felt a perverse flash of satisfaction. He didn’t want Shironne to be able to find the priest easily. That should be reserved for him. That had been his logic for dragging her along, though, he thought guiltily, placing her in just as much danger as Kai had. “I shouldn’t have brought you.”

Her look went mulish. “You are not leaving me. You can’t find him on your own anyway.”

“True.” He drew the sheathed knife out of the back of his sash and handed it to her.

“If I need this, I’ll be in more trouble than I can handle.” She took the knife, inspecting it with her fingers before slipping it under her own sash.

“I’d still rather you had some way to protect yourself. It’s better than being a pressed flower.”