Karys did not see Vuhas again. In the morning, Yviline passed on his apology. He had fallen ill, and was convalescing in his room, unable to see them off. It was nothing to be concerned about; he often suffered terrible migraines at this time of year. He hoped that they had enjoyed their brief stay, and wished them well on their journey.
Yviline was white-faced. She would not make eye contact, and spoke in a low monotone. It was unclear what exactly she had expected, arriving at the mansion that morning—what she might have guessed of her master’s intentions, what she knew of the Grateful Society. Perhaps not everything. But enough. She withered under Karys’ stare.
“I’ll summon the awrig,” she whispered.
One garbled warning meant nothing. Ambivalent or not, Yviline had been complicit in this. Unspeaking, Karys followed her through the back door. A coward, a timid little mouse of a woman, content to serve Vuhas his breakfast and bring him his slippers. Pathetic. She had done next to nothing, and now … now …
Now, Ferain would not answer.
Karys had not slept at all—her shadow had only returned her body an hour before dawn. She had sat alone in the guest parlour as the sun rose, listening to Winola retch in the bathroom. When the scholar finally emerged, the vineyards were touched with pale gold. Karys tore her eyes from the long rectangle of light cast through the window, from the juncture where her shadow merged with the armchair’s, where the darkness lay bunched and inert.
“Tell me what happened,” she said.
Winola took one look at her face, and recoiled as if struck. “Embrace, Karys…”
“Tell me.”
The scholar slumped onto the opposite couch. She wet her lips and shut her eyes for a moment, gathering herself. Then she spoke.
Ferain had woken her a little before three in the morning. He had not explained much then; only that Vuhas had poisoned Karys in order to recruit him to the Grateful Society, and that he needed her to perform a working. From his pocket, he had produced a handful of date sweets. He asked her to extract the salt from them, and then to wrap them in a guise. Make them look and taste like bread. When she was done, slip down to the kitchen. The house’s security workings were inactive; she would not be noticed or harmed. Leave the bread in the pantry, and hide in the broom cupboard. Wait for him. Do not wake Haeki.
He had taken Rasko’s parcel from Karys’ bag, and disappeared again.
Removing the salt was trivial; any first-year workings student could accomplish that. Shaping the sweets into something that resembled bread was also reasonably straightforward. But making the taste and texture convincing? That was not a guise; it was material, structural working. And it had felt like such a stupid task. While struggling to persuade dates and sugar to taste like wheat, Winola had known they were in terrible danger. She had suspected that Karys was already lost.
She managed to produce a single roll. Small, dark and dense, but close enough to bread to pass as the real thing. Afraid and alone, she crept down to the kitchen, placed her creation in the pantry, and shut herself in the closet.
When Ferain and Vuhas arrived, it was clear they had been drinking. Winola watched them through the keyhole. They spoke loudly, in high spirits; Ferain praising Vuhas’ collection of artefacts, thanking him for the private tour, promising favours, information, resources. He had been loquacious and at ease, all traces of his former tension gone. Seeing Karys possessed had already been uncanny, but for Ferain to fit so naturally into her skin? If not for their earlier conversation, Winola would have believed him genuinely happy. Genuinely grateful.
Vuhas sat down on one of the kitchen stools, turning over Rasko’s box in his hands. He had not opened it; he was speculating that the contents were worked and organic, possibly dangerous. Ferain asked whether it might be a relic. Vuhas said that was a possibility. He could perform a few tests on it tomorrow. Very curious. He was clearly intrigued; he held up the box against the light, studying it from different angles. Ferain interrupted to apologise. It had been weeks since he had tasted food and—Vuhas quickly assured him that he completely understood; Ferain was welcome to whatever he could find. Ferain asked, jokingly, if Vuhas would break bread with him.
“He made it seem so effortless,” whispered Winola. “Karys, you don’t understand. Ferain was—I believed him. Vuhas never suspected a thing.”
It took less than a minute. Ferain, with the neutralising agent still in Karys’ bloodstream, ate unaffected: still talking, still laughing, disarming, flattering. But Vuhas had drunk a full mug of spiced chocolate earlier in the evening—and now unwittingly swallowed the other half of his own poison. Inebriated and distracted, he didn’t notice the heaviness of his limbs until he was almost falling off his chair. Even then, faced with Ferain’s wide-eyed concern, he seemed unable to put two and two together. He joked about the years catching up with him, about being unable to hold his liquor. Ferain swung a supportive arm around his shoulder.
Vuhas seemed on the verge of blacking out before the truth finally sank in. Too weak, too slow, he fumbled for an ampoule in his pocket. Ferain knocked it away, then clamped a hand over Vuhas’ mouth to prevent him from triggering any worked defences. Vuhas thrashed, Ferain held fast. After a few seconds, the struggles subsided. Ferain lowered him to the ground.
“He called to me, and I came out,” said Winola. “And when he looked at me … I knew what came next would be worse. I don’t know how much he had planned, how much he was improvising. He said that there wasn’t much time; he could feel you fading. He looked scared.”
They had dragged Vuhas back to his study. While Winola tied him to his chair and fed him the contents of the ampoule, Ferain ran down to the artefact repository and retrieved Noaj’s amulet. By the time he returned, Vuhas was already stirring, mumbling unhappily. Ferain tied the amulet around his neck. Then he turned to Winola and told her what was needed.
The problem was not Vuhas, but his friends. If it wasn’t for the Grateful Society, Ferain could have killed Vuhas on his own. It would have been ugly, but far simpler. He had the will for it. Although he had never killed anyone before, he would have done it.
No, the problem lay in the fact that Vuhas had talked. Ciene, and probably others, knew of his suspicions regarding Karys. Knew who she was, knew something of his plans. If Vuhas showed up dead in the morning, all eyes would turn to her. All the Society’s resources, all their power—if Ferain killed Vuhas, she would never be free. The Grateful would hunt her down.
What was needed, therefore, was for Vuhas himself to call off his friends. If he told the Grateful that Karys was nobody, they would believe him. The situation would make for an amusing anecdote: the time that the Society almost inducted a hapless Mercian into their ranks. Of course, admitting to his mistake would make Vuhas a laughingstock, and further degrade his social position. He would never agree to that kind of humiliation.
Which left only one option.
“The four great sins in working.” Winola’s eyes were red-rimmed, her voice hoarse. “Human binding, apotheosis, soul retention or obliteration, and mind manipulation. Earlier this morning, I performed the last. I broke into Vuhas’ head, and changed his memories. I cracked him apart and rearranged him, so that his thoughts bent to my will. I forced—”
Her lower lip trembled, and she touched her mouth. Karys kept quiet.
“I forced myself on him,” she said. “Not physically, but it amounts to the same.”
In the end, the choice had been hers. Establishing the working was difficult—she had needed to refer to Vuhas’ own manuscripts for guidance on its intricacies—but once it was in place, the rest was sickeningly intuitive. Vuhas sat and listened to her, eyes glazed, and she told him what to think.
All along, New Favour had been mistaken or misled: Ferain Taliade was dead with the rest of his retinue, the letter to the Foreign Ministry had been a ruse, and Karys Eska had only ever been an unlucky, unremarkable victim of circumstance. Under the drug’s influence, she revealed nothing that suggested familiarity with human binding. Instead, she had seemed sweetly eager to please. She was forthcoming and grateful for the safety he had provided.
Vuhas had found himself unexpectedly affected by her trust. In spite of her sordid history, the deathspeaker remained a rare innocent. And so, while she was distracted, he had slipped the neutralising agent into her drink. The impulse surprised him; it was not like him to be so sentimental. Still, it felt right. When Eska left, it was with a kind smile on her face.
Was he disappointed? Of course. It was going to be embarrassing to admit to his error. In fact, if he could, he should avoid talking about the affair altogether. Let the Society make their own assumptions, let them even believe he had disposed of the woman. It would be difficult, but he would endure. He always did.
In any case, that was a problem for the morning. His troubles would wait, because he was not feeling well. Not well at all—cursed migraines, always this time of year. In a sudden spell of dizziness, he had fallen and knocked his face against his desk. Nothing seemed broken, thankfully, but he would stay away from company for a while. Ridiculous, really. It almost looked like he had been punched.
Winola’s voice faded toward the end; it dropped to a murmur and then to nothing. Without it, the silence of the parlour was suffocating. No wind today, no birds, only a queasy stillness outside, and emptiness within. Pressure bore down on Karys’ chest. She could not feel her shadow. Its subtle coolness, its familiar weight … gone. She could not feel anything.
Ferain?
Behind her, a floorboard creaked. Karys started, and Winola jumped up from her chair. But it was only Haeki, tousle-haired and barefoot, leaving her bedroom. She stopped when she saw them.
“Karys?” Her voice went tight. “Karys, what—what’s going on?”
They left the mansion under the same airless silence. Early though it was, the sunlight burned and the scrublands shimmered; in a few hours, the heat would scorch the barren waste. In the canyon, what remained of the dead would wither—Pavian and the saints covered in flies, decaying, the baboons picking across the soft sand.
“You had no right,” said Haeki.
The interior of Vuhas’ awrig was cool; the windows tinted to diffuse the glare. Karys watched the house as the vehicle pulled away down the vineyard-lined track. The building appeared grossly out of place, like one image cut out and stuck on top of another. The long windows threw back the light, and hid all that lay within.
“I was right there.” Haeki’s voice was rough. “Why? Why didn’t you wake me?”
Winola would not look up. She sat on the opposite bench, her hands bunched in her lap. “Ferain told me not to.”
“I don’t care what the reeker told you, I was there. I’m Favoured; I could have—” She broke off, too angry to speak. She breathed in, unsteady. “Why?”
Winola looked small, the lineaments of her face sunken and sharp in the daylight. “Because if you had learned what Vuhas did to Karys, we would not have been able to stop you from killing him.”
“Bullshit.”
“The situation was too delicate.”
“Is that what you think of me?” Her voice rose. “That I can’t be trusted to—”
Karys laid her hand on Haeki’s knee. She didn’t say anything—she felt too tired, too empty—but Haeki fell quiet nonetheless. Beneath Karys’ palm, her leg was shaking.
“I’m sorry,” said Winola.
So tired. Karys tilted her head back and closed her eyes. The darkness was a welcome relief. She didn’t want to think anymore, didn’t want to hear the silence. She let her hand slide from Haeki’s knee. They should never have come here.
She did not fall asleep exactly; it was deeper and more vacant than that. Her mind went blank, and she descended into a dreamless, unfeeling void. No sense of time passing or her own body—when she woke, she was lying sideways across the bench, her head cushioned on Haeki’s thigh.
Karys sat up quickly, muttering an apology. Haeki never moved; she continued to stare out the window to her left, fist against her mouth. The landscape had changed; they passed through rolling hills covered in faded green and purple, low grasses and heather. It looked to be mid-afternoon, and bulbous clouds crowded the sky, blinding in their whiteness. Winola was curled up on the other bench, turned away from them. The scholar’s breath rose and fell in slow waves.
“She said you needed sleep,” murmured Haeki.
At Karys’ shoulder, there was a fading heat, as though a hand had been resting there until recently. She straightened her hair, fingertips brushing the warmed skin. “How long has it been?”
“Hours. She dozed off not long after you did. Seemed…” A small movement of her hand. “Like she was barely even here.”
“And you?”
“And me, what? I didn’t need any more sleep.”
“Haeki.”
“I never wanted to be a burden. I thought—Karys, all she had to do was knock on the door.”
Haeki’s hair glinted like loose coils of copper, and she seemed, in that moment, achingly fragile. All of her strength and fierceness lost, all her anger faded.
“You’re no burden,” said Karys quietly.
Winola’s shoulders hitched in her sleep. Haeki lowered her hand from her mouth, although she did not turn away from the window.
“What happened to him?” she asked. “Your reeker? He hasn’t moved in all the time you were sleeping. Hasn’t said anything to me.”
The pressure on Karys’ chest grew heavier.
“He…” She took a breath. “He’s just tired.”
There was a long pause. Haeki finally looked at her.
“He’ll be all right,” she said.
Karys nodded. The awrig altered course slightly, curving its path around the slope of a hill. Winola mumbled something inaudible, and Haeki glanced at the scholar. An odd, uncertain expression crossed her face.
“What is it?” asked Karys.
Haeki shook her head slightly.
“There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you,” she said. “It isn’t important.”
“I’m listening.”
Haeki sighed. She rubbed her thumb back and forth across the knuckles of her left hand.
“That letter I sent you about Oboro?” she said. “I got the man at the counter to write it for me.”
“I figured.”
A small grimace. “Right. So, that’s … I can’t read.”
Karys knew that the admission hurt, and so she kept her voice light. “You and the rest of Boäz. What of it?”
“You can.”
“I paid a tutor when I moved to Psikamit.” It hadn’t been cheap. “He forged a library card for me to use at the College.”
Haeki shifted on the bench. “Was it difficult?”
“Yes.”
“Will you teach me?”
“To read and write?”
A quick nod.
Karys looked down at her hands. There wouldn’t be enough time; Sabaster would call her compact before Haeki even mastered the basics. Delusional to think otherwise. Just one more regret to weigh her down before the end.
“I can,” she said. “If that’s something you want.”
Haeki breathed out. She leaned back on the bench, offering a small smile when Karys glanced at her.
“Thanks,” she said simply.
“It won’t be easy.”
“I know. But … thanks.”
Karys turned her gaze out the window, watched the rugged hills slide by.
What was one more delusion? At least for the moment, this one felt like it mattered.