“I will not solve this mystery in three days, Laya. Even if I had three hundred, I could not.”
Laya took him by the shoulders, and the force of her grasp stopped him. “This Jannart—the man you loved,” she said, looking him dead in the eye. “Do you think he would want you to give up, or carry on?”
“I don’t want to carry on! Do you not understand? Does nobody in this world understand, damn you? Is no one else haunted?” A quiver of wrath entered his voice. “Everything I did—everything I was—everything I am, is because of him. He was someone before me. I am no one without him. I am tired of living without him at my side. He left me for that book and, by the Saint, I resent him for it. I resent him every minute of every day.” His voice cracked. “You Lasians believe in an afterlife, don’t you?”
Laya studied him.
“Some of us, yes. The Orchard of Divinities,” she said. “He may be waiting for you there, or at the Great Table of the Saint. Or perhaps he is nowhere at all. Whatever has become of him, you are still here. And you are here for a reason.” She held a callused palm to his cheek. “You have a ghost, Niclays. Do not become a ghost yourself.”
How many years had it been since anyone had touched his face, or looked at him with sympathy?
“Goodnight,” he said. “And thank you, Laya.”
He left her.
On his stretch of floor, he lay on his side and pressed one fist over his mouth. He had fled from Mentendon. He had fled from the West. No matter how far he ran, his ghost still followed him.
It was too late. He was mad with grief. He had been mad for years. He had lost his mind the night he had found Jannart dead at the Sun in Splendor, the inn that had been their love nest.
It had been a week since Jannart was supposed to return from his journey, but no one had seen him. Unable to find him at court, and with word from Aleidine that he was not in Zeedeur, Niclays had gone to the only other place he could be.
The smell of vinegar had hit him first. A physician in a plague mask had been outside the room, painting red wings on the door. And when Niclays had shoved past her, into their room, there was Jannart, lying as if asleep, his red hands folded on his chest.
Jannart had lied to everyone. The library where he had hoped to find answers was not in Wilgastrōm, but in Gulthaga, the city razed in the eruption of the Dreadmount. Doubtless he had thought the ruins would be safe, but he must have known there was a risk. Deceived his family and the man he loved. All so he could stitch a single hole in history.
A wyvern had been sleeping in the long-dead halls of Gulthaga. One bite had been all it took.
There was no cure. Jannart had known that, and had wanted to leave before his blood started to burn and his soul was scorched away. And so he had gone to the shadow market in disguise and procured a poison named eternity dust. It gave a quiet death.
Niclays trembled. He could still see the scene now, detailed as a painting. Jannart in the bed, their bed. In one hand, the locket Niclays had given him the morning after their first kiss, with the fragment inside. In the other, an empty vial.
It had taken the physician, the innkeeper, and four others to hold Niclays back. He could still hear his own howls of denial, taste the tears, smell the sweetness of the poison.
You fool, he had screamed. You fucking selfish fool. I waited for you. I waited thirty years …
Did lovers ever reach the Milk Lagoon, or did they only dream of it?
He gripped his head between his hands. With Jannart’s death, he had lost one half of himself. The part of him worth living for. He closed his eyes, head aching, chest heaving—and when he fell into a fitful doze, he dreamed of the room at the top of Brygstad Palace.
There is a hidden message in it, Clay.
He tasted black wine on his tongue.
Intuition tells me that it is a vital piece of history.
He felt the heat of the fire on his skin. He saw the stars, richly painted in their constellations, as real as if their love nest opened out on to the sky.
Something about the characters sits oddly with me. Some are larger, others smaller, and they are spaced in a strange manner.
His eyes snapped open.
“Jan,” he breathed. “Oh, Jan. Your golden fox still has his cunning.”
41
South
Ead lay in her eyrie, glossed with sweat. Her blood ran hot and swift.
This had happened before. The fever. A fog had been around her for eight years, dampening her senses, and now the sun had burned it away. Each breath of wind was like a broad stroke of a finger on her skin.
The sound of the waterfall was crystal-clear. She could hear the calls of honeyguides and sunbirds and mimics in the forest. She could smell ichneumons and white orchids and the perfume of the orange tree.
She missed Sabran. With her skin this tender, the memory of her was torture. She slid a hand between her legs and imagined a cool touch on her body, silken lips, the sweetness of wine. Her hips reared once before she sank into the bed.
After, she lay quiet, burning.
It must be close to dawn by now. Another day that Sabran was alone in Inys, circled by wolves. Margret would only be able to do so much to keep her safe. She was quick-witted, but no warrior.
There had to be a way to convince the Prioress to defend the Inysh throne.
The servants had left a platter of fruit and a knife on her nightstand. For a time, she would burn through enough food for three grown men. She took a pomegranate from the platter.
As she cut away the flower, her hand slipped, made clumsy by her fever. The blade sheared the other wrist, and blood brimmed from the wound. A droplet leaked down to her elbow.
Ead looked at it for a long time, thinking. Then she shrugged on a robe and lit an oil lamp with a snap of her fingers.
An idea was taking form.
The halls were quiet tonight. On her way to the dining chamber, she stopped suddenly next to one of the doors.
She remembered running through these passageways with Jondu, carrying a squeaking Aralaq. How she had feared this corridor, knowing it was where her birthmother had drawn her final breath.
Zāla du Agriya uq-Nāra, who had been the munguna before Mita Yedanya. Behind this door was the room she had died in.
There were many legendary sisters in the Priory, but Zāla had made a habit of being legendary. At nineteen, in the second month of her pregnancy, she had answered a call from the young Sahar Taumargam, the future Queen of Yscalin, who was then a princess of the Ersyr. A Nuram tribe had inadvertently woken a pair of wyverns in the Little Mountains. Zāla had found not two, but six of the creatures harrowing the nomads and, against the odds, she had slain them single-handed. Then she had dusted herself off and ridden all the way to the market in Zirin to satisfy her craving for rose candy.
Ead had been born half a year later, too early. You were small enough to cradle in one hand, Chassar had once told her, chuckling, but your cry could have brought down mountains, beloved. Sisters were not supposed to involve themselves too deeply with their children, for the Priory was one family, but Zāla had often slipped Ead honey pastries and cuddled her close when nobody was looking.
My Ead, she had whispered, and breathed in the baby scent of her head. My evening star. If the sun burned out tomorrow, your flame would light the world.
The memory made Ead ache to be held. She had been six when Zāla had died in her bed.
She placed a hand on the door and walked on. May your flame ascend to light the tree.
The dining chamber was dark and silent. Only Sarsun was there, his head tucked against his chest. When she set foot on the floor, he woke sharply.
“Shh.”
Sarsun ruffled his feathers.
Ead placed the oil lamp beside his perch. As if he sensed her intention, he hopped down to scrutinize the riddlebox. Ead took hold of the knife. When she lifted the blade to her skin, Sarsun let out a small hoot. She sliced across her palm, deep enough for blood to flow generously, and placed her hand on the lid of the box.
it closed in clouds of salt and steam—it opens with a golden knife.
“Siyāti uq-Nāra once said that mage blood was golden, you see,” she said to Sarsun. “To possess a golden knife, I must draw blood with it.”
She would never have believed that a bird could look skeptical until she saw his face.
“I know. It isn’t actually golden.”
Sarsun bowed his head.
The engraved letters gradually filled, as if they were inlaid with ruby. Ead waited. When the blood reached the end of the final word, the riddlebox split down the middle. Ead flinched away, and Sarsun fluttered back to his perch as the box opened like a night-blooming flower.
In it was a key.
Ead took it from its bed of satin. It was the same length as her forefinger, with a bow shaped like a flower with five petals. An orange blossom. The symbol of the Priory.
“Faithless creature,” she said to Sarsun.
He pecked her sleeve and flew to the doorway, where he sat and looked at her.
“Yes?”