Sir Edwin settled himself in the seat opposite hers, leaned his head against the side of the carriage, and ran a hand over his eyes.

‘You may rest,’ said Ari. ‘I will wake you once we find Hesperus.’

‘So that you may kill me while my eyes are closed?’ he said, with the faintest trace of a smile.

‘I am not sure if having your eyes open would make much of a difference if I hit you with a hurricane.’

‘That is also true. But I’m afraid even if you don’t kill me, my mother surely will for the bad manners I’d be showing should I indulge in the presence of sweet Acren, Child of Dreams, when I am already in yours.’

‘But she’d let you live for breaking into a lady’s home?’

‘Ah. Anything that I do to satisfy my role as Royal Coroner – impressing ladies with rare insects from Rernin, for one – is already a lost cause to her. Speaking of impressing ladies, can I please ask you a personal question, my lady? One of the knights who served with me – I trust him with my life, but not with his understanding of the female kind – he said that many ladies like forearms. Is that true?’

‘…Why are you asking me?’

‘The only other woman I have spoken to in the past month was several days deceased at that point. I merely asked her professional questions such as who did this to you?’

‘I… suppose he’s right about the arms.’

‘Then is your jester married?’ he said, rolling up his sleeves. ‘I thought she’d be with you today. My messenger spotted her near Master Strond’s.’

‘She has gone to the baths. And my answer doesn’t apply to…’ For a moment, she grasped at Natty’s new name. ‘…to Fabia. Fabia would not find your arms–’

‘The baths…’ Sir Edwin leaned forward, his fatigue falling away. ‘Which one?’

‘No. You can’t stalk her.’

‘I’m not… My lady, I am merely trying to find out if… There is a bathhouse near Master Strond’s with certain connections. Lady Fabia spends most of her time in Aquilon. She may not be familiar with the bathhouses of Eirene.’

No. Natty had never been to Eirene. How did she know there’d be a bathhouse in… in… By asking someone in Claribel’s household, of course.

~I have never heard of any allegations against any bathhouses… though I have never frequented such an establishment.~ To Sir Edwin, she said, ‘Explain yourself, good sir.’

‘There is just… a rumour among the guards and coroners that the bathhouse is involved with some Khurammian issues. The owner, I hear, has a Khurammian mother, which has recently become an issue because of His Majesty’s hostility towards them of late – unfortunately due to their apparent spirit-possessions. It is best to visit other bathhouses, lest he sends his Royal Guards to detain its visitors.’

‘How sure are you that these allegations are true?’

‘I could always be wrong. But… my lady, just as I have moved your marriage certificate to a safer location, so that its existence is only proved by a line logging it to this case in the Royal Coroner’s Book of Evidence, this knowledge should remain within the bounds of this carriage. Like I said, His Majesty is waiting for a chance to swoop down on the whole operation. He would be deeply angered should anyone warn them beforehand.’ He gazed out of the window. ‘Speaking of suspicious places, we are about to pass Lord Selvan’s abode.’

Ari peeked through the curtains too. A little way downstream from the crematorium, a lone house loomed on the banks. She wondered if Lord Selvan and Lady Mona had spent much of their time before their disappearance spotting clumps of ashes flowing down the river.

‘Can we stop and take a look?’

‘But Hesperus may–’

‘He is taking care of a young talented earth mage I have recently discovered. He will not run. We will be quick. It will not take nearly as much time to look through a house as it would to attend Tristram’s last rite.’

*

The door was barred, but there was a hole in the thatched roof that was crudely covered with a few twigs, right under a branch of an oak tree near the front of the house that was the only thing that was standing guard.

Sir Edwin hoisted himself up the tree, scooted over to the hole and dropped down. A minute later, he opened the door with a bow and welcomed her in, picking reeds off his sleeve.

‘It’s a little dusty, I’m afraid.’

It was worse than dusty. The house had been ransacked. Firewood was strewn near the hearth, and from the dust on them, it had been ransacked a while ago. Almost everything else was gone. There were holes in the walls where candelabras might have hung in metal that was worth something. Presumably the candles were also worth something, because they, too, were gone.

She tilted her head, looking for clues, because every unusual location she’d visit on a mission would be a location of interest. There’d always be something: a torn piece of paper with a message written in blood, or a postcard with a mysterious address, tucked behind a mirror. But all there was was the smell of wet rot.

Farther they went, floating through the empty kitchen and buttery, hooks still nailed to the walls, but pans and pots and crockery and food all gone. Up they went, trudging up to the bedrooms, where the linens were gone too, replaced by spiderwebs. There it was, the source of the wet rot, clawing its way into the floorboards beneath the hole in the thatched roof. She tiptoed around it just as a raven with a missing foot hopped out from under the bedframe and squawked at her.

~Crow.~

Déjà vu.

Was that the crow she’d seen pecking at her window before?

Sir Edwin lunged forth and shooed it away. ‘There is nothing here, my lady.’

‘Exactly. It doesn’t look like the house of someone who’d merely gone on a pilgrimage.’

‘You would usually ask a servant to watch a place like this when you were away. It is still possible that the servant has betrayed them and taken their things.’

‘Then they’d have entered through the front door, not the roof. Though I suppose it’s possible that an accident befell the servant, and others saw an opportunity to break in.’ The posters advertising their house as a sitting duck couldn’t have helped. Or did it not matter by then, because they were already gone, souls floating into the unknown, like the white smoke from the crematorium through their windows, like any traces that Hannah Temple might have left behind.

They made their way back down the stairs, creaking with every step. One door remained unexplored, tucked away at the back of the buttery.

‘That must be the door to the cellar, my lady. It is sure to be more unpleasant than here. I fear there might be rats.’

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‘Then you’d better unsheathe your moderately-sized rapier and prepare to skewer some,’ she said, taking a step inside. She patted the wall, feeling for a light switch, before remembering where she was.

‘I don’t think the rats would be on the walls! One moment…’ Sir Edwin rummaged around the corners of the buttery and returned with a handful of reeds. From the back of the kitchen, he scraped a handful of sticky grime and smeared it over them. ‘I wish we’d gone and found Hesperus first. He wouldn’t be here digging up old cooking grease to put together a rushlight right now. Snap! And you’d get a nice blue flame. Ahhh… this reminds me of old times, gathering rushes by the riverside in the summer and the autumn, and mother shouting at us for dipping our fingers in pig’s grease and eating it, because it’s supposed to be for the light! We’d keep one lit all night to avoid this very situation,’ he said, drawing out a piece of dark metal shaped like a miniature horseshoe. Then he drew out his bollock knife and a small black handkerchief.

~Cover your ears!~

Sir Edwin struck the metal against the knife – sparks flying from Cain’s knuckledusters as he rammed his fist into the crumbling concrete and struck the exposed steel rod within, and–

Ari blinked. Sir Edwin’s flurry of swearing brought her back to the here and now, where she already had her hands over her ears. Not that it made much difference.

‘Burn, you stupid… Ugh. I hate. This. Stupid. Thing. I do apologise, my lady. I just need to get enough of those fate-forsaken sparks onto this fate-forsaken char cloth. Please tell me that you are surprising enough to have a secondary aspect of fire.’

‘I have a secondary aspect of fire.’

He nearly dropped his fire steel, but when it struck the knife, the sparks caught by the char cloth glowed orange.

‘Not really,’ she said, ‘but looks like you don’t need it anymore anyway.’

‘Ah. It seems to me that you do have a secondary aspect of luck. I was just about to suggest that we leave this for another day, but…’ He let the flame grow with the wind from his palms, then lit the ends of the rushlights. ‘Here we go… rat hunting!’

Down they went, even as Ari muttered an apology to Claribel’s chambermaids, who’d have to clean the dust and grime from her silks.

~Oh no, that would not be Lucy, Wini and Patricia. My laundresses handle all the washing and… if the dress is damaged beyond cleaning, we will just have to dispose of it and acquire a new one.~

~Well. The threads that look gold and silver in the forepart are actually gold and silver, so the forepart is not something that can be laundered easily, and I cannot wear it stained.~

~We are talking about a mere ten crowns for wanting to explore a fate-forsaken cellar.~

~Both of Sir Dagon and Sir Beren’s steeds added together with some to spare. Oh, you prefer to have things in cows, don’t you? That’d buy you around sixty-five cows.~

Ari clutched the sides of her head and let out a silent scream, even as she realised that ten crowns was what Coell had borrowed from Madame Lucretia. If he’d killed Tristram for the price of what she’d inadvertently ruined…

The rushlights lit up patches of the cellar. The thieves had chosen not to intrude here. Trinkets still lined the shelves, as if the room was the darker twin of the apothecary. Dust blanketed a collection of wooden statues, seashells, and, as far as she could tell, a whole row of knights with faces replaced by a lady’s downstairs lips.

~Oh those. They are pilgrim badges from Merta’s shrine.~ Claribel sighed and shook her head, as if choosing to amend the words she was yet to speak. ~They… must have been praying for children for many years.~

Years of half-hearted dusting had left all but the latest badge from Merta’s shrine etched in grime.

‘Looks like they’ve taken everything here as well,’ said Sir Edwin.

‘But the trinkets…’

‘They’re not worth anything. The apples and jams, on the other hand…’

A pair of pilgrim badges sat on a shelf next to the five stacked wine barrels too, depicting a pair of lounging figures, lounging so hard that the robes were falling off of their bodies, draping themselves in the wine that they poured onto each other instead. The dust was thinner here, perhaps protected by the direction of the air flow, or… Ari placed a palm against the stony walls, soaking in their chill. Almost clean. Scrubbed clean?

‘Has someone searched the place properly?’

‘Their friends, I’d presume.’ Sir Edwin shrugged. ‘They’ve commissioned quite a few of their likenesses to be painted throughout the city. I’d assume that they’d search their home first before thinking that Lord Selvan and Lady Mona were missing.’

But no police? ‘Not you?’

‘Like I said, we’d assumed that nobody’s dead.’

No body. No.

Just a foreboding. Just a lesson about the clean-ups that she’d never had to do once she’d qualified as a Red: ‘After you scrub out the blood stains, make sure you reapply the lived-in dirt.’

But she was in a world without luminol. Only the wine barrels stared back, refusing to spill their secrets.

Spill.

Ari slid in front of the barrels and turned on the tap.

Drip, drip, splatter.

‘What are you…’ Sir Edwin scrambled to her side, trying to shield her gown, all ten crowns of it, from the mess.

‘Wine has to be worth something, hasn’t it? Then why haven’t they taken it?’

The wine splattered, dark red, like blood.

But it smelled like burnt prune syrup.

Sir Edwin frowned and caught a drop on his fingertip.

‘Hey–’ she tried to pull his finger away from his lips, but it was too late.

‘Hmmm…’ He closed his eyes. But did not drop dead. At least, not straight away. ‘I wouldn’t advise drinking it, but it’s not poison, just spoiled.’

He turned to the other four barrels, and caught drips from each.

‘All spoiled.’ He winced and took a sip from his waterskin at the end of the last barrel. ‘I’m guessing that’s what you wanted to know. Otherwise you’d have stopped me by now.’

‘It just feels odd. Why would they have five barrels of spoiled wine? I’m not an expert, but doesn’t wine keep for a long time, especially in a wine cellar? Six months doesn’t seem all that long for wine.’

‘When I say spoiled, I mean it’s dull and flat and just… horrible. But at least it’s not sour. If you ask me, and I have to say, I am a minor expert at wine, I’d say that it’s been cooked.’ He smiled at her blank expression. ‘That just means it’s been in a room that’s too hot for wine. Happens sometimes when it arrives in wagons on a hot day.’

‘But they wouldn’t have bought five cooked barrels. Who would buy it without tasting the wine, and spend all that energy carrying those barrels down the stairs and stacking them here? It must have cooked here.’

~No. It was a mild summer, leading into this mild winter.~

‘You’d have to light a fire in the cellar,’ he said with a laugh, putting voice to her suspicions. ‘You don’t think…’

There was no trace of soot on the floor, also scrubbed clean. No trace of anything really. Just the smell of spoiled wine.

Smell.

~My hunting dogs?~

~In animals, yes, but…~

But it was worth a shot. She wrapped a few of the trinkets in Claribel’s handkerchief and secured them in the pouch that bore her pills. Failing a blood hunt, perhaps one of those would still smell of Lord Selvan and Lady Mona… and of the scented handkerchief, and of the turmeric of the pills… The pointlessness of it all.

*

As they left the house, the crow with the missing foot cawed at her again, swooping down from the oak tree to peck at a spot near the roots. Two circles of pebbles sat at the foot of the tree, each enclosing a knot woven from weeping willow branches, shaped like three entwined circles.

~The symbol of Mella, the Child of Peace, woven from the tree of mourning,~ said Claribel, from somewhere high in the branches, ~but I have found another here, near the crow’s nest. The seven-pointed throwing-star is the symbol of Susu, the Child of War, Child of Vengeance.~

A gust of wind blew it from the tree. Whether it was from her palms, or Claribel’s breath, or the world that tied them to each other, she couldn’t tell. But the symbol that fell at her feet? That she could tell: the seven-pointed seeing-star of the Institute, painted on the ceiling of her dorm, printed on her pillowcase, tattooed onto the scalp of her real body, the scalp of every Agent, so that their enemies would shave their heads to check, and send them back to the Institute hairless, bodiless.

‘Who can name all seven?’ said the Chief, tapping at the centre of the star, enclosing a circle bisected by a horizontal line. ‘New boy. You.’

‘Me? What am I–’

‘Name them.’

‘I… Red? Orange? Yellow? Green–’

‘I asked for the sapta-bodhyanga, the seven factors of awakening, and you try to name me the rainbow?’

‘Sorry sir, I was just trying to think of seven of something, so–’

‘Someone else name them. Ari Lee. Name them. Show him even someone with half a brain can remember how to achieve awakening. Whether you can actually achieve it is another matter altogether.’

Ari cleared her throat. ‘Mindfulness: to remember the nature of reality.’

‘Which you don’t.’

‘Investigation: to use your wisdom to find out the nature of reality. Energy: to devote hard work and determination into finding the nature of reality. Joy: to find rapture in discovering the nature of reality.’

‘You have no wisdom, no devotion, and no joy. Carry on.’

‘Tranquillity: a lightness and steadiness in both body and mind. Concentration: a calm and steady focus. The final step in the path is equanimity: a heart that can accept reality as it truly is, unshaken.’

The Chief sighed and tapped on the circle again, right at the centre, right on the dividing line. ‘And when will you do that? When will you open your eyes?’