Ari stared deep into the shifting surface of Levia’s sun arches through the carriage window. Its crystalline surface took on the sapphire-blue of this morning’s sky, a lingering pink from the sunrise that had far departed, and a tinge of murderous dark, like her thoughts.
If she couldn’t lift the Eye from the pope’s holy sceptre, then couldn’t she do it the old-fashioned way? Couldn’t she cut it from the head of some mythical monster, lugging Claribel’s silk-lined body to the fabled lake, blistering mile after mile?
She hadn’t dared to miss her body with a vengeance until she’d found there might be a way to get it back.
===Pick an Eye of Una to target. It will affect your path going forward.===
---One-Eyed Sceptre. You will find it in the holy city of Leth. You must leave Eirene on time to attend the new pope’s inauguration in spring.---
---Lake Una. You will cut it from the body of Lady Una. You must train your own body and gather a party that can defeat a monster.---
---???---
The familiar scroll in her mind should have brought comfort in a time of chaos, but the words bled into the pulse-red behind her eyelids. She tried to look beneath the symbol of the sceptre and the lake, but the words flickered and rearranged themselves.
===Pick a suspect to accuse in front of Sir Edwin. It will seal your fate.===
---Coell. Motive: money for his School of Thought, which has been borrowed from Madame Lucretia from La Petite Mort, who seems to be a loan shark. Opportunity: spotted at the City Square on the night of Tristram’s death. Means: ??? [Questioned? Y] [Question further? Y/N]---
---The Church. Motive: blame Cardinal Capac’s faction for death of both Malory and Tristram, causing riots in Taur in order to force the inauguration of Archbishop Benedine. Opportunity: ??? Means: ??? [Questioned? Y] [Question further? Y/N]---
---???---
===Pick a witness to question.===
---June [Questioned? Y] [Question further? Y/N]---
---Unknown musician. [Questioned? N]---
---Man who gathered Malory’s remains. [Questioned? N]---
---???---
The scroll shifted again, and rearranged itself into a single line of screaming words.
===Mission: Return of the Child. Locate Miri and bring her back to her family.===
She swatted it away, trying to take her mind back to what she’d been dwelling on before. Before…
The man… Hadn’t Claribel offered him coin for his service? Was that yet uncollected from Wingshill House? And the unknown musician with the overlarge instrument case: was he a witness or a hazy suspect that had yet to be written in ink?
And what about the troubling fact about the ants? If Tristram had died the night before, before she’d ever arrived in this world, then how could she narrow down the list of witnesses? What if–
~We’re here, I said!~ Claribel waved a hand through her head, sending ripples through the letters that she’d summoned, an anchor that tumbled towards the deep ocean floor, chain after chain after shackling chain.
They were indeed. The carriage had come to a stop outside the crematorium. Twin columns of smoke rose from the river, brushing sombre tendrils into the sky.
Tilly was already there, eyes bone-dry but rimmed with red, smothered in a sea of white lace, clutching a fistful of dried rosemary, still with their purple flowers preserved.
A woman with greying blonde hair and leather-tanned skin marched over, picking a piece of corn out of her teeth with a nonchalance that could only be bred from familiarity. ‘She wants to be left alone,’ she said, wrinkles writhing through her face.
‘Oh no!’ Tilly cried, ‘My lady, you came all this way and–’
‘Shush, child. This is for you. Go bid your Ma goodbye. Don’t worry about putting on a face for the lords and ladies. Go! Our lady Claribel will make herself scarce at the rites. She’ll go where she’s needed, to the owner with her gold.’
‘But–’
‘One more but and I’ll knock your teeth out. Might like to put some extra in my mouth. Lost two last year. Now, we’ve said our hellos. Time for the goodbye.’
‘Yes, Granny Gertrude.’
Tilly scuttled away, leaving Ari standing among families milling about with stifled sobs and shaking shoulders, among ravens and crows swooping in, filling the air with caw-caw, caw-caw.
For a moment, she thought she saw one hop along on one leg. Then a man with a trimmed goatee, a cropped white jacket and a fistful of rings slinked over and grinned up at her. ‘Guess you probably don’t need it, what with your fine clothes, but in case you’d like to make coin before that girl’s mother burns, we’re trainin’ chargers in the yard. Three today. We need a few more volunteers, that’s all. I’ll take a third off the price of that woman’s last rites for an hour of her time. It’s not much. We’ll even dust off her face after.’
‘You… what?’ Ari prodded Claribel, who only offered further confusion.
‘Here, let me show you how tasteful we do it here. We even provide bags for the heads, see?’ He led her away from the wooden huts where they dressed the bodies for the pyres on the river, down the stone steps, right to a dirt yard filled with the neighing and whinnying of horses.
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Three chestnut chargers, she presumed, flared their nostrils, twirling their tails and spinning their ears. A stableboy eased one forward, towards the middle of the field, where a few bags of straw lay, stuffed like men.
‘Woah, good boy. Come now, slowly, yes, this way.’
The charger gingerly trotted past the bags of hay, then again, and again, when at last, it set a hoof upon the hay.
‘Good boy, well done! And again.’
The boy eased the charger towards the far end of the yard, where the obstacles on the ground were no longer made of hay. The man was right. He’d been respectful enough to place hemp sacks over their heads. One was stained with an open-mouthed face. Ari wondered if it belonged to the head under the sack, or the man it had adorned before.
‘We try to work them up gently. At least get them to stomp on a real body a couple of times today,’ said the man, spinning one of his golden rings, just as the charger treaded on the dead man’s left leg. ‘That one’s doing well. Some refuse. A real shame, you know, considering that’s four crowns of solid gold gone down the shitter. I can only sell it to some young upstart for a raven or an eye, but the older knights with real coin? They know to check. You don’t want a charger bolting on you in the middle of battle. Just a bit of noise and bloodshed, and bye-bye steed, hello broken neck. No, you don’t want that.’
A stretcher arrived from the direction they’d come from, bearing the body of a woman not much older than Ari, freshly dead, legs frozen in a curl from rigor mortis. Her eyelids had fallen open, as they so often did after death. There was a touch of amber in the clouding hazel, nesting under a bed of brown curls, that reminded her of her own.
‘We got one, sir. Family’s happy to do it with her face uncovered too.’
‘Good, good. Leave her there.’ He waved at a spot by his foot and turned back to Ari. ‘If you want to go for the uncovered option, I’m willing to offer the rites at half the price. It’s not too late. We can still snatch the woman from the pyre! It’s good work we’re doing here too. Every steed must be trained properly. It’s not just for the tournaments and the jousting – that’s why it’s just chargers I’m training today – these are trying times. The Tasrine Empire’s creeping ever closer. Who’s going to keep them at bay when the time comes? The brave knights of Ventinon, that’s who! And they need proper horses to ride on.
‘Tell you what though, even some who pass the final training break in the heat of battle,’ the man’s voice took on a shadowy echo of words spoken at another time, in another place. The trotting sound of hooves pulsed farther and farther away, into another world. ‘It’s a shame. When a vessel of war bolts, all you can do is cut your losses. And we all know what that means, don’t we?’
He dragged his thumb across his neck, bleeding ruby over his uncut skin, burning holes into the fabric of the universe.
She wasn’t the type.
She hadn’t crumbled under the flames. She wouldn’t splinter to fit into a body that wasn’t her own. Wouldn’t lose her grip on reality.
She slipped, falling, formless but not purposeless, trying a trick that had failed once already, crashing uselessly into the unknown woman’s carcass. Unlike Leolin’s concrete edges, the woman felt like a bed of razors. Some part of her screamed, shattering against the rejection.
The earth called, promising a bed of darkness, soon to be roses. It would be so easy to sink into its embrace, into its comforting calm, into it’s-all-over, yet part of her scrambled, searching for a home among ants and earthworms, glancing off the ground and scattering into the wind, into the charger that shook her off and reared, into the hopping form of the one-legged crow, and…
The sky full of swooping birds shed their bleak black feathers and burst into dazzling greens, purples and blues. She balanced on her remaining leg and looked down on the human she’d been compelled to find.
Red will come, spoke the words that had possessed her on the night that turned her leg into a stump, before the hand had saved the rest of her with a sweep of a cloak. Red? The Red Raven? She looked down into her own face. An Agent, Red.
An echo of a moment past, trapped inside her head, like how she’d been trapped within the human nest she’d tried to feed from.
Like how the human had been trapped before it’d died, among ropes and snares. Its cheeks had been sprinkled with a night sky’s worth of stars. Its eyes were tired and the colour of robin’s eggs. Its word had only made sense after its death, after it’d flung its last remaining moments into anything that might host its life, into stone walls, wooden beams, sleeping human trinkets, and her.
‘You want the truth? Okay then. There’s another world. The real world. You are just a character inside a book, okay? I’ve got to go and find a real person – a poor child – who’s trapped out there, so let me go! Let me–’
~What are you doing?!~ Claribel yanked her hard, slamming her back into the body where she belonged. ~Did you do that on purpose? Tell me!~
~Right. That’s it. We’re going.~
~There’s more where that came from.~
~Coins! I have coins! Lots and lots of them, thanks to some mines. What I also have is a deal. With you. Seven days, you said.~ Claribel marched towards her carriage, slapping her feet against the dusty ground. ~It’s true that I dislike having my body occupied by a stranger, but you are no longer a stranger. And yes, I still want you out, but I want you out properly. I wouldn’t recommend trying to cut one from Lady Una, but if we’re going to do it, we will at least go with a legendary sword.~
~I also want to know if I am really living in that book.~
Claribel scoffed. ~Just call it ‘Hannah’.~
Ari’s breath caught in her throat. Of what she could piece together from the crow’s visions – if they were to be believed at all – then Agent Hannah Temple was dead. The face she’d seen didn’t look much like Hannah’s, but Fabia hadn’t resembled Natty either. Someone had killed Agent Hannah Temple, for the revelation that they were characters in a book?
~Well? Are we following the plot?~
~And there are no sequels?~
~Never mind. Well, the book is full of inaccuracies, as we can ascertain from your knowledge upon arrival. Did it ever mention Marquis Valery? No? There you go then.~
~Everything,~ said Claribel, forming the gentlest frown on their forehead. ~Everything has to do with everything else. Susu, Levia, Ninus and Moracea: that is why you are here today, bearing my face. We are worshippers of the Fated One. We believe in the world as an ever-expanding tapestry. Each of us is a stitch placed after the one before, living to our fullest in order to make the picture as beautiful as we can for the Fated One’s consumption. It would not shock any of us to find that what we are making is a book instead of a tapestry. In fact, many holy texts use that very metaphor. It would therefore shock me to find that one of us could feel rage enough to kill your friend just because she revealed that we were but threads, players, characters for another being’s consumption. That does not feel like the whole story.~
Ari pondered upon moments that the crow hadn’t seen, and upon the trinkets that the crow had seen: lounging figures that it had mistaken for sleeping humans. Even through a crow’s eye, they resembled those who’d watched the secrets locked inside Lord Selvan and Lady Mona’s cellar. Everything has to do with everything else. Lord Selvan and Lady Mona: was that why she was here today, trying to latch on to an echo of purpose that had once been so clear and legible during all her previous missions?