Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In his dreams, he’s always running to her.

He has had this dream before, too many times to count (Inaccurate: thrice at the end of December, ten times in January when she didn’t meet him in Helligbrücke, seven in February, five in March, twice in the last month. Initial increase and subsequent decrease in frequency suggests relation to anxiety/potential insecurity regarding Vanja’s… well, everything.)

She’s always darting through a crowd on a snowy cobblestone lane in Minkja, just out of reach. The best is when his subconscious mind conjures glittering night, lanterns twinkling off stained glass and her sharp wicked laugh trailing in the air like smoke, daring him to catch her without piercing his hand on the thorns.

This version, though—the sky hard, flat, and pale as a white penny, fear like a chisel in her wild eyes, guilt and shame yoked to his back—this is the one closest to wretched memory. This one is the worst.

He needs to tell her he’s sorry. He doesn’t know what for. (A consistently shifting variable: For letting her go. For holding her back. For saying she’s beautiful, which she thinks is a trap. For thinking her guilty. For thinking her innocent. For asking about her mother. For chasing her to begin with.)

This time, he doesn’t know why until they’re at the staircase up to the viaduct, and he’s snagged her by the arm. I need to say I’m sorry, he pleads. She’s twisting like a fish on a line, only to go eerily still, staring back at him.

For what? she demands.

And the words spill out once more, so fresh he can still taste her skin on his lips: I love you, Vanja. And then: I’m so sorry.

The world shifts, smears with night. Vanja is a blur reaching for him—he knows the feel of her palm along his face like the road to his old hometown. He sees her mouth move, the sounds mere drips of ink touched to wet paper, diffusing into the dark.

The bed is uncomfortably warm when Emeric begins to wake.

The initial fracture through his sleep is the whisper of cinnamon and orange rind and roses; dreams never have a smell, but Vanja does. Her bed does. The lines they crossed together the night before do.

They waft through his teeth, igniting memories like incense. The pressure of her shaking fingertip drawing the circle into his hand. The signposts of shed clothing trailing to the bed. The intoxicating weight of her on his hips, her hair bleeding through his fingers as they moved this way for the first time like a dance, like a landslide, like a forge. He thought he might die in beauty and devastation, and gladly drew her to him.

But this morning warmth is—static. Wrong. Not radiating from Vanja, whose sleeping form is his landmark every dawn; this is omnipresent, almost oppressive beneath the blanket. The dissonance finally pries his eyes open.

He never knows how to explain the world without his spectacles, how it’s sometimes a relief for the world’s edges to soften and simplify for a bit, how he’s learned to read fogged lines and uncertain shapes to divine their nature from obscurity. (Theory: This is, at least in part, how he has managed not to bungle things too terribly with Vanja.)

Neither does he know how to explain why Vanja is nowhere in sight. There’s only a wasteland of empty linen divided by his outstretched arm.

When he lifts his hand to reach for his spectacles, a spot of red blooms against the pillow beneath it.

No, not red—copper.

His worst instincts surge. This is January all over again, this is the fight in Dänwik—

Emeric tamps those memories down by rote, then forces a quiet laugh.

Vanja must already be up, and this is her own crude joke, her calling card as a thief. He can perfectly picture her irresistible smirk as she tucked the red penny under his palm. Doubtless she’ll spend the rest of the day cracking jokes about stealing his virtue and the like, and he’ll pretend to be indignant and huffy, and they’ll both enjoy it tremendously.

His spectacles settle on his face, and the world too settles into clarity. The penny’s face affirms the culprit: She always leaves them crown-side up. It’s not the only culprit he spies. The unpleasant heat is coming from the funny little iron door left ajar in the chimney, presumably to keep him warm in her absence.

That’s how she operates, after all, and how she snuck into his heart like it was a window he forgot to lock; he simply woke up one day and found her already making herself at home. The hardest truth he knows is that kindness is a choice. To most people, cruelty comes easier, and Vanja carries the scars of that. Yet in a thousand ways, great and small, she chooses singular grace. She’ll stop for a frightened little girl, feed a hungry stray, push him out of his own claustrophobic head when he needs it, a compass rose among fickle windvanes. She might do it with a vulgarity on her tongue and a trick up her sleeve, but the dreadful part is, he thinks he likes it that way.

Then Emeric spots a small heap on the crate-turned-bedside table. The silver of a message mirror, the pewter of an amnesty token, a prefect courier token he’d given her in Rammelbeck, the vial of sedatives he entrusted to her…

It’s… odd.

(Not that odd if one factors in the clear connecting thread between all of them. Emeric, however, is electing to ignore it.)

It doesn’t have to mean anything. Vanja woke up before him, left—

He’s plunged abruptly back into Helligbrücke, reading and rereading the letter that said she wasn’t coming after all, telling himself uselessly it wasn’t the end, that this wasn’t about him—

Emeric stuffs those thoughts back where they came from. This isn’t January, this is different. They’ve been through too much in the last month to leave any room for doubt.

Instead, he pushes himself up, stretches as much as he can in the tiny lean-to, and tries not to wince at climbing back into yesterday’s breeches. The alternatives are the pair of breeches utterly demolished in the confrontation with Marthe Ros’s ghost, or the two pairs he never got a chance to wash while nursing Vanja through the aftermath. Maybe now with Vanja recovered and his case paperwork off to Glockenberg, it’s time to sort out his dire laundry situation.

He tells himself that that’s why her rucksack is missing. It waited like a loyal hound by the stool he’s haunted these last three days; he memorized the pattern of stitches and stray threads between Vanja’s bouts of delirium. He’s not certain when, or even if, to tell her how many times she cried out for her mother in her fever dreams.

But now the bag’s gone too.

Emeric adjusts his glasses, studying the room, mouth tightening as he compiles what he knows. Vanja left her calling card penny, which means she went on her own terms. She took her rucksack; motive unclear. Before she left, she removed some objects from her bag, all of which are connected to the prefects.

Motive… unclear.

Only a fool would pretend ignorance of what this looks like. But—this is Vanja. There’s always more to the story. He’s learned better than to assume he has all the pieces when it comes to her.

He feels the reasoning strain as he wrenches the assembled facts into innocuity.

Theory: Vanja got up early to wash her clothes, so they could dry in the May morning sun. She removed things from the rucksack to avoid spilling them in the water.

Supporting evidence: Red penny. (Unclear.) Pile on the bedstand. (Circumstantial.) Missing rucksack. (Circumstantial.) Missing Vanja. (Insufficient.)

Conclusion: Vanja’s left him—

No.

Conclusion: He should find where Vanja’s gone off to.

That is, for the moment, acceptable.

He pockets the penny and finishes dressing, a familiar stiff anxiety creeping into his ribs. It’s a quick walk around the back of the Ros brothers’ house, but when Emeric reaches the front door, he hesitates.

On the one hand, he’s spent the last month traveling with two of their sisters and courting one, and capped it off with a surprise visit to the family home for a wedding. Perhaps that’s enough to merit walking in without knocking.

On the other hand, Udo Ros looked ready to pop his head off like a cork before they left Hagendorn at the start of April. The wedding was cut short by the fake god who’d claimed Emeric, and whose cult slaughtered all of Udo’s lambs. And, crassly, Emeric may have spent a beautiful and lifechanging night with the girl he loves, but… he isn’t sure how soundproof the walls of the lean-to are. There is a nonzero chance that Udo and Jakob have a working idea of what transpired between him and their baby sister.

Considering part of Emeric is fixed on someday becoming their brother-in-law—a part of himself he staunchly refuses to process because he has been with Vanja for a sum total of two months—this requires some discretion.

He spends at least two minutes on the doorstep vacillating between knocking (no, too formal) or walking in (absolutely not, too presumptive) before Udo Ros yanks the door open (shit.)

“Are you coming in or not?” Udo grunts, as if he’s not bodily obstructing the doorway. Out of the corner of his eye, Emeric sees Jakob Ros tactfully draw the curtain back over the window.

“Er,” says Emeric. “I—I’m looking for Vanja?”

Udo’s eyes narrow like a portcullis winching down. “Why.”

“Saints and martyrs, at least feed the lad before the interrogation.” Jakob drags his brother back, then hands Emeric a rye roll. “We saved breakfast for you two. Is she meeting you here?”

Emeric does his best to refrain from wringing the roll until it reconstitutes into dough. “She wasn’t in when I woke up.” The brothers trade a look and he adds quickly, “I don’t suspect—that is, I’m sure she’s fine, she left a penny behind as a joke.”

The brothers Ros only trade another near-identical look.

Emeric elects to ignore that as well. “Is there a place people typically use for laundry nearby? Her rucksack’s gone too—” oh damn everything, he knows how that sounds, but it’s different this time—“so I thought I’d start there.”

Jakob’s eyebrows lift. “Most people use the stream outside, on the bank with the flat rocks. But…” His gaze darts to a hutch across the room. There’s a waxy bar of launderer’s soap on a shelf, notably dry.

“Vanja might be off helping one of the neighbors.” Udo’s tone has shifted. Consolatory? That seems improbable. “She blames herself for all this mess.”

“Right.” Emeric ducks his head. “If you see her, would you please…” What, exactly? Ask her where she’s been? Keep her in one place until he can catch up? “…let her know I’m looking,” he croaks. Then he spots an empty bedroll by the far wall. He frowns. “Proctor Kirkling’s gone too?”

“Caught a ride to Glockenberg before dawn with Helga,” Udo answers, and Emeric doesn’t know if it’s better or worse that it doesn’t involve Vanja. “Said she ought to be back tonight.”

“Right,” Emeric says, acutely aware he’s repeating himself, but his brain is struggling to meet the sudden demand for small talk as anxiety strangles the supply lines. “I’ll. Well. Thank you for breakfast.”

He finds the place Jakob described downstream. A few villagers are scrubbing at stained linens against the rocks, but Vanja is not among them. None of them have seen her either. One recommends to check the longhouses, another to ask the innkeeper, a third to see if she’s back at the stave church to press Leni for answers.

Vanja did the last one yesterday and didn’t seem inclined to return. He picks at the rye roll as he walks to the longhouses instead, thinking of the story of the lost children who tried to leave themselves a trail of breadcrumbs in the woods, and only fed beasts in the end.

Vanja is not in the longhouses. She is not at the inn, nor does the innkeeper know where she’s gone. Nor is she at the baker’s, the smith’s, the weaver’s, nowhere. The stave church is dark when he passes.

Emeric is running out of excuses for where she might take all—most—of her belongings. He is also running out of bread.

He forces himself to sit in the town square to eat the rest of the roll and down a flask of water. It sits in his stomach like a peach pit, his jaw aching.

He doesn’t have the full story.

This is Vanja. Vanja.

Vanja, who summoned one Low God, revived another, and cut her own mother off from their world, all to save him. Who he still owes a better I love you than the clumsy mumble against her throat last night, if she was even awake to hear it. Who may not have said the words out loud herself, but—but he thought—hiding in the corner of her smile, in the way she said his name, he thought he’d found it there—

Emeric stands abruptly, refills his flask from the stream, and walks into the woods.

He calls for the Briar Hag. She does not answer; it was a long shot anyway. He’s not sure if Vanja’s aware of how she seems to attract gods and monsters, how they pay her heed in a way most mortals, even prefects, rarely receive. With the interloping Scarlet Maiden gone, though, their business with the Hag is concluded.

He crosses one more way to find Vanja off the list, tries not to dwell on how few options are left, and heads for Boderad’s Gorge.

Vanja’s still processing everything that happened with her mother. Maybe she wants to revisit the site where Marthe Ros fell for the last time.

Maybe he wants to hold out for the handful of hours it’ll take to hike there and back. Let himself believe this is anything but the worst, most obvious answer.

Each footfall through the beech and hawthorn sows a question as Emeric makes his way to the gorge. Did he do something wrong last night? Did she regret it, being with him? Was it—was it bad, and she didn’t know how to tell him?

I love you, Vanja. I’m so sorry.

What if that was too sudden, too fast? What if she wasn’t ready to say it back, and—

An old, old memory of Hubert Klemens flaps a hand. You’ll drown in a sea of what-ifs, he always chided. Focus on what is.

The what-is is worse. Emeric does his best to drown them both.

When he reaches the bridge spanning the gorge, it’s empty. Of course it is. Far downriver below, he sees Ilsza of the Rivers strolling the waters like a road, but Vanja isn’t with the revived Low God either. The lights of Boderad’s hellhound eyes stare up from the Kronenkessl, unblinking and fixed on him. The last meal it had was the lantern housing Marthe Ros’s ghost.

Centuries earlier, it feasted well on fools vying for the bridal crown lost below the waterfall. Something tells Emeric that one bitter ghost did not sate its hunger.

From here he can see the deserted sacrificial bridge, the bank of the pool where Vanja was willing to give the most vulnerable part of herself just to save him, once again—was that it? Did she realize he needed her more than she needed him, and cut the deadweight loose—

In the depths of the Kronenkessl’s dark waters, he sees a dim wink of coronal gold.

Before he knows it, he’s backing away toward the footpath that led him here.

More what-ifs spin from his imagination as he winds his return to Hagendorn. Vanja wanted to visit her godmothers after being cut off from them for so long. Vanja went to Helga with a question about something they did last night. Vanja wanted to do something illegal, and even though odds are he’d silently approve, she left behind anything he could use to track her so he’d have plausible deniability.

Vanja was up to something he couldn’t even comprehend, and she’ll be waiting for him to get back, laughing at the fool who went all the way up to the gorge looking for her instead of sensibly occupying himself in town.

It’s well into the afternoon when he numbly sets foot back in Hagendorn. He ought to be hungry, but the calcified knot in his stomach grants no quarter.

Vanja is not waiting for him.

He marches to the stave church, past the tanner standing guard. Leni is huddled inside, wincing at the daylight as he throws the doors open. “Where is she?” he demands. “What did you say to her?”

She gapes up at him. A beatific smile blooms over her face. “The false prophet is gone?” she breathes, rhapsodic.

“What did you say to her?”

Leni only lifts her face to the rafters, eyelids gliding shut. “Thanks be to the Scarlet Maiden, by whose grace this ground be cleansed…”

“Conrad.”

Emeric whips around. Proctor Kirkling stands in the doorway, the shadows masking her expression. She’s returned from Glockenberg.

His voice breaks as he scrapes out, “Vanja’s gone.”

That impossible consolation reappears, this time in the proctor. “I know.” After a moment she gestures. “We need to speak privately.”

A hornet’s nest of theory and suspicion roars to life in his skull as he follows Kirkling to the Ros brothers’ home. Did Vanja go with her this morning? Was there an issue with Prince Ludwig? Did she leave the penny just to say she was all right?

Where is she?

Where is she?

Why would she—how could she just—?

Udo and Jakob are speaking at the kitchen table in low, hushed voices when Kirkling leads Emeric inside. “We’ll be outside,” Jakob tells Kirkling as they pass, with an uncurious resignation that tells Emeric they already know what’s coming. Something about the quiet in the house feels as stifling as the heat of the morning once the door shuts behind them.

“Sit.” Kirkling pulls a stool up to the table.

Emeric shakes his head, hands wringing. “I’d rather—”

“I think you should sit down,” she says in a tone that isn’t a warning so much as a terminal diagnosis.

This is when Emeric allows himself, finally, to consider his worst instincts without reservation.

He thinks of the trail he’s walked all around Hagendorn today, searching for Vanja; he wonders if this is what it feels like, to look back and see even the meager crumbs of hope have been stolen away.

It turns out Kirkling is right. He needs to sit down.

He folds himself into a chair and rattles out, “Why did you go to Glockenberg?”

If a civilian asked Hubert what made Elske Kirkling an exceptional prefect while she was active, he would list off standard traits such as a keen eye for details, impeccable intuition, and a sense of justice you could build a fortress on. But when Emeric had asked, Hubert included one more detail; perhaps he found it unseemly for the average questioner.

“Never play cards against Elske,” Hubert laughed. “Face like a blank slate. She’ll clean out your coin purse faster than a landlord.”

Now, Emeric wishes he could see any sign, any at all, that Kirkling’s about to tell a lie.

Kirkling draws a breath and meets his eyes. Her voice is carefully level, like he’s a wild animal caught in a snare. “I was up late last night at the May-Saint Feast. On my way back I saw Miss Ros—”

He can feel the rope closing. “Was she with anyone?”

“Conrad—”

“Did she seem—alert? Aware of what she was doing?” He’s grasping for crumbs, he knows, for the gods’ sakes she left her penny but maybe he missed something—

“She was alone,” Kirkling answers, “seemingly of sound mind, but heading toward the road with her rucksack.”

Emeric can feel Vanja’s hand on his face in the night, see her mouthing something, the preamble to oblivion—

“I tried to stop her, but… by the time I caught up, she was gone.”

Villanelle. That was the shape of her lips. He’d started to wake and she used the sedative pills to make sure he…

He couldn’t follow.

“I went to Glockenberg this morning to try to intercept your paperwork,” Kirkling is saying, like that matters at all. When he stares at her, uncomprehending, she winces. “Conrad… your Finding declares her innocent.”

And there it is. The snare pulls tight.

He said it himself yesterday: That’s it. You’re in the clear. He told her the paperwork would be sent off that afternoon.

He told her all this mess—her cult, her mother’s ghost, the damage to Hagendorn—wouldn’t have a single consequence for her. He’d written her way out himself.

She used him.

Vanja got exactly what she wanted from him; she took the lie—gods, she took it all the way to their bed. She was his first—first everything—and he’d been nothing to her but a way out.

No, less than that.

Something to leave behind.

Kirkling’s still going. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t able to reach Glockenberg in time, the paperwork was already on its way to Helligbrücke. I never meant to put you in this position. This isn’t the test of impartiality I thought it would be.”

A test of—Emeric snaps, “Because now I have to charge her.”

That perfect card face isn’t cracking. “Because you can’t, Conrad. Your Finding—”

“I have new evidence,” he rasps, mortified by the wet choke in his voice. His spectacle lenses are beginning to speckle and fog. He can’t feel the tears through the fire searing over his face.

“Do you?” Kirkling asks. “The case you prepared shows Miss Ros was not complicit.”

“I was misled.”

“About the facts of the case?” Kirkling pushes. “Or about the nature of your personal relationship?”

He has no answer for that.

“I wanted you to at least have time to reassess, but as your proctor…” Kirkling’s expression fractures, just for a moment. “I believe Miss Ros was a victim of her mother, no more and no less. Your first Finding was correct, and met our standard of duty. You are far too good a prefect to change it solely because your courtship ended.”

No, that’s wrong, this isn’t the end—

He’s in Helligbrücke, holding her letter; he’s back in Dänwik, wondering if she’s about to walk away because he fouled it all up; he’s staring into the Kronenkessl at the edge of the gorge, wondering what killed all those other fools first, drowning in the torrent or being torn to pieces for someone else’s desire—

Vanja is gone.

He swore that if she wanted him to find her, he would.

And she doesn’t.

The red penny isn’t a cruel joke or a vague reassurance, it’s her checkmate in a long, cold game. She only leaves them at the scene of a crime.

She wants him to know it was her, all her.

And even now, he can still see the crook of her grin, still taste her skin on his lips, every memory sawing down his veins. Even now he still wants them, her, more.

Emeric doesn’t know he’s in motion until he’s pushed through the door, striding toward the bridge. His lungs are burning, Kirkling is calling after him—the sunlight shatters too bright on the water, the air catches coldly on tracks down his cheeks—

He tears the penny from his pocket and hurls it into the stream.

Staggers to a halt.

Then—

Lurches into a run, splashing into the water, falling to his hands and knees, what a damned fool he is, how could he throw her penny away, how could he be such a fool, how could she, how could she, how could she—

She doesn’t want him to find her. She doesn’t want him to chase her.

She doesn’t want him.

If you’ll have me—

She won’t.

That night, in his dream, he’s still running, running, running, always after her.

Every time, it ends with him lost in the cold and the thorns, chasing her laugh, always out of reach.

Chapter Text

In her dreams, she’s drowning.

It starts in a river, battered by white water and the black rocks that jut from the froth. Her feet never find the bottom, and the banks race by too swift to reach, too far away. Even if she kicks and fights, the river only grows wider, the shore more distant, the crest and swell of current into only greater torrents—

And that is when her enemy becomes an ocean. Her mouth is full of salt, her eyes are full of brine; there is no land in sight. She tries to swim back the way she came, but the tide drags her further and further. Sometimes it’s by day, the waves blinding bright as quicksilver. Sometimes it’s by night, in a sea like currant wine.

It’s always, always endless.

In every dream, she swims until her arms and legs give out, and in her last thrashing moments, she wonders if this is how it’s always going to be, or if she’ll ever find solid ground.

Vanja tells herself it’s because the Wild Hunt sleeps at the edge of the Night Sea. (Ironically, during the day.) They shelter beside a cold beach hemming a dark forest, the bristling firs thick enough to block out the sun in the glades, and Vanja knows once she leaves the Hunt, she will never find this place again. To her, it feels not unlike the cottage she shared with Death and Fortune as a little girl, both drawn from the mortal world and withdrawn from it.

It’s been a cold kind of relief, that detachment. This will be her final night with the Hunt, one more blur of sky and song, hoof and chase, and it mostly only reminds her of Emeric when she notices one more thing he would hate about this. Two weeks is enough to scab over the memory of how his eyes always softened to meet hers. To staunch the open vein of every way he’d held her, touched her, set her ablaze. To let scar tissue fill in the hollows of her heart, where once had been the peace and safety she’d felt in his arms.

Two weeks has bought her wounds the distance they need to breathe. But when she returns to her world… Vanja knows she will see him in everything.

As it is, she’s just grateful no juniper grows here.

She chose this, she reminds herself as she sits at the edge of the grove. She chose this heartbreak for both of them. Or maybe it had been waiting all along, and she’d finally faced the truth: that the only way out was a price she couldn’t let Emeric pay. Their time together has always been stolen, never truly theirs.

His future was either with her, or with the prefects; they’d only ever been in denial of that fork in the road. And he would have chosen her, if she’d let him. He would have chosen wrong.

She has to believe in her bones that he would have chosen wrong.

Her wretched mind, though, makes pilgrimage again and again to a winter day in Minkja. He’d kissed her at the Gambler’s Altar, and she’d believed it a trap, drawn a golden knife on him to cut her way free. And some foolish part of her needed it to be a trap, a lie, because the thought that she mattered to someone was too frightening to bear.

Vanja can’t help wondering if it was that same foolishness that drove her from their bed.

Tomorrow, it won’t matter anymore. Doubtless Emeric has been ready to call her before the Court of the Low Gods from the moment he saw her penny on the pillow, and if she regrets one thing—

(One thing? One thing?)

—it’s that she had to deny his closure for the two weeks of her debt to Brunne. After tonight, whatever protection the Wild Hunt has afforded her will end.

Little surprise, then, that she cannot sleep.

Instead, she watches the dark waves dash themselves to pieces against the sand.

Footsteps crunch deliberately toward her; spirits and gods rarely make noises they don’t intend. “God Daughter.”

“Brunne.” Technically, ‘the Huntress’ is the rest of the Low God’s title, but Vanja likes to think that after two weeks, they’re on a first-name basis.

“Tonight is your final ride with us.” The ground trembles a bit as Brunne sits beside Vanja, raising a brief flurry of pine needles and sand. For a moment they both gaze out at the waves, the unbroken line of the horizon. Then Brunne says, “God Daughter, I think you were running from something when you decided to settle your debt. For your sake, I would that it had been more gladly paid.”

The words are thorns in Vanja’s throat, tearing even as they grow too quickly to keep caged behind her teeth. “I—” she falters, “I think—I may have made a terrible mistake. I didn’t see another way, I still don’t, but…”

Brunne draws her long tumult of warm brown hair over a shoulder and begins picking out pine needles. She admits, “It has been a very long time since I was mortal, God Daughter. But still I remember that some problems have no good answers. Will you be able to put it to rights when you return?”

“No. I… I don’t think I can.”

Can? Or should?

“Hm.” Brunne pulls at a stubborn twig, but offers nothing more.

Vanja has to draw a saw-toothed breath before she can cut to the heart of her grief: “I’m scared that—that no matter what I do—I always end up hurting someone.”

“Then,” Brunne says, plucking out a dried leaf, “cease.” Vanja stares at her, almost angry, and the Huntress gives a shrug that somehow manages to flex one immense bicep. “Even if you had no good answers, the harm is still by your hand, is it not? You know which of your actions led you to such a choice. If you wish to stop causing harm, your actions must change.”

“Easy for a god to say,” Vanja spits, because it is easier than thinking Brunne right.

Brunne only tilts her head. “Perhaps. I cannot choose to change myself; I am what your world believes of me. Still, this I know: The same accident happens but once. After that, negligence becomes a choice of its own.”

Vanja has no answer for that.

She was trapped, after all. If she’d stayed, she would forever be a stone around Emeric’s neck. The roads before them were incompatible.

But perhaps—she could have stayed at least one night, just to say she loved him too much to drag him under with her. Or she could have pushed him harder, sooner, made him face their reality, so they could have planned a gentler end together.

Or maybe she could have let him choose her after all, and strung that guilt around her own throat. Maybe that’s why she keeps dreaming of the sea. The only way she knows to reach solid land is to sink to the bottom.

Vanja roughly scrubs the hot saltwater carving down her face. “Well,” she rasps, “I don’t think I’ll get the chance no matter what. I’ll be called to the Godly Courts once I’m free of my debt to the Wild Hunt.”

What Vanja does not say is: she needs to see the loathing on Emeric’s face. To know that door is closed. She needs it the way she needed to put a knife to his throat when he made the mistake of wanting her.

Brunne pauses, sets down her nutmeg locks. “God Daughter… the Hunt answers to the court. If you had been called, you would know.”

That—

That can’t be right.

Vanja stares at a wave as it shatters on a rock, black stone and white froth, far away.

He needs to convict her to close the case. To become a prefect.

He’s supposed to need her.

Another wave smashes into plumes of froth.

After a long, stiff quiet, Brunne rises to her feet, dusting off the sand and pine needles. “Get some sleep,” she advises. “And think on where you would like us to leave you at dawn.”

Three weeks later, Vanja has still not been summoned to face trial.

And so she has come to Helligbrücke to see why.

And to see Emeric.

And to see if this means, somehow, she hasn’t blighted this too. If by some impossible, infuriating miracle, there is still a chance for—them. Maybe she can explain how her mother’s words have haunted her, how everything she touches falls to ruin, how amputation was the only way to stop her rot from reaching him.

Maybe it’ll be like when they fought in Dänwik, or when he found her in Hagendorn, or after she drew the knife on him at the Gambler’s Altar. He’ll understand. He’ll remind her, once again, that she’s more than the worst of her scars, the worst of her memories, the worst of her choices. His letter is still carefully folded in the notebook he made her: he will choose her every time.

He isn’t supposed to.

But maybe he can, one more time.

Helligbrücke isn’t quite what Vanja expected. As the capital of the Free Imperial State of Brymling, it sprawls over both sides of the Weisra river only a few miles short of where that river joins the Night Sea, lending a slight brine tang to the breeze. And as a city that grew from the headquarters of the Order of Prefects of the Godly Courts, she anticipated a lot of somber grays, right angles, and a general air of pretentiousness. Instead, apart from a robust temple district dominated by an extremely robust cathedral for Justice, it’s rife with the crooked cobblestone lanes, narrow half-timbered houses, and frenetic clustered markets of any respectable imperial municipality.

Vanja got one thing right, at least, while she was with the Wild Hunt: she sees Emeric everywhere.

A bakery window flaunts the pastries they shared in Rammelbeck. Round-lensed spectacles, just like his, glint on the face of a passing scribe. Worst of all: the prefect uniforms at every turn. Most are on people too young to be anything but cadets, but the standard issue is similar enough to a full initiate’s that every head of short, dark hair sends a jolt through Vanja’s gut.

Already the powder on her face is congealing to a paste from sweat as she trudges over one of Helligbrücke’s many bridges, wandering just to get her bearings for the moment. The early June sun isn’t doing her any favors either, and the hat that’s supposed to shade her brow just traps heat in the braids she’s stuffed beneath it. It’s not much of a disguise, but it ought to be enough to buy her time to hide if Emeric crosses her path. Or Kirkling. Or Vikram, or Mathilde—and Ghendt and Dursyn from Rammelbeck—

Vanja is slowly realizing this plan could have benefited from another hour in the oven.

Then a gaggle of cadets stroll past. Vanja catches, “…Conrad’s initiation” from the conversation, and immediately discards any lingering reservations.

The conversation continues as she slips into the ambient foot traffic behind them. “I mean,” one cadet grumbles, “he’s a bit of a prick.”

Before Vanja can engineer a way to push the cadet off the bridge, one of his classmates slugs him in the shoulder. “You’re a prick. And if you were about to become the youngest prefect in history, you’d be an even bigger prick about it. We’re going to the ceremony this afternoon and that’s final.”

The first cadet sighs dramatically. “I suppose the cathedral’s on the way to dinner anyway. You’re buying.”

It does not take a masterstroke for Vanja to deduce that Emeric’s initiation will be held at the cathedral of Justice, patron of the prefects. As she starts winding her way towards the telltale spires of the temple district, what she struggles to deduce is how it’s happening. Again: To pass his second initiation, Emeric needed to complete his Finding, his first official case as a prefect.

And to complete his Finding, he needed to charge her as an accomplice to her mother’s profane fraud.

Right?

Let him pass his Finding and move on. It was the one thing Vanja had asked of Kirkling— Kirkling, who had already intercepted his paperwork declaring her innocent; she’d been building her own case against Vanja the whole time. Kirkling had said it herself, to the point of obsession: Only Emeric’s love had protected her this long. And Vanja broke that beyond repair.

Right?

Motion flickers at the edge of her sight. In a shop window, a plank sign sways against the glass, newly flipped to CLOSED. Behind it Vanja sees figures weaving around tables bearing neat arrays of awls and thread, stacks of blank and printed parchment, pots of glue. The letters above the door read ANSELM’S • Quality Printing, Book Binding, & Restoration.

That name flips a memory over: Emeric holding her one awful afternoon in Rammelbeck, telling her about his family after she’d foundered on the discovery of her own. She named it Anselm’s, after my father…

Vanja doesn’t realize she’s stopped until someone collides with her back with a startled oof. “Oh—I apologize,” a familiar low voice sputters, “pardon me—”

Her heart jumps at another point of familiarity: the black prefect uniform coat slung over one shoulder, its white-and-black trim marking the owner as a research officer for the prefects. She tugs the brim of her hat down and mumbles something as Vikram Mistry, Emeric’s closest friend in the prefects, veers towards Anselm’s. A bell clangs accusingly over the door. It swings open to let out a brief procession of brunettes: two teen girls, one somber-faced boy, and finally an older woman with steel streaks in her hair, all dressed up for the occasion.

Hester. Elieze. Lukas. Clara. Vanja still remembers their names. They all look like him. They’re all just as he told her. Even his mother smiles like him as she embraces Vikram. The only mercy is that the door closes after her; Emeric isn’t there.

Vanja hurries away before her stare turns into a liability. An alleyway offers her refuge until the whole group passes, also bearing toward the temple district.

For a horrible moment, she can imagine herself among them, and it hurts so much she might choke on it. If she’d stayed that night, if she’d come here with him after, if she’d let him introduce her to his family and his life here and let him make a place for her—that could have been her life. In another story, she’d belong with them.

But she doesn’t.

She chose to spare him the ruin that followed her. She chose to save him. And that was the right choice to make.

Wasn’t it?

Vanja tells herself she’s staying in the alleyway to give Emeric’s family space. She tells herself that for five minutes, then ten minutes more, just to be sure. Just until she can breathe again.

When she makes it to the temple district, she finds a busy broad plaza, busier in front of Justice’s cathedral. People trickle in and out of the side doors, but the wide paved plateau before the massive main double doors is completely clear, every broad stair cordoned off and monitored by prefect cadets.

A chill runs down Vanja’s spine. She never asked Emeric how, precisely, the second initiation was supposed to unfold, but this looks an awful lot like they’re keeping the area open for the gathering of a court.

Then—this is it. This is what he’s been waiting for, why it’s taken so long. The Finding will happen here. Today. He’ll summon the Court of the Low Gods and convict her before an audience.

And then it’ll be over once and for all.

Vanja’s chest tightens. She could run—but the summons will come no matter what. She could ask Death or Fortune for help—but they’re Low Gods too, they can hardly spare her from their justice.

So the only option left is to face what’s coming, and try to do it with dignity.

Just as she has this thought, a bead of powder-thickened sweat rolls off her jaw and lands in a beige splatter on her drab mold-blue coat.

Vanja makes an executive decision: If she’s going to face Emeric today, she’s not doing it with this clownish disguise powder on. But… she sneaks a look around the plaza. The Conrad family is being led to seats in the raised area before the cathedral. Vikram is still with them—and his partner Mathilde has also shown up. Two people who will know her on sight, and arrest her accordingly.

Distance, then, and safety in numbers. Vanja carefully meanders through the growing crowd until she reaches a shrine on the far side of the temple square. Then she frees a rag and a water flask from her rucksack, mops her powders off, and pulls her hat down even lower over her brow. When she returns, she maneuvers herself so a tall man’s head is blocking Vikram and Mathilde’s view of her, and hopes that will be enough to stay unnoticed until court is called.

It’s hard not to feel increasingly trapped as more bodies fill the plaza. Minutes tick by with the sun beating down, and sweat trickles down the back of Vanja’s neck, her stomach coagulating into a knot. She can feel the twinge of her pulse gradually quickening, a cold numbness spreading up from her fingertips.

She’s going to see him again.

And he’s going to hate her.

And then this will all be over.

The bells of Justice’s cathedrals suddenly break into earsplitting song. A hush falls over the crowd. The double doors yawn open, exhaling a small cluster of people in very seasonally impractical full-length black robes.

And—there he is. There he is, and she doesn’t know if he looks paler, more haggard than before, or if she just needs him to. He’s too far away for her to scour for hints; even if she gambled pushing closer, her sight is wavering with tears.

One of the black-robed figures speaks into a charm enchanted to project his voice over the square, droning on about history and duty. Vanja can barely follow it over the aching roar of breath forcing through her nose, the staccato thrash of her pulse, the hypnotic blur of Emeric’s distant face. The current has her; the river is sweeping her toward the sea.

Then three words break through: “…passed his Finding.”

The world goes quiet for a beat, and Vanja wonders if the Godly Court has been summoned abruptly, only for that dry voice to fade back in. He’s saying something about service and Emeric answering a higher calling and other pig shit. Except now it’s mixed with ‘welcome to our ranks.’

Passed. Passed.

That can’t be right.

The man finally shuts up. He and the other black-robed figures move to flank Emeric, lifting their hands. A throb of silver light sweeps through the plaza, and Justice herself appears behind them, towering nearly as tall as her own cathedral. She looks the same as she did in Minkja, lanterns for eyes burning in a stark bare human skull, a cascade of shifting parchment for her garb. She lifts her staff, touches the tip to the back of Emeric’s neck.

A jolt rocks him. He takes only one step forward, then steadies himself, straightening obstinately. His hand twitches, and Vanja thinks she catches a tweak of his shoulder.

Of course—the binding mark on his back has been completed.

Justice thunders, “Serve in my name with wisdom, honor, and compassion, Emeric Conrad, sign of the Lantern, Journeyman Prefect of the Godly Courts.”

The Low God vanishes in a flurry of parchment and lantern flame. A flood of cheers and applause bursts from the crowd, drowning out all else as the man who spoke before lifts Emeric’s fist in triumph.

It’s done, then.

It’s done, and she’s still here.

And he’s up there, and he’s a full prefect now, and it all happened…without her.

The throngs start breaking up as Emeric’s family and friends swarm him, laughing and throwing their arms around him and mussing his hair. Vanja can’t make herself move, petrified.

He did it without her. Closed the case without her. Passed his Finding, made it through the initiation, and here he is, surrounded by loved ones and respected peers, saints and martyrs even Kirkling is looking on like a proud mentor, and he’s fine.

More than fine.

Without her, he’s—flourishing. He’s better.

You chose this, a bitter part of her reiterates. You cut him free. Of course he’s thriving without you to hold him back.

Far away and long ago, she hears her mother saying, Everything you touch, you ruin.

And all too raw, Vanja hears Brunne the Huntress’s words: The same accident happens but once.

Thirteenth child of a thirteenth child. Her mother had insisted that made her ill luck, walking disaster, born cursed.

What if she was right?

What if there’s a reason this keeps happening, not just awful coincidence but a measurable pattern?

What if, from her first breath, she’s been—cursed?

The moment Vanja thinks it, it’s as if a boulder has been rolled off her back. A curse doesn’t absolve her of the worst of her choices, but maybe it explains why she keeps being forced into them.

And more importantly, a curse is breakable.

If it means breaking this cycle, if it means she’ll stop hurting the people she loves, then she’ll do whatever it takes.

Abruptly, Vanja realizes enough onlookers have cleared out that the view from Justice’s cathedral is completely unobstructed. She forces herself to turn away lazily, as if she’d just been standing there mulling over what to make for dinner, and starts strolling away.

But as she does, she can’t shake the feeling of a stare locked on her back.

She fights the urge to check. And then she recalls Emeric’s spectacles, which allow him to see a number of enchantments and supernatural ties, including her own very particular marks from Death and Fortune.

If he’s spotted her—

Vanja glances over a shoulder. To her relief, Emeric’s engrossed in conversation with his mother.

But she hasn’t escaped completely unnoticed.

Mathilde Richter is gazing across the square, directly at her.

Vanja doesn’t stop, doesn’t let herself even slow, just keeps meandering away, fists clenched with iron control. The feeling of being watched doesn’t fade until Vanja’s rounded a corner. Even then, she holds her breath and waits for the sound of footfalls, the sight of a long shadow approaching—and none comes. Mathilde must have bought her disguise after all.

Vanja takes a moment to just lean against the wall and breathe. There may be a way out for her. She’s broken curses before and she can do it again.

And then maybe, maybe, if this poison burns off, if the ghosts can be exorcised… maybe she can try to let someone else in.

That night, when the river casts her into the sea, after her limbs burn and falter from the long fight, but before her head slips beneath the waves—she sees it.

For the first time, in her dreams, Vanja sees land.

Chapter Text

The problem, Emeric Conrad decides, isn’t that he’s had two unpleasant surprises today; unpleasant or not, surprises usually mean puzzles. Puzzles mean distractions.

Being back in Dänwik means he is in dire need of distractions.

The problem, Emeric Conrad decides, is that this surprise is Dieter Ros.

Because of course it is.

Strained lute notes waft through the stiflingly hot, pointlessly grand dining room of Prince-Elector Ludwig von Wälft’s hunting lodge. No, not the dining room, a dining room. Emeric’s fairly certain he ate in a different one the last time Ludwig invited him for dinner back in April. This one is just as lavish, but a solid wall of open windows affords a splendid, sweeping view of the shore of Wälftsee, Dänwik’s crystalline lake, glittering in the last few hours before sunset.

It is somewhat soured by the fact that Emeric can’t look at it, because Vanja’s older brother is planted in the middle of the panorama, staring daggers while strumming the lute like it owes him money.

It doesn’t even make sense. The last time he’d seen Dieter, they were on decent enough terms, considering the ghost of Dieter’s mother was trying to sacrifice Emeric and make herself into a god. And considering Dieter’s little sister swindled an acquittal from Emeric, took his virginity, then rolled out of their bed and ran. Really, on the balance, Emeric ought to be the one nursing a grudge like a bone stuck in his throat.

Unless…

It’s mid-July. Plenty of time for Vanja to go back to her family and spin some lie about why she’s alone.

Or worse, tell them the truth—the one Emeric, on some level, needs to believe he’s still missing.

Maybe Dieter knows something Emeric doesn’t.

“My boy?”

Emeric realizes he’s neglecting his host. And even though ‘my boy’ is not the address he’d prefer for a journeyman prefect—gods, how odd that sounds—he has a very specific appearance to keep up. “Apologies, sir. I was… overtaken by the splendor.”

A wide smile breaks over Prince Ludwig’s face, one that reaches his eyes only in a little gleam of triumph. “Rather pleasant little cottage, isn’t it? And a sight better than the family estate in Lüdz, no shrieking brats getting in my way. I was asking what business brings you back to Dänwik.”

For a moment, Emeric remembers—everything. Him and Vanja cracking up as they tried to kiss in a moving carriage their first day here. The shameful weight of her, bloody and wounded in his arms, as he staggered away from the Library of the Divine. The ribbons he’d bought for her like a lovesick little fool.

Even now he sees her glaring out from her brother’s face, spitefully plucking out a tune.

He’s tense, almost itchy; he wants to throw his plate out the window and wring Dieter for answers, Ludwig be damned. That itch surges through his blood, stale and familiar. This plague of anger has haunted him for… he doesn’t know how long.

(He does.)

Emeric takes a long drink of water. Focus, Prefect Conrad, he orders himself. You’re on the job.

“Your invitation yesterday was actually quite timely,” he tells the prinz-wahl, who all but preens on the spot. “I intended to consult with you while I was here, as the local expert on the preservation of holy relics. I’m tracking one that was recently stolen and rumored to be brought to Dänwik for sale.”

Considering the last relic theft in Dänwik was, in fact, orchestrated by Ludwig himself, ‘expert’ is perhaps a little on the nose. They’re both politely ignoring that for now.

Prince Ludwig drums his fingers on the table. “How dreadful. I hadn’t heard. What was taken?”

“The mirror of Saint Frieda,” Emeric answers blandly, spearing a buttery flake of trout fillet on his sterling fork.

Lines frame Ludwig’s lips as they tighten. “From the Aschelin Tomb?”

“That’s the one.” Emeric knows the weight of the Aschelin name; their royal house has supplied four of the last seven Blessed Emperors, including the current Blessed Empress. Empress Frieda even took her ancestral saint as a regnal name upon consecration to the throne. “House Aschelin of course requested this matter be handled with… discretion. They weren’t terribly forthcoming about the circumstances of the robbery, but they did say the mirror would be priceless after considerable restoration. And as custodian of Saint Willehalm’s goblet, I thought you might be familiar with any local artisans up to the task.”

Emeric can see the arithmetic and machinery behind Ludwig’s eyes. The houses of the princeps-electors stay in power through an overwrought ecosystem of treachery, ambition, and gamesmanship. The lost relic of the Blessed Empress’s saintly namesake affords a veritable wealth of potential exploits, should it come into the possession of House Wälft. Ludwig could quietly auction it off to one of House Aschelin’s many rivals. He could hold it hostage in exchange for a favor. He could even attempt the same gambit he’d made with the goblet: openly keeping it as a trophy, knowing as a holy relic, the process of reclaiming it is much slower.

In fact, the only meaningful complication for House Wälft would be that Prince Ludwig’s larcenous history with relics puts him at the top of the suspect list. It’s a history they both know Emeric is very, very familiar with.

The prinz jerkily dabs a napkin to his lips, scooting his chair back. “I, er. I’ve a list of just such restorationists. Let me track down my steward and have him make a copy for you.”

He hurries out of the dining room. Emeric leans away from the table, tugging at his collar. There’s a faint breeze blowing off the lake, but a long stretch of hot July days has followed him east into the principality of Lüdheid. Every landmark he passes—the distant swell of Broken Peak, the crossroads leading to Hagendorn, the roadhouses they slept at—seems to make the air all the more suffocating.

It takes a moment for him to recognize the shift in melody from Dieter Ros: the forlorn sway of The Red Maid of the River. Startled, Emeric finally looks at him.

The song dwindles with a twang as Dieter’s fingers still. A dreadfully awkward pause percolates between them. Emeric turns over every permutation of a question, ransacking his brain for one that will weather the broadest spectrum of answers, he’s running out of time before Ludwig returns—

“How is—” he blurts out just as Dieter asks, “Where’s Vanja?”

They’re briefly locked in a bewildered standoff. Then, once again, they both blurt out an answer, this time in near-unison:

“I don’t know.”

THREE WEEKS EARLIER

The problem, Emeric Conrad decides, is that he’s angry all the time.

And there’s never a good reason. He’s angry when he misses a button on his shirt. He’s angry when he miscounts the pages he’s binding for his next journal and has to start over again. He’s angry when the rosebushes begin blooming outside the dormitories for journey-year prefects.

(There’s a reason. It’s just never a good one.)

He’s too angry for someone who just became the youngest prefect in history, and now Kirkling has taken it upon herself to handle him. His workload has mysteriously lightened to paperwork and the occasional case consultation to spice things up, all requested through Kirkling.

That’s Emeric’s best guess for why he’s been called to this meeting with her, Yeshe Ghendt, Jander Dursyn, and a smarmy-faced junior prefect Emeric’s never met and dislikes on principle.

(The principle is: He’s somehow ganglier than Emeric, inhabiting a shape of human that seems to exist only as a gauntlet slapped in the face of nature.)

“Not like you to be late,” Prefect Dursyn observes coolly as Emeric takes in the meeting room from the doorway.

He knows he’s late. He left his quarters just as the hour bells were ringing, and the dorms are on the other side of the First Office complex so he should have left sooner, and it’s rude to make them wait on him when all this reeks of a charity assignment.

He bristles anyway, opens his mouth to snap off a retort—

“My fault,” Kirkling interjects. “I didn’t pass your request along until this morning.”

It’s a blatant lie, the sort Kirkling is telling more and more frequently on his behalf these days. Something shifted with her after Vanja ran. She’s closer to the prefect he remembers prior to her retirement. Or maybe she was always like that, and her hostility was just one more illusion stripped away when he woke to an empty bed.

Or perhaps it’s her guilt. Emeric would be lying if he said he wasn’t angry at Kirkling too, somedays. She could have picked a different Finding; she could have forced him and Vanja apart before he was in too deep; she could have tried harder to catch Vanja that night. Instead he’s just left with her bottomless condolences.

If one more scrap of pity gets shoved down Emeric’s throat, he’s going to puke. He drops into a chair, rests his hands on the table, steels his countenance until there’s just Journeyman Prefect Conrad. “What do you need?”

Ghendt and Dursyn trade looks, but Ghendt cracks open her file a moment later, tucking away a strand of hair that’s escaped her inky black braids. “It’s the Wälftsee Holdings case,” she says, measuring each syllable like volatile alchemy. “How much do you remember?”

Another irrational snarl of anger flares in the back of his skull. How incompetent do they think—

It’s a reasonable question, he tells himself, it’s been months, and it was never your case. But he still remembers the players painfully well. “A dockworker named Erwin Ros was bribed to deliberately founder the Grace Unending,” he rattles off, “shutting down the port of Rammelbeck in a way that should have turned massive profits for businesses owned by Wälftsee Holdings. Gertrud Kintzler was arrested and charged for her role in laundering some of those profits through her brothel. We suspect Prince Ludwig von Wälft controls Wälftsee Holdings, and is using his art collection to launder money as well.”

The junior prefect at the corner of the table finally pipes up. “We’ve kept Prince Ludwig’s involvement confidential. Who told you?”

The worst part is, there’s still a part of Emeric that instinctively wants to brag about Vanja. A part that can still perfectly picture her laying out the theory one golden morning, how her nose wrinkled as she worked through the threads, how the sunlight buried itself in her hair like it was coming home.

But he’s not about to say that out loud, especially not to someone with the audacity to be taller than him. Instead, he says flatly, “Common sense. I’ve seen Ludwig’s gallery. Who are you?”

The junior prefect leans back and cocks his dark blond head, and the disbelieving grin cutting over his face only emphasizes the mismatch between his narrow frame and a blocky jaw. “Hah,” is all he says.

“This is Junior Prefect Hensel Dorholtz,” Prefect Dursyn answers, running a hand over a dishwater-colored mustache that seems to be embezzling from his receding hairline. “His second initiation starts soon, and I’ll be proctoring his Finding, but in the meantime he’s assisting with this case as a study. You are correct, Conrad. We’ve enough evidence to establish that Wälftsee Holdings is a sophisticated network of small- to midsize money laundering operations, with the largest sums being processed through various art and antiquities dealers. Our current theory is that the dealers acquire items of interest to Prince Ludwig, then mark up the price significantly. Ludwig uses dirty money to cover the price difference when he purchases the object, making it indistinguishable from a legitimate transaction. He gets to keep a cut, along with his acquisition.”

Emeric considers. “It fits with what I know of the man. But you hardly need my sign-off.”

“No. We need a strategy.” Prefect Ghendt shows him a chart that almost looks like a family tree, five neatly-labeled progeny connecting back to one criminal patriarch; it’s concise and orderly and perhaps the most calming thing Emeric’s seen in weeks. “This is the ring of dealers connected to Wälftsee Holdings. We were able to obtain this copy of one dealer’s sales records from an audit last year.” She slides a sheaf of parchment across the table. “All the largest purchases were simply marked on behalf of an Anonymous Client—there’s no documented tie to von Wälft. If we were to take the whole ring into custody now, we’d have to make a deal to get one to flip.”

“It’s the easiest answer,” Junior Prefect Dorholtz drawls.

Emeric narrows his eyes. “Not if you’ve seen how dirty money gets made.”

“Whatever you say.” Dorholtz grins again. “One of us has been up close and personal with dirty money, and it isn’t me.”

Emeric locks his hands under the table so no one can see his knuckles turn white. It’s not what you think it is, cold and dispassionate Prefect Conrad insists, even as the wretched and bloodied part of him lists off Vanja’s nicknames: Beautiful terror. Penny Phantom.

It’s paranoia, he’s on edge, that’s all this is. ‘Dirty money’ doesn’t have to mean her.

But the worst part of his slow workload, of the awkward looks and the kid gloves treatment, has been that nobody, not a single soul, has asked why he needs it.

Queen of Roses. Red Penny.

He can see the copper stain on the pillow—

Kirkling clears her throat, scuttling the memory. “I believe the current plan is to try sending in Junior Prefect Dorholtz undercover?”

“As a potential client,” Prefect Ghendt confirms. “The dealers may already know my face or Dursyn’s, since we’ve been sniffing at the Holdings. We just need proof that Prince Ludwig is the anonymous buyer, so we can tie him to the rest of the Wälftsee operation.”

Kirkling glances to Emeric. “Conrad, I suggested you be consulted because of your experience with von Wälft. What do you think?”

Once again, Prefect Conrad views the case with a distant eye.

“I think the dealers are a gamble,” he says. “Even if you find the proof you need, one slip-up and you’ll have to arrest the whole ring immediately or risk them all fleeing. What about going to Ludwig directly?”

“We’d need a large number of prefects to search his residence, too large to bring to Dänwik unnoticed.” Dursyn scowls. “But if he suspects anything, he’ll start destroying evidence.”

Emeric skims the chart of the dealers, then the copy of the sales records. There’s a tell here somewhere, a thread leading to Ludwig. He just has to find it.

Vanja told him something once: that Ludwig was the kind of man who would come to a game of Find the Lady convinced that he already knew the trick. That he would lose because he assumed he knew the only trick.

Emeric wishes, more than anything, that he could stop thinking about her.

He dreads, more than anything, the day that he does.

Focus.

There—there, in the records. A thread.

His brow furrows. Dorholtz mutters, “I said he wasn’t ready—”

“I met Prince Ludwig,” Prefect Conrad cuts him off, “after he stole a holy relic from the Library of the Divine, then invited me to dinner. He was testing to see if I could tell it from a replica. He likes to play games.”

“Hah,” Dorholtz says again. It sounds almost like an accusation.

Emeric ignores him. “I don’t think we have to flip one of his dealers. I think, if we bait him into it, Ludwig will give us everything we need.”

PRESENT

“Last I saw Vanja was at the crossroads, with you.” Dieter Ros shifts the lute in his hands. “Helga… told me what happened. But I thought she’d—”

“I haven’t seen or heard from her since,” Emeric says a little too fast. The ridiculously large dining room steeps in another stiff silence.

Ludwig bustles back in, bright-eyed and in high colors. “All settled! My steward will have the list of artisans delivered to the prefect outpost in the morning. Now, let’s finish supper before it gets cold!”

He belly-laughs at his own joke as he hops into his own chair; if it gets any hotter out Emeric suspects the contents of their plates will start smoking. After a moment, the lute music picks up again. At least Dieter isn’t glaring anymore.

Emeric would bet half his year’s pay that Ludwig’s list never makes it to the outpost, and that a messenger is hurrying out of the hunting lodge this very moment, carrying Ludwig’s orders regarding Saint Frieda’s mirror. That means it’s time to put the next step in motion.

It’s not as graceful a maneuver as he’d prefer. “I—hgk.” He coughs, snatching up a napkin.

“I say, are you all right, my boy?”

“Fish bone,” Emeric croaks. “I’m fine.” After a bit of a struggle he sets the napkin down in a discreet wad. “I was thinking,” he stumbles, “that is, I hoped you might be willing to show me more of your art collection. I so admired what I saw last time.”

Ludwig himself tries to hide a smile behind his napkin. A gallery tour is a clumsy ruse, they both know it. And they both know Emeric won’t find Saint Frieda’s mirror there. “Why, you are too kind. I’d be delighted to after dinner.”

The prinz naturally drags things out for another three courses. Emeric doesn’t know if that’s to buy time or just to make him wait, one more little game. It’s obnoxious either way. Dieter doesn’t say anything when they finally leave the dining room, doesn’t even look Emeric in the eye.

Good, thinks an ugly part of Emeric. Dieter knows what his sister did.

Ludwig leads them down the hall, past a gallery Emeric saw last time, and into a new wing. It’s stuffed with riches, silk and gilt, so much the walls might as well sag under their weight. He can feel the prinz watching his reaction, and tactically walks into the man, who lets out a satisfying oof.

“Ah, my apologies again, sir,” Emeric babbles, as Ludwig chuckles and waves him off.

“Happens to the best of us. Couldn’t remember if we wandered around here last time, but I think the statuette might be new either way.” Ludwig waves vaguely at a stone figure of a kneeling woman, no taller than Emeric’s forearm. “The dealer said some nonsense about a curse, and I do love a challenge.”

“Oh?” Emeric reaches for the notebook in his breast pocket. “An antiquities dealer? Perhaps they might know something of Frieda’s mirror.”

“I’m afraid I don’t recall.” Prince Ludwig sounds breezy, too casual. “I work with so many vendors.”

“Might your steward know the name?”

Prince Ludwig pauses, and for a moment, Emeric wonders if he’s shown a bit too much of his hand, pushed a little too hard.

“No,” the prinz says. “An obliging man, but no. He handles my household affairs, I manage my galleries. I find they call for a more discerning eye.” Then, unexpectedly: “The last we met, you were in the company of a young maiden. How is that faring?”

It hits Emeric like a knife between the ribs. He rocks in place for a breath, finally forcing out, “It isn’t.”

There’s another stiff pause. Ludwig clasps his shoulder. “Ah, well, condolences, my boy. Hearts break every day, though. You’re young, you’ll bounce back soon enough. Come along now…”

That parasite anger gorges near to bursting as Emeric makes himself follow. Bounce back? He shared every part of himself with Vanja and wanted only to give her more. He knew the lines of her face, her mind, her scars by heart; the only thing more beautiful than what they had together was the sight of her in his arms every morning. He was ready to build the rest of his life on that bedrock.

And while he was sleeping, a sinkhole swallowed it all.

How is any of that supposed to be easier because he’s young?

Ludwig is speaking. It takes deliberate effort for Emeric to actually listen instead of just watching the man flap his mouth. The prinz drones on, first about an ancient family crown, then about a small collection of stupid tapestries, eyes occasionally flicking to the windows to judge how long the evening’s running. He’s dragging this out just like the dinner.

That means Junior Prefect Dorholtz has to be close to done.

And that means Emeric is running out of time.

“Fascinating,” he lies when he manages to intervene in Ludwig’s monologue. “However did you acquire these?”

Ludwig actually hides a laugh in an embroidered sleeve before he neatly sidesteps naming names. “It’s quite a dull story, I won’t bore you with it. But here, I have a few marvelous pieces from a Thírolian painter you might fancy.” He pushes aside a heavy velvet curtain.

“Any records you have would be—” Emeric is derailed by a faceful of velvet as Ludwig lets the curtain fall on him. There’s an uncomfortably desperate note rising in his voice as he pushes through. “Any records,” he repeats, “particularly with antiquities dealers, would be most helpful.”

Ludwig sweeps an arm at the comparatively claustrophobic room. “Yes, I’ll be sure to look around my study. But first! The works of Carolo Benedicci.”

Emeric doesn’t mean to look that closely at the paintings; he’s not here to study the work of a master, just a blowhard who thinks himself one. But his eyes are practically drawn to a rich, vivid confection of oils nearby. It’s a young man with dark hair in a chapel, staring, enraptured, at the face of a woman playing the organ. The afternoon light streaming through the stained glass catches the edges of her hair, igniting the red curls like glowing embers.

Ludwig is showing him this on purpose. Just like he asked about Vanja when Emeric pried a little too deep. Emeric said it himself weeks ago: The man likes to play a game.

And so Prefect Conrad turns his face to stone, and says evenly, “What mastery.”

“Isn’t it?” Ludwig’s eyes crinkle with muffled amusement. “Benedicci’s works are all so very true to life, I find.”

Emeric can only make himself nod, wordless, searching vainly for a safe portrait to land on. The next painting instead thrusts two more lovers into his view, this time embracing on a twilit balcony. Another frame boasts a pair nestled on a secluded sofa, one kissing the others’ fingers. Another, a man kneeling before a seated noblewoman, gazing up into her face and holding her hands. Chivalry. Adoration. Bliss.

All these asinine, honey-coated lies about love, and nothing about the wretched truth—that passion, constancy, devotion, they’re all worthless with the wrong person. Worthless, or just as likely to be held to your throat.

He tries to move around the little gallery before he boils over, acutely aware of Ludwig’s gaze following him. It’s just so damn hot. The linen around his neck sticks and scrapes, gummy with sweat. Emeric relents and starts shrugging off his uniform jacket a little too eagerly, wrenching a shoulder as he does.

“I’d open a window,” Ludwig dissembles with amusement as he watches, “but we’re a bit stricter with security these days.”

The crystal goblet. Of course this insufferable heat is Vanja’s doing too. For someone who excised herself so neatly from his life, she seems determined to haunt him in every stain, every rip, every wrinkle, at every turn.

The question pulses through him as it’s done every day since the May-Saint Feast, no matter how he’s tried to choke it down: How could she? There were so, so many easier ways for her to end things, and she chose to drag it out, to make it hurt, to make a fool of him. How could she do it? How could she be so cruel?

Emeric doesn’t realize he’s gone still before a painting until too late. Benedicci clearly has a fixation on redheads; this one sits astride a warhorse in her gauzy pink gown, bending to peer into a knight’s helpless, transfixed face, her ginger tresses a cascade of oily brushstrokes shrouding them both. Her expression is—impossible. Haughty? Amused? Uncaring?

“‘The Beauty Without Mercy,’” Prince Ludwig says behind him. “An old ballad about a knight on his deathbed, reminiscing on the lady of the wilds who bewitched him, but left him with only a hunger that would never fade.”

There’s something terrible in the knight’s face, a trace of fear in the ecstasy, like he knows this will be the end of him. Like the damned fool knows exactly what he is.

There’s something terrible in Emeric’s anger, too, as it swells again in his chest, ignited by that empty stare. Walk away, you pissant, he wants to say. Let it go before she leaves you with nothing.

Cruelty—that’s what he sees in the lady. Beauty without mercy.

The problem, Emeric realizes, isn’t that he’s angriest with Kirkling, or Dieter, or even odious Junior Prefect Dorholtz. Not even Vanja. He knew what she was when he crawled into her bed. He knew she’d make a fool of him.

The problem, Emeric sees finally, is that he’s angriest with himself—for letting her.

ONE DAY EARLIER

“Oh, welcome back, sir.” The clerk at the Book and Bell smiles up at Emeric as he tries not to wince. He hasn’t been back in Dänwik since April, but of course it’s just his luck that the clerk has a good memory. “Another room for two?”

As if he needed a reminder.

“One,” he grits out, “thank you.”

The only reason he’s staying at this godsforsaken inn is to facilitate Prince Ludwig’s inevitable and bombastic dinner invitation. The beds may be nicer here, but he prefers the plain bunks of the prefect outpost, and blissful lack of memories, by miles. Emeric wastes no time tossing the rucksack full of clothes onto his mattress, locking up, and heading to the outpost to get some work done.

Except Junior Prefect Hensel Dorholtz is waiting for him at the front desk. “Conrad,” he drawls over the jangle of the doorframe’s bell. The really incredible thing is how he manages to imply the disrespect of feet propped on the counter, all the while maintaining a semblance of posture, solely through the intonation of: “Took you long enough.”

Emeric knows bait when he hears it. He doesn’t bite. “I’m all set up. Ludwig ought to send the invitation to the inn tonight.”

“Ooh, an inn, cushy.” Dorholtz leans back in the front desk’s chair. “Well, everything’s handled on my end.”

Emeric waits for him to continue. When Dorholtz doesn’t, Emeric prompts, “The merchants?”

“Made my rounds yesterday,” is the clipped answer.

“You were sure to ask about restoring—”

“An antique mirror,” Dorholtz finishes with a faint sneer. “And dropped that there’d be an auction for it tomorrow night at the Golden Bine. Guntradus, Jung, Einhorn, and Johanneson are already in town, and the others should arrive by tonight.”

“And no one saw you come back here—”

“Of course not. I’ve been here almost two weeks and no one has a clue. It’s almost like I know what I’m doing.”

Emeric’s jaw starts to ache. “All due respect, junior prefect,” he says frigidly as he hangs up his uniform jacket, “but one of us has five years’ field experience and has passed his Finding. I’m not chancing loose ends with a case this important. Now if you’ll excuse me—”

“You know this is a trial run, right?”

Emeric pauses. He shouldn’t indulge this, he knows Dorholtz is just trying to get a rise out of him for some unfathomable reason, but—

If there’s anything he learned in May, it’s that ignorance is a dangerous luxury.

Prefect Conrad summons his most ironclad nonchalance. “A trial run of what?”

“Partnering us up.” Dorholtz jerks a thumb at Emeric, a supremely punchable grin on his face. “Youngest prefect in history, and…” He gestures to his own chest. “Second youngest, once I pass. Won’t that be fun.”

“Who told you we’d be partners?” Emeric asks, trying not to scream.

Dorholtz folds his hands behind his head. “Common sense.”

 Emeric tells himself he’s on edge because he’s in Dänwik. That Dorholtz is likely annoyed he missed his shot to be the youngest. That he’s never given the junior prefect a chance, because in the few times they’ve spoken, Emeric’s always been one mild jibe away from swinging a fist.

He would still, at present, burn the Helligbrücke First Office to the ground before accepting Dorholtz as a partner.

“Interesting theory,” he lies tightly, and reaches for the door. “I have work to do. Good day.”

“Your jacket—”

The door slams shut before he has to listen to Dorholtz for one more miserable moment.

Emeric doesn’t know where he’s going, doesn’t care as long as it’s further away from the outpost. When he was very young, he used to frighten his parents terribly this way; when he was upset, he’d just leave their house and wander toward the easiest landmark of all, the sea. They’d find him pacing the sand around seagrass tuffets, arguing with himself, and only now does he understand that that was not typical of most six-year-olds.

There is no ocean here, so instead Emeric bears towards the mirror of Wälftsee, eyes watering from the glare off the lake. Apart from that, he pays no mind to where he’s going, or to the stares a prefect uniform attracts. Dorholtz has to keep a low profile; Emeric is supposed to do the opposite. The more of Ludwig’s informants see him, the smoother this ought to go.

He winds up across a marketplace from the Golden Bine, an enormous tavern he’s only heard about, never visited, and is not about to pay custom to today. Instead he opts for the adjacent park, all but hurling himself at a bench beneath a shady oak. Something about the gardens bothers him, but he can’t place it and doesn’t care to try.

Partner. Partner. Of course he’d need a partner eventually, but—by the prefect charter (Article Eight, Subsection Two), the first partnership lasts a minimum of a year, to make fickle new initiates take the commitment seriously. Most of him had been content to leave the decision to the judgment of the higher-up prefects, and the rest of him had secretly wondered how to finagle Vanja into the role.

That was when he didn’t know any better, though.

Or perhaps he did. Perhaps that’s one more reason he’s so angry all the time. Vanja’s always been a coin toss to him, never knowing what side she’ll land on today. The girl he knew in the quiet, with her wit and her laugh and her soft ferocity… he believed, truly believed, that she would never choose this kind of cruelty.

But there is another Vanja. A Vanja who cheats, and lies, and steals, sometimes because it’s the right answer, and sometimes because it’s the easy one. There is a Vanja who runs, and he thinks it’s for the same reasons. She runs until she can’t anymore, and then she draws a knife and bares her teeth and cuts away anything that holds her back.

Abruptly, he realizes why this park bothers him: Months ago, he was supposed to meet Vanja here after an argument. That went awry, and to make matters worse, neither of them had the full story, and it all turned into an ugly, bloody mess only redeemed by his immense relief when it was clear he hadn’t lost Vanja for good.

Not yet, at least.

He traces the edge of the weight lingering in his pocket, a red penny he fished out of Hagendorn’s stream. The one he found on her pillow.

It’s easier to believe she left it in malice. Or because it was easier than facing him.

The cold preponderance of his experience says otherwise.

It’s the kind of thought you have to chew over before it kicks your teeth in. Emeric shoves it to the back of his mind, then pulls his new-stitched notebook from his satchel and flips to a clean page. He digs in his satchel again for a fresh charcoal stick, and then finally, a folded parchment. A thumb fixes the sheet in place as he begins to copy the contents into his notes, starting with the title:

Known Works of Carolo Benedicci.

When he returns to the Book and Bell a few hours later, Prince Ludwig’s messenger is waiting, invitation in hand.

PRESENT

It’s the loss of control, really.

It’s the way he let someone else sink roots into him, only to tear them out.

It’s the way he’s being told Dorholtz will be his partner, like it’s already decided.

It’s the way this suffocating heat reminds him too much of waking up alone in Vanja’s little room.

It’s not all of why he’s angry, but naming even these pieces—it’s the same kind of relief as clearing clutter off a desk. It frees up parts of his head he didn’t even realize were grinding away at those chunks of gristle.

He doesn’t feel like his old self; he’s not sure he ever will. But it’s enough to carry him through the springing of the trap.

Emeric extracts his notebook from his breast pocket. It’s harder to find the right page without his bookmark, but he can’t bring himself to look at the Queen of Roses card yet. He holds off cracking it open just yet anyway; perhaps he can do this from memory.

“‘Melodia,’” he recites, gesturing to the painting of the organ player and her admirer. “By Carolo Benedicci, completed April 755 Blessed Era. Sold by Hermann Jung in November 759 to an anonymous buyer… for approximately a thousand gilden over the purchase price.”

The smile freezes on Prince Ludwig’s face.

Emeric twitches a finger at the image of the kneeling man. “ ‘A Hero’s Return,’ also Benedicci, sold by Arnholt Johanneson in February 760 to an anonymous buyer for approximately thirteen hundred gilden over the purchase price.”

“My dear boy—”

“ ‘Lovers By Dawn.’” A tip of Emeric’s head to the couple coyly entwined on a balcony. “Benedicci, sold by Ordolfus Einhorn to another anonymous buyer for”—he purses his lips—“eleven hundred gilden over the purchase price, I believe? I’d check against your records but I suspect they’re incomplete in regards to your galleries. Perhaps your steward could have assisted after all.”

The prinz is turning red. It clashes rather satisfyingly with his yellow-blond hair. “I’m sure there’s a misunderstanding—let me—let me open a window—”

Emeric peels his notebook open. “ ‘The Beauty Without Mercy,’” he reads aloud, ambling over to where Ludwig is locked in mortal combat with the window latch. Perhaps if the prinz ever opened them himself, he’d have a better idea of how they work. “Benedicci, sold by Widraus Guntradus this June 761 for two thousand gilden over purchase, to an…” He eyeballs Ludwig meaningfully. “…anonymous buyer.”

 Ludwig gives the windowpanes an indignant, nigh-desperate rattle. Emeric reaches over and wordlessly flips the latch for him. They look to be two stories up, ideally high enough to keep the prinz from attempting an escape jump.

The hinges squall horribly as the window swings open, but Ludwig doesn’t move.

 He does try one final squirm: “I don’t know these men, I only bought art from them if I was in the neighborhood. I had no idea they were marking up the prices so extravagantly.”

“How strange. Three weeks ago, Prefects Dursyn and Ghendt inquired with a number of antiquities specialists about a relic mirror that had gone missing from the Aschelin tomb. I believe all seven of your dealers proceeded to send priority couriers straight to this very hunting lodge, as if they were very familiar with your tastes.” Emeric closes his notebook. “And when you got wind the mirror would be auctioned off here in Dänwik, you summoned all seven to attend.”

“Why would I want a dingy old mirror?” Ludwig’s lip curls, but with a hint of petulance.

The cool night breeze is doing wonders for Emeric’s mood, but he elects to fan himself with his notebook, partially for effect. “Apart from the power it would give you over House Aschelin? Because you knew it would sell for much, much more if it had been restored. And as custodian of Saint Willehalm’s goblet, you know every restorationist in Dänwik, which is why the poor bastard hawking the mirror around town couldn’t get anyone to take the job. You wanted to force him to sell it as is. And as an extra precaution, you wanted all your dealers at the auction so as to muscle out competition but keep the final bid from going too high. You just needed to verify the mirror was real before giving your dealers the go-ahead to bid. My arrival, following the mirror’s trail, was that confirmation.”

“You mean to tell me you know where Saint Frieda’s mirror is, and you’re wasting time here?” Ludwig blusters.

“I mean to tell you,” Emeric says coolly, “that there is no mirror. There never was.”

Ludwig’s face doesn’t fall so much as crash. Emeric would wager that this is the part where he finally grasps the truth: there are more tricks in this world than the ones he knows.

“This was a ruse to gather your ring of dealers in a single location, and confirm you as their anonymous buyer, all in one go,” he continues. “The supposed seller was an undercover junior prefect. His supervising prefects helped him arrest your dealers at the Golden Bine when they arrived for the auction two hours ago.” Emeric leans to peer out the window, which handily overlooks the gate. Three figures in uniform are striding up to the hunting lodge. “Seems like they’ve wrapped up, so our evening together is coming to an end. Oh, and I suppose I should mention: Prince-Elector Ludwig von Wälft of Lüdheid Principality, you are under arrest for money laundering.”

Ludwig’s mask is off. He snarls, “You wish you had the authority, you conniving little—”

“I’m afraid you’ll find I do,” Emeric returns. “You can take it up with the Low Gods at the trial.” He squints thoughtfully at the paintings. It was easy to spot that Ludwig kept buying Benedicci’s works in the dealer’s records, but it’s another matter entirely to see them in the flesh. This artist paints a number of subjects, from war fields to funeral processions, yet Ludwig’s curation here has a particular theme.

Hearts break every day.

The prinz has been collecting these paintings for years. He’s done it with a kind of devotion Emeric wishes he didn’t understand.

And the prinz, despite overwhelming gossip, has never taken a spouse.

A wild theory is stitching into place; Emeric decides to pull the thread and see what happens. “Does your steward have her name?”

The prinz turns from red to bone-pale. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The mother of your child,” Emeric elaborates. “These paintings remind you of her, don’t they? You said earlier, no shrieking brats getting in my way, but you weren’t just referring to your siblings’ offspring. A firstborn of illegitimate issue would jeopardize your line of succession, were they to be discovered. And if she were merely your mistress, you’d have moved her in… but she wouldn’t leave the child behind.”

Far away, muffled thunder rolls up from the prefects pounding at the front door.

“Damn you, Conrad,” Ludwig says softly after a pause, “but you rather are a menace.”

Emeric tries not to flinch. It’s a little too easy to relish feeling in control at times like this, especially when so much more feels beyond his grasp. “If you wish to provide for them,” he says, not without pity, “I would pass written instructions to the head of your household, quickly, before your arrest suspends control of your assets.”

Ludwig swallows. And then he walks out of the room, calling for his steward.

It takes the better part of the next hour to take the prinz into custody; Emeric lets the other three handle it, since he suspects Dorholtz will waste all their time trying to get a rise out of him otherwise.

Dieter Ros catches him on his way out of the hunting lodge, lute slung over a shoulder. “I wanted to say, I know what you’re…” Dieter trails off, eyes on the floor, then musters his words properly. “Never mind. Just thought I’d ask, if I see her again before you do… is there a message you want me to pass on?”

How much was real, and how much was a lie?

Did you plan this?

Did it ever mean anything?

How could you?

Where are you?

Why?

Why?

Why?

An infinity of questions, and he’d cut off a finger to ask just one.

He doesn’t know the girl who abandoned their bed in May. But when she left that penny on the pillow, she knew exactly the harrowing doubt he’d suffer in her wake.

“I have nothing to say to Vanja,” Prefect Conrad answers, and walks out into the summer night.

Chapter Text

The problem, Vanja Ros suspects, isn’t a curse.

Or rather: it’s not the curse. No—no—that isn’t quite it either—if the curse wasn’t a problem, it wouldn’t have strangled her first love, it wouldn’t have brought trouble down on everyone she foolishly cared for, it wouldn’t have chased every good thing from her life.

The more immediate problem, though, is who can help her break it.

She scowls at the condensation her wheat beer’s left on the bar of what used to be Madame Treasury’s. It goes by the Gilded Rose now. After scamming Madame out of the deed and title back in April, Vanja unwisely left renaming the establishment to her designated managers, and they in turn decided to get cute. At least the new greenhouse-themed décor leans more towards roses than gilding, but the blunt force pun has not escaped Vanja. Unfortunately, the brothel’s spare rooms are her cheapest option for short-term lodgings in Rammelbeck.

Few things could bring her back here, where every corner catches at memories like splinters she didn’t know were still buried under her nails. (Especially in the miserable heat of August.) But her curse wasn’t laid by a Low God, a vengeful grimling, or a warlock wielding a spirit’s power. It was laid by her birth mother.

It runs deeper than magic. It runs in the blood.

And that means she needs her brother Ozkar.

And he will know exactly how desperate she must be to seek his help.

The sigh she heaves sends a judder through the modest puddle accumulating around her beer. Then the water’s surface shivers again, this time from the thud of a tattooed elbow settling on the smooth wooden bar nearby.

Vanja waits for the elbow to move. It doesn’t. She sneaks a glance at the owner, only to find him looking directly at her. He’s a lout of a recent nineteen at the oldest, with a summer tan under a cap of gold curls and the kind of broad inelegance that follows the ambush of a growth spurt. The brown-black knotwork tattoos climb both arms and disappear above his elbows under high-rolled linen sleeves. His hazel eyes might appear sleepy at first blush, but there’s a conspiratorial gleam as he leans on the bar.

He’s the sort of handsome that knows it. That expects young girls to swoon accordingly. That Vanja finds inherently suspicious, none the least bit because that handsome’s been aimed at her.

“Can I help you,” she doesn’t really ask.

The lout sweeps a look around the bar floor of the Gilded Rose, then unfurls a spinnaker grin. “You,” he says under his breath, “can tell me to piss off. Louder the better. You look much too interesting to be drinking alone here, but none of these fools—” he gestures to the other patrons “—will make a move until they feel like there’s competition. They see you shoot me down, and you’ll have a whole line of men curious to see if they measure up.”

Even more suspicious. Vanja’s lips thin before she grinds out, “Pass.”

“Then I’ll do the honors; the next round’s on me. I’m—”

“Pass.”

“…Benno,” he finishes slowly. He tips his fingertips up, and Vanja can’t tell whether he means to show he’s unarmed, or to disarm her. “No agenda. Just seems like you have a story to tell.”

The worst part is, Vanja knows by all accounts, she should want this.

He’s friendly, good-looking, interested. On a purely factual basis, she knows that ought to make him, by definition, attractive. It would be so much easier to navigate this if she did find him attractive, if rejecting him could be a temptation resisted instead of a continued indifference.

But the thing is, she’s in town only long enough to find out Ozkar’s price.

The thing is, she doesn’t have it in her tonight to explain that it’s not him—Benno or whatever—it’s her, that if she falls for him it won’t be over a drink.

The thing is, before she fell for Emeric, she had to read page after page of his private notes, survive multiple attempts to murder them both, bicker and squabble and posture, fumble through agonizingly personal honesty, accept a gesture of staggering goodwill, see the worst of him, show him the worst of her, and then—finally choose, on the coldest night of midwinter, to let him in. Only then did she feel drawn to him, when for others, it takes just a word, a touch, a look. How do you explain that to someone new?

And even if she did have time to get that close to this Benno…

Vanja doesn’t look at him, but her voice softens a fraction. “Maybe I have a story. Doesn’t mean I want to share it.”

The pretty lout shrugs. “Fair enough. Enjoy your evening.”

Infuriatingly, not even a full minute after he strolls away, another lout sidles up to take his place, just as predicted. Maybe another girl, a pretty girl, would be flattered by the attention. But Vanja doesn’t like the way this new man’s gaze pries at her, as if trying to sniff out what about her caught a pretty boy’s eye. “Good even—”

“Pass,” Vanja growls into the beer she’s draining. Before he can protest, she’s plunked the empty mug down on the bar and pushed off her stool. (The barkeeper’s not supposed to accept her tips, but if she hides the sjilling under the mug, they can all claim plausible deniability.)

She dreams of the sea again that night, fighting for a glimpse of distant shoreline. Sometimes land is a band of gray sand, or shoals like shed antlers, or a barricade of bleak cliff faces. Most nights it’s just a blurred streak on the horizon, little more than the knowledge that it is there, and that it is out of reach.

Tonight, it is a hard ink line, and she thinks maybe the waves are pushing her toward instead of against for once—

Until something catches her ankle and drags her under. A shout pulses through the water—a name she hasn’t heard in months—

Rohtpfenni, Rohtpfenni, Rohtpfenni.

When she wakes with a gasp, she can still taste the salt.

Her ribbon is still pinned to the wall in Ozkar’s workshop.

It’s hard not to look at it, not to think of Emeric tying it around her braid each morning, about its mate tied around a little red leather notebook and buried under a layer of clothes she conveniently hasn’t taken out of her rucksack in months. It’s how she always manages these things—a shallow grave suffices so long as no one goes digging.

The thing about Ozkar is he doesn’t waste time digging. He extracts.

“I already told you it was horseshit,” he says, not even looking at Vanja as he methodically lays out an array of cogs. “Marthe said you were unlucky because it was easier to blame a four-year-old than act like an adult. If you knew anything about curses, you would know that isn’t one.”

“I was cursed by a Low God less than a year ago,” Vanja snaps back, “so I probably know more than you think.”

“Then go ask them instead of wasting my time.”

“I asked three. And a half god.” Godmother Death and Godmother Fortune had looked for everything they could. When they found nothing, she’d gone to Bóern to consult Ragne, and after bribing her with a goat offering, Eiswald. They all said the same thing. “None of them saw a typical curse—”

Ozkar blows a scoffing breath through his teeth.

“—but,” Vanja grits out, “they said they never saw the blood ties Marthe used to draw power from us either.”

That does something; Ozkar’s hands pause on his array. It’s been four months since their first reunion, long enough for Vanja to look back on that introduction with a swindler’s eye instead of a little sister’s. Ozkar is all about transactions, data, preserving his finger on the scale.

And she knows just which weight will tip him off-balance. “You know, the ties I cut a few months ago. You’re welcome, by the way.”

“I don’t owe you anything. Anything.” Ozkar finally looks at her, yellow lights blazing in his pupils despite a face schooled to iron. “You did that to save yourself, so if you’re operating under some misguided delusion that—”

“I just want you to hear me out,” Vanja returns, matching iron for steel. She doesn’t really think he owes her either. But if the only way he’ll listen is if he thinks it’ll discharge a debt, so be it.

Ozkar snaps his fingers, and the spectral yellow form of a giant owl flickers into sight over his head, shifting uneasily. Of all the spirits to bind himself to, he chose their ancestor, one he calls Grandfather; naturally, the only family Ozkar keeps around is the one he can use. He wordlessly folds his arms.

Vanja takes that as a sign to proceed. “Marthe was the thirteenth child, and I’m her thirteenth child,” she starts, only to bristle when his lip curls. “And maybe thirteen is unlucky only because people believe it’s unlucky, but that still makes it real in the empire, we know that’s how it works. She spent years saying I ruin everything, that I’m bad luck, all because I’m her thirteenth. She could have manifested something with my luck and hers, something that works like the blood ties, something a normal warlock can’t see. But a blood relative, contracted to my ancestor’s spirit…”

Ozkar purses his lips. A good sign. Even better: he’s gazing beyond her, distant, pondering. Finally he says, “I won’t do it for free.”

Vanja is suddenly very glad she left her rucksack back at the Gilded Rose. There’s precious little he can take from her this time.

He snaps his fingers, and Grandfather vanishes, the yellow lights igniting once more in his pupils. “There’s a statuette called ‘The Cycle.’ Famous in the warlock circles for being a puzzle. Old as dirt and said to be cursed, but no one has ever found any trace of magic.” One finger twirls in a precise ring, and yellow light weaves into the image of a kneeling stone woman. “Catastrophe seems to befall everyone who possesses it nonetheless. Its most recent owner is Prince Ludwig von Wälft, who—”

“Was arrested by the prefects last month, I know. But they’ve been looking into him for months anyway.” Vanja frowns. “And there’s no way I’m getting anything out of prefect impound.”

“You want to look for a curse that’s undetectable by usual means. This is the only other instance I know of. Besides, it may not be impounded yet. The prinz is fighting the arrest, something about an illegal search.” He surveys his cogs again, then switches two. “Bring me the statuette and I’ll tell you about your curse. Those are my terms.”

There’s an air of finality, one hard to dispute. Ozkar knows if she’s sought him of all people, she’s desperate enough to do anything he’ll ask.

But it’s bad enough to steal from an ex’s workplace. It’s manifest madness when that ex is a prefect.

Maybe she just wants to throw a wrench in his certainty; maybe it’s fear. “I’ll think about it,” she hedges.

He waves her off. “Do it elsewhere. The door’s behind you.”

Part of Vanja knows she should walk away from this whole idea. She should accept the reality—that she’s just like her mother, looking for anything to blame but herself—and move accordingly.

The rest of her is already poking the pins of the lock, drawing in the pool of condensation on the bar as she nurses another beer back at the Gilded Rose.

If the prefects already have the statuette, that’s it, she’s done. It would take a veritable smorgasbord of miracles to pull off that heist, even without the complications of personal baggage.

But if Prince Ludwig still has it, if him contesting the arrest means it’s still with him in Dänwik…

But Emeric had said he wanted to open an investigation into Ludwig. Sure, an illegal search doesn’t sound like him. That doesn’t mean he’s not involved.

Is it worth the risk, just to hear Ozkar say her curse is real?

She draws a line through the fresh ring of condensation on the bar.

Two months in Bóern didn’t give her any real answers. Just… time away from the memories of the north. Gisele and Ragne didn’t ask questions, did their best to keep her from wallowing, but they couldn’t tell her how to stop ruining what she loves. And just because the memories of Minkja were older didn’t make them hurt any less in the end.

Would it be worth it, risking popping the stitches if she crosses Emeric’s path, if it meant she could love something without breaking it?

A little goblet is pushed into her line of view, a measure of clear liqueur trembling in the glass. Vanja winces at the familiar waft of cherry.

“Kirsj,” a man’s voice announces. “Top-shelf, from Sovabin.”

It’s the lout from yesterday—not Berthold or whatever, the one who tried to slide in after she shot him down. He’s still eyeing her like he’s combing through a pawn shop for a bargain.

Cherry kirsj is Dame von Falbirg’s favorite. When Vanja was her servant, she knew the stronger it was on her breath, the darker the bruises she left.

It’s not this fool’s fault that he picked a liqueur Vanja wouldn’t use to sanitize a chamber pot, much less drink. Even if he hadn’t, she’s in no mood to entertain a man who heard “no” and decided she meant “try again when I’m drunker.”

“Sorry, I’m allergic,” she lies tonelessly.

The man’s mouth turns down at the corners, almost petulant. “Then what do you want to drink?”

At the edges of his form, Vanja sees a smudge of coal dust, an omen of misfortune. She appreciates her godmother’s warning, but she didn’t need it to know this man is bad news.

Quietly, she starts auditing her options in order of best-to-worst-case-scenarios. On one end of the spectrum: he gives up and leaves her be. On the other: there’s a knife in her boot. Best course of action for now: polite disinterest.

“I’m still working on my beer.” Vanja taps the side of her mug with precisely-calculated nonchalance. “Thanks anyway.”

He doesn’t speak for a moment. Then his face hardens. The coal dust thickens. “You think you’re too good for me, then?”

“I didn’t—”

“You think you’re better than me?” His voice rises. Vanja sees the bartender’s head raise. “Speckled little bitch like you, too good for my drinks?” He backhands the kirsj and her mug off the bar, ceramic and glass crashing on the floor, then grabs her wrist. “You think—”

Vanja slaps him as hard as she can. He only tightens his grip, and white-hot panic floods her skull. “Let go—”

A tattoo-mottled arm wraps around the man’s neck and wrenches him back. “You’re done,” barks the blond lout from the night before, as one of the bouncers hurries over.

Vanja distantly registers a quick and rough exit for the man, the sideways looks of other patrons, but it’s all drowning in the smell of beer and cherries and the throb of her wrist. Her ears rang like this whenever the von Falbirgs shouted, her wrist hurt this way when Adalbrecht von Reigenbach attacked her in their castle, when she’d faced her mother this spring Marthe had snarled You always thought you were better than me.

And it hurts all the more to know she drove away anyone who might help her now. By design, she is on her own.

“Are you all right?”

The voice breaks through the fog. Benno, that’s his name. He’s standing in front of her, looking properly vexed.

Vanja opens her mouth to say I’m fine, thank you, or Waste of a good beer or Depends on how many teeth he has left—and, humiliatingly, bursts into tears instead.

“Oh, that won’t do, come on—over here—” Benno passes her a clean napkin and ushers her off the barstool, then over to a table tucked in a discreet corner. No coal dust this time, so at least Fortune likes her odds. “Sit tight, I’ll be right back.”

Vanja grudgingly obliges, furious with herself for acting such the ninny over one entitled asshole. But even as she snivels into the napkin, she knows it’s not just that.

It’s that she misses Emeric so much she can’t breathe, sometimes. It’s that she misses the little moments when he would brush hair out of her face, lend her his coat, take care of her in a thousand little ways that suddenly fell back onto her shoulders. It’s that he should be the one setting a mug of water down in front of her now, silently sitting at the table now, waiting for her. Not this boy she barely knows.

And it’s not fair to keep that from Benno, but it will hurt so, so much to say aloud.

“Sorry,” she croaks out, voice thick. “Thank you, I really… You should know I just… got out of a serious thing recently. So…”

“I meant it when I said no agenda,” he says evenly. “Don’t even worry about that. Do you want to talk about it?”

Vanja swallows. The closest she’s come to talking about the split was with Brunne; she couldn’t stomach telling Gisele and Ragne, who knew both her and Emeric well enough to tell her if she made a mistake. A stranger, though… She gives an awkward shrugging half-nod and takes a sip of water.

“When did it end?” Benno asks.

The May-Saint Feast is a painfully easy landmark. “Three and a half months ago.” As she says it, it feels… uncomfortable. “I… know I should be past it already.”

Benno scratches at a temple, head tilted. “Not necessarily. Some people never get over a long relationship.” He glances at her; Vanja hastily takes another drink of water, even more mortified. “It was…?”

She cringes. “Five… five weeks… And three weeks around Winterfast… Saints and martyrs, this is pathetic, isn’t it?”

It’s almost a relief when he laughs. Not because he’s laughing at her, but because it’s a commiserating sort of laugh. “It is, but sometimes it’s like that. The first girl I courted left me for a brewer’s son, and I got some very impractical tattoos and swore I would never love again. I made it three months before a cute greengrocer had me tripping over my feet.”

Vanja ducks her head. Maybe there’s hope yet. “Those don’t look impractical.”

“Oh, these—” he twists his arms “—were later. This was back when I lived in Lüdz, and there was a tattooist we called Sloppy Jofrid, and…” He gestures to his chest. “Bad choices were made. Cost twice as much to get removed. I heard he’s moved shop to Rammelbeck too, in case you’re in the market for more bad choices.”

“Not with someone called Sloppy Jofrid,” she cracks into her glass with a half-grin. His eyebrows raise momentarily, and she blinks. “What?”

He runs a hand through his curls, abruptly fidgety, and doesn’t answer right away. “Again, no agenda, especially if you’re still working through things. But if you don’t already know… you have a really good smile.”

The problem is, she does know. Kind of. Emeric once said when she smiled, his heart felt like it would explode, but the problem is he was in love with her when he said it. He thought she was beautiful. He made her feel beautiful. And if you were to ask him now… Vanja is certain of few things, but she knows without a doubt that she is no longer beautiful to him.

She just thought that meant she wasn’t really beautiful to begin with.

She doesn’t know if she’s ready for someone else to see beauty in her.

“There you are.”

She looks up. Marien, the manager-in-training of the Gilded Rose, is crossing the bar floor towards them, a frown on her face and a hand towel slung over a shoulder. “I heard there was trouble?”

“I handled it,” Benno answers before Vanja can, curiously. “New customer who wouldn’t take no for an answer. He’s on the ban list now for us and the Sleeve both.”

Marien nods. “Good. Let me know if he tries to sneak back in during your shift.”

Vanja’s stomach starts to knot. “You work here?”

“Tending the bar. I’m on the clock soon, actually.” He winks. “And to make up for that asshole earlier, I think your drinks are on the house.”

Marien snorts. “Everything is on the house for her, you dolt. This is Vanja. She owns the house.”

His brows rise again, a little of his cheer ebbing away. “Oh—well then.”

Vanja bites her tongue.

Whatever might have started between them just got squashed. Has to get squashed. Emeric taught her that, every time he gave up the power to arrest her; she can’t be in a real relationship with someone whose livelihood hinges on her goodwill.

“I’m going to turn in for the night anyway,” she says swiftly, and retreats to her room before he or Marien can protest. Only when the door shuts behind her does she take a minute to breathe in the stuffy air, trying to fight the rising panic.

One breath. Two.

It’s not helping.

She goes to the high, narrow window on the far wall and wrenches it open, standing on her tiptoes to taste the fresh breeze. Three. Four. No good.

It’s the curse. Isn’t it? It has to be. The first person to show an interest, the first she starts to connect with, and asking him to love her would be like asking him to grab a knife by the blade.

Vanja reaches for her rucksack, rummages until she feels the leather notebook, the bumps of thread. The ribbon almost cuts into her finger as she slowly pulls it out.

It’s strange how she misses even this shade of green. No—she misses seeing it, and not feeling gutted all over again.

It feels like another betrayal, even thinking about a future with someone else.

Five weeks.

Part of her is clinging to a fantasy: she’ll shake this curse, she’ll find Emeric again, she’ll explain everything, they’ll cry and laugh and cry and hold each other and wake up together in a new day. They’ll find a way forward, together.

Three and a half months.

It’s just a fantasy. Nothing more.

The sole truth is the one she keeps coming back to: the only way out is forward.

The bell above the door of Ozkar’s workshop rings as she lets herself in the next morning.

“I’ll do it,” Vanja says shortly. “Tell me everything you know.”

This time she trades the bar for the table in the corner, and the beer for apple juice cut with fizzing sjorle water. She’s borrowed one of the slates Marien uses for tallying, writing only in chalk, for the same reason she’s not touching booze tonight.

She’s going to steal evidence from the prefects. That calls for a clear head, and a lack of an evidence trail.

There are too many variables right now, but she can narrow them down with the first, most critical step: locating the statuette. Everything starts from there.

The chair to her right creaks. She looks up and finds Benno once more, an odd look on his face. “Thought you’d be here,” he says, then grimaces. “I mean, besides the obvious you-own-the-place thing. That was smoother in my head.”

Vanja pauses her scribbling. “Look… Even if you’re fine with it, it wouldn’t be right—”

“I am officially tendering my resignation,” he says in a tone that would be breezy but for the taut current in the underbelly. “Tendered, I suppose, Marien already knows. I’ll work all my scheduled shifts until my replacement is trained. And I know that sounds outrageously presumptuous, but—sorry, there’s no way to make this sound smooth—it’s not because of you?” He nervously laces his fingers together. “I found out this morning that, uh, I’m coming into some money, and… I don’t need to work for a bit.” Benno’s mouth quirks in a tentative smile. “You must be good luck.”

Vanja sucks in a breath.

When she can speak again, she says painstakingly, “I… don’t know what I’m ready for right now. And it takes a while for me to know, with someone new.” She ventures a look up from her slate and finds Benno studying her.

“You don’t have to be ready for anything,” he replies. “Sure, now I definitely have an agenda, but the timing’s up to you. And if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen, and I will be fine.”

“I want to try,” she blurts out, surprised by her own candor—but, for the first time in months, this feels different.

Maybe she’s never going to stop missing Emeric. Maybe every prefect uniform will haunt her, every green ribbon will wrench her heart, for as long as she lives. She can’t control that anymore than the weather.

But she can make herself move forward.

She sets her slate aside for the evening as Benno’s smile grows. “So… how about that drink?”

Chapter Text

It is Emeric Conrad’s nineteenth birthday, and he is fairly confident he’s about to die. Which would be a real problem, considering he needs to catch a coach in… ten hours? Four?

He has the general sense that it’s morning, or at least, daytime, but opening his eyes means letting the light in more, and every pulse of his headache suggests that would end poorly.

Then his stomach gurgles, and he doesn’t have much of a choice.

Light sears into his watering vision, jamming thumbs into the headache—he thinks he sees the edge of a bucket beside the bed and flops frantically through the pain—

He makes it, barely. He’s half off the mattress, holding himself over the bucket with one arm pushing off the floor and the other gripping the bedpost for dear life as he retches. And retches. And retches. Distantly he hears shuffling and murmurs, and the thunk of a mug being deposited on the bedside table nearby. A pair of slippers nudge into sight, carefully staying out of the splash radius.

When the worst seems to have passed, a strange feminine voice says, “There’s water and a towel.”

His brain feels like it’s clogged with honey and bile. Most of the bucket’s contents look to be liquid. And red. Blood? His nose is running too bad to smell, burning worse than his throat.

“Am I dying?” he creaks dimly.

“Drink the water,” the voice orders, sounding slightly annoyed. “You’re not dying. You just can’t handle your liquor.”

He pushes himself back from the truly vile bucket and rinses out his mouth, wipes his face off, and starts working on the water. And on figuring out where he is. His head does not want to cooperate, each thought a nail pounded behind his eyes, and every inch of him aches.

Emeric makes himself look around. He’s never been in this room before. (He thinks he hasn’t. If it stops spinning, it’ll be easier to know for sure.) It’s modest and practical, a few luck-charms and bundles of dried flowers on the walls, a simple vanity in once corner, and a screen tactfully masking another corner, likely for a washtub and chamber pot.

His companion is a woman with ash-blond hair and impatient dark eyes, early twenties at most. No obvious tears or mending in her well-fitted kirtle and shift, so a reasonable income. Something about her face strikes a familiar chord that, at the moment, he couldn’t place even with instructions and a demonstration.

She tosses a pile of fabric onto the bed. No—a prefect uniform.

His prefect uniform.

This is when Emeric realizes he is, in fact, stark naked. And in a stranger’s bed.

“Nothing happened,” the woman says briskly, reading the look on his face correctly. “At least, not with anyone here. You’re in the Sünderweg, at Gilded Rose, in my spare room. Jenneke at the Green Sleeve brought you over last night, completely soused and covered in vomit, and asked me to let you sleep it off. You let us take your clothes to have them cleaned overnight. You can stay until you’re good to get yourself home.” She wrinkles her nose. “Might want to wash up first.”

Emeric has started off with relief, detoured through confusion, swerved into mortification, and is now back on track to misery. He doesn’t remember much of last night, but clearly it was not a collection of his finest hours. “Thank you,” he rasps out. “I owe you a great deal. I can pay you for lodging and laundry and—and—anything else—I just need my satchel.”

The woman tips her head. “You didn’t have any satchel when Jenneke dragged you in.”

Emeric’s stomach sinks. He thinks he might be sick again and tilts toward the bucket out of an abundance of caution. “Shit,” he mumbles, cleverly. He’ll have to track his satchel down once he’s dressed—how did he even drink this much red wine—

Then the slow, ungainly marble of a thought that’s been coursing through a series of procedural and inebriated obstacles finally plunks into its horrible cup.

His proof of fare is in his satchel. The one for the coach he needs to catch by no later than three in the afternoon, today.

“What time is it?” he wheezes desperately, starting to throw himself from the bed, only to remember he is still very much in the nude. “I apologize, can you…?”

The woman ducks behind the screen in the corner, rolling her eyes. “It’s half past ten.”

Emeric splits the difference between lurching out and extracting himself from the bed, and yanks on his breeches once he’s regained his balance. All he remembers of the previous night is a few other prefects taking him to a pre-birthday dinner. He reaches for his shirt. “Did Jenneke say anything about where I’d been?”

“No, just that the owner wouldn’t like it if something happened,” she says vaguely. Emeric only half-listens, distracted by a sudden sizzle of pain on his lower back as he starts tucking his shirt in.

Baffled, he stumbles over to the vanity mirror. Maybe he took a fall? Got in a fight? It’s just a very strange place to have a bruise—

As he hikes up the back of his shirt, he finds, to his horror, that the culprit is not in fact an injury. It’s so, so much worse. So bad that a strung-out, asthmatic “No-o-o-o-o” faintly whistles through his teeth.

Splashed across the base of his spine, almost level with his hips, is a tattoo.

And not just any tattoo.

It’s misshapen and smeared with faded blood, but he can still pick out four legs, hooves, a horse tail… and, where the horse neck should start, the upper body of a woman. One with a garish leer. And an impractically large and exposed bosom.

And an abundance of freckles.

And two incriminating ginger braids.

Behind him, he hears an almost reverent echo of “Oh, no.”

A blond man about his age is standing in the doorway, one hand over his mouth. Knotwork tattoos cover both forearms, which makes Emeric think he knows what he’s talking about when he says grimly, “Sloppy Jofrid.”

All Emeric can muster is a dazed, “Whuh?”

“Sorry, just came up to see how Marien was getting on, but…” The man jerks his chin at Emeric, grimacing. “I’d know Sloppy Jofrid’s work anywhere. Though he’s branching out, centaurs are new.”

“I thought it was a dog,” the woman—Marien, right, Agnethe’s older sister, now he remembers—says from behind the screen. The man makes a scoff of disbelief and she adds, “Obviously not a good dog.”

Emeric whips his waistcoat on, which is to say, he puts his arms in the right places like a broken branch smacking into other boughs on its way down. His lower spine is now matching his headache throb for throb, which means the waistcoat gets to stay classily unbuttoned. What an undeniable asshole he must have been last night. How did this even happen?

The tattoo’s the only lead he has at the moment, so he latches onto it. “Where’s this… Jofrid?”

Twenty minutes later, Emeric is standing in a surprisingly legitimate-looking tattoo parlor, considering it hosts someone known as ‘Sloppy Jofrid.’ He is also actively resisting plugging his ears, as Jofrid recognized him the moment he set foot in the parlor just outside the Sünderweg, and launched into a heated and loud oral history of the previous twelve hours.

“…and I told you no refunds and you said fine, and I told you it’s hard to do horses, their legs are all fucked and you said do it anyway, you said baaaw I can fix it, if I could just see her again—”

“I—” Emeric tries to interject, unsuccessfully.

Jofrid just gets louder. “—and you bled all over the place and cried the whole time—”

“I DON’T WANT A REFUND,” Emeric bellows, his patience utterly run dry. “I want it gone and I want to find my satchel.”

“Jof, tell me you didn’t take another drunk customer,” a new voice cuts in from somewhere in the back, stern. “We’ve talked about this.” A pale, soft-featured man in his mid-twenties steps through the doorway behind the counter, looking irate as he ties his shoulder-length auburn hair into a low tail. The lines of the tattoo on his left arm almost seem to move—and then Emeric realizes they are moving. Either a powerful enchantment, or the mark of a warlock. Ordinarily, he ought to be able to see which it is, but something’s amiss with his spectacles, some fuss he doesn’t have the spare attention to recall through a hangover.

“I’m Tam,” the new face sighs, leaning on the counter. “Owner of this fine establishment, which is not so desperate that we’re taking drunk customers, Jofrid.”

“I’ve never seen this man in my life,” Jofrid says immediately.

Tam rolls his eyes and reaches under the counter. “Which is why you were just quoting him from last night. And I assume you’ve never seen this—” He emerges with a bottle of brandtwein, squinting at the label. “—extremely expensive and unopened alcohol, which you were definitely not bribed with? Get out of my sight. One more drunk customer and you’ll be working out of a privy on the docks.” He waits until Jofrid shuffles to the back, scowling, then turns back to Emeric. “Let’s see the damage. We can do a partial refund, free removal, discounted modification if you remember what you asked for…”

“I don’t even remember coming here last night,” Emeric says, surreptitiously making sure no one’s looking in the parlor windows before he turns around. He lifts his shirt. “But I think I left my—”

Tam chokes on, from the sound of it, his own dismay. “Dear gods.”

“—satchel,” Emeric finishes dourly.

“He asked for a redhead!” Jofrid protests. “Said he wanted to see her again! Then he started crying about horses and I thought he said he wanted that too!”

“Stop helping,” Tam calls over his shoulder, then runs a hand across his face as Emeric turns back around. “Sir, I am so very sorry about this, we will provide you with a full refund and free removal. I’d take it off right now, but there’s less chance of scarring if we let it heal for a week first.”

“Fantastic,” Emeric says with as much sincerity as he can muster, which is still at a significant deficit. “Can I get my satchel back now?”

Tam looks behind the counter, frowning. “I don’t see any satchel here… but you’d need it with you to pay…”

Sloppy Jofrid supplies an answer that has more questions than resolutions: “His friend paid. The other prefect.”

Tam blanches. “Excuse me, sir,” he croaks, “one moment.” Then he ducks through the door again. Emeric hears muffled hisses of “prefects” and “drunk” and “you absolute asshole!”

Other prefect?

Emeric rubs his eyes behind his atrociously grimy spectacles, trying to fish any recollections out of the morass of the night before. It started with Vikram and Mathilde taking him out for dinner for his birthday early, since he’s leaving for Helligbrücke today. (Hopefully.) Then they ran into a group of other prefects at the Three Swans, more than usual, since the Ludwig von Wälft case got so messy and needed more hands. Then—

“Again, I apologize, this is completely out of line with our store policies,” Tam says quickly, hurrying back to the counter. “Here, this salve should help numb and protect the site while it’s healing. Don’t speed it along with magic, or it might be harder to remove the pigment.”

Emeric takes the proffered little pot of salve and fumbles with the uniform coat balled under his arm. It turns out drinking that much red wine makes him feel like he’s mildly on fire the morning after, which means even the early September cool is too warm for a jacket. “I’ll be gone at least a fortnight,” he says, stiff. Three days to Helligbrücke, two more days to Rabenheim, a day or two there, then another long trip back. It’s inconvenient timing for the von Wälft case, but his superiors know this trip is non-negotiable, as it has been every year. “Will that be an issue?”

“Eh… give me the salve a moment.” Tam waits as Emeric wrestles it out again—surprisingly difficult to get something out of a coat you’re not wearing—then presses two fingertips to the stopper, frowning. The lines of his tattoo shift again into eyes that blink up at Emeric, unsettlingly canny. Tam’s a warlock, then, and his mark is the spirit he’s bound to. “There. It’ll still numb the area, but keep it from healing too much. If it’s too messy, use a light bandage during the day.” Then Tam hands him the bottle of brandtwein, the one used to bribe Jofrid. “They only sell this at the Smoked Oak, on the Welkenrode side of the river. Maybe they have your satchel?”

An hour later, Emeric is doing his best not to fidget in the Smoked Oak. The noon bells will chime any moment, it took longer than he expected to walk here, and if he doesn’t get his satchel soon he’ll have to sprint to the prefect outpost just to draw enough advance pay to cover another coach fare for the three o’clock departure. And then he’ll get to spend the rest of the afternoon stinking up the coach interior, because it’s looking increasingly like he won’t have time to wash.

And he can’t stop hearing Jofrid: I can fix it, if I could just see her again.

He shouldn’t want to fix anything. Right?

The bartender at the Smoked Oak is inspecting the bottle like it might explode in his hands, mustache twitching. “Good thing you brought it back,” he rumbles, “your friend didn’t pay his tab, and even for a prefect, this isn’t cheap. The seal’s intact, at least.”

Emeric links his hands behind his back to keep from drumming them on the counter. “I apologize, I’m in something of a rush—I just need to find my satchel. Did I leave it here last night?”

His heart sinks as the barkeeper shakes his head. “Afraid not.” Then, salvation: “The other prefect had it on him, last I saw you two.”

“Other prefect?” Emeric isn’t sure what’s winning, desperation or embarrassment. “Sorry, I don’t recall much of last night, any description you have would be of great help.”

The barkeep nods at a corner table. “Tall lad, little older than you? Light brownish hair, I think. You came in with a big group of prefects, but that one kept shoving wine and spirits down your gullet long after they left, until I had to cut him off. Said something about your birthday.” He squints. “Happy birthday, I suppose.”

“Thank you,” Emeric says automatically, mind racing. It’s coming together now.

There’s only one prefect—prefect aspirant—who fits that description.

And it’s the one whose big, glorious debut has been fouled up by… Emeric.

Or rather, his spectacles.

Ludwig von Wälft has delayed his conviction for over a month by insisting the enchantment on Emeric’s spectacles constituted an illegal search. That being able to see active magic without a warrant is an invasion of privacy. And the worst part is, he has a point, which is why Emeric’s stuck with normal spectacles until the issue is decided by a special tribunal in October.

Which has, in turn, delayed Prefect Aspirant Hensel Dorholtz’s ascension to the Order, as he was assigned a connected case for his official Finding.

Which is why every time Dorholtz looked at him for the last six weeks, it’s been the way you look at a splinter.

Emeric makes it to the prefect outpost in under fifteen minutes, walking speed accelerated by aggravation alone. Of course. Of course it was Dorholtz. How the asshole has made it this far is beyond him. He always acts like he’s doing Emeric a favor, like Emeric didn’t get routinely harassed by cadets playing the exact same games as Dorholtz, just waiting for when no one was looking.

And sure enough, when he stalks into the shared living quarters in the outpost’s second floor, Dorholtz is lounging at a communal table, pretending to work on a file. Emeric knows he’s pretending because there are any number of rooms Dorholtz could use downstairs, but none of them would have let him see Emeric come in.

Dorholtz rattles off a laugh. “Rough night?” Then he tosses Emeric his satchel.

Emeric would like to live in a world where he catches it. He does not. The strap snags on his outstretched hand long enough to neatly flip the rest of the bag upside down and dump its contents onto the ground. The only upshot is, Emeric can see the proof of fare for his coach ride.

He kneels and starts collecting his belongings. “I understand you had some part in it.”

“How’s the tattoo?”

“It’s gone,” Emeric lies. “I returned the bottle you stole from the Smoked Oak, but you need to settle your tab.”

“Later,” Dorholtz says unconvincingly. “You’re welcome for me keeping an eye on your stuff overnight, by the way.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

Dorholtz lets out a snort of disbelief. “Damn, Conrad. I thought dipping your wick might get you to loosen up, but—”

Emeric goes cold. “What.”

For once, Dorholtz seems to realize he’s stepped onto thin ice. He doesn’t answer.

Emeric gets to his feet. The hangover, the tattoo, the goose chase for his satchel, those were all inconvenience and petty malice. But—he doesn’t remember—he doesn’t remember anything—

“What,” he says with a hollow fury, “did you do.”

Dorholtz shifts in his seat, looking away. “It was your birthday—”

“What did you do?”

“I just paid a mietling to let you blow off some steam,” he mutters. “I don’t know what the problem is.”

Emeric doesn’t say another word, only takes his satchel to his assigned room and shuts the door.

He stands at the washbasin for a good five minutes, trying to breathe.

It shouldn’t matter. Right?

This is what people are supposed to want. He’s supposed to want it. It shouldn’t matter if it’s a stranger, it shouldn’t matter if he doesn’t remember it, isn’t he supposed to want this? Didn’t he get lucky?

Marien said nothing happened at the Gilded Rose. That Jenneke brought him over from the Green Sleeve. It’s cutting it close, but—

After he’s washed up and changed, stuffed a few changes of clothes into a rucksack, and collected a form from the outpost’s clerk, he catches a coach back to the Sünderweg. The bells sound a lonely toll for one in the afternoon as they roll off. He can make his ride to Helligbrücke, as long as he pays this coachman to idle outside the Sünderweg. And to keep his mouth shut about it.

Foolish, foolish, foolish. It shouldn’t have been so easy for Dorholtz. Vikram would have never left him alone with the man. But he didn’t, he left Emeric with a group of prefects, and none of them knew better. Emeric keeps replaying the scraps of the night. Maybe he could have left earlier, with Vikram, but he was supposed to be having fun. Maybe he could have refused to leave with Dorholtz. Maybe he could have turned down drinks, but he didn’t even notice how his glass never ran dry, foolish, foolish.

When he makes it to the Green Sleeve, he has to wait another ten minutes as Jenneke concludes business with a client. That’s its own misery, sitting around and trying to ignore muffled sighs and rhythmic grunts from elsewhere in the brothel; he can’t stop wondering if he sounded like that last night, sweating like a pig between a stranger’s thighs—he can’t stop seeing Vanja’s blurry face, trapped in the sounds of the first and last time they laid together—

“Prefect Conrad,” Jenneke’s voice cuts in.

He starts, then scuttles to his feet a bit too fast, heart pounding. “M-Miss Jenneke. I… had some questions about last night.”

Jenneke tips her head to the side parlor, where he and Vanja had spoken when they’d come to the Green Sleeve back in April. “I thought you might. And you need to eat something. Join me for lunch.”

There’s already a tray of cheese rolls waiting on a table inside. The décor has been upgraded from the last time; apparently business is thriving without Madame Treasury’s drain on the Sünderweg. Jenneke shuts the door behind him and says, “First of all, you should know that nothing happened last night.”

Emeric sits on the couch, hard.

“My mietling Willa said another prefect tossed her a gelt and shoved you at her, then left. She brought you to me immediately, and once you stopped vomiting, I took you across the street to the Gilded Rose.” Jenneke sweeps into the chair opposite him, her green silk robe billowing as she drops onto the cushion. “We do not service clients too drunk to consent, end of story. But we need to talk about what happens next.” Then she holds out the tray. “Have a roll.”

Emeric obliges. He wants to start picking shreds off, but his hands are shaking too badly. “Thank you,” he says, ashamed at his own relief, and takes a bite. Even though his stomach still feels like a swamp, the bread helps.

“Don’t thank me yet.” Jenneke chews a bite of her own roll. “You understand that you need to report your colleague, yes?”

“I have the form. I just…” His throat closes, and, humiliatingly, his eyes sting. Something about this feels deeply unfair—for the gods’ sake, it’s his birthday. “What do I even report? That I got drunk? That he got me an ugly tattoo? That he paid for sex I didn’t have?”

Jenneke doesn’t answer a moment. When Emeric looks up, she’s tight-lipped with anger. “People like to say,” she grits out, passing him a hanky, “that alcohol reveals who you really are, because it lowers your inhibitions. And as a mietling in charge of the safety of other mietlingen, I will tell you that is a fucking excuse. You want to see who someone really is, give them power to hide behind. Prefect Conrad, would you want the services of a mietling if you were sober?”

He ducks his head. This is already difficult to talk about without a hangover, in less emotionally-wrought circumstances. “No,” he stumbles, feeling the need to explain, “but—not because they’re a mietling—it’s just not something I feel a desire for until after I’m… already involved with a person.”

Jenneke nods. “If you were sober, would you have gotten that tattoo?”

“Gods, no,” he spits out.

“How did you get that drunk?”

“I was out with some friends for my birthday.” He wrings the hanky between his hands. “And he was there, and I guess he kept…”

“Would you have had as much to drink without his influence?”

He starts to see the shape of the point she’s making. “No.”

“Finish that roll and drink some water.” She waits until he takes another bite, then lifts a fist. “So to summarize: Your colleague deliberately got you intoxicated beyond your limits.” She unfolds a finger. “He coerced you into getting an embarrassing, painful permanent mark on your body when you were too drunk to consent.” Another finger. “And he attempted to use a mietling to force you into sexual acts you could not consent to and would not want if sober.” Three.

Emeric sees it now.

“At every step, he escalated the violation of your safety and bodily autonomy. That’s what you report.” Jenneke lowers her hand and leans forward, braid falling over a shoulder. “If not for yourself, Conrad, then you report it because he’s a prefect. That’s what he’s willing to do to one of his own. And I am responsible for the safety of my workers. Do you understand?”

He makes himself nod, tries to think of something clever and confident to say, and instead spills out: “I’m an utter fool.”

“Oh—oh no.” Jenneke quickly moves over to the couch next to him and puts a tentative hand on his shoulder. “You were in a situation that should have been safe, and it wasn’t. And that’s not your fault. Imagine if someone you care for had been in your shoes last night, would you think them a fool?”

Vanja, of course he pictures Vanja for a moment, drunkenly bumbling along on Dorholtz’s arm. A savage wave of anger rips through his chest—it’s not real, it’s not real, but even if it was it wouldn’t be her fault.

If he could just—

“Thank you,” Emeric forces out. “For everything. He’s not a prefect yet, and he won’t be if I can help it.”

“Of course.” Jenneke shrugs. “We would have helped you even if Vanja didn’t own the Gilded Rose.”

Emeric’s knuckles go white against the linen. “What?”

But in the pause, he’s already connecting the dots. Ghendt and Dursyn mentioned someone buying up Madame Treasury’s for a white penny thanks to forfeiture, Vanja had asked him about taxes, he just had refused to connect them, refused to think of the missing bribe money, has refused to deduce why the Gilded Rose and the Green Sleeve are suddenly doing so well.

“I thought you knew.”

“It turns out,” he says with a dry sort of bitterness, “there was a lot about Vanja I don’t know.”

“I…” Jenneke hesitates. “I’m not sure what happened with you two, but she didn’t look happy about it either. At least to me.”

Emeric’s breath catches. His hands go still in the linen. “You’ve seen her.”

No, no, no, he can’t go back. Vanja made herself clear with the penny that’s still buried between the pages of his last notebook, beside the Queen of Roses.

But hasn’t he asked himself a thousand times if he should have left a message with Dieter Ros? If he shouldn’t leave some back door cracked open if she changes her mind? If he should have tried harder to follow, if he could just see her again—

The hour-bells toll for two. He snaps out of it and rushes to his feet, laying the hastily-folded hanky on the table. “I have to go. Please… don’t tell her about this.”

“Of course.” Jenneke hands him another roll. “Finish your lunch on the way.”

That night, lying in a roadhouse bunk, the words force and coerce and violation keep cycling through his mind, always punctuated with: escalated. His skin stings where he scrubbed himself too hard at the outpost, and even with Tam’s salve, the tattoo feels hot, sticky.

His mind only quiets when he takes the form out of his satchel, lights a lamp, and gets to work.

Emeric drops the misconduct report off at the First Office in Helligbrücke three days later, trying to ignore the raised eyebrows and sideways glances. He tries not to think of what it’s going to be like, testifying to every humiliating thing that happened to him before a group of his peers. Maybe they’ll think him a fool too, but it’s better than letting someone like Dorholtz become a prefect.

His mother knows something’s amiss—at least, more so than usual this time of year—but then, she could always read him like the type she sets at the printshop. She knew things had ended with Vanja before he’d said a word; when he’d been caught in that unshakeable anger, she’d made him eat dinner with the family once a week just to make him take some space.

She doesn’t even fuss at him as much when he slides the heavy pouch of gilden across her table the night before they leave. The family’s finances are more stable than when he was first recruited, but he’s still in the habit of padding their savings from his stipend. It was ten years ago—coming up on eleven now—that they all learned they were one disaster away from near-ruin.

But most importantly, his mother doesn’t pry, just smooths his hair and straightens his spectacles a little more often on the ride to Rabenheim. Even his younger siblings, who normally make harassing him a competitive sport, stick to squabbling amongst themselves.

The coastal town looks a little smaller every year. When he was younger, the lighthouse on the bluff seemed like a fortress; the mayor’s house was good as a mansion; the temple in the heart of town was nigh a cathedral. His aunt and her wife moved into their old home when the Conrads left for Helligbrücke, and even that feels like a coat he outgrew years ago. The room he once shared with his brother Lukas is a nursery now, too cramped for either of them.

The graveyard, though, always feels too big. Too open, too exposed.

His mother goes first in the morning; he and his siblings wait under one of the sparse pines, giving her distance and privacy. It’s nice for a mid-September day. He misses the cut of the salt air whenever he’s inland, and the intermittent sun keeps the wind from sapping the warmth entirely, catching in the yellowing leaves of distant oaks.

When his mother makes her way back, it’s Emeric’s turn. He follows the little trail he knows by heart. Even if he didn’t, his mother’s bundle of aster and vervain would mark the stone of his father’s grave.

He kneels on the grass. It’s silly, empirically he knows it doesn’t bring him any closer to a man long gone, but it’s how he’s done this every time. The name ANSELM CONRAD is etched deep into the marker. This time it feels almost like an accusation, like his father is waiting for an explanation.

“Hello, Father.” His voice cracks. “Oh, that’s… earlier than usual.” Emeric clears his throat. “It’s been—it’s been a really—really strange year. I made it to full prefect, youngest in history. Hubert was… I suppose if you can hear this, you already know. I think I fell… I did fall in love with a girl. And it didn’t end well. And I don’t know why.” He chokes up properly this time. “I miss you all the time, but—but gods I wished you were here this year. You always knew how to fix it, and I, I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I’m so scared I’m going to disappoint them, that I’m going to make a mistake that gets someone hurt, that you—you wouldn’t be proud of who I am.”

There’s a distant grate of stone, a whisper of cascading gravel behind his father’s marker.

When Emeric looks up, Death is looking back.

Vanja said she saw her godmother always cloaked in smoke and shrouds. Emeric sees Death not unlike the carved granite saints, her robes melting to fresh grave dirt at the hems, a train of headstones trailing after her. The one thing in common is the inconstancy of Death’s face, always shifting to that of someone perishing at the moment.

“You were good to her,” Death tells him, tone inscrutable; he doesn’t have to ask who Death means by ‘her.’ “I am grateful. So just this once, I will tell you: he is very, very proud.”

Then in a sigh of salt air and rustling pines, she’s gone.

It’s strange, Emeric thinks, how the cemetery is too big, and his old home too small, but somehow the sea feels the same. Perhaps it’s that it’s too great to fathom, too vast for him to know a difference on a distant shore, too measureless to even feel the passage of days or years or decades.

Perhaps that oblivion is a relief in itself.

He lets himself sit in the sun and the quiet for a few more minutes, eyes closed, breathing in the swell and ebb of the surf. He could scream everything he’s lost in his life, in this year, into the waves, and the sea would be the same. He could be a prefect of legend, defend the powerless, stop the worst of the empire, and the sea would still swallow him whole.

And his father would still be proud.

No matter the face Death wears, after all, a Low God cannot lie.

When he’s ready, he pushes himself back to his feet one more time.

“Happy birthday, Father,” he says. “I’ll see you next year.”

Chapter Text

• I have a good smile
• something good I helped someone who was lost yesterday
• I did my hair the way Luisa showed me and it looked nice
• I fixed a problem last night
• An old lady said I was “spirited”
• I

“I’m just saying,” Fortune says, leaning over Vanja’s shoulder as she taps her charcoal stick on the parchment, “it seems like exactly what you were looking for.”

“I’m trying to focus,” Vanja grumbles into her palm. She slouches at the little table in Benno’s flat. He’s gone out for breakfast, and if she doesn’t think of another thing to add to her list before he returns, he’ll be vexed. No, disappointed. No, some blend of the two, which is worst of all. After all, this was his idea.

It started last week, after she’d slept over here a third time. She made what was supposed to be a joke—that they had to use his place because she wasn’t pretty enough to be bedding anyone at the Gilded Rose—and instead of laughing, he let out a long sigh. Then he said something to the effect of I really wish you’d stop insulting yourself to guilt me into flattering you and then she said something to the effect of fuck you, I didn’t ask you to say anything and then he came back with of course you didn’t ask, you just dumped your shitty self-esteem on me and unsurprisingly, that turned into their first real fight.

And then the next day, he shoved this stupidly long piece of blank parchment at her along with a charcoal stick and said Every morning you’re going to write down something good about yourself until you’ve filled this page.

 Or else? she asked.

Or else no more— He made a crude gesture.

One that, admittedly, Vanja found extremely compelling.

(At least for a day. When she got bored on Day Two and tried to write ‘something good about yourself’ Benno did not find that particularly funny either.)

The worst part is that it was easier to shrug and claim she didn’t like anything about herself, keep that at arm’s length, and move on. It’s not just harder to find the good; it’s harder to admit it. There’s a risk, a vulnerability, to openly liking anything, let alone herself.

“You are clever and relentless,” Fortune suggests. “Your freckles are pleasing to some, myself included. There. Now will you listen? The woman came to my Gambler’s Altar in Welkenrode, asking for good luck with a corrupt magistrate.”

Vanja grudgingly writes I have nice freckles, because Low Gods cannot lie. All the same, she says, “Sounds like she wants your help.”

Fortune swishes around to the other side of the table, her wreath of coins shedding a smug jingle. “Aha, but! She left a red penny—”

“So do a lot of people.” Fortune’s temples all have four urns outside their entrance, each for a different kind of donation. One is for red pennies, to relieve one’s own misfortunes.

Vanja feels her godmother’s fingers slip beneath her chin and tilt her face up, just as they did thirteen—no, almost fourteen years ago now.

“She left a red penny on the Gambler’s Altar,” Fortune says gleefully. “And she prayed for the Pfennigeist.”

Vanja catches her breath, brow furrowing. After a moment, she asks, words clipped, “How did that happen?”

“Did you know the tale is, you brought down Ludwig von Wälft?” Fortune laughs. “That the prefects only finished what you started? All of Dänwik has heard how a red penny was found in his gallery, and his fortunes have only tumbled since.”

Considering Vanja’s still hunting Ludwig’s damned statuette to buy Ozkar’s help, she wouldn’t mind if his fortunes rolled expeditiously off a cliff. But that’s secondary concern. The Pfennigeist is only a tool, no more. It needs to stay that way. “Don’t tell me your hand was in it.”

Fortune shakes her head. “I didn’t nudge a single thing. He brought that mess on himself. And stories of the Penny Phantom are growing beyond Bóern now. So how did this happen? A woman brought a red penny to relieve her misfortune. And she knew if anyone could help, it would be the ghost who ruined a prince.”

The flat shakes a little as the front door shuts downstairs. Benno’s back. And Benno… doesn’t know about her godmothers.

“I’ll think about it,” Vanja lies under her breath, just to get Fortune off her case before Benno’s footsteps reach the top of the steps.

Fortune gives her a narrow look. “Do.” Then she vanishes in a whirl of gold and dust.

“Alright, let’s see it,” Benno says as he comes through the doorway of the flat proper, a basket that smells suspiciously of apple cake dangling on one arm, a carafe of coffee in the other. He sets them on the table and leans over her, pressing a quick kiss to the back of her head. “Mm. You do have nice freckles. But I might have to check them again to be sure.”

Vanja can’t hold in a clumsy laugh—just because she’s writing these things about herself doesn’t mean she can handle others agreeing with them—but it shifts to a breath sucked between her teeth when he draws her hair over a shoulder and moves his lips to the side of her throat.

Part of her is here in this mid-October morning, sitting at the table, blood buzzing at the sensation.

Part of her is in Hagendorn the first night of May, as Emeric whispers, I love you, Vanja Ros in the exact same spot.

She forces herself back into this moment, twisting to give Benno a quick peck before murmuring, “Breakfast first.”

He sighs dramatically as a mummer, flinging himself into the other chair with a hand thrown over his arm. “O! Fatally wounded am I! Is not mine bed more tempting than a mere pastry?”

Vanja reaches for the basket. “I’m telling Tommes you said his apple cake was a mere pastry.”

“You would wish death upon your lover?” He hooks fingers through two mugs racked nearby and swings them down. “O, cruelty herself!”

“Some of us have work to do today,” she says briskly. He’s not really cross with her, or he wouldn’t be using his pageant-stage voice. He’s just bored, and looking to occupy himself like many a person their age.

Most of the time, she wouldn’t mind occupying herself with him either. It was almost a relief, how easy this was.

(Is.)

(Usually.)

She expected stilted explanations, deferrals, frustrations. Instead he was considerate and easygoing, slowing down whenever she was nervous, letting her be the first one to invite him into the bedroom at the end of September, a couple weeks after she’d returned from a fruitless trip to Dänwik. Benno had been so cautious, in fact, it had almost been a completely chaste night after he learned he was only her second. It took some very enthusiastic reassurances to convince him she didn’t feel rushed, that it was what she wanted.

(Part of her, the part that keeps reaching back to that night in Hagendorn, needed that reassurance too.)

But then it was…fine, sleeping with him. Awkward. Nice. A relief, that it could be fine with someone else.

And they’d both been there in the morning, and he’d gotten them water and they’d split a day-old muffin before fooling around some more, and it was so normal Vanja almost cried. And that’s just how it’s been, just so easy, since then. Mostly. He makes her laugh, he treats her like the most gorgeous creature alive, and even though it doesn’t have the same thrill of discovery as it did with Emeric, it’s good. It’s simple.

He knows she owns the Gilded Rose, that her mother abandoned her when she was young, that she worked as a maidservant for most of her life and only recently has she reunited with her siblings. She knows he was raised in Lüdz by his mother, and came to Rammelbeck a few years ago to seek his fortune.

He doesn’t ask where she goes at odd hours, or how a former maidservant came to own a brothel at age seventeen, or why she seems to know which bets to place and which rickety steps to avoid without fail.

She, in turn, doesn’t ask why he isn’t working at the Gilded Rose anymore, or anywhere anymore, or why his flat is suspiciously new and alarmingly nice for a barkeeper-turned-wastrel—for the gods’ sake, it’s on the Welkenrode side of the river now.

They don’t ask. They just enjoy each other’s company.

And so far, she hasn’t ruined it.

For now, that’s enough.

(Mostly.)

“Question,” she says around a mouthful of apple cake. “When you got your tattoos from Sloppy Jofrid removed, was that in Lüdz, or here?”

“Tam’s, by the Sünderweg.” Benno raises his eyebrows. “You don’t have any tattoos.”

“That might change. And un-change, if I don’t like it.”

A shadow crosses Benno’s face. “It wouldn’t mean anything?”

“Does it have to?” Vanja swigs coffee. There’s an ornery itch in her skull, one she’s trying to stomp out. This has been going well for a solid month, not counting the two weeks he spent courting her in August before she had to go to Dänwik. By now, she can’t deny the pattern: Good things last in her life for about a month before she starts looking for the trap door. She tips her head at his knotwork-covered forearms. “Yours are just for fun.”

Benno sets his own coffee down, jaw working, and Vanja knows on the spot that she is wrong. She braces for impact.

“They’re my family tree,” he finally says, terse. “On my father’s side.”

“I thought you didn’t—you never mention him,” Vanja fumbles. Now that she knows what she’s looking at, she can see how the lines branch, how they terminate in stylized nodes of symbol and rune.

Benno’s voice has a chill she’s a stranger to. “I didn’t exist to him for most of my life. I wanted a reminder that no matter what he said or did, I knew what I came from.” Then he shifts with a creak of the chair. “Sorry. That’s none of your concern.”

It’s meant as a way out for her. It feels more like a door in her face.

“It’s fine,” she lies again.

She can’t quite banish the feeling of unease, even when his mood passes and he sweeps her into bed for the promised freckle inspection. Leaving afterwards only makes it worse; he’s dozing, naked, in the sheets as she dresses, gathers her things, and slips out. It’s all too familiar.

Five and a half months since that wretched night, and still she’s haunted.

Stop looking for things to go wrong, Vanja orders herself as she lets herself out into the street. Just let it be fine. You don’t need any distractions today.

It’s already a pain in the ass to get back to the Gilded Rose from Benno’s place, and it’s even worse right now. The autumn Karneval is in full swing, a fact she’s about to utilize, but the festivities of the Week of Providence have clogged the streets with drunken revelers well before noon. There’s no getting a coach down the lanes, which means she has to make the trip over to Rammelbeck on foot.

Still, the inconvenience is a shield. Tomorrow, she’s stealing the statuette from the prefects. Today, she’s laying the final stones of the heist’s foundation.

And it’s been a long month of work to get here. The first, most obvious hurdle was that she simply can’t get it from prefect custody. Too many safeguards, too many people who might know her face.

But Emeric had told her long ago that there are only ever a hundred active prefects at most. Even with their clerks, that’s not enough to handle impounding an estate like Prince Ludwig’s. So that meant the statue wasn’t going to stay in their custody.

It took the better part of two weeks surveilling the high-end couriers of Welkenrode before she spotted a prefect clerk uniform headed into one: Neidhardt’s & Associates. Unfortunately, when she strolled up to “apply for work” the next day, the doorman turned her away with an apology, saying most of the staff were gone for the fortnight on an urgent job. And when she made it to Dänwik, it was just in time to see the string of heavily-fortified, even heavier-guarded wagons already rolling away from Prince Ludwig’s hunting lodge.

At least the long, embarrassing ride back gave her plenty of time to sulk. And then, grimly, to plot her next move, because the alternative was a life spent waiting for the axe to fall.

The next time she came to Neidhardt’s, it was in the fine clothes of a noble house’s steward. She had told the woman at the reception desk that her mistress was seeking a courier for a matter of some… discretion. That she needed to be certain of her shipment’s security. And given the timing—Monday of Karneval’s first week, the Week of Reaping, which is all about settling debts and feuds—the clerk knew better than to pry.

Instead, the extremely helpful clerk had personally walked Vanja through everything she needed to know to crack Neidhardt’s like a rotten tooth.

Then the boisterously festive Week of Providence gave her all the cover she needed to observe their staff rotations and regular clientele from the Gharese pastry shop across the street, usually over a basket of sweet yak-cheese dumplings.

And now, on the last day of the Week of Providence, Vanja has returned. This time, it’s in the outrageously frilly sort of barmaid costume typically foisted upon tavern wenches during Karneval. (The Gilded Rose had a few she could borrow; Vanja is trying not to think too hard about what the previous owner was doing in this get-up. Instead she’s focusing on the fact that they have a contract with a very reputable laundry.)

She’s also carrying a tray (stolen) as she maneuvers around rowdy drunkards, crowded with snifters (also stolen) that each hold a knuckle-width of the Smoked Oak’s top-shelf brandtwein (guess.) Even though she waited until she was only a block away to pour them from the flask strapped to a thigh, it takes some fancy footwork to dodge revelers without spilling as she closes the last few steps up to Neidhart’s doormen.

“The gods provide, gentlemen,” she says, swishing her skirts aggressively. “The Smoked Oak sends their favors for the house.”

The doormen eye the glasses, each stamped with the tavern’s seal. It’s a deliberately miserly pour; the Smoked Oak nearby is as known for its prices as it is for pinching pennies. But it’s customary for food and drink vendors to send around gifts on the last day of the Week of Providence, and bad luck to turn them away. And it’s so little that they’ll hardly be drunk on the job.

Plus… free booze.

“The gods provide,” one doorman echoes back as he takes a glass, the other following suit a moment later. Then, since everyone on the premises is supposed to partake, he steps away from the door. “We’ve a clerk inside.”

Even though that’s what Vanja wants, she makes a face. “Oh. Do you have a privy I could use? It’s, uh, urgent.”

The doormen laugh. “Ja, ja, just be quick about it!”

She ducks in. There’s a soft ding at the far end of the room.

Last week, when Elen the reception clerk had walked her through Neidhardt’s protocols, that was the first she highlighted: An enchantment that tracks every window, door, vent, and other passage in the building, logging whenever someone enters or exits. An overnight watchperson monitors the log and summons guards if there’s an anomaly.

That was when Vanja ruled out a nighttime break-in. Knowing the prefects, even a whiff of misdeed would be enough to cancel the shipment.

By day, however, there’s no such thing as an anomalous visitor, only customers. And she can blend right in with those.

“The gods provide,” she announces, swishing even harder as she approaches the reception desk. Elen did warn Vanja she’d be out during the sabbath, leaving coverage to her partner, Gerrit. Vanja knows his name from the massive jar of pickles on the desk, labeled ‘Gerrit.’

“Not like he needs a label,” Elen had sighed two Mondays ago, shoving the pickles away from a stack of paperwork. “He’s the only one here who goes through a whole jar a week, the fiend.”

Gerrit, a man who looks like the most exciting thing in his life is his pickle jar, is indeed screwing the lid back on as he looks up. “Oh, lovely—the Smoked Oak, eh?” He winks. “Don’t mind if I do!”

He stands up and helps himself to a snifter as Vanja hops from foot to foot. “I’m so sorry, the doorman said you have a privy I could use?”

“Of course, frohlein, down the hall and to the right.” He gestures with the snifter. “I’ll mind your tray.”

“Thank you.” Vanja sets it on the reception desk and darts down the hall. She knows exactly where the privies are from last week—right beside the changing rooms and across the hall from where the uniforms are kept.

This was the second protocol Elen had explained as she ushered her to the back: “Our uniform jackets are checked in and checked out, and counted daily. Any courier who is making a trip that calls for a change of uniform must return with exactly the same sets of uniforms or have their employment terminated on the spot, and the customer is notified immediately.”

And that was when Vanja knew she couldn’t simply walk out with a uniform without raising suspicion by day’s end; she’d have to buy herself more time.

She loudly opens and closes the door to the privy to mimic going in, then tiptoes across the hall, into the uniform room. This part is the most precarious; the variable is how much time she has before Gerrit is a concern. Her best chance is to hope for minutes but plan for seconds, so she gets to work, reaching into her blouse and yanking out a roll of cheap olive-green wool that had previously been padding her costume’s generous bosom. The wall of uniform jackets is close to the same green, each one folded and stacked in tight rows on the shelves to make for easier counting, almost like book spines. And more importantly…

A clerk or a courier might not spot it, but as a former maidservant, last week, she didn’t miss the faint layer of dust on the top shelves.

They don’t take the jackets out to count them. Which means a bolt of cheap wool, folded the right way, will pass muster just as well.

In the front of the building, she hears Gerrit let out a faint, startled burp. That’s a good sign that the spiked brandtwein is working. It’s a less good sign of how much time she has.

There’s a ladder off to the side. Vanja scales it and pries a dusty jacket from the nearest top shelf, tucks it under an arm, and then folds her own fabric to an acceptable approximation and slots it into place. The lack of dust makes it stick out until she smears a sleeve across the whole shelf, redistributing the schmutz more equitably.

A chair creaks in the reception area. She catches her breath. No footsteps… yet.

Vanja scuttles down the ladder and back across the hall, then into one of the privy closets, where she sets about stuffing her blouse once more, this time with the uniform jacket. She’s just shoved a cuff under the stiff bodice when she hears Gerrit rush down the hall.

Deliberately, she opens the door and goes to the wash stand as he barrels in, green-faced and sweating. “Please excuse me, frohlein,” he gasps, before flinging himself into a stall.

“Oh dear,” Vanja simpers. “Good day to you, sir!”

She hustles back to the reception area, where one last snifter remains untouched on the tray. Vanja sets it aside on the counter, perhaps for after she’s done with Neidhardt’s. The powder she spiked the brandtwein with is harmless, after all… until it comes into contact with vinegar, such as the pickle brine. Then it foams into the kind of gastrointestinal catastrophe that will keep a man like Gerrit in the privy for a long, long time.

The gods, after all, provide.

Vanja tugs at a ribbon loop subtly embedded into the now-empty tray’s surface. It lifts, and a thin panel lifts with it, revealing a few sheaves of blank parchment. Ozkar’s specialty parchment, in fact. She’d bullied her brother into parting with it for the sake of stealing the statuette; he’d passed her word from a contact in Aederfeld that the statuette would be arriving at the prefects’ research institute for study next week, and that was when Vanja knew he was more invested than he was letting on. 

Parchment in hand, Vanja slips behind the counter to study Elen and Gerrit’s desk. This next part would be tricky for a common thief. It’s less tricky for Fortune’s goddaughter. A gold shimmer spangles one drawer below the pickle jar, and when Vanja opens it, she sees another suggestion gilding a particular file. It’s labeled OPGC – Order of Prefects of the Godly Courts.

Fortune is being even more helpful than usual today. Vanja suspects she knows why.

“I need to handle this first,” she says, the words barely above a breath, knowing Fortune will hear. The gold dust vanishes, and Vanja sighs. “Once I’m done with Ozkar, I can look into the magistrate, alright?”

The gold dust makes a twinkling return.

Vanja cracks open the file. Sure enough, it’s the work order forms for the prefects. Right on top is the one she’s looking for: the transfer form for the statuette.

She spreads a page of Ozkar’s parchment over the form, then starts running her index finger over its surface. Lines of ink bloom under her fingertip, making a perfect replica of the form below. Description: granite statuette of kneeling woman, age unknown, properties unknown. Copied. Transfer authorized by: Prefect Aspirant Hensel Dorholtz. Copied, signature and all. Someone’s about to have a bad week.

Vanja saves the delivery time for last, and lifts her finger before it copies the scribbled Noon. Then she sets aside the statuette’s work order and returns to the prefects’ file, looking for one more form. Like Neidhardt’s, the prefects are extremely careful with their uniforms, and this office gets an order just to pick up the laundry on Sundays and Wednesdays… at three in the afternoon.

Vanja lines up her copy of the statuette’s form, then carefully presses her finger to the last section, filling it instead with the laundry pickup’s time slot of three o’clock instead of its original noon. This altered copy goes into the file. Now Neidhardt’s won’t send the real courier until hours after she’s made the pickup.

But this is not the hour to cut corners either. She makes two quick copies of the laundry order. The first gets it date changed from Sunday to Wednesday, still scheduled for three in the afternoon by Head Clerk Marten Roeland of the Welkenrode outpost. That one she slides back into the file. Now when the paperwork’s inevitably reviewed, it’ll look like a simple mix-up.

The second copy goes into her tray to be tweaked later, along with the original form. That’s her escape route, if she needs it.

She returns the file to its drawer, then digs up the final security measure she’ll need to clear: hiring documents. Elen didn’t mention whether these were tracked as well, but to be safe, Vanja uses more of Ozkar’s parchment to make copies of the blank registration form, and lifts Gerrit’s signature off a completed one. She can fill out the rest later. Really, what matters is the page at the back, which just holds a strange symbol.

Elen actually hadn’t shown that part to Vanja last week, only described it: “Every employee has a proprietary mark tattooed on their arm as a requirement of the job. It’s changed every six months, or if a courier goes missing. Once a courier formally accepts a work order, their mark can be tracked until their cargo is received.”

Vanja would be more concerned about being tracked if she didn’t plan on having the mark removed well before they even realize the statuette’s gone.

She makes the copy, then stores her parchments in the tray’s compartment, replaces the panel, gathers the snifters, and swishes out the door.

“Happy Providence Week,” she tells the doormen as she collects their glasses as well. “Enjoy your afternoon.”

#

The first night Vanja had spent with Benno weeks ago, when they were done and lying together in the slightly-too-warm September night, he made the mistake of asking how she was.

“Fine,” Vanja had said, “good, really good—” and what she had meant was she had successfully kept from calling him Emeric every moment but once, and that once was just in her head, and on the balance that was a win.

As he’d fallen asleep, she’d lain awake under the weight of an arm she wished was someone else’s, and knew that it was deeply, deeply unfair.

 But then she’d woken them both up with a nightmare, and even though she couldn’t tell him what it was, he’d held her and hummed a sweet little lullaby, badly, until she drifted off again.

And now he wakes her with lines of poetry in the mornings, calling her a muse of fire, the dawn’s only rival, other nonsense that makes her laugh almost as much as his fondness for terrible puns. And now she’s begun to wonder if she deserves something this good. And now she knows that means she really wants to keep him, which makes lying in his arms tonight all the more deadly.

Mid-October nights are cooler, easier to enjoy the post-bedding afterglow without having to kick her legs out of sweat-gummy linen sheets. She’s studying his arm tattoos even closer, searching for the secrets she missed before. A finger taps a double-bordered diamond. “Who is this?”

“An aunt,” Benno says lazily.

“Does she have a name?”

 “And three kids.” His chest shifts under her cheek in a movement she interprets as a shrug. “Never met any of them.”

“How did you learn about them?” she asks, trying to mind where she’s stepping, but—

Well, it’s not that he’s a stranger to her, not exactly. They’ve spent hours walking along the banks of the Trench, they’ve drunkenly howled choruses of bawdy songs in crowded taverns together, they’ve spent more nights together than not the last two weeks… but.

But.

“Public record,” is all he says.

Vanja isn’t sure how she feels that for once, she’s not the evasive one in a relationship. Emeric was always forthright—

She cuts that thought off. It’s not fair to compare them like apples in a market.

But now she can’t help wondering if this was how she made him feel whenever she held back.

“Marien and Erwin are going out again tomorrow,” she says, partially to change the subject and partially to distract herself.

Benno’s ribs swell with a laugh. “Now that I didn’t expect. No offense, mind. Just seems he’s more the sort to, y’know, settle down.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

There’s a pause. “I don’t really see the point of it,” he says finally. “It just makes people miserable, seems like.”

“ ‘It’?” Vanja tries to keep the tension out of her voice.

Benno pushes himself deeper into the mattress. “Marriage. Kids. Little house, a dog, all that. Tying yourself down forever. It’s asking for a lifetime of resentment.”

Vanja can’t stop the memory, then: Emeric threading her hair through his fingers, saying almost shyly that if she chose it, she’d make a beautiful bride.

And some new, small, hard part of her crystallizes: that matters to her.

She pushes herself up, turns to look Benno in the eye. “So… what are we doing?”

He stares back at her, almost bewildered. “Having fun. Enjoying each other’s company. Saints and martyrs, Vanja, I’m only your second. It’s been what, two months—barely? Did you expect…?”

“No—not now, I just…” She’s back in the Library of the Divine, saying, Because this has an end date, and Emeric answering with Because it doesn’t.

Was that so strange? Is it needy to want Someday we could instead of Fine while it lasts?

Benno’s still looking at her like she’s about to cut his head off.

“I think I should go,” she mumbles, and rolls to the edge of the mattress.

The linen sheets shift behind her, an arm slipping around her waist. “No, wait—you don’t have—”

“I just need to think, alright?” she bites out. “At least one of us should know what they want.”

Silence. She shoves herself out of bed and goes looking for her chemise.

Benno’s voice has that angry chill in it again. “You know, it’s really amazing that you’re this upset when you’ve had one foot out the door the entire time anyway.”

“I’ve had—Do you have any idea how hard it is to get you to open up?” Vanja explodes. “I ask you about your family, the one you have tattooed on your arms, and you act like I’m asking you to pull out an eye!”

This is all another echo—she and Emeric fought just like this before—

“Oh, and you’re a paragon of transparency, are you?” he fires back. “You take over a money laundering operation, you run off to Dänwik and still won’t say why, you’ll barely even talk about where you go all day, but I’m supposed to feel bad for not telling you about tattoos I don’t even want anymore?”

Vanja wordlessly stuffs her shirt into her breeches. If she says anything now it’ll be meant to draw blood. How does this keep happening? How does she keep falling for boys she has no future with?

What if that’s why she keeps falling for them?

What if it’s safer to chase something hopeless?

“Wait. Look.” Benno levers himself out of bed, putting himself between her and the doorway. “We … need to have a talk anyway.”

Oh no.

Oh no, he’s breaking up with her.

He’s breaking up with her when, not even twenty minutes ago, he was inside her.

She feels sick.

And even though she doesn’t think he’d hurt her… the fraught animal part of her still panics at him blocking the way out.

There is one thing Vanja’s learning about herself and relationships: When she leaves, it’s on her own terms.

She grabs her overnight bag from the table and pops the adjacent window open. “No,” she says stiffly, “I think I can guess the rest.”

It’s brutally cold, but worth the look on his face as she swings out the window and climbs onto the roof. In moments, she’s running along the shingles, headed back toward the Gilded Rose, trying not to cry, trying harder not to look at the constellation of the Lantern hanging overhead.

#

That night, in her dream, the sea drags her down just as she feels sand under her fingertips. She’d almost done it this time, almost beat the song of Rohtpfenni, Rohtpfenni, Rohtpfenni at her heels.

Almost.

The bloated, gray face swims out of the darkness, shoving her deeper: Yannec. “Thought you could drown me?” he gurgles. “Thought you’d get away?”

Dame von Falbirg chirps: “Who said you could leave, Rohtpfenni? Your work’s not done here!” Hands, cold and knobbed with colder rings, slide around her throat.

Her lungs burn as cuts open all over her hands, spilling red threads into the water. They yank taut as her mother’s voice hisses, “You’re just the same as me.”

“I’m not,” Vanja gasps, but it comes out as nothing but malformed bubbles.

Just as everything’s going dark, one final voice whispers in her ear:

“My, my, my,” coos Irmgard von Hirsching, reaching for her eyes, “haven’t you gone soft.”

Vanja doesn’t know if it’s a relief or not when she wakes alone in an empty bed. Either way, it’s harder to fall back asleep on her own, without the comfort of a bad lullaby.

#

I am…

I have…

For some reason, Vanja can’t help trying to think of another good thing in the morning on the way to Tam’s tattoo parlor. Maybe she’s just in the habit now.

I don’t give up.

She does like that about herself. Except—

You’ve had one foot out the door the entire time.

That was different. Right?

Benno wasn’t wrong, exactly; maybe some part of her sensed she was the only one looking for something deeper, something he clearly didn’t want. Maybe she didn’t give up so much as never really dive in.

Or maybe the only thing she’s comfortable giving up on is herself.

It is very fortunate for Vanja that she arrives at Tam’s before that thought can send her into a complete meltdown instead of just a partial one. A partial meltdown she can defer. Maybe even until she and her sister Luisa meet for tea this afternoon. Luisa, for some bizarre reason, seems to be rather invested in Vanja’s wellbeing, and that’s just the sort of conundrum she’ll happily dissect.

She pencils in her emotional collapse for later and walks into the tattoo parlor, hiring papers from Neidhardt’s in one hand, uniform jacket slung over her other arm. An auburn-haired woman at the counter looks up as she knots her apron. “Good morning and welcome! How can I help you?”

Vanja holds up her hiring papers. “I’m supposed to get a tattoo for my new job, but I don’t know if I’m going to stick with it? I heard Tam could take it off?”

“I’m Tam,” the woman says as she ties her hair back from her face. “You don’t have the tattoo already?” At Vanja’s head-shake, she smiles. “Phew. That makes this a lot easier. One more question—will it go over any scar tissue?”

Vanja frowns. “Scar tissue?”

Tam beckons her closer as she rolls up a sleeve. A shiny reddish bump sits on one wrist, smaller than a pinkie nail. Ink is flowing around it, pooling into eyes that blink up at Vanja—a spirit. Tam must be a warlock.

“Scar tissue holds pigment a little differently.” Color blooms on Tam’s forearm, hitching and marbling around the bump before it flushes blue, then purple. “It’s tricky but doable.”

“I didn’t even know you could tattoo scars.”

Tam shrugs. “Sometimes people want to make them into something else.”

Once, Vanja had thought of the scars on her back as thorns, before Irmgard had found a way to ruin even that solace. Emeric had shown her in April that she could still be loved as she was; Benno had only asked but once, and never pried beyond the pruned truth she told him, never wavered even by daylight, when the scars were plainest.

That still doesn’t mean she likes seeing them. Sure, they remind her that she can survive, endure. But they also remind her of what she’s suffered.

Vanja never considered making them into anything… different.

 A quarter-hour bell chimes in the distance, and she shoves herself back on track, rolling up her own sleeve to show the plain skin. “It just has to go on my arm. I figured I’d try the job for a day and get it removed if I don’t like it.”

“Then here’s what I propose.” Tam wiggles her fingers. “I can give you a version of the mark that’s, in simple terms, very shallow. It’ll fade on its own after today, but you can come back and get the real deal if you want to commit. How’s that?”

“Perfect. How much?”

Tam names her price, and Vanja shells out a few white pennies, then extends her arm. It’s almost reassuring that Tam checks the hiring paperwork first, but definitely reassuring when it passes muster.

It stings a little as the warlock traces lines onto Vanja’s skin, but soon enough, a perfect replica of Neidhart’s proprietary symbol sits stark below her elbow.

“There.” Tam dabs at a little loose ink with a rag. “Shop’s open all hours, but I’m off after three for the Hallowmarch, so if you haven’t decided by then, come by in the morning. Oh, and I might be a man tomorrow, I go back and forth. Sometimes that throws people off.”

“Got it.” That’s something like her sibling Jörgi, who explains it as feeling neither-and-both. “If… I wanted to do a different tattoo…”

“I also take walk-ins,” Tam says with a smile.

Vanja keeps that idea in her back pocket as she crosses the bridge into Welkenrode. Would it change anything, if she covered her scars? She’d know what they were beneath the ink. But… it’s her body. She didn’t choose those marks. Who’s to say she can’t transmute them into something she did choose?

She’s still mulling it over when she gets to the street of the prefect outpost an hour early or so. The Hallowmarch, a procession of local dignitaries, clergy, and performers dressed as saints and martyrs that falls on the Sunday of the Week of Hallows, will be winding through this part of Welkenrode around noon. The chaos will cover her retreat, but crowds are already starting to gather along the lanes. Getting here early was the right call.

As the clock strikes a quarter to noon, she ducks into an alley for the final details. A small packet of powder worked into her hair, and suddenly, she’s a brunette. A layer of fine paste, and her freckles are subdued. One uniform jacket slipped over her nondescript shirt and breeches, and she’s a Neidhardt’s courier.

 She does a final check: hiring documents tucked away in the inside pocket of her jacket. Left pocket: the form for picking up the statuette. Right pocket: her backup plan. Backstory: Her name is Mar—

Not Marthe.

Some habits are easier to break than others. Grudgingly, Vanja unfolds her hiring paperwork to review.

Backstory: Her name is Greta Jung, she was just hired yesterday, they’ve been shorthanded all morning, and she’s just supposed to bring the package to the office. If anyone inside thinks she looks familiar, it’s because Greta used to work at the Smoked Oak, maybe they saw her there? The clerk should be the only risk; the prefects are usually in their studies and workrooms, and Emeric… If this was his case, his name would be all over it, not some Prefect Aspirant Doorknob or whatever.

But she only has to deal with the clerk anyway. Usually she’d feign jitters about her first day to elicit empathy, but nervousness could rouse suspicion with the prefects; she’ll need to keep a cool head instead.

Then she can just walk the package right over to Ozkar, and he can tell her how to break her mother’s curse. Too late for Emeric, too late for Benno, but maybe—not forever.

Maybe a Someday we could.

Vanja readies herself, then walks into the outpost as the clock strikes noon.

The clerk’s at the desk. He looks not unlike Gerrit the pickle fiend, albeit a decade or so younger. He perks up at the sight of her uniform jacket—but only asks, “How can I help you?”

Smart fellow; knew better than to assume what she’s here for. She fishes a paper out of her left pocket and squints. “Uh… Marten Roeland? You have a package scheduled for pickup at noon, right?”

“I was expecting Ingwar,” the clerk—Marten—says slowly.

 Vanja nods. “I just started today, and we’re a bit short-handed, so he asked me to bring it to the office for him.”

“Very well. Let’s see your mark, please.” Marten comes around to the front of the desk as she puts the form back in her pocket and rolls up her sleeve to show the fresh tattoo. A line appears between his bushy brows. “It hasn’t been activated?”

“It hasn’t what?” Vanja blurts out.

“Your mark hasn’t been activated.” Marten’s tone stays neutral, but the line in his forehead isn’t budging.

Sometimes approximate truth fits better than a lie. “Sorry, Gerrit didn’t—didn’t say anything about activating it,” Vanja stumbles, before pivoting from carrot to stick: making a delay for Marten. “I can go back to the office and check with him, sir, it just might take a bit with the procession.”

“That won’t be necessary. I’ll have the package brought up here if you’ll take a seat.” Marten gestures to a bench. She obliges, a knot in her stomach, as he walks to the hallway and pokes his head into one of the side rooms. There’s a quiet, indistinct query, and then she catches the end of Marten’s reply: “… get Dursyn or Ghendt, quickly.”

Those were two of the prefects working on the case of the Grace Unending back in April. And neither of their names were on the work order; they’re fully-ordained prefects.

Fully-ordained prefects who can make an official arrest.

She’s been made.

For a moment, the knot in her stomach wrenches impossibly tight—

Then she remembers Godmother Fortune saying, You are clever and relentless. And gods cannot lie.

She’s prepared for this. Because she’s good at this. She’s good enough that a saint asked her to steal for him. She’s good enough that there’s a statue of her in Minkja. She’s good enough that a desperate soul in Welkenrode sought her by name in Fortune’s house, praying for intervention.

And she’s good enough to get out now.

Vanja waits until a prefect cadet emerges from the study and vanishes down the hall. Marten’s maintaining a decent mask of politeness as he walks back, but he’s certainly not taking his eyes off her. That’s fine.

She extracts the work order from her right pocket and purses her lips. “Sorry, can I ask—how much laundry is it, usually?”

Marten stops in his tracks, almost to the desk. “What?”

“It’s just with the Hallowmarch—” Vanja waves vaguely towards a window “—it could be a bit tricky to carry around all the people, you know.”

“The laundry pickup is at three.”

Vanja holds up the form almost theatrically. Nervous would be suspicious, but witless and confident is always believable. “This says laundry pickup at noon, authorized by Marten Roeland. You sure you’re him?”

“May I,” he doesn’t really ask, and plucks the form from her hands. As he scours it, Vanja can see the story reconstructing itself behind his eyes, just as she’s engineered it: He must have switched the times when filling out the forms, scheduling the laundry for when the statuette was supposed to go out.

And he’s going to have to explain that mistake to the senior prefects he’s called down to arrest a girl for trying to pick up their laundry.

Just like that—his ass is on the line, not hers.

Brisk footsteps start creaking down the hall.

“There’s been a mix-up,” he says swiftly, shoving the paper back at her, “the laundry’s not ready yet, you can come back at three. Good day to you, frohlein.” He opens the outpost door and all but shoves her out.

Vanja makes herself stay composed as she weaves through the crowds, holding it together all the way back to the quiet alley. Then in the shadow of the narrow walls, she peels herself out of the sweat-soaked coat, heart still pounding, and sags against the stone. Her eyes burn. Foolish, foolish, foolish, that was her one chance and she lost it, a month’s work gone, just like she wasted all this time with Benno—or was he wasting time on her—

A small voice pushes back: How could you know?

And that same unsettling revelation slips back in: The easiest thing for her to give up on is herself.

There’s only so much of this failure she can own, and the rest was just plain bad chance.

She still isn’t sure what Marten meant by ‘activated.’ And Elen hadn’t mentioned it either; it wasn’t in any of the paperwork; she only would know if she’d managed to get hired for real. Or if she’d asked some very specific follow-ups. And now she knows better.

The statuette isn’t out of reach either. She knows where it’s going, and by which courier, and that’s more than enough of a head start.

She… did her best. And it didn’t work, not this time. It wasn’t enough. But—

But that’s all right.

It can be all right.

She’ll be all right.

#

“I used to do the same thing,” Luisa says over her teacup four hours later, pulling her shawl a bit tighter. It’s warm for mid-October, but there’s a breeze blowing off the Trench waters. The tea shop they picked overlooks the wharf where the biggest, gaudiest Hallowmarch procession will move from the streets onto the river itself. “My husband got so cross with me while we were courting, because I’d always be saying how I hated my nose, how dull or silly I was, how fine things were wasted on me. It wasn’t until he wrote it down and read it back that I realized… I was just repeating what Marthe said about me.”

Vanja finds her own sip of tea is a bit harder to swallow around the surprise lump in her throat. “I… didn’t think of that.”

Luisa comes into Welkenrode every other week for errands, and she’s made it a point to meet with Vanja. At first it was mostly stiff small talk, but then it turned from fashion to friends, to lovers and courting, to family. Ozkar had mentioned Luisa was their mother’s first scapegoat, and in that way, she understands Vanja perhaps the best of all their siblings.

“The list that Benno boy had you start, it’s a good idea,” Luisa says. “I was looking for someone to make me feel better about myself, to be louder than Marthe’s voice in my head. And relationships can help you, but your partner can’t be the only voice. It’s not fair to them, and in the end, the only voice that will truly drown her out is your own.”

“I think I…” Vanja’s voice catches. “Emeric always just did it, and I didn’t even ask.”

Luisa rests a hand on hers. “You never told me why it ended.”

Vanja’s had plenty of time to think of a good way to say this.

She hasn’t.

“I—I was always going to be a problem,” she says haltingly. “His supervisor was trying to make him arrest me to punish him for something else, and I realized she wouldn’t be the last. Anyone could use our relationship against him. And I couldn’t let him throw it all away for me.”

Her sister squeezes her hand, briefly, but takes a moment to respond. Her voice is measured, tentative. “Sometimes… it’s difficult to be in a relationship when you’re still finding who you are. And there’s no shame in that. Especially—gods, you’re not even eighteen. You have so much time.”

She thinks you made a mistake.

Now Vanja can hear it—how that voice sounds like Marthe.

Even if I did, she tells herself, it’s over, I can’t change it, and I’ll be all right.

“I think the Hallowmarch is coming,” she says, looking over the tea shop patio’s railing. Sure enough, masked dancers are jigging down the street, cheers rising from onlookers. The parade barge deckhands jog to the stations in the wharf as the din grows louder.

Luisa leans to look. Her face sours. “Ugh. Prince Ludwig’s here. Of all the shameless…”

“Oh, you didn’t hear?” Vanja laughs. “He’s flushed out some bastard son to officially recognize for an heir now, so today’s his big introduction. Guess he knows the prefects will win once they get him into court.” Now she can see Ludwig’s parade float too. The prinz-wahl is easy to pick out, clad in sunny gold, blond ringlets bouncing. There’s a stiff, tall figure next to him.

One that… no.

Absolutely not.

Luisa’s asking her something.

“Sorry, what?” Vanja can’t tear her eyes off the float as it draws nearer.

“So you and Benno had a fight,” her sister is saying. “Is it serious, or do you think you’ll still see him?”

Vanja isn’t sure of a lot of things.

She doesn’t know how she’ll get the statuette for Ozkar.

She doesn’t know if she’ll ever find anyone who, who fit her, as well as Emeric.

She doesn’t know where things could lead if she answers a prayer for the Pfennigeist.

But she does know one thing.

As she watches Benno roll past, blonde hair neatly combed, tattoos hidden under sleeves fit for royalty, a tight-lipped smile as he stands next to his father, Vanja says faintly, “I think we have to break up.”

Chapter Text

“Damnedest thing,” the man mutters to Emeric as he lays a damp cloth on the head of the little girl shivering in the bed. “Every time they seem to get better, it comes back.”

“Have you been working in the Runoffs long?” Emeric asks, once again irked by the sheer scale of unknown variables in this case. The file was unusually thin for something that merits a prefect’s investigation. He’d read it in its entirety on the way to Lüdz, five times, and not because he’d set records for reading speed in the prefect training academy. (Which he has. His mother still has the trophies in her kitchen. That’s beside the point.)

“A few years,” the man—Doctor Hermann Matthes, as he’d introduced himself outside—answers. “A moment, please.” He takes a tiny hourglass from a pocket and flips it, then takes the little girl’s wrist in one hand.

Emeric takes the opportunity to study the floor of the sickhouse, tightening the kerchief over his lower face. Any reputable healer recommends a mask around disease; even if they’ve moved past miasma theory, there’s no denying it slows the spread. And no healer has found a way to tackle illness the way they can mend wounds, not yet.

If there’s any magic at work, it’s not the sort his spectacles can detect—at least, not without a warrant now, or a thorough affidavit detailing why the use was merited. The tribunal last month had decided his spectacles hadn’t picked up anything relevant to Prince Ludwig’s case, but the potential for a privacy violation or illegal search was too great to remain unaddressed. And Emeric doesn’t mind the compromise: His spectacles still show malicious magic, like curses and hexes. But he has to activate the lenses for anything else, like the charm on the von Falbirg pearls. And, as Justice told him sternly, he has to have an excellent reason why. One he can put in writing and testify to before Truth.

Which means he can rule out a magical plague in the Runoffs, but at present, not much else.

For a charity sickhouse, this one’s fairly clean. The beds are filled with people whose only common trait is the wear of a hard life in a district like the Runoffs—that and the flush of fever, the rattle of besieged lungs, the sour-sweet odor of vomit. In the sickhouse ward Emeric’s in, it’s progressed to what they call the Shivers—tremors that don’t stop until the heart itself does.

And the reason Emeric’s in this ward is because every bed is too big for its occupant, and every bed is full.

“Are you a real prefect?” a small voice asks to his right. Emeric turns and finds another little girl of no more than eight staring up at him, pale-faced and glassy-eyed, huddled under blankets.

“I am,” he says cordially.

“Liar,” she returns with a frown. “You’re not old enough.”

He crouches by her pillow, feeling his eyes crinkle in a short laugh. “They let me start when I was really young.”

“Oh.” She considers a moment. “Maybe I can join when I get better.”

“Tell me, frohlein, do you remember eating or drinking anything new?” Emeric asks. She shakes her head slowly, sweat-stiff curls crunching on the pillow. “Did you play anywhere unusual?”

“It’s been too rainy to play outside,” she tells him, like he should already know.

“Right you are.” He pushes himself back up. Then—he shouldn’t let this get personal, but—“What’s your name, frohlein?”

“Irzel.”

“Irzel, hm?” He writes it in his notebook, making sure she can see. “When you get better, I’ll put in a good word for you at the academy.”

Dr. Matthes mumbles a number behind him. Emeric turns to see him release the other girl’s wrist, grim-faced, as he pockets the hourglass.

“Accelerated heartrate?” Emeric asks.

“Not at first.” The doctor winces. “Let’s discuss it on the way back to my office.” He stands and hands a green glass bottle to the nurse nearby. “This should be enough to get you through tomorrow. I’ll come back with more before then.”

“You were sent by the gods themselves,” the nurse says wearily.

All Dr. Matthes says back is, “Would that I was.”

The sky overhead is the rough-edged lavender of clouds waiting to crack open, dimmer in the shortening days of November. Emeric does his best to pick solid ground in the muddy lane as they leave the sickhouse.

Dr. Matthes takes no such pains as he splashes through the puddles, resolute. He’s a lean man in his early forties, brown hair combed back, wide-set blue eyes tired. He pulls his own face covering down to reveal a snub nose and slanted mouth hardened at the corners. “Starts with fever, stomachache, coughing. Progresses to vomiting, delirium, convulsions… then the tremors. The pulse picks up, the lungs start to fail, and if they’re lucky, they go in their sleep.”

“It’s not always fatal, though?” Emeric tries not to dwell on Irzel. Damn him, why did he ask for her name?

“Don’t know,” Matthes says shortly. “This is something new. And it keeps coming back.”

The Runoffs sit at the base of a hill pocked with dead dreams; a century ago, House Wälft thought they’d found a vein of silver in the slopes and burrowed like ants into a mound. Instead, they’d only found devil-copper in the mines, which wasn’t worth the boils and dizzy spells it caused in the miners, or the illness it spread as noxious dust spilled into this neighborhood, tipping it all the way into the textbook definition of a slum. Even now, Emeric can see the remnants of cart tracks cut into the hillside. “Any chance the children are going into the mines?”

“Every tunnel’s been boarded up for years.” The doctor slows in front of a doorway. The window’s painted with Hermann Matthes, doctor and apothecary, in flaking letters. “I took the liberty of preparing some notes when I was told you were coming.”

“That would be very helpful.” Emeric follows him inside.

“Here.” Matthes walks over to a counter and picks up a folder. A pale little moth is clinging to a corner, but he brusquely blows it off. Then he pauses. “If I may… This is a disease, and it’s in the Runoffs. No one here has been worth attention from on high before. Why is a prefect looking into it?”

“With the losses, we want to be sure Lüdz is doing everything they can to manage the situation humanely,” Emeric says blandly. It’s vague enough to be true.

What he doesn’t say is: An anonymous petition for help was delivered to the Lüdz outpost of the Order of Prefects in October.

What he doesn’t say is: The mysterious ailment is spreading beyond the Runoffs now, deeper into Lüdz.

And what he doesn’t say is: Eleven children have died in the last two months.

People of all ages are getting sick, but only children are dying. And only in the Runoffs.

“Well, we appreciate the help,” Dr. Matthes says, and hands over his notes.

A letter is waiting for him at the front desk of the Lüdz outpost. It’s from Vikram, and it contains extensive and creative mockery at Emeric’s expense, along with an invitation to the annual Arcane Innovations Exposition in Aederfeld in January, where he’s showing his latest project.

Emeric scans it on his way up to his room, and is folding it back into its envelope with some difficulty when a voice cuts across the hall: “Conrad.”

He drops the envelope, swearing. Dorholtz is standing in the doorway opposite his.

“Sorry,” Dorholtz says, crouching, “let me—”

Emeric snatches it before he can. “What are you doing here?”

“I just wanted to apologize,” Dorholtz says in a rush. “I—I was jealous, and I’ve been an ass to you. And I know you’ve been having a hard time this year, so I thought I could help get your mind off your problems, but… I know I went too far. I’m going to do better. It won’t happen again.”

He looks at Emeric, almost expectantly, and Emeric realizes: this is the part where he’s supposed to accept Dorholtz’s apology. And, presumably, drop his misconduct report, the one keeping Dorholtz from proceeding with his Finding until it can go to a hearing.

I am responsible for the safety of my workers. Jenneke’s words haven’t faded from his memory yet.

“I appreciate the time you took coming to Lüdz,” Emeric says, courteous and curt in equal measure. “And I concur, it won’t happen again.”

He lets himself into his room, starts to shut the door—

Only for a hand to grab the edge.

Emeric can see Dorholtz’s face through the gap. “So you’re dropping the report.”

“Let go,” Emeric orders, heartbeat rising. If things get physical, he knows empirically that he will win—Dorholtz isn’t that much taller, and as a fully-initiated prefect, Emeric would wipe the floor with him where magic’s concerned—but his animal instincts still know a threat when they see it.

Dorholtz steps back, raising his hands. “Sorry. This is just really important to me.”

“I understand,” Emeric says coolly. And he does; he spent ten years becoming a prefect.

But he also understands that Dorholtz led with I was jealous, then pivoted to I thought I could help. One of those explains why the older boy incapacitated him and gleefully dragged him through a series of humiliations.

The other is a lie to shift the blame.

He shared a bed with the Pfennigeist; he can see misdirection in action.

Emeric looks Dorholtz in the eye. “We’ll speak further at the misconduct hearing.”

The other boy’s face darkens as Emeric shuts the door.

Then, for the first time in years of sleeping in prefect quarters, Emeric locks it.

Morning finds Emeric in Ponsviertel, a quarter of Lüdz one meager step up from the Runoffs by virtue of its houses being mostly intact. The anonymous petition sent to the outpost mentioned an ongoing outbreak here too, but with no known fatalities. The Ponsviertel sickhouse was quite certain it was due to the skill of the apprentice healer who tended their patients; given Dr. Matthes’ rigorous notes, Emeric isn’t certain how accurate that is, but he’s accepted directions to the apprentice’s office anyway.

The door sticks out to him, painted sky blue in a long stretch of oak boards, and a jingle announces his entrance as he pushes it open. There’s a young woman of no more than nineteen seated on a stool at the counter, bent over a heap of notes, her walnut-brown hair in a rather artless heap on her head. “I’ll be with you momentarily,” she says, not even sparing him a glance.

Emeric clears his throat. “Excuse me, I’m—”

The woman lets out a long sigh that might as well be distilled from an even longer eye roll, pointedly sets down her quill, and levers herself off the stool at a speed that makes glaciers look hasty, as if to punish him for interrupting her. Emeric would admire the artistry if he wasn’t trying to track down what might be a serial killer.

“I’m looking for Miss Lilje Kiefer,” he says.

“That’s—” She turns around, takes in his uniform, and blanches, then croaks, “me.”

Emeric elects to ignore the theatrics in favor of making inroads. “I’m Journeyman Prefect Emeric Conrad, and I’ve been assigned to investigate this situation with the illness in Lüdz. The staff at the Ponsviertel sickhouse said you may have some useful insights.”

“Oh, do I,” she blurts out. “I—I mean—if it’s of any assistance.”

Emeric cracks open his own notebook and writes down Lilje Kiefer, apprentice healer. “I just started the case yesterday, and our own information was very limited, so anything you can tell me will, in fact, be extremely helpful. How long have you been working in this district?”

She ducks behind the counter and, bizarrely, fetches a rag to start dusting what appears to be spotless birchwood, apart from her scattered notes. “Two years. Er. A year and a half. Give or take.”

Extremely nervous, Emeric writes. “You’re apprenticed as a healer?”

“And alchemist.” She shrugs almost violently. “You know, better to keep a variety of irons in the fire. And I think there’s—there’s overlap with the two. Um.” She shrugs again.

“Hm.” Access to chemicals. “And what have you observed with the Shivers?”

“W-Well, for one thing, it doesn’t get as bad as the Shivers over here.” Lilje lets out a giggle of pure uneasy torment. “That is—the symptoms start the same, but never progress as severely, and the sick recover, and there’s no pattern in who gets sickest.”

Emeric jots a few more notes, partially for reference, partially to push Lilje’s buttons. She’s definitely hiding something from him. “Miss Kiefer, do you think it’s odd none of your patients have died from this disease?”

She almost slaps the dust rag against the immaculate counter, which would be a nice break from wringing it in her hands. “Of course I do! Why do you think—I mean, I’m not even sure it’s a disease!”

Emeric pauses his note-taking to meet her indignant stare. “What makes you think that?”

Lilje’s face turns red. She doesn’t answer.

Emeric slowly closes his notebook. “Are you being entirely truthful with me, Miss Kief—”

“That’s not my name,” she blurts out, and claps her hands over her face. “I’m sorry! You asked my name earlier, and I go by Lilje Kiefer here, but I realized if I have to testify it’s going to come out, and I kept thinking oh saints and martyrs, did I accidentally lie to a prefect, and I don’t want to be arrested, one of my experiments isn’t going to be done for three months and I can’t miss it—”

Emeric has been listening to this monologue with a faintly stunned air, only to surprise himself with a sharp, sudden laugh. He claps a hand over his own mouth. Then he coughs, and says, “Let’s try this again, miss. What is your name?”

Lilje lowers her hands, eyes on the counter. “Sofia Liljenne von Kaarz-Wälft-Rhendt.”

“You’re—” Emeric’s voice cracks. “You’re nobility.”

She shakes her head. “Not quite. My family disowned me two years ago. My alchemy tutor lives in Ponsviertel, and they took me in. I started my apprenticeships six months later. Is there anything more you need to know?”

Emeric can pick out a thread of pain in her tone, but… due diligence requires thoroughness. “That depends,” he says carefully. “Were you disowned for anything that could be related to this outbreak?”

“Goodness, no. They had no problem with me studying medicine.”

“And the ongoing case against Prince Ludwig von Wälft, will that be an issue?”

Lilje’s nose wrinkles. “My family is a cadet branch of a cadet branch of House Wälft. We saw him perhaps once a year during Winterfast. And he was a pompous ass every time.”

“Then I only have one more personal question.” Emeric opens his notes once more. “What name would you prefer me to use?”

“Kiefer is fine.”

It stirs a memory: sitting by a fireplace almost a year ago, as the girl before him blushed and said Vanja is fine.

Focus.

“Miss Kiefer, why do you suspect this isn’t a plague?”

She lights up like a torch and all but lunges for her notes. Her mouth opens—then closes, along with her eyes, as she takes a deep breath to collect herself. “Right,” she says. “Towards the end of spring this year, I thought I noticed a pattern in the outbreaks, but couldn’t confirm it until September.”

Lilje beckons him over and lays two sheets of parchment side by side. One contains a table—gloriously methodical—listing each date of the last few months, along with the weather that day. The other is a similar table, but instead of tracking weather, it lists the numbers of mild, serious, and severe cases of the illness.

She places one finger on the first parchment: September 4^th. Heavy rain.

Then, with her other hand, she points to two weeks later, on the second chart: September 18^th: 30 mild / 47 serious / 13 severe.

“The numbers went down for a couple weeks, but…” Lilje moves her hands. September 21^st. Heavy rain. September 22^nd. Heavy rain. October 5^th: 21 mild / 50 serious / 19 severe.

Emeric’s already scanning the rest of the dates, the wheels turning. “There’s always an outbreak roughly two weeks after a heavy rain. And another one should be coming in five days. This is—this is tremendously helpful, Miss Kiefer.”

“Wonderful.” There’s palpable relief in her voice. “I didn’t think anyone would believe an apprentice.”

Emeric peers a little closer at the tables, then shoots her a look from the corner of his eye. “Is that why you submitted the anonymous petition?”

She gawks at him. “How did you—?”

“Handwriting.” He taps a page, then tilts his head. “Oh, no, I’m being silly. You didn’t want the complications with your name.” Lilje looks more alarmed than impressed (why is he trying to impress her?) and it clicks. “That can stay between us.”

Lilje is immediately more at ease. “Thank you. If you’d like, I can make you a copy of my notes. I recorded symptoms and duration across different cases as well.”

There’s an entirely unwelcome flutter in Emeric’s stomach. He fumbles his charcoal stick.

“Th-that would be extremely useful,” he stumbles as he stuffs it in a pocket and snaps his notebook shut. “I need to acquire some documents from the city administration, but may I call on you tomorrow?”

“Anytime.” Lilje smiles, and for the first time, he notices that her eyes are the same peculiar gray, somewhere between steely and delicate, as the storm clouds.

Emeric gives an awkward, baffled nod. “Then—good day to you, Miss Kiefer.”

He barely catches her goodbye as he all but flees the building.

Nearly a week later, Emeric can’t help but feel like he’s got very little to show for himself.

He knows, on a strictly theoretical level, that that’s not true. And the charts, maps, and notes strewn across the table he’s sitting at in one of the prefect outpost’s studies back that up. Between the old city plans he requisitioned from the Lüdz city archives, and Lilje’s notes, he was able to form a hypothesis, one Lilje herself has just sent word to finally confirm.

The Runoffs are named for an old waterway that used to run alongside the area before joining the main Eilfe river that threads through Lüdz. That waterway was diverted to dry out the ground for ore-laden carts back when the mines were first being bored. But the main wells for both the Runoffs and Ponsviertel were dug along its former track, tapping into the groundwater beneath the silt.

And now, every heavy rain is flushing devil-copper from the abandoned mines into the aquifer. Lilje and her alchemy mentor tested the wells against others scattered through the city over the last week. The ones closest to the hill had trace amounts of devil-copper, and the levels increased the closer it got to the two-week mark after the last heavy rain.

It’s not a disease. It’s metal poisoning. It matches the symptoms: fever, nausea, coughing. Or it should, except…

After he’d hatched this theory almost a week ago, his first stop was the Runoffs’ sickhouse—well, second, after he’d picked up a filter from the prefect outpost’s supplies. He’d privately passed it to the head nurse in the children’s ward, and asked her to purify any water that was to be given to her patients. And he’d impressed upon her that no one else was to know the children’s water was any different.

But none of the children have gotten better.

And that suggests something much, much worse.

Until they know what the poison is, there’s nothing he can do. Even the most thorough, exact healing magic in the world is useless if he doesn’t even know what substance he’s looking for.

He doesn’t know how to tell Lilje that all her hard work has amounted to nothing. No, not nothing; doubtless it’ll take a few weeks of bureaucratic arm-twisting, but he can get Lüdz to lay purifying charms on the wells, perhaps make sure the devil-copper isn’t seeping up through the soil as well.

He’s just acutely aware that after a week of working together, he turns into a bit of an oaf around Lilje. That half the time he’s trying not to laugh at outrageous things she says, and the other half he’s trying to catch up.

That despite his gut saying he’ll be in Lüdz for a few weeks more at least, that the answer is could be yes….

That old cowardly streak is keeping his mouth buttoned shut.

November 22^nd. One year and one week and half a day ago, he met Vanja at a party, shortly after she’d robbed nearly two hundred gilden worth of jewelry from its hosts. How different everything would have been if he’d caught her then. Instead, he’d let her ride off into the night.

How bitter it had tasted nine weeks ago, when he’d confessed to his father’s grave that she was the first girl he ever loved.

The worst part about this is, no one tells you when you’re supposed to be ready to try again; you’re just supposed to know. No one tells you what the point is of all the pain that follows, only that it’s supposed to be vaguely worth it.

A short, sharp knock at the study door jolts him from his thoughts. “Come in,” he starts, but the door is already opening.

“Conrad.”

Emeric gets another unwelcome feeling in his stomach. This time it’s closer to a knot.

Senior Prefect Jander Dursyn, proctor of Dorholtz’s Finding, is already closing the door. He’s clearly fresh off the road, his dark wool cloak still weighing down his shoulders, and he has a sour pinch to his lips that tells Emeric exactly what he’s here to discuss.

Emeric’s weapon of choice in dealing with unwarranted hostility is to pretend it doesn’t exist. At the best, it disarms someone who doesn’t realize they were looking for a fight; at the worst, it flusters people who know they want a fight but didn’t expect to be denied. “Prefect Dursyn. What brings you all the way—”

“Drop the misconduct report,” Dursyn barks, flat. “This is your last chance.”

Anger seeps like poison up Emeric’s spine. He wonders how different it would be if all this effort were spent keeping someone like Dorholtz accountable, instead of clearing his way to power. His voice stays wrenched into calm. “Prefect Aspirant Dorholtz showed an inexcusable lack of ethics—”

Dursyn cuts him off. “I’m not asking.”

Emeric pauses, considers incredulously what the protocols are for defending yourself in a brawl against another prefect, then says, “We have nothing to discuss. I’ll see you at the hearing.”

Dursyn stands there a moment, simmering. Then he dictates: “The bartender at the Smoked Oak had a busy night. He saw you and Hensel getting drunk together in the corner before you left.”

“He told me the next day that Dorholtz bought all the drinks and practically forced them down my throat.”

“I’m telling you how he will testify.”

Emeric doesn’t have to ask why Dursyn’s so certain. That knot in his gut is only getting tighter. “That won’t hold up to Truth’s—”

“Outside of trials, Truth only attends expulsion tribunals. Your report does not meet the level of severity required to call either.” Dursyn waits, and when Emeric says nothing, pushes on. “This hearing will do nothing but embarrass you, Conrad. Your own judgment is already in question. It’s clear you’re threatened by someone like Hensel, another young talent stealing your glory. We all wondered if you were really ready for your second initiation, then all it took was one bad breakup for you to fall apart. And of all people, you chose the Pfennigeist. Couldn’t resist a taste of the forbidden—”

Emeric’s on his feet before he realizes he moved. Dursyn tapers off, eyes glinting. This is what the senior prefect wants, to bait him into one more smirch on his reputation, one more way to discredit his report.

“This is about Dorholtz’s actions, not mine,” Emeric says stonily.

“Hensel’s a good lad who made one mistake, and he learned his lesson. It’s not worth ruining his life over.” Dursyn smooths his mustache. “Besides, it isn’t our place to judge if he deserves the role, it’s Justice’s.”

“If he passes his Finding, an entire year will go by before he has to answer to Justice,” Emeric retorts.

“Then that’s plenty of time for him to prove he deserves a second chance.”

“Or plenty of time for him to do worse.” Emeric shakes his head. “I’m not dropping the report.”

Dursyn stares at him, eyes burning. “It’s a shame, Conrad,” he sneers. “You had such a bright future. Good luck getting assigned any case bigger than a pickpocket now. I’ll make sure the entire order knows you can’t keep your prick out of the suspect list.”

He slams the study door on the way out.

Emeric stands there a moment, heart thudding an executioner’s drumbeat in his ears. When he lifts a hand to push his spectacles up, it’s shaking too badly, so he puts it back down on the table, feeling useless.

Useless. Powerless. Pointless.

He joined the prefects so he’d never feel this way again.

Maybe that was as much a fantasy as the Vanja he thought he knew.

He blows out a breath, then grabs his coat off the hook by the door and ducks out. He needs air.

“Oh—Prefect Conrad—” The head clerk’s voice rings down the corridor. His head appears around the corner a moment later, face somber. “A messenger came by from the Runoffs sickhouse. I’m afraid one of the children succumbed overnight.”

Twelve.

Twelve dead children, and he can’t stop it.

“Thank you for letting me know,” he rasps, even though he wishes to all the heavens and hells that he didn’t know at all, and makes himself walk away.

It takes a few wrong turns, but he finds his way out to the little courtyard some outposts have, lined in boxes bristling with the stalks of dying and hibernating plants. Some sit behind wire cages, because every plant is either medicinal, poisonous, both, or in possession of some other unique property relevant to the prefects, because waste not, want not rules every inch of the outpost.

There’s a cold stone bench all but crammed in between two boxes, and he sinks onto it, trying to breathe. The chill stiffens every lungful. All he can think is, What’s the point?

Children are dying, he can’t tell if it’s better or worse that he doesn’t know if the Shivers claimed little Irzel, it’s only a matter of time for her no matter what, because he can’t stop whatever or whoever is poisoning them.

He can’t stop Dorholtz from becoming a prefect, because Jander Dursyn thinks a predator is a good lad who just made a mistake.

He can’t even ask a clever, pretty, fascinating girl to dinner.

He can’t stop missing Vanja, or the lie of her, long enough to do it.

Pathetic. It’s all so… pathetic.

Hubert Klemens would never let himself get caught in so many traps. He would tell Dursyn to suck dung and go back to doing his job. He would engineer a reason for Emeric to interview Lilje in a charming little uptown bakery. He would know what’s killing the children.

But he’s not here, and Emeric isn’t him; he isn’t even a shadow of the man who came before.

A thin, papery thudding makes him look up. Even though it’s barely past four, the skies are starting to dim; someone’s lit a lamp in a nearby window, and a hemlock moth is hurling itself, again and again, at the glass.

 He swallows. It’s a little too close to home. Slamming into unseen walls as you chase the fire, not even lucky enough to burn.

Then—

Something aligns.

Emeric’s eyes lock on the moth, at each futile crash against the pane, as a keystone slots into place.

He leaps to his feet, sprints to the head clerk’s desk, and breathlessly says, “I need a message sent immediately to Miss Lilje Kiefer. She’s to meet me at the Runoffs sickhouse as soon as she can.”

It’s full dark when Emeric arrives at Dr. Hermann Matthes’ office to deliver the news.

“It’s not a disease,” he tells the doctor, who’s loading bottles of his tonic into a crate for the next week’s doses. “It’s metal poisoning. The rains are carrying devil-copper from the mines into the groundwater. We’re going to work with the city to filter it out, and the illness should stop.”

“That’s wonderful.” Matthes swats at a little moth making drunken, fluttering circles around the nearby lamp. By the wavering light, Emeric would say Matthes almost looks… vexed. “Will you be staying to supervise?”

“For a few weeks.” Emeric watches another moth join the dance. “You seem to have a pest problem.”

“They’ve been around for months,” the doctor grunts. “Can’t get rid of the damn things.”

Emeric steels himself; his voice stays neutral. “I’m not surprised. This species is drawn to hemlock plants.”

Dr. Matthes goes still. Looks up at Emeric.

Then lunges for the heavy stone pestle sitting in its mortar nearby.

He never reaches it; Emeric seizes his arm and wrenches it behind his back, then pins him face-down on his own counter. His breath is coming too fast, too heated. Calm down. It’s not personal.

That’s a lie; he still sees Irzel’s empty bed in the sickhouse every time he closes his eyes.

He needs answers. “Why,” Emeric grits out, elbow firmly in the man’s back.

“It’s a kindness,” wheezes the doctor. “Don’t you see? There’s no hope for them. They’re born in filth, they’ll die in filth, and between the two, they’ll rut in the muck and make more filthy little tragedies.”

“Pig shit,” Emeric snarls. “We found hemlock in every child you’ve been treating, every bottle of medicine.  You watched them suffer for months. Why.”

The doctor tries to push back, but Emeric isn’t letting up. Then, abruptly, Matthes goes limp. An almost giddy chuckle seeps from his lips.

“Like you don’t know.” The words drip out like honey. “It’s the same reason you became a prefect. It’s why you’re putting your boot on my neck now instead of hauling me off to a cell and washing your hands. It’s exquisite, isn’t it? Feeling someone’s whole world in your fingers, watching them squirm and try to fight, when you can end it all with one little squeeze.”

Emeric should know better. Does know better.

He falters anyway.

Matthes whips his head back and into Emeric’s nose. There’s an entirely ugly crunch, and it’s only partially cartilage; his spectacles are knocked askew, splitting his sight into dizzying quarters as his eyes try to catch up with a world fractured between blur and focus.

The doctor swings an elbow into Emeric’s stomach before he can steady himself, then shoves him to the floor. Even through the pain and the blur, Emeric can make out Matthes’ hand picking up the stone pestle. Emeric throws an arm over his face as the pestle lifts—

And stops, frozen in place.

The office door crashes open.

“Prefect Conrad—oh, your poor face—hold on—” Much to his mortification, he hears Lilje hurrying over. Fingers slip under his chin. “I apologize in advance for this.”

There’s a horrid noise like a cork squealing in a bottleneck, and a white-hot flash of pain. Then Emeric can breathe through his nose again, even though it’s still throbbing. He holds his now-crooked lenses to his watering eyes, and blinks up at the looming figure of Dr. Matthes.

Dr. Matthes is blinking back. He hasn’t moved an inch, trapped mid-swing. His eyes are darting around frantically, and a strange gagging sound is coming from his throat, but he’s as good as a human statue.

“My word,” Emeric says numbly. “What did you do to the man?”

Lilje holds up a half-empty vial of witch-ash oil, almost sheepish. “I, er? I stopped…? Stopped? His? Bones?”

“All of them?”

“Well, not his ribs, so he can still breathe,” she clarifies, in a tone that makes it sound like he really ought to have gleaned that from context clues. “Just everything else. I have been practicing.”

Emeric isn’t certain whether to be horrified or impressed. “Tell me it wasn’t on people.”

“Of course not,” she says, almost offended, and he feels bad until she adds: “My alchemy tutor lets me use the stew rabbits and roasting chickens they get from the butcher. I can even make them do a little dance. Oh—don’t give me that look. They’re quite dead already.”

“Khhhk,” says Dr. Matthes.

“I don’t accept criticism from child murderers,” Lilje sniffs.

The pain in Emeric’s nose is fading. He does his best to bend his spectacles back into functional shape for the moment, still astounded. It takes a prodigious amount of skill to pull off something like this, and so quickly. “This is truly… remarkable, Miss Kiefer. But—did you follow me here?”

“I had concerns,” she says. “And clearly I was right to. Don’t prefects work in pairs for a reason?”

And for the second time today, something aligns.

“Yes,” Emeric answers slowly, “they do.”

The rest of the night is a blur. He makes sure Dr. Matthes is safely behind bars and his ‘tonics’ destroyed, starts his paperwork, realizes he’s still covered in his own nose blood, falls asleep in the bath, wakes up long enough to pass his spectacles off to a resident research prefect for repair, and crawls into bed.

In his dreams, one more time, he’s chasing after Vanja.

The orange-and-roses smell of her mingles with the blood still limning his breath, and he’s running through the thorns, pushing through no matter how they tear at him.

She’s still out of reach.

No matter how he runs, chases, bleeds for her, she’s out of reach.

What’s the point?

For once, the question isn’t pure despair.

Why is he doing this to himself?

He slows. Stops. Looks to the sky, and finds it blanketed in pewter rainclouds.

Maybe… he doesn’t have to keep running. Not after someone who doesn’t want him.

For the first time, he turns—

And Vanja’s behind him, betrayal and accusation burning in her face. You gave up.

You left me, he protests.

All she says is, Did I?

Then she’s gone, and he’s stranded in the thorns once more.

He spends most of the next day drawing up the paperwork for Matthes’ trial, cataloguing evidence and taking witness statements. Lilje he saves for last. He tells himself it’s to be minimally disruptive to her workday; he knows it’s because odds are she’ll say something comically absurd enough to lift his spirits after such a bleak case.

But she remains unusually businesslike as she answers his questions in the outpost study, albeit a bit fidgety, as if she’s hiding something from him once again. After he has her sign her formal statement, she says, “I’m sure your sweetheart back home will be happy to have you back now.”

Emeric presses his lips together as he checks her signature. “If I had one, I would hope so.”

“Oh?” Lilje tilts her head. “Really? No one?”

“Not since May,” he says, surprised to find the admission less painful than usual.

Is it his imagination, or are her fists clenched rather tightly? “I’m certain that was a lucky person, to have such a suitor.”

“She was…” Of all the adjectives for Vanja, ‘lucky’ is perhaps the most loaded. “Unpredictable. But it’s in the past.” He changes the subject. “Anyway, I’ll be in Lüdz for a few more weeks at least. There’s still the trial, and depending on the sentencing, I may have to oversee remanding him to the city’s custody, and we also need to make certain the filtration system is implemented properly, and—”

“Journeyman Prefect Emeric Conrad,” Lilje interrupts, twin spots of pink blazing in her cheeks.

He pauses, staring at her.

She’s turning an even more vivid pink. “You can be so dense it is shocking. If you leave without asking me to accompany you for drinks, I will be seriously cross.”

“O-oh—” Emeric rattles, “I—I see.” Then, after an agonizing pause: “If I were to leave without asking, I would be an irredeemable fool.”

There’s a familiar moment then, awkward and lovely, where they’re both red-faced and grinning like drunkards, and he forgot how nice this is, and he wasn’t even sure he could feel this way again—

He’s not letting this one go.

Emeric gets to his feet, tidying his stack of paper. “In fact, let me get my cloak, and we can leave.”

“You’re done?”

“With my witness statements.” Emeric heads for the door, then, feeling particularly daring, adds, “I saved the best for last.”

That gets a real laugh out of her, not a nervous giggle but a delightfully sunny thing, and he finds himself striding down the hall before he gets any more ridiculous.

A conversation in another study dies off as he approaches, then passes the open door. Dorholtz and Dursyn, both of whom give him an absolutely acidic look from the overstuffed armchairs they’re lounging in.

Emeric pays them no mind, other than to note the study, and when he reaches his room upstairs, to grab his copy of the form he filed with the clerk this morning. Then, with his cloak slung over a shoulder, he heads back down. The two men’s faces are just as ill when he walks through the door.

He’s about to make their day much, much worse.

(And, for a short while, his own life, but it’s going to be worth it.)

“Congratulations, Prefect Aspirant Dorholtz,” Emeric says with an evil sort of cordiality as he hands the other boy the form. “You have received your first partner request.”

If the sheer outrage in Jander Dursyn’s quivering mustache could be converted to energy, Emeric suspects it could grind a year’s worth of grist in an hour.

“He can’t be assigned a partner until he’s passed his Finding,” the senior prefect growls.

“But requests can be filed ahead of time.” Emeric gestures to the stamp indicating the document has been entered into official prefect record. “And as the first request from a fully-ordained prefect, one currently unpartnered, mine will have priority over any other applications.”

Dorholtz gawks up at him. “You won’t drop your stupid report, but you want to be partners?”

“No,” Emeric says, dropping any veneer and letting winter roll through his bones, until he’s the unshakeable Prefect Conrad. “Charter of the Prefect, Article Eight, Subsection Two: ‘Following the assignment of a prefect’s first partnership, no transfers, discharges, or other terminations of the partnership shall be considered for one full year, unless compelled by emergency injunction, or by death, expulsion, or retirement of one party.’  You’ll be stuck with me, watching you, for a year, until you have to account for yourself to Justice.” Then he drops a coldblooded smile on Dursyn. “I’m sure we’ll have plenty of interesting cases to work through. And perhaps a pickpocket or two.”

Emeric couldn’t solve this like Hubert Klemens would. So instead, he’s choosing to solve it like Elske Kirkling.

Dursyn lurches to his feet and shoulders past Emeric none too gently, hollering for the head clerk as he storms down the hall. They all know it’s too late.

However, it does give Emeric the one-on-one time he was looking for with Dorholtz.

Emeric takes another step towards him, plants a hand on the back of his chair, and leans in. For once, Dorholtz seems to shrink; Emeric isn’t surprised. At the end of the day, a bully is just a coward with a suit of armor.

“I will be watching you,” Emeric says, “every minute of every hour of every day we spend together. And I will be documenting every boundary you cross, every toe out of line, every violation and infraction, until I have a file the size of Helligbrücke, which should take a week at the rate you’re going. And then I’m going to call your expulsion tribunal. And I will still be watching when they rip every scrap of your initiation mark out of your back.”

Dorholtz hisses, “Are you really so jealous—”

“I am the youngest prefect in history,” Emeric says icily. “I was the youngest junior prefect in history and the youngest recruit in history. I won my first case without my supervising prefect and my second without its key witness. I brought down the most powerful politician in the southern half of the empire, I bound a spirit on the brink of becoming a god, I handed you Prince von Wälft, and I am the one they called to Lüdz. Let me know when you’ve actually won a case, and I’ll consider feeling jealous. Until then…” He lets go and heads for the door. “Watch your back.”

“You’re sick,” Dorholtz spits at his back.

“I’m just doing my job,” Emeric says mildly, fastening his cloak; he’s kept Lilje waiting long enough. “Now if you’ll excuse me, Aspirant… I have better company for the evening. Good luck with your Finding.”

Chapter Text

It’s a simple system, really:

On the first night, the petitioner leaves a red penny on the Gambler’s Altar in Fortune’s temple. (And just in Welkenrode. For now.) They pray for the help of the Pfennigeist. If the penny is gone the next morning, they’ve been heard.

On the second night, they return to the Gambler’s Altar. Every candle lining the walls goes out. They speak their troubles to the dark, answer any questions that follow, and wait until the candles light again to leave.

(That’s Fortune’s favorite contribution. She’s always been a sucker for the drama.)

Usually, by the third night, they find the penny back in their pocket, or on a bedroom windowsill, or on the doorstep, and know at least that little grievance is solved. Whether it’s the release of wages unjustly withheld, the destruction of blackmail against a good person, the arranged discovery of a city official extorting bribes…

It’s child’s play for Vanja. Especially compared to trying to get her hands on this damn statuette. But it makes her feel like she’s accomplishing something in the meantime.

Unfortunately, tonight, it’s backfired, because it turns out Fortune is bad at faces.

She’d just told Vanja It’s a boy who’s looking for a missing lover and she, feeling sentimental, accepted. Later, Fortune would defend herself with All mortals blend together for me, except for you, dear, never you.

Which is why Prince Benedikt von Wälft is waiting for Vanja at the altar, admittedly an outcome neither of them had thought on the table.

“It is you,” Benno breathes before she can signal for the candles to go out, then throws up a hand as she immediately turns on a heel. “No—please, wait, I swear I won’t tell anyone. I’m just here to—to say sorry.”

“That’s not what this is for,” Vanja growls.

“I’ve tried to reach you for over a month,” Benno retorts. “Marien returned my letters unopened, you didn’t come back to the flat… I had no idea where you were. I only figured it out because my father mentioned the Pfennigeist stealing Saint Willehalm’s goblet while he was complaining about—about Prefect Conrad.”

“And?” Vanja pushes, because that’s nowhere near enough to draw that conclusion.

“My father was sure Conrad had a hand in the goblet theft. And…” Benno has the decency to look chagrined. “I saw that notebook in your bag, one time. The inscription’s signed.”

The little red leather notebook, the one Emeric made for her birthday last year. She didn’t even know it had an inscription, because cracking it open means her perfect memory of it will change. Vanja swallows, stuffs down the ugly voice that jeers how she was too thoughtless to check. She’s named that voice Marthe. It helps with shutting it out.

Benno went to the trouble of tracking her down, supposedly to apologize. And it’s not as if she ended things well herself. “I think I owe you an apology too,” she admits, immensely irate at caving to maturity. “I disappeared on you instead of settling things.”

He wavers, then offers a tentative grin. “Disappearing seems appropriate for the Penny Phantom, at least.”

A little of the tension in the chamber fractures. Vanja drops onto one of the stone benches, and he takes the one across from her, propping a boot tip on the stone by her knee.

“I don’t know about you,” Benno says, “but I… looking back, I had no business starting anything with anyone. That wound up hurting you, and I’m sorry. I didn’t know I was looking for something casual until we were getting, well, real. My father showed up out of the blue the day after that one asshole got pushy with you in August, and he told me he was going to recognize me as his son and heir. I didn’t even think he’d recognize me, period, because I’d only seen him in parades until then. He—he completely abandoned my mother after she decided to keep me, not even a quiet little stipend or a month’s rent here and there. But when he needs an heir before he goes to jail, suddenly he’s got a fat purse ready to hand off.” He looks like he wants to spit on the ground, but checks himself. “He gave me until the Hallowmarch to tie up any loose ends, but I didn’t know how to tell you. After the way he treated my mother, I’m sorry, I don’t know what I believe about love. But I know marriage is probably part of my future, and if I’m going to do a better job than my father…”

“It would never be me,” Vanja says hollowly. He’d need to marry for the benefit of the principality.

He nods, shamefaced. “I won’t insult you by pretending you’d be happy as a mistress, either. You deserve a love that can stand by you in the daylight.”

Vanja blows out a long breath. She’s had a while to mull over how, exactly, she wound up bedding the future prince-elector of Lüdheid, and this lines up with her own theories. “I’m sorry too,” she sighs. “I’ve been thinking a lot, and I know… I didn’t let you in, not really. It was easier to be a cynic, to find some excuse. It’s easier for me to give up on the good things in my life, because it hurts less when they leave.”

“That’s no way to live, Vanja,” Benno says heatedly. “Not letting yourself care? It’s denying yourself the best of your life, because you might encounter the worst.”

“Ask me how I know,” Vanja deadpans. “I’m working on it.”

If you’ll ever have the chance again, sneers the voice she now calls Irmgard, you’re so ugly, you couldn’t even keep a jobless layabout in your bed—

Vanja silently envisions shoving Irmgard into a very small, very dark cupboard, and slamming the door shut.

Benno looks almost—sad. “For what it’s worth, I don’t regret being with you, just how it ended. And I know whoever you let in for good… They’ll be lucky you chose them.”

“Likewise.” Vanja hears the hour-bells begin tolling for midnight. “I’ve got to go, my ride’s coming.”

Benno lifts the hood of his cloak as he follows her out of the little chamber. Fortune’s temple is usually quiet at this hour, but it’s good to be cautious; she doesn’t have to ask to know this little visit has been a matter of discretion.  “Your ride?”

Vanja, for her part, is making sure her scarf and coat are securely fastened for the winter night before she sets foot outside. “I’m going out of town on business,” she says. “Now that you’re a prince, the next time I see you, it better not be because someone prayed for my help.”

Then, as the final bell tolls, she pushes open the temple door, steps into the night, and lifts a hand.

In the next breath, glowing fingers wrap around hers. Brunne’s shout of “Hail, God Daughter!” thunders, but only for Vanja and the rest of the Hunt. She can see wind rattling the stained glass of the cathedral, and Benno’s awestruck face, before the Wild Hunt carries her into the night.

#

It’s a simple arrangement, really:

In exchange for one night’s ride with the Wild Hunt, Brunne will drop Vanja off anywhere under her domain at sunrise. That covers all of Lüdheid and a respectable amount of other territories. It also gives Vanja a way to cover a week’s ride in a single night, and in a way that can’t be traced.

Which is how she makes it to Aederfeld, in the northern edge of the principality of Sax Dominika, before the package she sent from Rammelbeck a week ago.

The plan is remarkably tidy, in fact. After she failed to intercept the statuette during the Hallowmarch, she broke into the Neidhardt’s shipping depot, where packages are held overnight before being sorted into coaches bound for their destinations. It was a rush job, and considerably riskier than breaking into the front desk, but still fruitless: all she found was a note in the log, one that said the transfer to Aederfeld had been delayed for a month for some trial.

It did yield two tiny bits of assistance, however: the list of roadhouses Neidhardt’s has standing contracts with for their longer delivery routes, and a key observation. Neidhardt’s, for their own security measures, packs every delivery into standardized crates stamped with the company name and the destination city.

From there it was a simple matter of reading the description of the statuette from the form she’d stolen during Karneval, finding an item—in this case, an exceptionally ugly vase—of roughly the same size and weight, and paying a visit to Neidhardt’s to have it shipped to one “Greta Jung” at the Spyglass Tavern and Inn of Aederfeld. Vanja’s almost embarrassed she didn’t think of this first.

And now, a week later, once Brunne drops her off at the Spyglass on the cold December morning, all Vanja does is get herself a room under the name Greta Jung, then go take a very long nap. She even treats herself to a nice bath in the afternoon, and when she goes downstairs for dinner, the cannonball-sized Neidhardt’s crate is waiting for her at the front desk.

It's just like one that ought to be departing Neidhardt’s depot in Welkenrode at that very moment, bound for Aederfeld. Except that crate holds the statuette, and hers holds the world’s ugliest vase.

The next morning, she charters a coach for her and her vase back to Rammelbeck. It’s pricy, but it means all she has to do is sit back and wait as they travel north. Sure enough, on the third night on the road, when they roll up to the roadhouse, another coach is pulling off the southbound road… a coach emblazoned with the Neidhardt’s insignia.

Once again she moves at midnight, sneaking into the carriage house through a window. She checks the Neidhardt’s luggage compartment first—

And there it is. A cannonball-sized crate stamped with Aederfeld for its destination. To be absolutely certain, Vanja slips her boot knife under the lip of the lid and pries it open. Dried grass and burlap are cushioning the contents, but then her hands brush rough stone.

She pulls out the statuette of the kneeling woman, squinting at it in the dim long enough to confirm, then stuffs it back into its crate and quietly tamps the lid back down before setting the crate on the ground. 

Then she cracks open her own chartered coach’s cargo hold, pulls out the identical crate stamped with Aederfeld, and switches the two. Someone at the Aederfeld Order of Prefects Research Institute is going to get a hideous vase; hopefully it’s someone with taste terrible enough to be delighted.

In the morning, her coach, now containing the statuette, continues on to Rammelbeck, and the Neidhardt’s coach, with the vase, goes on toward Aederfeld. It takes all of Vanja’s self control to resist verifying that the statuette is in her coach now, that nothing went awry, until they stop for the evening and she can check the crate without suspicion.

The statuette is still there, nestled in its bedding in the crate in her hands.

Vanja stands for a long moment, staring at the stone woman, breath clouding in the chill. She’s finally done it. After months of planning, trying, failing, trying again… she’s done it. And she’ll finally learn what Marthe did to her. She’ll finally know how to fight it. How to break the pattern, how to fix herself.

 For the first time in months, she falls asleep smiling.

#

The green ribbon is gone.

She doesn’t notice it until she’s handing the statuette over to Ozkar at his workshop. The past few times she’s been here, she’s noted the loops of ribbon pinned to the wall between an amethyst pendant and a toy soldier; now only blank plaster remains. One more tiny precious thing, burned for power.

He probably wants her to ask what he’s used it for, which means she won’t. She still has the other ribbon, and that’s been enough, it’s had to be, for months.

Ozkar draws a glowing yellow ring around the stone statue, frowning at the runes and symbols it sheds. “Well, it’s the real thing,” he says absently.

“Don’t sound so disappointed.”

“It’s exactly what I expected.” He whips a hand through the ring, dissipating the light as he shoves the statuette to the far side of his workbench. For all intents and purposes, he looks… done. Already.

“I did what you asked,” Vanja reminds him. “Now hold up your end of the bargain and tell me how to break this damn curse.”

Ozkar starts scratching away at a scroll, unhurried. “You can’t.”

“Try me,” Vanja spits.

He pushes back from his workbench, rolling his eyes, and finally looks at her. “You can’t break it because it doesn’t exist. There is no curse, Vanja.”

For the second time, Vanja finds herself utterly at sea in her brother’s workshop, with no solid ground to cling to.

Nauseated panic starts boiling up from her belly. “We—we had a deal—you said you would look—”

“I said if you brought me the statuette I would tell you about the curse. I’m telling you it isn’t real. That counts.” He moves past her to pluck a jar off a shelf. “That statuette is called The Cycle for a reason. There’s no curse on it or you, no magic of any kind, and yes, I looked for anything using blood ties. Bad things happen to whoever owns The Cycle because life happens, and it’s easier to blame some imaginary curse than to admit to fulfilling your own doomsday prophecies. All Marthe inflicted on you was a predisposition for self-sabotage.”

“But—she believed I was bad luck—I’m the thirteenth—”

“And you’ve done a fine job picking up where she left off,” Ozkar drawls. “But it was all in her head, and now, it’s all in yours. Granted, if you want to be absolutely certain… I do know one more thing we could try. But you’d have to acquire some materials for me.”

Vanja stares at him, wordless with fury.

Of course.

Of course it was never enough. Of course he’s going to keep dangling this in front of her, using her to get his hands on new toys.

Ozkar waits a moment, then points at the door. “I told you up front that there was no curse. Don’t blame me because you didn’t want to hear it. Either—”

“You know,” Vanja hisses, “for someone who hates Marthe so much, you love to play the same games.”

She slams the door on her way out, bitterly glad her ribbon’s gone, so no part of her is left in his hands.

#

Vanja has learned that, while pastries cannot in fact fix many things besides an empty stomach, they can at least improve the situation. For one thing, taking a moment to sit and eat forcibly compels her to give herself a break, or at least neutral ground to consider her problem. For another: pastries.

This is how she finds herself sitting by the frost-rimed window of a bakery and coffee shop in Rammelbeck, chewing morosely on a cinnamon bun. She thinks this is the bakery Emeric got them from back in April. She’s done a thorough survey of nearby offerings and this feels like the closest. She’s still willing to investigate further.

Across the street, the milliner is putting up an evergreen garland for Winterfast—much too early, right? Vanja tallies up the date she left and the time spent on the road, and comes up with…

December twelfth.

She’ll be eighteen tomorrow.

Suddenly the pastry is a bit harder to swallow.

Eighteen, and no less a fool—

That’s enough out of you, Marthe, another part of her shushes. It’s stern, no-nonsense, but never cruel, and it helps if she thinks one of her sisters is saying it. Vanja closes her eyes. What would her sisters say about the last year?

Katrin Little would be proud of her turning the Pfennigeist into something more than a thumb in the eye of Bóern’s nobility. She might tell Vanja she’s going through her rubies too fast, though.

Luisa would like the little things she’s doing to take care of herself, the pastries and the baths and practicing with cosmetics to make her reflection something she likes. She’d tell Vanja that helping others has to start with herself.

Eida would find everything that happened with Emeric and Benno romantic and tragic; Vanja suspects they have the same embarrassing tendency to tear up at inopportune moments, given how her sister sniffled all through their brother’s wedding ceremony. She’d have an extra handkerchief for Vanja, and she’d be the one insisting Vanja found love before, she has her whole life to find it again.

And Helga… Helga, ever the practical midwife, would remind her that she has until the end of March to decide if she wants another root-bind to keep from getting with child for the next year.

Perhaps that’s overly optimistic.

But none of them are living her life. At the end of the day, what matters is how Vanja feels about the last year.

She let her guilt and grief drown out the signs of Ozkar’s deceit. No more.

She made choices, some good, some bad, some she’s not sure of.

She changed. Backslid. Grew.

This time last year, she was about to die, about to overthrow a margrave, about to find love and family of every kind. She is still a thief, but perhaps she’s becoming more than that. Perhaps she’s becoming a warning, a haunting, a reminder.

Perhaps she’s taken the ghost of the girl she was, and forged it into the revenant that could have saved her.

The thought reminds her of October, watching color flood the raised flesh of a scar, as Tam says Sometimes people want to make them into something else.

The Pfennigeist isn’t the only part of herself that can become… more.

As Vanja finishes her pastry, she officially decides:

For her eighteenth birthday, she’s going to get a tattoo.

There’s a slight hitch when she walks into Tam’s tattoo parlor and is greeted by a man. Tam’s pulled his auburn hair up into a tidy topknot, and traded the practical shift and kirtle for a plain black shirt and tan breeches; he’s adding another log to the iron stove behind the counter when Vanja pushes the door open. “Hello, welcome to—oh, welcome back!”

Vanja hesitates. It’s not that Tam seems untrustworthy; it’s just that what she has in mind is going to require baring a part of herself few people have seen, and even fewer men.

The inner voice she likes to think of as Joniza pipes up, confident and reassuring, as if pointing out the ace up a sleeve: Tam is a professional, and he’s working on the edge of the Sünderweg. He’s probably tattooed people in places you can’t even see without a mirror.

“Hi,” she says a bit stiffly. “I—I wanted to talk about tattooing over some scars.”

“I had a feeling you might. Can I ask a favor?” Tam gestures to the door behind the counter. “My new apprentice, Pasha, hasn’t seen me work on scar tissue before. Is it all right if she observes?”

Some part of her unknots a little at that. “That’s fine.”

“Great. Here, have a seat.” He pulls a stool up to the counter, then fishes a piece of parchment and a charcoal stick out from under it. “Let’s talk about what you’d like.”

Less than an hour later, Vanja is reevaluating this plan, lying facedown on the softest surface a canvas-covered pallet on a wooden table can provide, which is to say, not very soft. She’s not technically shirtless, but the smock she’s been given completely exposes her back, and the noon light bouncing around the little curtained-off area is undoubtedly unforgiving.

Pasha, a girl about her age with a long black braid and splashes of lacy rainbow hues on any open skin from the neck down, carefully maneuvers a brazier into the room, air shimmering over its coals. “There,” she grunts, “should help with the cold.”

There’s a rasp of fine metal tools nearby, and then Tam says, “Thank you. Vanja, I’m ready to start if you are.”

“Y-yes.”

“Remember, you’re going to get a bit of a rush that will help with the pain. If you need a break, for water, air, anything, let me know. And Pasha has a towel if you need something to squeeze, just ask. Here we go.” There’s a rustle, then a stinging line starts tracing over her back.

Her heartbeat, inexplicably, picks up.

She can smell herbs, the soot, feel the burn of the tainted salve in her wounds—

No, the voice she thinks of as Ragne reminds her, patient and hopeful and brutally honest. That was long ago and far away. You are changing it into what you want.

The coppery tang of blood stings her nose anyway, she can hear the crack of the whip, feel the sear of eyes on her exposed, bloody back—

“Would you like to talk about it?” Tam asks quietly, so quietly she almost doesn’t hear him. “How you came by these scars. You don’t have to, I just know it helps some people.”

Vanja pauses, flexes a hand as the line of pain moves closer to her spine. Maybe… maybe this is what she’s learned over the last year: Vulnerability hurts, the way it always hurts when you cut to the bone. And with the wrong people, it’s a disaster.

But most of the time, it’s the only way to really heal.

“I used to be a maidservant,” she says with some difficulty, “in a noble household. Their daughter was my age, and we thought we were friends. When I was thirteen, another noble girl named Irmgard visited with her father and lied about me stealing a ring from her. They all knew she was lying, but they had me whipped anyway, because they didn’t want to anger Irmgard’s father. Then Irmgard put soot and starch-root in my healing salve, so the wounds healed badly.”

“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” Tam says.

Vanja’s both surprised and unsurprised to find her eyes watering. She’s only told the story a few times, but each time, it always guts her to be—believed. For someone else to act like it was deeply wrong, not like it was just something she should have expected, working as a maidservant.

“Why did that girl hate you so much?” Pasha asks, almost in awe.

Vanja has spent more time than she’d like asking herself the same. “I don’t think she did at first,” she allows. “I think Irmgard was just the kind of kid that liked burning ants with glass. She didn’t see me as a person, just a thing that made funny noises when she hurt it.”

Tam makes a hiss of disgust through his teeth. “It still sounds like it got personal.”

“The girl whose family I served—she asked Irmgard to apologize to me for a prank, once.” Vanja flexes her fingers again as the searing crosses her spine; she takes the rag Pasha holds out. “And I think that scared Irmgard, because just once, she had to treat me like an actual person. She was obsessed after that. She told me I was ugly, no one would ever want me, over and over again.” The rag twists in her hands. “The first boy to love me called me the Queen of Roses. Gods, it was sappy. But this is my way to remember Irmgard was completely, utterly full of shit.”

There’s another brief pause.

“The people in my village… were not ideal,” Tam says. “Some of them tried to understand me, but others just thought I should pick one, boy, girl, neither. They didn’t think I could be both. Lif—my contract spirit—was one of the few who knew what I am. They’re a wind-whirl, and sometimes I saw her as a bride, and sometimes he was a young man. Some asshole pinned them down with a copper knife, and my village kicked me out for freeing them. Best thing they ever did. When we made our contract, Lif chose to bind themself to the worst of the scars my home left on me, and now it’s my favorite thing in the mirror.”

Pasha snorts.  “Are you kidding? Your everything is your favorite thing in the mirror. I swear half the time you’re late to open, it’s because you spent an hour on your hair.”

“How could I not?” Tam huffs back. “It’s so glorious, it deserves nothing less.”

Their good-natured bickering continues. It eases Vanja’s nerves even more as the pain dulls, her adrenaline at high tide.

Then, to her immense chagrin, she becomes increasingly aware of the fingertips trailing over her back. Of every time they pause, or push carefully against a raised scar, or move a few inches. Of the timber of Tam’s voice, the music in his laugh.

Her heartrate starts rising for a different reason entirely.

Before she realizes it—it’s over. Pasha is helping her sit up, carefully holding the smock in place. She’s steered in a rather elated fog over to a wall mirror, then turned and given another looking glass.

Her back is bloody, swollen, uneven—and beautiful.

Once, Vanja had tried to console herself by romanticizing her scars as thorns.

Now, that’s exactly what they are: a wild, intricate tangle of blood-red roses and green briars, climbing over every gnarl and knot of tissue like a trellis. Blossoms for her lovers, thorns for her foes, clusters of teardrop-shaped leaves for the ones in between.

Emeric’s time in her life may be over, but now, every time she sees her own back, she will remember that at least for a little while, she was loved.

And if Irmgard was wrong about that, she was wrong about everything else.

“It’s perfect,” she whispers. “Thank you.”

“Thank you for letting us be a part of this,” Tam says. “Now, I’ll go over the aftercare while Pasha’s getting your bill ready.”

Vanja follows him over to a hutch that smells of herbs, listening with half an ear as he talks about bandages, bathing, scratching, ointments, and so on. She knows she ought to be paying attention, but she can’t stop watching Lif flow over Tam’s forearms, how the muscles shift beneath the ink lines. A lazy sort of heat is rolling around her skull, softening the edges of everything.

Then Tam hands her a heavy, pungent jar. “That should tide you over for a week, but if you run out, I’ll have more.”

“Th-thank you.” Her hands close over his—

And he pulls back and turns to the hutch, tidying up. “You should take it easy tonight,” he says pleasantly. “Your body is already coping with the adrenaline rush from a tattoo, and for you, it’s also revisiting the trauma behind the scars. Catharsis, closure, they’re as powerful as any drug, and you’re probably going to feel a little… intense, for a bit, until the rush wears off.” Tam sweeps a hand to the door leading to the parlor’s front counter. “Come on, let’s get you all settled up, and Pasha will help you change.”

Vanja pays her bill, gets her back bandaged enough to put her shirt and cloak back on, and is ushered out the door with a practiced, almost breakneck expedience. She starts trudging back to her room at the Gilded Rose, and gets a good way into the Sünderweg before the cold and the waning euphoria clear her head enough to realize precisely what’s happened.

She wasn’t exactly being subtle with her furious blushing and awkward ogling.

And Tam, in the politest, most professional way possible, had given her an unspoken Pass.

Vanja slows to a halt at a corner, then covers her face with her hands.

Oh, gods.

The first man she opened up to since Emeric, who opened up to her the tiniest bit in return… and she was ready to fling herself into his arms. No wonder he’d been sure to emphasize she should have a quiet night. Intense. What a nice way to say ‘desperate.’

But… it wasn’t just desperation and alchemy, was it?

Vanja makes herself keep walking.

A month and a half with Benno, and she never truly felt the same kind of… pull. Not like she felt with Tam. She liked Benno, certainly—enough to enjoy herself, even without the all-consuming blaze she’d found with Emeric. Benno made her feel pretty, a feat unto itself; but he also made her feel like a stranger looking over a fence.

Maybe, if he had ever opened the gate, she would have had a harder time walking away.

Or maybe you’re just going to keep cutting off your nose to spite your face, Marthe snarls. Maybe you’re never going to get better.

It’s the voice she hears in the sea in her dreams, pulling her down.

Did you think a prince would want a dirty little russmagdt? coos Dame von Falbirg, who always reminds her of her place in this world. You know better than that. Go back to what you know and leave love for the people who have earned it.

As the fear, the panic, swells up her throat, Vanja makes herself ask: What would Ragne say?

She is my friend, and you are hurting her.

Joniza would laugh at the sheer melodrama of her getting a crush on her tattoo artist. Then she’d buy her a drink, and they’d spend the evening definitely not going back and forth about how to swindle the wealthy merchant in the corner.

Her sisters would hold her, tell her there are plenty of fine people out there, tell her she has so much time and the right person will know she’s worth the world.

She doesn’t have to listen to Marthe, to Irmgard, to Dame von Falbirg, anymore.

Land.

Under Vanja’s feet: land.

The sea is always going to be with her. But piece by piece, she will reclaim herself.

She finds herself stiffly marching up the steps of the Gilded Rose, her back sore but—good. The doors swing open with a blast of warmth, the new bartender calls her name in greeting, Marien waves as she’s making her rounds. It’s not home, but for now, it’s close enough to belonging.

She’s still mulling over the last thing Tam said about closure as she goes to her room and flops (decidedly facedown) onto her bed. She hadn’t thought about the tattoo that way, but it makes sense. This is as close to a goodbye to Emeric as she’ll get—a way to carry him with her, to remember how his love shattered the doubts Irmgard all but cursed her with.

There is no curse.

Vanja goes still.

Clarity, abrupt and colder than the night, falls.

All Marthe inflicted on you was a predisposition for self-sabotage.

This—this is why she chased the statuette, even if some part of her knew, deep down, Ozkar could not be trusted. Why it took months for her to recognize Marthe’s voice in her deepest fears. Why it’s been so much harder to break free.

Irmgard made her believe no one would ever love her. Emeric proved that wrong.

Marthe made her believe she was a blight walking.

And the only way to prove that wrong… is to love herself.

Vanja’s run from that for seventeen years, because cynicism is always, always safer.

As long as she can blame her misfortunes and mistakes alike on some unseeable, unbreakable curse, she’s going to keep running.

It’s a simple answer, really, for so long a chase: closure.

Closure with Marthe. That’s what she’s been looking for since she watched her mother’s lantern vanish from the crossroads.

It’s a simple answer, but it begets a harder question:

What is she willing to do to get it?

#

When Vanja walks into Ozkar’s workshop the next morning, she comes armed.

Not with a traditional weapon, other than her trusty boot knife, but with the kind Emeric prefers: paperwork.

“ ‘I, Ozkar Ros, will, to the full extent of my abilities and knowledge, determine if there are any remaining supernatural influences on Vanja Ros, originating from Marthe Ros, in exchange for the procurement of one…’ Be serious.” Ozkar gives her a snide look over the piece of parchment. “What possible reason would I have to agree to this?”

Vanja doesn’t waver. “Because you want me to get something for you. Otherwise you wouldn’t have tried to get me to take the bait for it yesterday. But if you need more incentive, I can always tip off the prefects as to who has their missing statuette.”

“And I can tell them who brought it to me,” Ozkar retorts, but Vanja can tell his feathers are getting ruffled.

“You can,” she agrees. “I’m sure you have a way to prove it.” The angry pause confirms what they both know: he doesn’t. “The only difference between our deals is that my terms are specific and fair. Take it or leave it.”

Ozkar narrows his eyes. “You need my help more than I need yours, little sister. Don’t act like you’ll walk away.”

“Won’t I,” she says coldly, and turns on a heel.

Vanja’s hand reaches the door just as he lets out an extended, entirely exaggerated sigh, and says, “It’s a lens.”

She waits.

“Some artificer in the service of House Dominitz claims she’s found a way to crystallize witch-ash,” Ozkar continues. “And the resulting material lets the viewer see magic, curses, and what have you.”

Vanja finally turns, giving him a look of pure disdain. “I know spectacles like that already exist, so you’re going to have to do better.”

Ozkar’s brow furrows. If she didn’t know better, she’d think him a touch impressed. “Of course we already have the methods to detect forces currently interacting with our reality. But this crystal is… the difference between eating a loaf of bread and having the recipe. Supposedly it acts as a window into the world transcendent itself, revealing blood ties, the interference of gods, dormant grimlingen, and more, whether it’s active in our reality or not. Helena Haintz is debuting a lens of the stuff at the Aederfeld Arcane Innovations Exposition in January, and I can use it to be sure you’re truly rid of Marthe.”

“You can,” Vanja says, “if you agree to my terms.”

Ozkar’s brow trench deepens as he picks at a burn on his leather apron. He abruptly sticks out a hand. “Deal.”

Vanja doesn’t take it. Not yet. She’s learned her lesson. “You agree to honor the terms of the agreement as I have written them on this parchment.”

A muscle tics in Ozkar’s jaw, but all he says is “Yes.”

It’s a simple thing, really: it comes down to closure. It’s about putting her mother behind her, and knowing that won’t end with a knife in her back. Knowing that the sea may be waiting, but only if she walks to the shore.

Vanja takes her brother’s hand. “Then we have a deal.”

Chapter Text

EMERIC

“I’m sorry, Prefect Conrad, but you can’t wear those in here.”

Emeric Conrad has a brief moment of confusion. The dress code for the Aederfeld Arcane Innovations Exposition is formal, so he’s in his dress uniform, which ought to suffice—goodness knows it’s been pressed and starched enough that he’s half worried anyone who bumps into him might cut themselves.

Moreover, it’s far from the only prefect dress uniform in the room. The yearly exposition draws artificers, alchemists, and apothecaries from all over the empire, but by dint of being held at the prefects’ own institute, many of the attendees look to be research prefects. The only way in is by invitation, whether from the presenters’ limited allotment, or from the management, and between that and the dress code, Emeric suspects it’s as close to a formal ball as most research prefects get.

The cloakroom attendant extracts an arm from the process of folding Emeric’s cloak, and taps his own temple. “Your spectacles, sir. You can’t wear them. The exposition managers are concerned you might see proprietary spellwork.”

“Not without a warrant, I can’t.” Emeric frames the objection in a polite frown.

The attendant does not budge; he only slides a case across the counter. “We have prepared replacements for the evening, sir. You’ll find the lenses are the same strength.”

The exposition managers mean business, then. And Emeric is already running late; Vikram’s likely to strangle him if he takes any longer. Emeric holds in a sigh and removes his spectacles, then switches them for the pair in the case, noting with some irritation that there’s the faint smudge of a thumbprint on the edge of a lens. Which is also… square.

Unfortunate. He pushes the case toward the attendant, and because he’s now officially irked, says thank you and leaves a generous tip but does not wish him a good evening. Not right away, that is. Just as he leaves. He’s certain his grievance is sufficiently conveyed.

There’s a certain dull roar unique to the combination of large crowds and fantastic acoustics, and the Aederfeld Research Institute’s cavernous exposition hall currently meets both conditions, the din almost crackling in Emeric’s ears as he makes his way across the hard marble floor. The pale, almost too-bright lights bounce off the walls nearly as much as the sound does in this space, rendering even the closed-off galleries above as well-lit as if it were noon, not well past sunset. Emeric hopes Vikram’s presentation involves turning them off, as the new illumination mechanic he’s showing might be rather undermined otherwise.

Vikram himself spots Emeric on his way over, and waves anyway. It’s not for the benefit of Mathilde at his side, but the young woman standing next to her. Because Vikram ordinarily wouldn’t care if Emeric was late, as long as he caught the presentation.

Tonight, however, he’s set Emeric up with a date.

And that folly is entirely of Emeric’s own doing, because it’s been over a month since he’s spoken to Lilje Kiefer.

Because even though she was delightful and lovely, he didn’t know how to tell her it wasn’t working. Because it was fun and euphoric until it was real, until there was skin in the game. Because he didn’t expect the approach of Winterfast to hit him so hard. Because he didn’t know how to explain she didn’t do anything wrong but he needed to move slower. Because he couldn’t bring himself to confess that part of him still wonders if he’s just that bad in bed and he’ll wake up alone again—

And on and on it piled up until he was hiding in his work and in his excuses like a coward, and waiting until too much time had passed so now he simply couldn’t call on her without it being awkward, and letting the guilt accrue on top of the anxiety until he rode out of Lüdz.

Somehow that was easier than the truth.

Which is why, after berating him for the last few weeks, Vikram has taken it upon himself to play matchmaker.

“Over here, Conrad!” he bellows, waving like a windmill despite being no more than thirty feet away.

“I think he sees us,” Mathilde drawls at the edge of Emeric’s earshot.

Vikram gives her a significant look as Emeric joins their little cluster. “Conrad, this is Thea Britz. Thea, this is Emeric Conrad.”

“Wonderful to finally meet you,” Thea says. She seems—nice? Nice. Flaxen blond hair up in a tasteful but practical cascade of ringlets, a nervous smile that doesn’t quite reach her blue eyes. Deep Northern heritage, perhaps. She’s the sort of pale that suggests she spends very little time in the daylight; her blue samite dress isn’t fine enough for that to be due to wealth. Either she loves her work indoors or she needs it to make ends meet. “Vikram’s told me so much.”

“Terrifying,” he says a bit grimly, before remembering he ought to make small talk.

To her credit, she laughs. “No, all of it’s good, I assure you—so good I could hardly believe it’s true.”

He manages to squeeze out an agonizing “Heh” before making a pivot as nimbly as a deer, if the deer were falling into a ravine. “So how do you know Vikram?”

“We met, what, back in October?” Thea asks, tucking a wisp of hair behind an ear as her gaze darts to Vikram. He nods encouragingly. “I had just come from east Merau to start working in an artificer supply shop here, and I was assigned his account.”

“I swear, by the end of the week, she knew more about the resource vendors than the owners did,” Vikram says in the tone that means if Emeric doesn’t at least pretend to be impressed, he’s getting another lecture.

Unfortunately for both of them, Emeric has encountered a catastrophic problem.

Too far away to speak, but too close to be mistaken, is perhaps the worst person he could have imagined attending the Aederfeld Arcane Innovations Exposition:

Miss Lilje Kiefer.

And she’s staring back at him, color rising in her cheeks.

“Thea’s the best account representative we’ve had,” Mathilde adds with a bit of strain.

Then—horrifically—

Lilje turns back to her own conversation, as if she never saw him at all.

Emeric wants to perish.

Vikram, Mathilde, and Thea are all looking at him.

“That’s very… great,” Emeric says faintly. “That you… did it. So fast.”

Mathilde, the saint, attempts another resuscitation: “What is the most difficult material you’ve had to source for someone?”

Thea’s brow furrows. “A specific type of moonstone, definitely. It had to come from a mine just south of Sovabin…”

Emeric is trying, he really is. It’s just that he can still see Lilje, and it’s like the ceaseless tolling of an alarm bell over this whole conversation as his mind tries to cook up something, anything to say—

And then, then, as if he’s not already on the threshold of running out the door and not stopping until he hits the sea…

He smells roses.

Not just roses. Orange, cinnamon, a slip of vanilla.

Eight months—it’s been eight months since he breathed her in, and he’s still standing in the stifling little room, breathing in the roses and clutching a red penny—

Vanja.

***

VANJA

“I’m sorry, Prefect Conrad, but you can’t wear those in here.”

Vanja Ros has died before; she’s fairly certain she will die again. She just hadn’t expected it to be tonight.

And she hadn’t expected the cause of death to be seeing her ex for the first time since June.

“…concerned you might see proprietary spellwork.” The cloakroom attendant’s voice snaps her out of the shock.

Scheit, scheiter, scheiten. His spectacles. Of course.

Vanja ducks behind a column, her knuckles whitening on the tray of appetizers she’s supposed to be offering. Naturally she’s in disguise—Aederfeld is guaranteed to have prefects, and she’s not risking getting recognized—but Emeric’s spectacles let him see right through the pearls in Minkja, betraying her by the marks from Death and Fortune as their daughter.

Something tells Vanja even though tonight’s veneer is all cosmetics and a brunette wig, Emeric won’t buy the idea that Death and Fortune have been wantonly adopting stray children across the empire.

Then a hint of Fortune’s gold glimmer catches her eye. She sneaks a look around the column just as the attendant’s voice carries over: “…replacements for the evening, sir. You’ll find the lenses are the same strength.”

Emeric, scowling, removes his spectacles and replaces them with square-rimmed ones being offered by the cloakroom clerk. Then he tips the man and strides right past Vanja, headed into the bright-lit exposition hall.

He didn’t even glance her way.

Vanja would like to move from the column. She would like to move, period. She knows someone’s bound to notice her looking stricken and frozen in place, and that’s going to raise questions she doesn’t have time to answer.

But he’s here.

He’s here, and the six months since his initiation have sharpened him, chipped at his edges, left a sharper edge to his mouth and shadows under his eyes; he’s here, and somehow those eyes are still inexplicably kind.

All she has to do is cross the room, take his face in her hands—

But she can still feel the weight of his face in her palm as she whispered villanelle, and brought their rosy dream crashing down.

Presence and forgiveness are not the same. Emeric isn’t just a storybook she set down and can pick back up now that she feels like it. Whether Marthe left her with a curse or a propensity for self-destruction, Vanja cut him free for a reason.

Something about that is an anchor.

She didn’t expect to see Emeric here, but at the end of the day—he’s why she’s here. She’s making sure that she will never hurt anyone again, not the way she had to hurt him.

And if getting Ozkar this fancy lens is the only way to do it, then so be it.

Joniza would tell her, Get moving.

Vanja looks down at the tray in her shaky hands. She’s opted for her tried-and-true gambit, infiltrating the event staff, but that means she has appetizers to get rid of before she can make a move for the lens.

She heads into the hall, wandering around blank-faced and smiling as hands dart in and snatch away impractically tiny pastries. At one point she has to sidestep a woman gesturing like a windmill—

Only to look back and realize she’s nearly backed into Emeric. He’s standing with Vikram and Mathilde and some girl she doesn’t know who’s prattling on about moonstones.

Vanja’s heart leaps into her throat. She scuttles away as fast as she can. The last appetizer is plucked from her tray, mercifully, and that means she can finally sneak into the staging area. All the staff have been briefed on the rules: the early presenters are allowed appetizers, but absolutely no kirsj for the first round until after their presentation.

To enforce this, however, they had to identify the first round presenters so the servers would know who to skip, and that means Vanja knows exactly which cubicle belongs to Helena Haintz, lens crafter extraordinaire.

Vanja maintains a neutral-to-occupied expression as she slips around the curtained cubicles, then stows her tray behind a decorative plant and ducks into the narrow back lane that they’ll be using to transport each project up to the presentation dais. Helena’s cubicle is on the end closest to the dais. Vanja peeks through the curtain and finds it’s empty, just as she hoped.

She slips inside, only to encounter her first problem: the lens.

It’s not difficult to locate, not in the slightest. If anything, it’s too easy, because it’s bigger than the desk nearby. The great disc might even be six feet across, standing in a pair of iron brackets, and even though it’s covered in a fitted brocade sheet, it certainly looks like a lens-type object.

Ozkar said it was a lens. Either he didn’t know how big it is, or he just decided that was her issue to reckon with.

She’s found it, just like he asked. But with half of the prefects in the empire gathered under the same damn roof—hell, with Emeric alone—how is she going to get it out?

***

EMERIC

Emeric’s gaze doesn’t sweep the hall so much as ransack it, frantically hunting for a glimpse of ginger hair, freckles, anything. It’s sick, he knows it, there’s already one bungled courtship in this room and another underway, but if he could just see her—if he could just bury this once and for all—

“Excuse me,” Thea says, a bit terse. “I’m… going to go to the privy.”

Vikram waits until she’s brushed past them and melted into the crowd, then glares at Emeric. “What is with you?”

The smell is gone. Maybe it was just his imagination.

“I’m sorry, Thea seems really nice, I just—” Emeric lowers his voice, then checks surreptitiously for Lilje. She’s still staunchly ignoring him. “The girl I was seeing in Lüdz, she’s here, so it’s a bit… distracting. I’ll try harder. Are they going to turn the lights off for your presentation?”

“Don’t change the subject, and yes they are, but I’m not up for another two hours anyway or else I’d be in the staging area.” Vikram points a finger at him. “Thea replaced a clerk who couldn’t tell a crucible from a cupel. She knows more kinds of salt than I can count. Don’t mess this up for us.”

“Perhaps we shouldn’t have gambled our business relationship on Conrad’s courtship skills,” Mathilde says mildly. “Let’s just hope she gets back for the opening toast.”

Vikram nods. “Or at least the keynote. House Dominitz’s lead artificer supposedly crystallized witch-ash into a lens that looks into the world transcendent itself. It could push our studies ahead by centuries if it’s the real deal.”

Emeric lets out an appreciative whistle. “And they were worried about my spectacles.”

“I just thought these new ones were a choice,” Vikram says diplomatically.

Mathilde nudges him with an elbow. “Do you want to run through your test audience questions again?”

Emeric half-listens, pitching in periodically, and makes it about five minutes before he feels the prickle of a stare on the back of his neck. He sneaks another glance and finds Lilje doing the same, of course; but this time, she looks pensive, almost inquisitive.

 He can’t decide if it’s better or worse that she might actually want to talk.

There’s a crash from the other side of the hall, where curtained cubicles have been set up for presenters to prepare themselves. A hush falls briefly as everyone looks for the source, and concludes it’s nothing interesting.

“Someone must have dropped a tray.” Mathilde gestures to one of the many attendants expertly weaving around the crowd with trays packed full of frosty kirsj goblets. “And look—Thea won’t miss the toast after all.”

Thea is also winding back across the hall. She gracefully snags four goblets on the way, doing an admirable job of keeping them steady until she reaches them and passes them around the group with a fidgety smile. “Here, saved you a trip.”

“Did you see what that noise came from?” Vikram asks.

Thea shakes her head. “No, there were too many people.”

“As long as it wasn’t my lights,” he sighs. “Well, we’re probably supposed to wait until the director’s speech, but here’s to a new year. Prozt.”

“Prozt,” they all echo, clinking their goblets and sipping. Emeric tries not to make a face. Kirsj isn’t his favorite way to imbibe by a long shot, but perhaps it’ll make him a better conversation partner. “Miss Britz, how long were you in Merau before moving here?”

“Oh, you can call me Thea.” She launches into a story about studying in Okzberg and moving to Rammelbeck and then east Merau, and Emeric manages to pepper in a prompt or two, and to mostly pay attention…

… though…

The longer she goes, the more he can’t help noticing murmurs and consternation brewing in the crowd. The kirsj is getting warm, the goblets sweating. The toast was supposed to happen at six o’clock on the dot, wasn’t it? Emeric could swear the bells tolled already.

“Excuse me.” A white-haired man with the university director’s insignia on his uniform is hovering at Vikram’s elbow. “Prefects Mistry and Richter, I need to borrow you a moment.”

“…Certainly, Director Gothart,” Mathilde replies, trading a look with Vikram.

“That sounds ominous,” Thea says as Vikram and Mathilde follow the director, headed toward the staging area.

Mercifully, Vikram waits until Thea’s not looking to turn back and make a series of exaggerated and incomprehensible gestures, mouthing something Emeric cannot understand in the slightest, other than possibly having to do with him and Thea. Emeric tilts his head. The tilt is answered with two enthusiastic thumbs up.

“I wonder if it has to do with—” Thea catches herself. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“What?” Emeric prompts, trying to focus. He can see Lilje in his peripheral vision, she keeps looking at him, but this isn’t the time.

Thea bites her lip. “There was a fight, I think? Over in the staging area. Two people were arguing in one of the, the curtain rooms, and then I saw a man storm out.”

“Interesting.” Emeric reaches for his notebook—the one currently sitting in his room in the prefect dormitories, where it can’t do him any good. No more kirsj for the time being, then. He needs his head clear. “Do you remember what he looked like?”

“He was kind of short… ginger hair for certain. I think he had a blue krebatte? Maybe it was his vest?” Thea shrugs. “Why, do you think something happened?”

Emeric opens his mouth to issue something neutral.

Instead, he tastes roses.

His mind blanks with desperation, fury, despair, every blistering ember of the last eight months blazing up once more.

“Prefect Conrad?”

“S-sorry,” he stammers. Get it together. Someone must be wearing a rose perfume, and someone else must freshen their clothes with dried orange peel, and whenever their paths and his intersect, he’s just going to have an emotional breakdown. Clearly the only rational explanation. What was he saying… right. “Something’s definitely happened, but it may or may not be related to what you witnessed. I suppose we’ll see.”

“Maybe sooner than later.” Thea points.

Vikram and Director Gothart are walking back already, making a beeline their way. And that’s when Emeric understands that the problem is much worse than he thought, because there are dozens research prefects in the exposition hall, but he’s wearing the only field investigator uniform.

But if they wanted attention, they’d be calling across the floor instead of coming all the way to him. Sure enough, Director Gothart’s voice is lowered when he arrives, and all he says is, “Prefect Conrad, I’m afraid we need to borrow you as well. My apologies, miss.”

Emeric gives Thea a contrite shrug, and tries not to think about how immense of a relief it is to get out of this crowd—or at least, away from the constant reminders of Lilje and Vanja both. “What’s going on?” he asks once they’re a respectable distance from the main bulk of the masses.

“There’s been an incident with one of the presentations,” the director says tightly. He strips off a pair of elbow-length leather gloves and passes them to Emeric, who only then realizes Vikram is wearing a pair as well. “We’d like you to take a look at the scene before we take any actions.”

“I take it there’s some sort of… hazard?” Emeric sheds his uniform jacket and pulls on the gloves.

Vikram nods, surprisingly sober. “You know the lens I told you about? The one made from witch-ash?”

“Please keep your voices down,” the director half sings, half mutters as they approach the staging area. “The lens wasn’t just made with witch-ash, it was witch-ash crystallized at a concentration previously thought impossible. Scholar Haintz theorized that any contact with bare skin would be… catastrophic.”

Given that the director’s referring to the lens in the past tense, Emeric is getting a very solid idea of what exactly the crash was earlier. “Haintz?”

“Helena Haintz, the lead artificer for House Dominitz’s research facilities. She was supposed to be our keynote presenter after the director’s speech.” Vikram hesitates, looking at the director, and Emeric does not miss the use of past tense here either.

It seems like there’s more to the crash than he realized.

“What happens when you touch the crystal?” he probes.

The director looks uncomfortable, but Vikram supplies the answer: “It’s like being struck by lightning, if the lightning is raw magical potential. And the result is… well, see for yourself.”

They reach the curtained-off cubicle nearest to the conspicuously empty presentation dais, and Vikram holds one of the drapes aside. Emeric ducks in.

Mathilde’s inside, peering at a wooden workbench at the far side of the cubicle, a coat still haphazardly tossed over the back of a folding chair. Her gloved hands are folded behind her back; she knows better than to disturb the crime scene. “Conrad. Watch your step.”

“We warned him,” Vikram says.

And not without good cause. There’s a sea of glittering shards on the marble floor, and as Emeric takes a closer look, shimmering prisms darting through each in hues of teal and cornflower and violet. The shattered crystal seems to have come from two iron brackets to his right, lying on their sides; the fragments haven’t scattered so far that he can’t make out the original shape, which seems to have been a great circular pane nearly six feet across. That’s backed up by little latches in the brackets, which would have kept it from rolling to either side.

And then he sees it beneath the flash of light off crystal: a heap of cloth and ash.

“Is that…” He swallows. “Helena Haintz?”

“We can’t be certain,” Mathilde says. “But… the ashes are human remains.”

Emeric squints. The pile is remarkably—concentrated, positioned almost perfectly between the brackets. Even the clothing is neatly compressed, as if it all simply collapsed in place. “Vikram, this… lightning strike effect. Would it be instantaneous?”

“Hold on, I’ll show you.” Vikram ducks out and returns with what looks like a fresh parsley garnish cribbed from a tray of appetizers. He touches it to a shard. The sprig immediately crumbles into ash, though the shard itself doesn’t so much as wobble. “It seems limited to living organic matter, but materials like leather and textiles aren’t affected.”

“Right.” Emeric turns to Director Gothart. “Sir, I am invoking the right of a field investigator prefect to lock this entire building down immediately. Please post staff at every possible exit and gather everyone else in the hall. No one is to go in or out until we’ve apprehended the culprit.”

The director blanches. “You’re certain this wasn’t an accident? She couldn’t have slipped while moving the lens? It was terribly unwieldy.”

Emeric points to the brackets. “She would have had to undo those latches to move it. Haintz was beside the lens when it killed her, I’m certain. But if she disintegrated on contact, then someone else had to push the lens over onto her remains.”

Director Gothart closes his eyes. “What an abhorrent tragedy. You have our full cooperation, Prefect Conrad. I’ll send the event staff manager over for whatever you need.”

He ducks out through the curtains as Emeric makes a mental list, pinching the bridge of his nose. Gothart’s voice rolls through the hall a few moments later: “Attendees of the Aederfeld Arcane Innovations Exposition, this is Director Gothart. It pains me to say that due to unforeseen circumstances…”

Mid-announcement, a harried-looking man with the attendant uniform and a supervisor’s badge steps in and introduces himself as the staff manager. Emeric’s ready.

“I need my spectacles from the cloakroom,” he starts, as dismayed murmurs start rising from the hall, “and if you could please query among your employees if anyone witnessed an argument in this area earlier, that would be greatly helpful.”

“The one involving a red-haired gentleman?” the manager asks. “I saw him storming out of this very cubicle.”

Perhaps this could be quicker than Emeric thought. “That’s the one. Do you think you could point him out in the crowd?” At the manager’s nod, he turns to Vikram and Mathilde. “Could you please help him track this man down and bring him somewhere private for questioning?”

“Yes,” Mathilde says at the same time as Vikram says, “Only if I can use your badge.” Mathilde drags him out after the staff manager before Emeric has to barter. She adds over her shoulder, “Haintz’s personal effects are also on the desk.”

“Thank you.” The cubicle feels dreadfully big with just Emeric and the heap of ashes, even more so as the dismayed voices outside turn to fear and indignation. No one likes being told they’re barred from leaving. They’ll like it even less when they learn a murderer is among them. And that is a when, not an if. There’s too much commotion around Helena Haintz’s cubicle, and too large an absence of Haintz herself.

One hour until the attendees connect the dots, Emeric estimates. Two at most before they reach a boiling point.

Plenty of time to catch the killer. Right?

***

VANJA

Vanja decides the first step is to verify this is, in fact, the lens she’s looking for. She goes and lifts the brocade. Beneath it is shimmering, prismatic crystal, sheens of teal and sapphire and lavender flashing through the disc. The hair on Vanja’s arm lifts as her knuckles brush the surface, and sticks straight up when she presses her palm flat to the pane, a funny buzz almost tickling her nose.

“Weird,” she mutters.

Ozkar said it was supposed to reveal the world transcendent, though. Either there’s not much transcendent about the back of the brocade cover, or this is the wrong crystal lens. (Maybe those are a trend for the exposition this year. Vanja’s not all too sure what these events are about, anyway.)

Experimentally, she braces one hand on the crystal for balance, then slips the other behind it.

The good news: She can see… something flickering there through the glass, trailing from her fingers almost like smoke.

The bad news: She can see something there, and that means it’s the lens Ozkar wants.

There’s no way she’s smuggling a six-foot slab of crystal out tonight. Well—maybe there could be a shipping accident? Or she’ll have to follow it to Helena’s workshop? Maybe she can pay for another, smaller version?

Then coal dust starts flocking the edges of Vanja’s sight. Fortune is warning her. Voices get louder outside the curtains; that probably means it’s Helena, and either way Vanja needs to be out of sight now.

She lets the lens cover fall, then ducks around it, praying Helena won’t remove it until right before her presentation. There’s a flap of drapery, and then a tense woman’s voice asks, “Time check?”

“Ten,” someone calls back.

“Thank you.” Vanja catches a few other bumps and shuffles near the desk. Then the curtains shift again. Helena sucks in an audible breath, and hisses, “What are you doing here?”

Vanja tenses, ready to bolt if she’s been found—

“Don’t play innocent,” a man snaps back.

Whew. Safe for now.

“What are you doing?” the man continues. “I know what happened with us was wrong, but—saints and martyrs, Helena, I thought you were better than this.”

“And you think you can lecture me on right and wrong?” Helena slams something on the desk. “You? The audacity. You couldn’t even tell me our betrothal was over before you and Dori ran off to hump like mutts in the gutter.”

“You wouldn’t make the time for us—”

“Wendel, you couldn’t stand if I was in the workshop a minute longer than you, if I co-authored a single paper more. Let’s not make it about my time.”

“Fine. Then let’s make it about co-authors.” Wendel’s voice rises. “You know this isn’t—”

“Shut up.” Helena’s footsteps clack across the marble. “She abandoned this project when you both ran off. Was I not supposed to finish the work?”

“You weren’t supposed to claim it was all your own!” Wendel explodes. “You weren’t supposed to act like you were the only one—”

“House Dominitz cleared it—”

“I don’t care, it’s not right—”

“It’s my lens!” Helena shouts. “This cost me everything, you absolute ass, so I’ll be damned if I give a scrap of credit to a lying, cheating, dull little waif just because you liked what you found between her legs!”

“How dare you—”

“How dare you! You truly came here thinking to shame me?”

“Don’t act like you didn’t send for me,” Wendel seethes. “What was it, you wanted to gloat? To remind me what a fool I was?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t believe you. I have the message right here.”

“Then it was a mistake.” Helena’s footsteps return to the desk. “If that’s all you had to say to me, get out.”

There’s a significant, searing pause. Then Wendel growls, “You think this won’t catch up with you? Think again.” There’s one final rustle of the drapes. “It always finds a way.”

Another quiet falls, punctuated by a muted sniffle. Helena’s voice is hoarser as she calls, “Time check?”

There’s no answer. Vanja holds her breath. Helena’s footsteps click out of the cubicle. “Hello?”

Vanja swings around the lens. The cubicle’s empty again, drapes swinging where Helena exited. She can get out—but if she’s spotted by one of the other servers, she’ll have to rejoin for the kirsj service. And maybe she can find something useful on the desk for Ozkar while Helena’s presenting.

“Time check?” she hears Helena demand again.

Someone finally answers with “Five.”

Vanja bolts under the desk, arranging the chair and the coat draped on it to hide her. And just in time, as Helena shoves through the drapes, storm-faced and taut as a bowstring.

She returns to the desk, setting down what sounds like a heavy bag and rummaging until Vanja hears the soft skid of leather. Long fingers drape over the edge of the desk: gloves.

“Helena?”

This is a new voice entirely, soft and pleasant. Vanja sees the hem of a periwinkle gown. She also hears Helena go completely still.

Faint trails of dusty black wisp through the air. Someone’s luck is turning.

“What are you doing here, Dori?” Helena asks, icy.

“I brought a peace offering. Is kirsj still your favorite?”

“It’s been four months,” Helena snaps. “Of course it is. I’m not supposed to have any before my presentation.” She turns away, walks over to the lens. “And if you’re here to yell at me, Wendel beat you to it.”

“I’m not,” the other woman—Dori, apparently—says. Vanja can’t quite read her tone. She walks over and sets what sounds like a goblet down by the bag with a faint clink. “I snuck a goblet off the tray for you. And I wanted to clear the air between us. That’s all.”

There’s a rush of fabric; the edge of the brocade lens cover falls to the floor, clutched in Helena’s white-knuckled hand. A sea of prisms scatter across the marble, rainbows shifting and curling, mesmerizing—

And then something twitches in Vanja’s view.

The dark hide of the gloves shifts, disappears. She sees the samite skirt sway, a leather fingertip slipping into sight before hurriedly retracting.

The coal dust thickens.

“You know…” Vanja can see Helena’s boots still pointing to the lens. “I still read your letter every night, trying to—to see where it went wrong.”

 “I’m so sorry.” Dori steps away from the desk. “If it’s any consolation, Wendel got bored of me after a month and left. I suppose it’s what I deserved.”

Helena’s boot tips turn to her, almost grudgingly. The chill in her voice has eased a fraction. “I won’t argue with that… but I appreciate you saying it.”

The edge of the brocade cover lifts methodically as Helena returns to the desk; she must be folding it up. One boot comes perilously close to kicking Vanja in the thigh. There’s a scrape of the glass goblet, and a sip.

Then Helena picks up the gloves and pulls them on.

Vanja’s gut churns as soot black starts clouding the air. Still, Helena’s not giving any sign of distress.

The worst is yet to come. But—how?

Dori’s periwinkle skirt trails Helena as they both approach the lens. Vanja can see the goblet twinkling in Helena’s gloved hand. “Maybe,” Helena says slowly, “I could… draw up a contract. You could get a cut of the proceeds from the sale.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Dori says lightly. Then her voice drops like a façade. “You’re also getting what you deserve.”

There’s a burst of motion and a thud; Helena drops the goblet and braces herself against the lens, gasping, “What are you do—”

And—silence.

All Vanja hears is a horrible grainy hiss, and the soft sigh of collapsing cloth. And one woman’s heavy breath.

Helena’s canvas smock crumples over her boots, gray sand pouring out of the sleeves. No—not sand—

Ash.

What in the name of every Low God just happened?

Dori bends down over the remains. Vanja commits as much as she can to memory: periwinkle samite, blond ringlets, pale face. She’ll know this woman anywhere.

The breath catches in Vanja’s throat.

She’ll know this woman anywhere… but who can she tell?

Even if she goes to Emeric under a false name, her disguise isn’t that good, and she’ll still have to testify before Truth, and—and—

There has to be a way.

Vanja never spoke to Helena Haintz. Never read her research, never even knew her name before she was tasked with stealing this lens. She sounds like she made some questionable choices, and earned some scrutiny.

But she didn’t deserve to die like this.

And Dori isn’t going to get away with it.

That means Vanja absolutely cannot get caught. She curls even tighter in the desk’s chair well, keeping the coat a curtain between her and Dori. There are rustles, sandy whispers, the rasp of leather that might be the gloves. A terrible low, grinding ring. Then—a crash Vanja feels in her bones.

Countless iridescent shards skate across the marble floor. One comes to a rest inches from the toe of Vanja’s boot.

The lens.

Dori’s harsh breathing is broken only by a hiccupping giggle. Then concerned voices draw closer to the curtains. “…Haintz? Is everything all right?”

Dori starts. Light footsteps beat a line for the opposite curtain wall and slip through a gap in the hangings. A moment later, a stressed-looking white-haired man steps into the cubicle and stops short. He covers his mouth, taking in the upturned iron brackets, the shattered crystal, the heap of cloth and ash beneath it. Then he steps back and calls for someone. Vanja catches, “…no one goes into this room before I get the prefects,” and realizes precisely how dire things are about to get.

Dori wanted this to like an accident, perhaps. But Vanja has only until they realize it isn’t.

Then Emeric’s going to lock down the hall and get his spectacles back, and if he gets so much as a glimpse of her and her godmothers’ marks, she’ll be caught.

If she runs for an exit now, maybe she can get out.

Something tugs at her gut. Dori did something to the gloves. Vanja’d bet half of Aederfeld that she’s scurrying off to hide them now. And who knows how else she’s planned to throw the prefects off her trail?

Getting Ozkar the lens is a lost cause.

But maybe…

Maybe Vanja can do this for Emeric, one last time.

She pockets the finger-length lens shard next to her boot—hopefully Ozkar will settle for scraps?—scoots back, checks the other side of the curtain to make sure no one’s around, then rolls out. The first step will be making sure Emeric won’t find her, that she can move like the ghost she needs to be tonight. That means she needs to get to the cloakroom.

Vanja sees Emeric in the crowd—can hardly keep her eyes off him—just as the white-haired man approaches his group. Then she catches a flash of periwinkle in the crowd.

Ice shreds through her belly. She stops short.

Dori isn’t just an attendee. She’s—she’s—

You have a job to do, Helga’s voice prods. Get it done.

She has to do this. For Helena Haintz, and now, for him.

Vanja slips into the cloakroom.

There are dozens of prefect cloaks, but fortunately, they all have the black-and-white piping of research prefects, save one trimmed in a field investigator’s silver. She finds a slender case tucked into a pocket, and when she cracks it open, his usual round-lensed spectacles are sitting inside.

The cloakroom gave him this case; if they find it empty, they’ll know his spectacles were taken. But if they can’t find the case either, it becomes a simple matter of clerical misplacement. She tucks the spectacles themselves into her own uniform pocket and hides the case in a corner, then leaves and scans the exhibition hall. Mathilde and Vikram are gone, along with the white-haired man, but Emeric’s still uneasily chatting with what appears to be his companion for the evening.

Vanja picks her way closer, perilously close, but it’s worth it. She catches: “…arguing in one of the, the curtain rooms, and then I saw a man storm out.”

Wendel. Vanja wasn’t the only witness to his fight with Helena. And he’d mentioned a message summoning him the Helena—one Helena knew nothing about.

It was engineered precisely to feed a clean answer to dozens of prefects. And Vanja would put good money down that it’s Dori’s handywork.

And that means Vanja is going to need help from a higher power.

She makes her way back to the staging area and tucks herself into a niche by Helena’s cubicle, eavesdropping. Vikram’s voice carries through: “…wasn’t accidental, Director Gothart. We need to get Conrad.”

Vanja holds her breath. Vikram, as Emeric’s closest friend, isn’t going to be exactly raring to aid and abet her. Hell, she’ll be lucky if he doesn’t arrest her on sight. 

But his partner Mathilde says, “I’ll stay here and watch the scene.”

Those—those are dice she’s willing to roll.

Vanja waits until she sees Vikram and the older man—the director, she supposes—leave the staging area, then swiftly lifts the curtain and steps inside.

Mathilde spins on a heel. “Excuse me,” she says warily, “you can’t—”

Vanja yanks her wig off but keeps her voice low. “Mathilde, it’s me. I need your help.”

Mathilde’s eyes just about fall out of their sockets. Then it’s as if Vanja can see her reconstructing a series of events, and finally she concludes: “No wonder Conrad is falling apart.”

That’s the last thing Vanja expected. “What?”

“Your perfume,” Mathilde says bluntly. “Or soap. You’ve been passing by us, haven’t you? He looks like he gets run over by a cart every time.”

Vanja swallows the sudden knot in her throat. “I—I can’t let him know I’m here. You know why. But I saw what happened to Helena Haintz, I was under the desk.” She takes a deep breath. “And you need to make sure Emeric doesn’t arrest the wrong person, because his arm candy is the one who killed her.”

Chapter Text

VANJA

“I saw what happened to Helena Haintz, I was under the desk.” Vanja takes a deep breath. “And you need to make sure Emeric doesn’t arrest the wrong person, because his arm candy is the one who killed her.”

Mathilde looks like she’s going to be unpacking the last minute of conversation for a very long time. “Thea? Thea Britz?”

Vanja shakes her head. “Helena called her Dori. Long story short, Helena and Dori worked on the lens together, but Dori stole Helena’s betrothed, Wendel, so Helena stole her work and claimed it as her own. Then Wendel dumped Dori anyway. Dori set him up to fight with Helena tonight, then came in after, did something with Helena’s gloves, and—”

“She must have tampered with them so Helena would touch the lens,” Mathilde says grimly. “Right. We knew the lens killed her, but it didn’t make sense, she knew to wear protective gear.”

Vanja squints. That sounds like an exaggeration—but no, she saw it in action for herself when Helena disintegrated on the spot.

It still doesn’t explain how she was able to press her own bare hands to the crystal unharmed.

That’s something she’ll have to unpack later herself. “You have to make sure Emeric doesn’t buy into the Wendel theory and make an arrest right away. And—” Vanja lunges for the desk. “Helena mentioned she reads a letter Dori left every day. I bet that’ll tip him off.” She fishes around in Helena’s cloak pockets; nothing. A leatherbound portfolio is lying on the desk. Vanja flips through the notes, all boring jargon-clogged drivel with pretentious words like asterism and adularescence and nothing juicy—until she hears a crinkle from a pocket in the back.

There’s a folded-up parchment waiting, folded and unfolded so many times the creases have felted. It starts, Helena, ends in Dori, and has a lot of bullshit excuses in the middle.

“Here,” Vanja says, waving the letter before stuffing it behind the first page of the notes. “You have to make sure he checks the desk. Dori took the sabotaged gloves when she left, so I’m going to go find where she stashes them and—and figure something out. But don’t let Emeric arrest Wendel, all right? And… don’t let him know I’m here.”

“One thing.” Mathilde fixes her stare on Vanja. “I saw you in June, didn’t I? At his initiation ceremony.”

Vanja swallows, eyes on the ground. So she’d been spotted after all. “I… had to see it for myself.” She slides the wig back on. “There are studies in the back of the hall. See if you can push him to do interviews in one, and I’ll know where you are.”

Then she ducks out the curtains one more time.

When she leaves the staging area, Emeric’s already on the way over with the director. Vanja’s heart gives a twist—there’s already a hint of a bounce in his step. He doesn’t look like the last few months have been easy, but a puzzle still lights him up like a beacon.

But Vanja’s not the only one with eyes on him.

As Emeric leaves, Dori’s stare doesn’t waver. And she has the restless resolve of someone with work still to do.

***

EMERIC

The bells distantly chime the quarter of the hour.

If Emeric’s lucky, the guests will tolerate lockdown for at least another hour and forty-five minutes. If he’s luckier, he’ll have solved the murder by then.

He carefully picks his way over to the pile of remains under the shattered lens. Once he gets his spectacles, he can look for any magical foul play, but for now he can examine the scene as is. A dissonant glint catches his eye—there, next to Helena, a crushed goblet, the plain glass stark among all the iridescent crystal. The cherry burn of kirsj stings his nose.

Interesting. He knows approximately when they all heard the crash, but this suggests the killer entered the room sometime after the kirsj service began. Emeric double-checks his own gloves, then reaches for the pile of clothing. Shards flicker against what looks to be a plain, long-sleeved canvas smock, gray smears of ashes trickling out onto the floor as he lifts it up. A pair of plain leather gloves also fall out. She was wearing protective gear—so where was the failure point? The gloves seem like the best place to start. He picks them up and looks closer.

They seem sturdy, functional. There are no splits in the seams, no rips in the fingertips, nothing to suggest they failed to protect Helena Haintz. The only odd thing is that they’re less ash-logged than everything else. Perhaps there’s some enchantment that accounts for it.

They’ll have to wait until he gets his spectacles back. Emeric sets them back down and moves to the desk, where a neat pile of brocade sits in the corner nearest the lens—likely the lens cover, given the quantity and how it’s folded into a wedge. There’s a leatherbound document portfolio open beside it, the parchment sheets within a little untidy. The first sheet is all detailed, extensive presentation notes in sharp, decisive script, but positioned… oddly. As if it’s obscuring something.

Underneath it he finds a page in different handwriting altogether, curving and cramped—and instead of more presentation notes, it’s a letter.

Helena—

I’m so sorry. We never meant to hurt you, but Wendel and I have something truly special together, and we cannot hide our love any longer. We’re leaving so you can put us both in the past. You are the strongest person I know, and I’m sure the next time I see you, you’ll be shining brighter than ever. I hope you can forgive me.

Dori

Emeric’s eyes narrow. Helena was an abandoned lover? That seems like an odd reversal of motive… He lifts the letter from the portfolio to take another read—

And there it is again, the thread of roses, twining citrus, sweet vanilla, electrifying and horrific. His eyes are fixed on the parchment but all he sees is Vanja smiling at him, Vanja flushed and gasping in his arms, Vanja snarling I’m not good enough for you as her eyes well with fury and tears.

And then it’s gone.

He’s going mad, he has to be. Or perhaps it’s all in his head, crowded between Thea, Lilje, and Vanja. He’s smelling phantom roses around a new woman he’s failing spectacularly to woo, around the first woman he cared for after May, around a letter from a treacherous lover. Some feral part of him roars to life when he crosses echoes of Vanja, and this is how it makes itself heard.

But that has nothing to do with his job. And he is running out of time.

Emeric grits his teeth and moves on.

He keeps rifling through the notes, but nothing offers any clues until close to the bottom of the stack: a sheet not in Helena’s handwriting. It’s notes about technical aspects, substance ratios, casting materials, elegant words like asterism and adularescence. Dates of different tests. The rest of the stack is in the same hand. It’s research notes… but from someone else.

Frowning, Emeric returns to Helena’s presentation notes. The notes’ data is referenced, cited, expanded upon.

The other contributing researcher… is not.

Helena Haintz was going to present this work as her own.

Emeric pictures his own absent notebook, jots a line in it: Stolen credit? But so far it’s potential motive, not evidence.

Then his eyes land on the letter. There’s no mistaking it: ‘Dori’ has handwriting identical to the strange researcher’s.

In his mental notebook, Emeric adds, Stolen lover; retaliation for stolen work?

“Prefect Conrad?” The staff manager slips through the curtains but stays pinned to them, eyeing the pile of ashes as if Helena might reconstitute at any moment.

Emeric sets the notes down for the time being. “Yes?”

“Prefects Richter and Mistry have found the man you asked about, and placed him in a private study with Prefect Richter keeping an eye on him. I am to escort you there once Prefect Mistry arrives to keep an eye on the scene.”

“By any chance, is the man named Wendel?” Emeric asks, pushing away from the desk.

The manager does a double-take. “Yes, he identified himself as such. How did you know?”

“Documents,” Emeric says vaguely. “Thank you. And my spectacles?”

The manager winces. “I’m sorry, sir, but… there seems to be some confusion in the cloakroom. They’re still looking.”

Emeric tries not to scowl. Most prefects operate without anything like his spectacles, it’s true, but this is the precise sort of situation that demands them. “Very well.”

The half-hour bells begin to toll as Vikram pokes his head through the curtain. “Conrad, you’re up.”

Hour and a half left, if he’s lucky.

But if the last year taught him anything, it’s that only fools trust their luck.

***

VANJA

The thing about being a maid for many years, and a facsimile of a prinzessin for one, is you get really good at judging how a dress is sitting on a person’s frame.

And judging from the faint warp in periwinkle samite at Dori’s hip, Vanja is pretty sure she’s smuggling the sabotaged gloves in her pocket. Badly.

Dori’s also been meandering slowly toward a balcony in the corner ever since Emeric strode off to the cubicles. Unfortunately for her, Vanja’s kept pace, strolling through the crowd with her tray (reclaimed from the decorative plant she stashed it in previously) and collecting a few empty goblets.

 She clears a cluster of agitated attendees and finds Dori moving for the balcony doors. And now—Vanja can see the balcony overlooks the river outside.

That’s how she plans on getting rid of the gloves.

A gravelly voice rolling across the hall: “Attendees of the Aederfeld Arcane Innovations Exposition, this is Director Gothart. It pains me to say that due to unforeseen circumstances…”

Dori’s nearly to the balcony, one hand brushing the outside of her pocket.

Vanja barks, “Excuse me! Miss! Are you finished with your kirsj?”

Dori pauses and turns, a steam-pressed polite smile on her face. “Why, yes, here you go.” She sets her goblet on the tray.

“…presentations must be indefinitely delayed…”

Can’t this windbag hurry up and lock down the hall? Dori’s already turning back to the open doors.

“Furthermore, for the time being…”

“Would you care for another?” Vanja shrills. Dori looks at her like the wig’s slipping, and she bluffs, “Another kirsj, that is. We’re offering another round as an apology for the cancellation.”

The balcony doors swing shut with a terminal click of bolts sliding into place.

Dori’s face drops.

“…no one is to enter or exit the premises by authority of the Order of Prefects of the Godly Courts.”

Fucking finally. Vanja’s better at keeping that off her face than Dori.

“No thank you,” Dori grinds out, and pushes past.

The director continues blathering on about providing refreshments, something Vanja will not be assisting with, and having everyone stay in the brightly-lit exposition hall, something Vanja will not be honoring. For that matter, neither is Dori. She’s shellacked over her sour expression with something akin to consternation, but her eyes are leaping to every solitary, shadowy alcove available, that twitchy hand grazing her pocket. The gloves in there are as good as a lit fuse.

Vanja keeps one eye on her as she circulates, marking the recess Dori picks, the way she sits and fusses with her skirts. The slight disarray of the cushions after Dori stands and drifts back into the crowd, her shoulders no longer bunched up, the quarter-hour bells chiming merrily in her wake.

Vanja sighs over her tray. Sure, Dori had to improvise, but the cushions? Amateur stuff. She’s starting to feel a little embarrassed for Helena Haintz.

The next part’s easy enough. Once Dori’s busy chatting up some deeply unsocialized artificer, Vanja trots over to keep “looking for goblets” in the alcove, and as she makes a show of “gathering up” ones she poached from the tray, she slips a hand between the window seat cushions.

Leather. Grit. It’s the gloves.

Now she just has to make sure Emeric gets them.

Vanja stows them in her own coat pocket and sets off for the private studies in the back. By now, Emeric should have found Dori’s letter, especially with Mathilde’s prompting.

It takes longer than she wants to make it across the hall. She has to avoid the notice of other servers as best she can, lest she be pulled into whatever refreshment service the director is using to keep everyone placated, and everyone’s on high alert now, whispers and glances picking at every flickering shadow. Staying out of sight is slow going, ditching her tray even slower.

Mathilde is already waiting in the wood-paneled corridor when Vanja arrives. Her expression stays impassive, but she flicks her eyes to the little study inside. She’s not alone.

“Excuse me, Madame Prefect,” Vanja asks as she draws close enough to sneak a look in the study. A redheaded man who looks like a Wendel is sulking at the table inside. With a pang, Vanja realizes he doesn’t know Helena’s dead yet—he just thinks he’s in trouble for their argument. “Are you in need of any refreshments?”

Wendel isn’t looking. Vanja checks to make sure no one else is, then pulls the gloves out of her pocket.

Mathilde’s eyes bulge. She leans in close and hisses, “Are those—what are you thinking?”

“That you could give them to—” Vanja cuts herself off as the half-hour bells toll.

Emeric’s going to ask where Mathilde got them. And he’ll want to talk to the person who gave them to her.

But unless Vanja can engineer another way for him to find them… she’ll be carrying an extremely incriminating piece of evidence around a murder scene.

“Scheit,” she breathes.

Mathilde’s gaze jumps over her shoulder. She abruptly shoves Vanja into the study next to Wendel’s and shuts the door before Vanja can so much as protest. Not that she would; there seems to just be a heavy velvet drape over a stone arch dividing the room into two studies.

“There you are, Conrad,” Mathilde says loudly. Familiar boot soles scuff down the hall. For a moment, Vanja could swear the ice-cold river outside is running down her veins.

Emeric.

He’s here to question Wendel.

And he’s going to do it with Vanja one curtain away, clutching the murder weapon.

***

EMERIC

Emeric is escorted through the lanes of exhibitors’ cubicles, all the way to the back of the exhibition hall itself, and down a little corridor. Mathilde is standing by an open door, and she waves him over with considerably more restraint than Vikram. Before he heads in, Emeric hangs back with the staff manager a moment. “I have one more request: Can you find out which member of your staff brought Helena Haintz her kirsj for the toast? They may have seen something useful.”

An odd look crosses the manager’s face, but he just says “I’ll ask around” and scurries off. Emeric steps through the door.

It’s a small, nondescript study, the plain stone walls broken up by bookcases neatly packed with inoffensive dry tomes, and a handful of chairs around a plain oak table. A heavy velvet drape hangs over an archway that seems to be another exit. A surly-looking redheaded man in his mid-twenties sits in an even surlier hunch, his motionless hands knotted together on the tabletop in a display of stoicism betrayed by the foot tapping away below the surface. He’s even wearing a blue krebatte, just as Thea mentioned.

Emeric sits down across from him as Mathilde posts herself in the doorway, arms folded. “Good evening, sir. Can you please confirm your full name for me?”

Wendel blinks snowmelt-gray eyes at Emeric, weighing the pros and cons of cooperation versus belligerence, and grudgingly opts for the former. “My name is Wendel,” he says. Then, incredibly, he elaborates: “Wendel Mendelsson.”

“On purpose?” Emeric blurts out. Wendel gives him a stony look that Emeric interprets as a yes.

  “This is absurd,” Wendel snaps instead. “I don’t know what Helena’s saying I did, but if it’s worth a prefect’s attention, she’s lying. Again.”

Emeric pauses. Wendel sounds like he thinks Helena’s still alive. It could be a clever ruse, or it could be sincere. Either way, if he plays along, Wendel might let something slip. He asks, “What is your history with Helena Haintz?”

“What did she tell you?”

“I’d like to hear your side of the story,” Emeric glosses.

Wendel emits a dramatic sigh and sinks back in his chair. “We met at university, oh, seven years ago? And we got along well.”

That sounds like an understatement, given the letter. “How well?”

“We were… betrothed.” Wendel shifts uncomfortably. “House Dominitz hired us both to work in their research facilities, but on different projects, and we wound up drifting apart.”

“Helena’s star rose, and yours didn’t, you mean,” Mathilde says dryly. Wendel lets out a sputter of outrage, and she shrugs. “I’ve only heard of one of you, and she’s not in this room.”

Emeric adds professional jealousy to his mental notebook. “But Helena wasn’t working alone.”

Wendel shook his head. “She has—had a partner, Doretta Berlein.”

Dori for short? Emeric look to Mathilde. She shrugs again. “Feel like I’ve seen the name, but… maybe in a footnote.”

There’s another thing Emeric wants to pry into: “You said had a partner.”

Wendel slouches even further. “Dori and I… connected. We got carried away. Before I knew it, we’d run off together and left House Dominitz and Helena behind. It was the most foolish thing I’ve ever done, and not a day goes by that I don’t wish I could go back.”

That strikes Emeric in a way he wishes it didn’t. Maybe it’s the memory of roses; maybe it’s the scar his own steps have worn into the floorboards of his mind, pacing circles around Does she regret it?

He swallows. “And how does Doretta feel?”

Wendel shrugs. “After a month or so, I came to my senses and left her. I haven’t heard anything since. I would hope she knows we… we were wrong.” Then his face darkens. “But that doesn’t make it right, what Helena’s doing. Half of that work is Dori’s, and just because she abandoned the project doesn’t mean Helena should get all the credit. That’s what I told her tonight.”

“Is that why you smashed the lens?” Emeric asks evenly.

Wendel’s eyes widen. “Is that what that noise was?” He shakes his head. “It was still standing when I left Helena. I was drinking the kirsj in the hall with my friends when we heard the crash, they can vouch for my whereabouts.”

Emeric can smell the cherries on Wendel’s breath, so he’s being truthful about that much, at least. There’s a timid knock on the door frame. The staff manager is back, leaning around the edge as Mathilde steps aside.

“Excuse me a moment,” Emeric says, and steps outside. He pulls the man further down the corridor until they’re out of Wendel’s earshot. “Sir, when did you see that man leave Haintz’s staging area?”

His brow furrows. “Right… right before the tray pass of the kirsj, so, a little before six o’clock? I was on my way to get my first round.”

Emeric pinches his nose. Given the placement of the broken kirsj goblet, Helena was likely holding it when she disintegrated. If Wendel was witnessed leaving before the kirsj service, then either he doubled back to kill Helena, or he’s telling the truth. “Then it’s imperative we find the server who brought Haintz kirsj.”

“That’s the thing, sir.” The manager flexes his hands. “I thought it was odd you would ask that, so I verified, and—the first round presenters weren’t to be given kirsj until after their presentation. None of our servers went into her staging area.”

Emeric takes a moment to assess:

His only known suspect was seen leaving the scene while the victim was still alive, and purportedly can confirm his whereabouts after.

The last person to see Helena Haintz alive seems to be the one who brought her kirsj.

And he has no idea who that is, he has no way to narrow it down, and he has at least a hundred increasingly confused and irate people confined in the exhibition hall who won’t stay there much longer. Including the girl he’s supposed to be impressing, and the girl he was too much of a coward to court, and the ghost of the girl who broke his heart.

And it’s such a little grievance, but it’s made all the worse that he can’t even look for magic at work; he has to manage with these miserable, clunky spectacles.

“Thank you for your help,” Emeric lies tightly, and walks back to the study, throat closing. “Mathilde, could you—could you please keep an eye on Mr. Mendelsson, but give me a minute alone? I need to… think.”

Mathilde’s got nearly as good a face for card games as Kirkling. Whatever she’s thinking stays with her as she says, “Of course,” then escorts Wendel out and closes the door.

And then—once again, Emeric is alone.

***

VANJA

It should be a comfort to have even a heartbeat to herself to think, to process. Instead, Vanja finds herself thinking of the light on Emeric’s face as he strode across the hall, the shadows under his eyes.

It’s been a torment, all these months, all these memories. Only the urgency of the moment has kept the sea from sweeping her away tonight, and without that, she just may drown.

This is where he belongs, isn’t it?

This is what they’re both meant to do—right?

A miserably familiar voice drifts down the hall: “…They may have seen something useful.”

Vanja hears her supervisor mumble an answer, but she’s barely paying attention. She knows the hum of greeting to Mathilde, the pause as he takes in the study where Wendel is waiting.

Then his voice carries over through the drapes, much too clear, over the scraping of chair legs. “Good evening, sir. Can you please confirm your full name for me?”

Vanja goes completely still. The drape does nothing to muffle his voice. She’s going to hear everything.

And unless she’s very, very careful, so is he.

“My name is Wendel,” the man replies. “Wendel Mendelsson.”

“On purpose?” Emeric asks incredulously.

Vanja chokes back a startled laugh, plasters a hand over her mouth. And then—then her eyes sting.

It’s been living in house on fire, these eight months. She knew she missed him like a bare root missed the soil, she told herself it was easier to love the soft edges of a memory than the hard unvarnished present, but the truth is—his voice is still a call every part of her burns to answer.

One tear runs down her face, then another, and another. She cries as quietly as she can, letting herself sink into the sway of his voice, listening while he draws Wendel’s story out and picks at the loose threads. She can hear the shift when Emeric starts to realize Wendel’s not his culprit. The tension rising in his voice as he steps out and confers with her supervisor down the hall.

She needs to leave. Should leave. Reaches for the doorknob to turn it while he’s still out of the room.

But it’s not fast enough. Emeric returns, asks Mathilde jaggedly for a moment to himself, and closes the door.

The hush that falls is all too close. If she can hear even the edge of his breath as he paces the stone, then he will hear her leave.

She just—just has to wait him out.

But the truth is… She’s been trying to wait him out for months.

The only sound is his breath on the other side of this horrible drape.

Then his steps falter, halt. A shadow lingers at the curtain’s hem, so close, almost in reach. Waiting.

Listening.

Listening for—her?

***

EMERIC

Emeric begins to pace.

It should help him, the silence. It should give his thoughts room, it should let him focus, it should let him see the larger picture.

It doesn’t.

It’s almost as if it presses in around him. Magnifies the rasp of his steps. As if the emptiness only makes room for the worst of his thoughts to spill over and drown out everything else. There is a killer in this hall, and he can’t stop dithering over the wretched state of his love life.

Someone just died, and he can’t stop being haunted by the girl who ran from him eight months ago.

Even now he can smell roses. Oranges, vanilla, cinnamon.

Why can’t she leave him be? Why can’t he let her?

He doesn’t realize he’s stopped by the heavy drape until the silence crushes in, until he’s drowning in roses. If he closed his eyes, he would swear she’s within reach.

Breathe, you damned fool, some cruel savior orders. In, out. There’s no one here, only a ghost. In.

Out.

It’s the first of May and he is drifting off with the taste of her on his lips—

In.

She’s holding his face in her hands, whispering villanelle—

Out.

How could she? How could she do it? Even now, he’s still crashing on those shoals.

In.

He thought he’d closed these wounds, by brute force if nothing else, but all it takes is a phantom to tear him open once more.

Out.

And then—a knock at the door.

***

VANJA

Can—can he hear her?

Vanja stills her lungs. Waits to inhale until he does. Matches him breath for ragged breath. In, out. There’s no one here, only a ghost. In.

Out.

He can’t know she’s here. That’s all this is.

In.

For just a moment, just like this—she can be together with him, one last time.

Out.

Some traitorous part of her whispers, But hasn’t it been long enough?

Wouldn’t it be easier to face him, to give him his spectacles and say she’s sorry for everything?

In.

Can’t she just tell him what she’s seen, and why she has to go before she hurts him even more?

Out.

Vanja reaches for the drape—

And there’s a knock.

Not at her door. At his.

Vanja jerks her hand back.

Relief and shame floods her veins—after everything they’ve been through, how could she even consider being so selfish? Emeric doesn’t need her right now, he needs—

“Can I come in?” asks a soft, pleasant, feminine voice.

Vanja’s heart drops when Emeric says stiffly, “Yes.”

Who is he letting in?

***

EMERIC

When Emeric opens the door, he finds the last person he could have imagined seeking him out in a glorified coat closet in the middle of a murder investigation:

Miss Lilje Kiefer.

“Can I come in?” she asks.

And because he’s teetering on the brink of the second? Third? Emotional breakdown of the evening, he says, “Yes.”

He closes the door as she sweeps in, chin held high, gown rustling. She really does look lovely as ever—the kind sort of lovely that deserved far better than how he’s acted.

“I—I owe you an apology,” he says unevenly. “Several. Actually. It’s just—” His voice cracks. “It’s just that I’m—this isn’t a good time, my head isn’t in the right place… You probably already knew that.”

She says steadily, “I do. Sit.” He’s too startled not to oblige, and even more bewildered when she awkwardly drags another chair over to rest next to his. “You were already having trouble earlier, I could see, and now something dreadful’s happened and you’ve been called to fix it and I… wanted to help any way I could.”

“I wronged you,” he says stiffly. “I don’t deserve your help.”

“I can decide that for myself,” she returns.

Emeric’s insides squirm. He buries his face in his hands. “I shouldn’t need help,” he grumbles. “I’m the youngest—”

“Yes, yes, I know, youngest prefect in history,” she snips, “and did it ever once occur to you that that means you’re going to have problems that no one else has ever dealt with?”

To Emeric’s utter mortification, it, in fact, has not occurred to him.

Lilje must be able to tell, because he feels the soft, warm pressure of a hand on his shoulder, and then she asks, “What’s going on?”

“I… it’s madness, but… I keep feeling as if…” Emeric takes a breath. “As if Vanja’s here.”

“The girl you courted before me?” Lilje asks, because that’s all he ever told her: they courted in May, and then it ended.

The words have always glued in his throat; anytime he’s spoken of what happened, it’s in the sparest terms, the swiftest and least personal way. He’d always thought that best, keeping the distance. Even now, the idea of saying anything more feels like rebreaking a bone.

But perhaps that’s the problem. Perhaps he never let it heal right in the first place.

“It was,” he admits, “in every way, my first. And it was intense. I truly believed I loved her. Then, without warning, she left, and I still don’t—don’t know why. Eight months, and I have no answers.”

Lilje’s hand tightens on his shoulder. After a moment, she says, “You won’t get them. But you still need to grieve, to be at peace with that.”

Emeric looks at her, lost, almost impatient. Even now he can hear people shuffling outside, people waiting on him to get his act together. “I don’t understand.”

She sighs; it’s her turn to take a beat and gather herself. “My family disowned me after they learned I was planning to elope with a tailor, Karlotte. We ran away together to Quedling, but… I think Karlotte loved the fantasy of me more than the reality. She wanted to be the opera heroine, a commoner who swept a crown princess away from her terrible and powerful family. Once we got to Quedling, I was just a bookish, morbid girl without a penny to her name, whose family washed their hands of her and went back to squabbling with other cadet branches. And Karlotte left me within a month.”

Emeric lifts his head to look at her properly. “I’m so sorry, Lilje. That’s—you deserved so much better than that.”

“I did,” she agrees. “But more importantly… I learned it’s never as simple as just moving on, it’s not like moving houses. You’re mourning not just the person you lost, but the person you were with them. Part of me will love her in a way, for a long time, maybe forever. I tried to protect myself by dwelling on every misery I could blame her for, but what I really needed was to mourn the good. I was poisoning myself against caring for anyone else, because I was denying the joy of love and only remembering the pain.”

Lilje releases his shoulder—then reaches for his hand, wrapping it in both of hers.

“So, Emeric Conrad,” she says, “what did you love about this Vanja?”

***

VANJA

“Yes, yes, I know, youngest prefect in history, and did it ever once occur to you that that means you’re going to have problems that no one else has ever dealt with?”

The silence implies that it has not, in fact, occurred to Emeric.

Vanja would have told him the same. Part of her rebels at the sound of her heart in a stranger’s mouth.

But some part of her is glad someone else is there to speak it, someone who can do it without drawing blood from him.

The girl asks, “What’s going on?”

Vanja hears Emeric take a shaky breath. “I… it’s madness, but… I keep feeling as if…As if Vanja’s here.”

I am, Vanja wants to scream, I am, I never wanted to go—

“The girl you courted before me?”

No, no, she shouldn’t listen to this—she doesn’t want to hear it—she’s held strong for eight months—

Emeric’s words fall like a death sentence. “It was, in every way, my first. And it was intense. I truly believed I loved her. Then, without warning, she left, and I still don’t—don’t know why. Eight months, and I have no answers.”

I did this to him.

There’s another quiet. Then the strange girl says, gently and terribly, “You won’t get them. But you still need to grieve, to be at peace with that.”

The notion catches Vanja in the throat, just as Emeric himself has done so many times, when he’s spoken a truth she already knew.

She’s been chasing answers she’s never going to get. Not really.

Anything like the truth is always going to be blurred with Ozkar’s evasions, warped from every string Marthe attached. She can bring Ozkar the scrap of the lens and he’ll claim it’s not enough, he needs more to see if maybe Marthe still lingers, always more.

Nothing would make Marthe happier than to know her despised daughter is still caught in her games.

And the only way to stop playing is to leave the table. To grieve the mother she wished she had, and bury the one she did.

Just because it was said by a stranger, just because it was meant for someone else, doesn’t make it less true.

Suddenly—it’s easier to stomach the girl’s voice with Emeric, the solace he’s finding somewhere else. It’s impossible for anyone to be worthy of him, but maybe—maybe this girl is close enough that Vanja can leave him in her hands.

He needs to bury the Vanja he knew. The least she can do is let that Vanja stay in the grave.

Vanja makes herself leave before she looks back, letting the conversation cover her easing the door open. Mathilde is still in the corridor, looking mildly irate as Wendel rolls his eyes and huffs, “How long are you detaining me?”

“Prefect Conrad may have more questions for you,” Mathilde says shortly. “Can I help you, miss?”

“I just wanted to check with the gentleman,” Vanja fibs. “Sir, were you able to meet with your colleague? The one who invited you to her cubicle? I was supposed to pass the message earlier but had to hand it off to another attendant.”

Wendel stares at her, connecting the dots. “I… yes, I think…” He starts fishing in his pockets.

“I believe I found some property that belongs to Prefect Conrad’s companion,” Vanja tells Mathilde quietly, while Wendel’s preoccupied. “I’m going to go return it.”

Mathilde’s eyes narrow. She looks to the closed door of the study, then back to Vanja. “Do you have a message you’d like me to pass him?”

For a moment, Vanja wavers. But—

It’s her own voice this time, not acerbic or scolding but steady, telling herself You already let him go.

Her voice scratches nonetheless as she answers, “Thank you, but no. I think he has other matters on his mind.”

Vanja can hear Mathilde knocking on the door as she hurries out into the bright lights of the exposition hall, chased by bells tolling for seven o’clock. She retrieves her tray one last time and ventures into the crowd, collecting glasses and soiled napkins, until she spies Dori’s periwinkle gown. She’s sauntering around with a tiny, smug smile and a goblet of wine. Vanja can’t blame her for that; after all, by all indicators, tonight’s been a roaring success.

Up until now.

Vanja readies the sabotaged gloves, and closes in on her mark.

***

EMERIC

“What did you love about this Vanja?”

Emeric can feel the bone straining, splintering. If he lets it, the answers will all come too easy, and for eight months he’s shut this out—

He’s tried to. But Vanja always snuck in. Will always sneak in.

Perhaps that’s what’s made this so painful, never being able to fully exorcise her, body and soul.

Perhaps that’s what he’s loved about her all along.

“She’s—” His voice cracks again. “She’s one of the cleverest people you’ll ever meet in this world. And one of the most outrageous. It’s as if she sees and understands all the rules we all live by, and decides—I don’t feel like it.” The words spill out faster, bloodier than before. “If the world told her to stay quiet, she’d speak her mind. If she was told to give something up, she’d keep it and steal your coin purse for the insult. She had the kind of childhood that would grind anyone else into powder, the kind that ought to have made her the worst of cynics, and I could see her fighting every instinct it left and choosing the right thing anyway. I spent ten years training to be a prefect, and she was the first person to make me see that justice shouldn’t just be about stopping monstrous people, but making things right for their victims. She made me laugh, seethe, question everything… and I was never more infuriated than when she wouldn’t believe in herself.”

Lilje squeezes his hand. “And do you regret the time you had together?”

Emeric opens his mouth to say Yes, of course, and discovers he can’t.

Every day was a coin toss between ecstasy and despair, but—perhaps, from a distance, he couldn’t see it—it was filled with love. Every dance in Minkja, every April morning waking to the warmth of her, even the quarrels and the breakdowns, it was all held together by the singular joy that she was in his life.

Until she wasn’t.

But when she was…

“I don’t,” he says, almost wonderingly. “I don’t regret it. I just wish I could know what I… did …”

He tapers off before he can end the sentence:

Wrong.

Even now he can remember the feel of the sun-warmed cobblestones in Welkenrode under his knees, holding Vanja to him as she sobbed, What did I do wrong?

Even now he can hear the resentment as Marthe Ros screamed I’ll just keep finding you as she was wrenched into her battered lantern. The look on Vanja’s face, the desperation in her eyes after her mother was finally cut off.

She never got her answer, did she?

Not…

Not until she abandoned him the same way.

It wasn’t a midwinter night, but they made their bed into a crossroads, and there she left him.

It shouldn’t be a relief to break this way, but it is, it is, it is.

Beautiful, agonizing clarity finally clears away the thorns. He’s guilty of doing just the same as Vanja. She made herself into the Prinzessin, the Pfennigeist, different faces to escape her scars; he summoned the construct of Prefect Conrad when pitiful Emeric couldn’t get the job done. She let her doubt carry her away from meeting him in Helligbrücke in January; he let his insecurities slowly starve what he’d started with Lilje in Lüdz. At every turn he’s run from facing the wound May left, held it and everyone at arm’s length, tried to forge ahead on his own—just as she was doing when he first met her. Really, the only thing he can’t trace back to Vanja is getting a questionable tattoo.

All this time, he’s been searching for an answer by repeating Vanja’s unfathomable choices, just as she did her mother’s.

A tear sears down his face, then another. He pushes his spectacles off as Lilje passes him a handkerchief.

“I,” he says, ragged, “I am so, so sorry, Lilje. You’re right. You’re right about it all.”

He hears the chair creak, and then her shoulder brushes his. “I know,” she says simply. “I’m glad I could help.”

And instead of crushing silence, it’s peaceful quiet that rules the little room for a few minutes. All the torment, all the betrayal, all the ghosts of the love he had, it’s all breaking free, and for once he’s not fighting it.

Somewhere, the clocks begin to toll.

Vanja had told him once that she used the bells to calm herself when she was overwhelmed. That she would let herself feel the fear and the pain and the panic until they stopped, then let those feelings go. He makes himself breathe each toll of the bells, lets himself cling to that rock of certainty in the torrent and the steady presence of Lilje.

And when the seventh, final bell rings, Journeyman Prefect Emeric Conrad gets to his feet.

“Better?” Lilje asks.

“Better,” he says a bit thickly, “is an understatement, and if I hadn’t spectacularly bungled things with you, I suspect we’d be making very improper use of this study. And if I didn’t have a murder to solve.” He considers a moment. “You didn’t hear that from me.”

“Don’t be silly, anyone can see it’s a murder.” Lilje sounds a bit distracted as she also stands. “But hold on, go back—”

They’re interrupted by a knock at the door, and Mathilde’s voice. “Conrad, you might want to hear this.”

Lilje catches his sleeve before he reaches the knob. “Before you leave tonight—we should speak.”

A tiny curl of hope unfurls in his belly. “We will.”

When he opens the door, Mathilde is standing a respectful few paces away with Wendel, who’s holding a little square of paper. She points at Emeric. “Show him.”

Wendel shuffles forward. “An attendant passed this to me earlier tonight. I—I thought Helena sent it, and when she denied it I just thought she was being spiteful.”

He passes Emeric the paper—a note written in a credible imitation of Helena Haintz’s handwriting. It reads, We need to talk. —H

But there’s a peculiar pinch to the letters. They’re stilted, the ends almost unfinished, except for where they end in a curl. Each word looks… cramped.

Emeric thinks of a leather portfolio full of notes. Of shattered, shimmering glass. Of a pile of ash, and sturdy leather gloves.

Of all the potential destroyed by a single, fruitless affair.

Of who pointed him to Wendel in the first place.

One piece falls into place, then another, and another, until he has a workable, testable hypothesis.

He looks to Mathilde, almost sheepish. “I’m going to need you to give Vikram some very bad news.”

A few minutes later, Emeric is winding his way back through the increasingly disgruntled crowd, though with any luck he won’t have to keep them much longer. Finally he finds Thea Britz standing at a window, looking faintly irate as a server passes her a fresh goblet of kirsj and glides away.

“I wanted to check on you,” he lies. “It’s utterly unseemly leaving you like this, but business called.”

“What happened? If you can say, that is.” She blinks her admittedly enormous eyes at him.

“Something of a fraud, I think.” He sticks his hands in his pockets. “The first presenter seems to be missing, but it looks like she stole quite a bit of work from someone else, a Loretta…? Loretta… Beren, I think?”

“Doretta Berlein?” Thea corrects. Then, catching herself, adds: “I’ve read her papers.”

“You truly are an expert. Mathilde barely even recognized the name.”

Thea presses her lips together. “Hm.”

(Discomfort. Frustration. Annoyance.)

“I actually need your assistance,” Emeric continues. “The man you saw earlier, we think he may be involved. To make sure we have the right one, we’re going to have you pick him out of a line of fellows who match the description, all right?”

Thea goes even paler. “Will he be able to see me?”

“Yes,” Emeric lies. “But it should be quite safe, never fear.”

(Theory: There is one person Thea planned on recognizing her this evening. That person is currently a pile of ash.)

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” she starts, “I can describe him for you—he’s on the short side, with bright red hair and a blue krebatte, gray eyes, I—I think I saw him earlier too and he had a problem with tapping his foot when he’s nervous—someone called him Wendel—”

“Mendelsson,” Emeric finishes. “Unfortunately. Miss Britz, I apologize, but I’m going to need you to turn out your pockets.”

She goggles at him. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am.” He discards the lackadaisical façade and links his hands behind his back. “By the authority of the Order of Prefects of the Godly Courts, in connection with this investigation, I am asking you to show me the contents of your pockets.”

 She gives a tiny, disbelieving shake of her head and reaches for the sides of her gown. Then—freezes.

“Miss Britz,” he prompts.

She slowly, incredulously pulls out a pair of leather gloves. He’s used to people being amazed he knows where they’ve hidden things, even when it’s the most obvious answer. “These can’t—I mean—they aren’t mine.”

“Of course not,” Emeric says coolly, taking the gloves. “You sent the message to Mendelsson, inciting his confrontation with Haintz. Then you brought Haintz the kirsj after, perhaps as a peace offering. And when she was distracted, you switched the gloves.” The pair in his hands is identical to the ones found on Helena… but even as he turns them over, he can hear the ashes sliding around inside. Every fingertip gaps with a fine, nigh-imperceptible slit—just enough to make contact with the crystal. “I’m honestly not certain if you pushed her into the lens or waited for the gloves to fail, but it makes no difference. You switched the gloves back, but didn’t think to make sure they contained ashes like the rest of Haintz’s clothes. Then you smashed the lens to make sure no one else could use your stolen work, and came back to tell me—the only field investigator prefect in the building—that you saw your former lover fighting with the victim.”

“Those gloves were planted on me,” she insists, eyes darting, wringing her hands. “Someone must have—”

“Dori?”

Wendel Mendelsson is standing a few feet away, staring at “Thea” as if he’s seen a ghost.

Theory: Doretta Berlein never left Sax Dominika. She just posed as a supply clerk in Aederfeld, biding her time until the exposition, where she could get revenge on the lover who jilted her and the partner who shut her out, all in one fell swoop.

Supporting evidence: “Thea’s” abnormal competence as a supply clerk; her absence during the time of the murder; her insistence on implicating Wendel; and, of course, the sabotaged gloves.

“Doretta Berlein,” Emeric says, “I’m afraid we will not be seeing each other again. At least, not under the best circumstances. If it’s any consolation, Vikram is going to be furious with me.”

It’s a bit of a blur after that, between formally taking Doretta into custody and letting the exposition hall out of lockdown. (The cloakroom has also located his spectacles at last, albeit a bit too late.) Still, when he sees Lilje hanging near the edge of the crowd, he excuses himself.

She tips her head toward a slightly more private alcove, and he follows, bracing for the scolding he so richly earned. Instead, Lilje reaches for his sleeve again.

“I know you’re still hurting,” she starts, “and I didn’t know how much. If you’re not ready to try courting again, you don’t have to be.” She bites her lip. “But if you are… I would be amenable to… further discussions.”

That little frond of hope sprouts roots. Cautiously, Emeric takes her hand. “That is more generous than I—”

“If you say ‘deserve’, I may strangle you,” she says tartly.

Emeric pauses, making several revisions to the slapdash speech he’s assembled in his head. “…Noted. So… Lilje, I care for you a great deal. And I’m a bit of a mess who doesn’t know which part of the empire he’ll be in any given month. I don’t feel like that makes me a particularly outstanding suitor, but… if that is what you want, I trust your judgment far more than my own. Which is to say, if you are open to it, nothing would make me happier than trying to court you, and doing a better job of it this time.”

He forgot what a sucker punch of a smile she has, how every blazing light in this hall doesn’t even hold a candle. “I would like that very much.”

Perhaps part of him will always love Vanja. Perhaps he’ll have to watch himself for years to come, to make sure he’s not walking the same cycles, tying himself in the same knots that she left in him. Perhaps this answer, fragmented as it is, won’t be enough forever.

But—for the first time in months—he can look back at May and see something other than an open grave.

He can see a way forward.

Emeric’s fingers lace with Lilje’s, and he looks to where Vikram and Mathilde are decidedly not using a conversation with the university director to spy on him.

“Lilje,” he asks, “would you like to meet my friends?”

***

VANJA

After planting the gloves back onto Dori, Vanja makes two more stops: First, to return Emeric’s spectacles to the cloakroom since she’ll be gone by the time he gets them back; then, on her way to a secluded staircase, she spots Wendel wandering about, apparently released from custody.

“I believe Prefect Conrad wanted to speak with you,” she lies, pointing to the window where Emeric is, in his polite-menace way, currently gesturing to Dori’s pockets. Emeric clearly is on the right track now, and Wendel identifying Dori will seal the deal.

Wendel sags a little but starts trudging across the hall. Vanja watches him go, then hies over to the stairs, bound for one of the upper galleries that’s meant to be closed off to the general public. It won’t hold up to her lockpicks, and it’ll be safe to stow away up there until lockdown ends.

She finds a bench in a gallery high enough to overlook the hall, yet too high up for Emeric to spy her lurking unless he knows where to look. Even better, there’s a mirror on the wall.

Before the lens was destroyed, she saw—something. Enough to know Ozkar could tell her more.

Vanja pulls her stolen shard from her pocket and holds it over an eye, then stares into the mirror.

For a moment, prisms whirl through her sight. Then she sees it.

A hand of pyre-smoke grips one shoulder; a hand of bone and gold grips the other. The marks of Death and Fortune. Threads spill from her heart, a prism of colors unto themselves, with twelve burning red among them—the blood ties to her siblings.

But something else is there.

It gutters like thousand ghostly candle flames kindled around her, shifting almost as swiftly as the prisms, but in hues of deeper red. One moment it looks like briars sprouting from her skin, the next a shower of copper coins, the next a flurry of rubies and roses.

It’s showing clearest and brightest around the fingers holding the lens shard up to her eye.

Vanja has no idea what she’s looking at. Maybe it’s what allows her to handle the lens crystal unharmed; maybe it’s some unknown boon from her godmothers. Maybe Ozkar could tell her.

But there’s one thing missing, and it’s the only thing that matters.

Nowhere in her reflection—not in the face staring back, not in the hands holding her, not in the ties to her heart—is Marthe.

Vanja stares a long moment, just to be certain, then lowers the crystal.

She won’t get her answers, ever, not really.

Marthe will never say why she left her daughter in the woods. Even if she was alive, she wouldn’t. She would hold it over Vanja’s head, or she would deny she’d ever done such a thing and say Vanja got lost herself, or she would claim Vanja was such a burden it was for everyone else’s sake.

Vanja came here looking for closure. The truth is, she was never going to get it from Marthe. She isn’t going to get it from Ozkar.

The only one who can give Vanja closure is herself.

She sits on the bench and looks through the crystal at the crowd. It makes Emeric all the easier to see, the stars of his contract constellation burning in the sign of the Lantern. He’s little better than a blur, speaking with a young woman in an alcove, but even from a distance Vanja can see him take her hand.

Part of her needs to grieve him, too, she realizes. She needs to mourn the future she saw in April, the life she saw waiting for her when it was her hand in his, when he said she’d make a beautiful bride and for once—she saw a future she wanted.

But how?

How do you inter a dream without sealing yourself inside the tomb? How do you speak a truth when you’ve made your bones its cage, so the only one it tears apart is you?

Maybe—

Maybe there’s a way to say it all, the truth, her dreams, her grief. Maybe she can do it the way people pray to Death sometimes—not because they want her answer, but simply because they need to put it into words.

Her idea crystallizes just as the director’s voice echoes across the hall once more, announcing the lifting of the lockdown. Vanja gets to her feet, finds the Lantern in the crowd one last time. Emeric looks—at ease. He’s leading the girl over to Vikram and Mathilde.

He’s fine without her.

And that’s how it should be.

Vanja slips the crystal shard back into her pocket, then heads for the nearest window, flips the latch, and climbs out into the night.

By the time she makes it to her room at the inn, her hands are stiff from the cold, and unusually clumsy as she digs through her rucksack. She brought all of her rubies with her, at least, and said all the goodbyes she needed to, so she won’t need to go back to Rammelbeck anytime soon. Ozkar is expecting her…

But she’s fine leaving him hanging.

She doesn’t owe him a thing.

“Hey Fortune,” Vanja grunts as she shoves aside a spare kirtle, “has anyone asked for the Pfennigeist in Okzberg?”

“I believe we have a request or two,” Fortune answers.

“I think I can make it there by the end of the week.” Vanja’s hand brushes stiff leather, and for the first time, doesn’t flinch back.

The little red notebook is waiting near the bottom of the rucksack, as it always has been.

The paper crinkles as Vanja finally cracks it open, fishing out a charcoal stick. The inscription Benno mentioned is scrawled on the inside of the cover, unassuming but clear:

For Vanja—so you can tell your own story. I wouldn’t trade anything in the world for being part of it.

Yours as long as you’ll have me,

Emeric

She winds up having to shove the notebook aside before tears stain the front, but once she’s mopped her face dry, Vanja flips to the first blank page. She gathers herself, then finally touches charcoal to paper.

Dear Emeric, she begins. I owe you an apology  

An explanation

Dear Emeric

No, she’s messing this all up—it’s pointless, he’ll never see it anyway—

“Back in your grave, Marthe,” Vanja mutters. She takes a deep breath. In. Out. In. Tries one more time.

Dear Emeric,

I owe you a story.

It’s not perfect. But it’s a start.