Chapter 27 #3
She was free. An amazed, relieved smile slowly bloomed on her face. Semras looked down at her fingers, willing them to flex. They trembled … and stayed still.
Her smile withered. She tried again, and again, and again—and then, she understood. She’d never be truly free ever again.
“What …?” Dropping to his knees before her, the inquisitor grabbed her hands in his. They quivered just as much as hers. “You … you tried to weave while wearing the witch-shackles?”
Gaze fixed on her fingers in the vain, heart-wrenching hope that she’d see them bend at any moment, Semras stayed silent.
Estevan exhaled with a shudder. “… You did. Of course you did. This is … this is entirely my fault. I pushed you too far, I—Void take me,” he murmured, passing his hand over his eyes. “What did I do to you?”
Blood crusted more cuts on her skin than she could count in one glance. A sickly pallor, broken only by red and purple rashes, had spread over her fingers. She couldn’t feel them; days of prolonged contact with the cold iron had numbed them.
They’d never move again as they once did. Time and healing would give some of her skills back, but she’d never weave easily again.
Semras blinked her blurring vision away. “… I wondered the same thing every day I spent in that Crone-forsaken room.”
Estevan froze, then shuddered. “Can … can your weaving fix this?”
“Not … not now. Everything feels … too raw. I’ll do it later,” she lied poorly.
How could she weave on her own hands when she needed both to grab the threads of the Unseen Arras?
The inquisitor searched her eyes for reassurance. His brow creased with sorrow. “You are lying,” he said quietly.
Her lips quivered. “… I can’t.” Semras let out a sob—just one. Just one deserved moment of raw, primal anguish. “N-Not on my own …”
“Could Miss Covenless—?”
She shook her head slowly. “She can barely see the Arras anymore. She can’t, and I can’t, Estevan. I just … can’t. I need a fleshwitch, a highly skilled one, and soon or I’ll … I’ll …”
Estevan brought her hands against his forehead, as if praying to his Radiant Lord would miraculously fix her.
“I will bring you one,” he said. “I know of one. She will heal you. Or someone else will, but you will get your hands back if that is the last thing I do, Semras. I swear it.” One after the other, he kissed the backs of her hands.
With a hollow smile, Semras watched him cradle them against his heart. “I don’t trust your promises.” The edge of her words stabbed him, cut him wide. “I will never trust you again, Estevan.” They spilled his guts open.
She watched him release her and step backward. Skin pale, eyes sunken, Estevan looked sick with himself.
He made her sick too.
“Then that will make your next step so much easier.” His lips stretched into a poor imitation of a smile. “Go to Cael. Tell him I killed Tribunal Torqedan. Have him arrest me.”
Anger swelled within her. It felt right—rage could keep her from feeling numb. “Oh, you want to die? You think it will make this,” she said, presenting her maimed hands, “any better? Are you under some delusions of martyrdom?”
“It is a calculated risk. There is a chance my father, the cardinal, would—”
“A chance? You’d gamble your life on a chance?”
“It is just a life,” Estevan muttered. “A single life to save thousands.”
“What about all those who count on you? Your father, your knights, your friends, and—and everyone else!”
How could he disregard so coldly his own life? Her hands would come back, diminished, but they would. His life wouldn’t.
Estevan turned away. “Monetary provisions have always been prepared for my retinue in case of my untimely demise. None of them are appraised of my plan in its entirety, so they will not be implicated, and with that money, they will be set for life once I am condemned. My only regret …” He glanced at her over his shoulder, then said, “… is you. You did not ask to play the role I forced upon you. My reasons were righteous, yet my actions were wrong. I bear that responsibility.”
Semras sneered coldly. “Oh, you do. And you will pay for it. This,” she said, looking down at her hands, “is your doing. Once I’m healed, I will carve your heart out.”
A smile lifted the corners of his lips, but it held no mirth within—just a feverish hope muddied by fatalism. “Do it. It is yours to take. I have no use for the wretched thing, and if it will make you forgive me after my odious—”
“It will not make me,” Semras replied. She couldn’t.
She didn’t even want to ponder if she wished to.
“‘Odious’ is too kind a word for what you made me endure. I do not forgive you now, and I may never. What I am willing to do, however, is remain cordial enough with you until we’ve fixed this Crone-forsaken mess.
Then we will part ways and never see each other again. ”
“I cannot demand more of you,” he said quietly. “I have taken too much already.”
“Glad to hear some humility in your voice for once, Inquisitor.” She paused, then furrowed her brow pensively.
“You are quite right. You took me from my home, but what I can’t understand is why.
If you meant to be arrested all along, why didn’t you simply surrender yourself?
Why go through the trouble of making me accuse you? ”
Estevan sighed. “With no motive, a shaky timeline at best, and the inhuman punishment awaiting the culprit of such a high-profile murder? Who would have believed it? It was better to create a plausible accusation against me first. I planned on being arrested and then confessing to framing a witch for my ‘crime.’ That meant I needed you to denounce me, and for that, I needed you to sincerely believe I could have done it.”
“It worked,” she muttered. “I did believe it, thanks to how odious you were.”
Sorrow brightened the inquisitor’s eyes.
“I am so, so sorry … I needed your despair to lend credibility to your plea. I asked Maraz’Miri to give you an escape opportunity, and I awaited Cael’s visit, hoping you would meet with him and tell him everything.
With his stellar reputation, he could vouch for your word, and the tribunals would have had to believe you.
And all along, I desperately searched for a suspect other than a witch, for another possibility that did not include you remembering me as a monster. ”
Semras looked down at her hands, thinking of all the times she had called him one in the privacy of her mind. “I thought you were a monster when you confessed to the murder. Now that I’ve learned of what you meant to make me do … I can say you truly are one.”
“I know.”
Her gaze snapped toward him. “Do you truly? Your world is made of violence, Estevan, and it turned you into a killer. You think everyone is as capable as you of condemning another to death? Of living on, knowing someone’s life had hung by their words?
You never thought of what that guilt would do to me, did you? ”
The inquisitor gawked at her. “… I—”
“Shut up, you bastard! You have no idea of how cruel—!” Her voice quivered too much to continue. Lifting her eyes to the ceiling, Semras tried to compose herself.
“It was cruel,” Estevan said. “I was cruel, I know. I have been appallingly horrible to you, antagonizing and scaring you on purpose. But I wanted to make it easy for you to—”
She glared at him. “Hating you wouldn’t have changed anything. I would still have borne the guilt of being your killer, you bastard! You would have ruined my life either way!” Her face twisted with hate and resentment. “You ruined me!”
“I know …” he breathed. “Our lives have turned into a nightmare by my own design, and I should be the only one to pay for it. I shall not ask for a forgiveness I do not deserve. There was no other choice, no other option. I had not expected …” He paused.
“Expected what?”
“… Just how much I would enjoy our verbal sparring.” Hands held behind his back, Estevan walked a few steps away to look through the window.
“So few people dare look me in the eye, but not you. You stood up to me and never backed down. I gave you the worst of me, and yet it did not impress you even a little.”
Semras stared silently at his back.
“I enjoyed your company, your quips, your spirit …” He chuckled wistfully.
“I wish my decisions hadn’t fated our acquaintance to be so brief.
I wish we had met before. In other circumstances, without the threat of war looming over us.
In another time, perhaps, when we would not each be standing on opposing sides … ”
The raw longing in Estevan’s voice transfixed her. With his secrets unravelled at long last, she couldn’t detach herself from the fascinating sight of the man lying beneath them. Of the vulnerability he bared for her, and her only.
“… or in another world,” he said, “one where I would have been free to wipe your tears away.”
Cruel words spoken by a cruel man. They wrapped around her heart and tried to smother her pain and rage. They succeeded, and she hated him for it.
Semras had to force air down her tightening throat. It felt too raw to breathe, too painful to speak. Tears shimmered in her eyes, but she didn’t let them fall.
No one would wipe them for her. Not in this world.
Estevan took a deep breath, gaze still fixed outside the window. “Well. I have said it all.”
The evening sun had long since died and been replaced by a moon hanging low in the skies. Its light hit the inquisitor’s silhouette, throwing its pale hue over him.
He turned, and the orange light of gas sconces hit the other side of his profile. “Now all that remains is for you to sneak out of the house, go to Cael, and tell him I am the culprit.”
From far away, her mind lost in another world she never knew she longed for, Semras returned to reality. “This will not fix our problem,” she muttered.
“Do not let guilt hold your tongue. I am prepared to die. All my affairs are in order, and—”