Chapter 12
I stare into the lazy swirls of bathwater, my fingers tight on the lip of the copper tub. I heave in the scent of the lavender oil, praying to Saintess Lucia that it will banish the sweet spice of asphodels infiltrating my senses. Then, of course, I remember.
I dip my free hand into the water. It’s still plenty hot, though it takes me a moment to even feel the burn. I am having trouble feeling anything at all. There is a great door in me, locked firm, and behind it lingers all of the betrayal and the pain and the ache. I am not strong enough to open it. So, instead, I add another loop of heavy chain around the door’s handles, then around myself.
Carina knew . Renault knew . I raise my gaze, eyelids still heavy and swollen with tears, and watch the steam drift up to the tall, bare ceiling of the Vincula. The two most important people in my life knew the Saints were nothing but a children’s parable, and yet they allowed me to go on believing for so many anni. Allowed me to beg at the feet of a creature that didn’t even exist, let alone possess the power to save me.
And yet, against all logic and scripture, the creature before me now—wreathed in steam, anointed in bathwater, all dark-browed and cruel-mouthed— could save me.
Swallowing hard, I refold the flannel washcloth in my lap. I spent so long entreating the Saints when I should’ve been consorting with the diaboli, it seems.
What I’m doing right now does feel like sin. There is little way around it. The Lupa Nox is bare of any clothing, submerged in a large copper tub some poor pages surely had to drag down into the Vincula. It’s charged with protective Mysterium—I can tell. Earlier, Renault explained the precise nature of the Blessing. I did not, I confess, listen that closely. There’s a second layer of it, too—some kind of blurred barrier between us and the guards, allowing them to keep an eye on us without being subjected to the lady knight’s wiles. To spare them the weight of temptation.
Did anyone spare a moment to think of the temptation I might feel, seated beside her on a short stool, doing the work of a lady’s maid? It’s work I know well; at ten and four, I’d been trained for it, but the women of the Houses with enough wealth to support a staff didn’t like my looks, my ruined limb, my obvious limp. I try to focus on that cadence: a detached awareness, an anticipation of needs, a downcast gaze. It is so, so much better than focusing on what lurks behind those doors in my chest.
“May I ask your name?” the knight murmurs, breaking the silence. Her voice startles me, and my head snaps up before I can stop it. Then I’m forced to view her as she scrubs one long, muscular arm, the soap suds momentarily erasing the inked patterns—more flowers, I think. Foxgloves, maybe.
“I’m...I—” My reply is a stilted croak. “I’m not sure that’s necessary.”
“Mine is Nyatrix,” she offers, like it’s the first bouquet of peonies after a long winter. “Nyatrix Arctura.”
A fly in amber, I am. A weak, struggling insect battling hopelessly through rich, golden honey. A dove in the jaws of a great black wolf.
“Will you need help washing your hair?” I ask, even though the diversion is just as dangerous—my fingers curling around those long, dark locks. What will that closely cropped section of her skull feel like in my hands? I pray she cannot see the heat on my face in the chamber’s dim light.
“Well, if you’re offering,” she replies, like being nude and damp in front of an absolute stranger is nothing all that strange to her. “I’m not supposed to get the bandaging on my hand wet, yes?”
I take a deep breath and look up at her. The injured hand dangles from the tub’s rounded lip, the tendons in her wrist standing out stark and marble-like in the candlelight. I do not trust myself to say anything at all, so instead, I scoot the low stool over to the end of the tub. She watches me—the way I’ve seen owls watch mice from the trees far above. A dark, glittering gaze that promises violence, yes, but never without a thrill. Not without a hunt.
I gather up the ends of her ink-spill hair, my heart pounding against my chest so hard I fear my sternum may crack. In my mind’s eye, I do my best to replace this terrifyingly beautiful woman with someone else—anyone else from my housemaid days. The cruel Lady Fabius. Her short-tempered daughter. Mistress Calvus, who used to braid my hair for me once I finished with hers.
“I hope you know,” comes a voice that is not Lady Fabius’s or Mistress Calvus’s or anything close; it is instead like the night itself slinking down into the forbidden domain of the day, “I’m not going to hurt you.”
I open my mouth to say I don’t believe her, or to remind the Lupa Nox who she is, or to perhaps list all the people I loved or even simply knew who’ve died at her hands. But before I can, she twists at the waist, just enough for one of her dark eyes to meet mine.
“But you’re afraid someone’s going to, aren’t you?” the knight asks, her voice even lower than before. It’s not pity in her expression; it’s something more level, frank, practical.
All at once, I remember Renault’s words. I remember Sergio and every single thing he said he might do. I remember my salvation dangling like a bandaged hand from the lip of a tub.
“Yes,” I reply, my voice authentically rough, my hands still in the bathwater. “Yes. Th-they want me to try to convert you. To the Church of the Host. If I don’t try...I don’t know what will?—”
“Well, then, try,” the knight replies, and there’s no lift to her eyebrows or quirk to her mouth. “I will not harm you, particularly not for doing something you have been coerced into.”
Time staggers around me, just as crippled as my own body, until I remember I am meant to be washing her hair. I return to the task, working soap through her sable strands. Like the rest of her, the knight’s hair is long and dark and unfairly beautiful. A fire bursts to life somewhere between my legs, my sin called forth by this creature, and shame follows close behind. The Vincula is chill, damp, the water going cold on my skin every time I pull my hands from the bath, and yet I burn as though I have stepped directly into flame.
I clench my teeth, furious at myself, furious at my mother for sinning so deeply that I am left to answer for her wickedness, furious at the Lupa Nox for being here with her hair between my hands. Hurriedly, I move to her scalp, wishing for nothing but to be done with this infernal task.
As my fingers work up the back of her neck, the knight lets out a soft, dangerous sound that makes the blood at the apex of my thighs pound as hard as hooves on cobblestones. I am viciously aware of every place where my clothing presses against my skin, where my feet meet the floor, where my bust heaves into the tightly corseted garment.
And so I think only of the flail in my bedside drawer. There are no heavy silken strands between my fingers, no long, sharp body hidden just beneath the bathwater’s soapy, opaque surface, no perfect lips from which that sinful, husky sound emerged. It works, though just barely, and soon the knight is rinsed and ready to emerge. I begin to move to notify the guards, but before I can, she grips both sides of the tub and stands.
Even in the candlelit gloom of the Vincula, the Lupa Nox is the most glorious thing I have ever seen. Water sluices down the hard angles of her flawless skin, her collarbones sharp as a knife, her breasts small and firm, the expanse of her upper body little more than flat, muscular planes, two hard lines meeting in a V low on her belly. At the apex of her powerful thighs, damp black curls tangle like the kind of bramble thicket that always hides the sweetest berries.
I finally manage to drag my eyes away, breathing heavily, frozen in place. Every part of me throbs, like my wickedness is doing its very best to get out, to puppet me like a diaboli’s marionette.
“You are welcome to try to convert me,” she says, her eyes glittering dangerously, chin tilted haughtily. She grins—a weapon in itself—as her gaze slides down my body, like she is perfectly aware of what she’s doing to me. “As long as I can attempt to corrupt you , little dove.”
Longing unstitches itself from my ribs, from the very place I thought I’d cut it free, and barrels into my throat. I stand there, motionless, watching steam curl around the Lupa Nox in the same way my hands would like to, dreadfully incapable of doing anything but sin.
And then suddenly, a sharp crack of pain explodes at the back of my skull. It takes me a long moment to realize I can no longer see the knight. My breath is short now, though not because of candlelit skin; instead, something cold has found its way around my neck. My mind attempts to make sense of fragmented images: An eye of cloudy haze. A slope of gleaming gold. A flutter of storm-gray vestments.
Black flies swarm across my vision on many legs and my lungs stretch tight across a painful abyss. One of my hands reaches out of its own accord, desperate, locking around the wrist of the monster that has pinned me against the damp stone of the Vincula. Distantly, I realize the purpose of the Lupa Nox’s distraction—to conjure up some vile spirit while I tumbled into the trap of her wiles.
Beneath my grasping fingers is gauzy cloth, death shroud-thin, and cold, rubbery skin—corpse skin, surely, my healer’s mind recognizes in an instant, the skin of something that shouldn’t be venturing beyond a grave, let alone pinning me to the wall with such force I fear I may die. For she is, after all, Fallen Fatum. The last of the Death-Bringers.
“Foundling.” The name bites into my consciousness on a sinister tongue, the scent of rot invading the little air I can manage to inhale. “We gave you another chance to glorify your Lord, and yet?—”
The words cut off abruptly just as my lungs are permitted to fill for the first time in what feels like an eternity. I slump against the wall, gasping for air, and look on helplessly at the utterly maddening sight before me:
A member of the High Ecclesia, Their tall, narrow frame shuddering, limbs flailing beneath Their vestments, as the Lupa Nox—clad in only a long linen overshirt that’s clinging to her damp skin—wraps one of Their pearl-studded chains around Their throat.
She should not, I know, be able to leave the Mysterium-charged copper tub. She should not, I know, be able to face down a member of the High Ecclesia, should not be capable of knocking Them to the ground like a child, one bare foot stamping on the hem of Their vestments to pin Them like a taxidermied butterfly.
She should not, I know, whisper something as she leans close into that gold-masked face, her voice soft and deadly as foxglove petals. And of all things, it should not be those four words the Lupa Nox murmurs to her most hated enemy and imprisoner:
“Do not touch her.”