Chapter 38
“And that’swhen I left. He got back to the penthouse later that night, and we left for Lyonesse two days after. He hasn’t spoken a word about Drobny or about the associates of Drobny’s I killed in the club.”
My uncle and I are walking along the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, me in a camel-colored coat and him with a magnificent scarlet cape over his simar. He was in town for some kind of conference when Mark, Tristan, and I returned from Serbia, and he thankfully extended his stay by a day so I could talk to him in person and tell him everything that happened in Belgrade. I could have delivered a report through the usual means, but I need his insight. I want to know what he thinks.
Mortimer looks lost in thought now as we walk, his eyes on the ground, his hands behind his back.
“Should I be worried about Ys following me?” I ask after a minute.
Finally, my uncle lifts his head, and he gives me a reassuring smile. “It sounds like from what you overheard that Mr. Drobny wasn’t operating on orders from Ys. I don’t think there is any need to worry.”
“But he was part of Ys too. Inside it. What if they know who I am now?”
“If Mark has been hunting them down for the reason he told Drobny, then I regret to tell you that they already know your name. But they don’t know that you’re a saint and that you have the power of the Church behind you. You’ll be safe.”
I don’t feel reassured, but I don’t truly feel scared either.
I’m more unsettled than frightened. I’ve lived my life with as much control as possible, with rigid boundaries and routines to keep my body strong and my soul clean, and now everything feels like it’s slipping out of control.
I fell in love with my husband…and someone else. I was supposed to seduce my husband, and now he barely looks at me…except he also killed a man, possibly or partly for me.
I’ve gotten no important pieces of information either from Mark himself or the server rooms, and I still barely know anything about Ys, and I have five new faces in my nightmares despite getting nowhere with anything.
And this morning when I prayed in my walled garden, I felt…nothing. No certainty, no peace. No beauty or hope or connection.
I felt hollow. And alone.
We turn the corner of the reflecting pool and keep walking, and I ignore the pain zinging up from my ankle every time I take a step. At least it’s not truly sprained. It was hard enough to sell the story the next morning that I’d twisted it during a late-night run—Tristan blamed himself for being asleep and therefore not going with me to save me from an uneven curb. Mark had only looked at me with an expression equal parts reserved and dubious and said, “You are ordinarily so graceful, Isolde. How strange.”
But I’d held his gaze and betrayed nothing of where I’d been or that I knew where he’d been.
The moment had passed quickly, however. We were packing up to leave the next day; I did actually have a few arrangements to make for that disagreeable bowl; and Mark seemed interested in spending as little time as possible with Tristan or me. Interested only in getting back to Lyonesse and hosting the swarm of powerful kinksters coming in for Lyonesse’s annual Samhain ball.
What is a tweaked ankle to the pain of heartbreak, anyway? Self-created heartbreak, at that, which is a hell Dante failed to properly describe.
I look over to my uncle now, whose characteristic grin has faded. His heterochromatic eyes are turned to the fountains of the World War II memorial as we pass it by. It’s a weekday morning, the day before Halloween, and aside from the usual clumps of school groups and out-of-town tourists, the National Mall is rather empty. There is only the sound of the water and the wind through the leaves.
“I am afraid this is coming to a head much quicker than I’d planned,” my uncle says as we turn back toward the Lincoln Memorial.
“Looking into Ys? I still don’t think we know much more than we did?—”
“No,” Mortimer says heavily. “The usefulness of your marriage. The usefulness of Mark Trevena remaining alive.”
The last several words don’t make any sense at all to me—they’re a joke, Mortimer is joking right now, and I can’t help the laugh that comes out. “I only think of murdering him once or twice a day these days. A big improvement from when I was eighteen and told to marry him.” The memory of blue eyes over a chessboard flashes through my mind. And then the memory of red-orange light catching on his eyelashes and hair and the tight curve of Tristan’s ass. What, still crying, my bride?
Maybe it’s not a good thing that Mark’s grown on me. Inside me. Through me like a bramble. Because now he hates me and I love him and it hurts and I’m so, so lonely.
“Isolde,” my uncle says, coming to a stop. “I’m being serious right now.”
I stop too. I can’t make any sense of what he’s saying. “Serious about what?”
“Killing your husband.”
“You need him,” I say slowly, because I still don’t understand. “I married him because you need him.”
“No,” my uncle says. His face is kind, pitying. “The Vatican needs what Mark Trevena knows. There is a difference.”
But I need him, I almost say.
I shake the words out of my mouth, try to get my bearings. This can’t be a real conversation we’re having. “It wouldn’t be clean. It couldn’t be. Lyonesse is a fortress, and he’s so careful when he’s outside it. Whoever tried to kill him?—”
“You, Isolde,” Mortimer says. “You would be the one to kill him.”
The wind picks up enough that leaves blow around our feet, dance in the air, flashes of saffron and the rare glimpse of a red cherry leaf.
I don’t answer—I can’t answer because there’s nothing to answer to, because this doesn’t make sense.
“You are one of my best saints,” Mortimer says gently. “If not the best. You’ll find a way to make it clean and implicate someone else.”
“No.” The word comes unbidden; I’m saying it before I know that I’m saying it. I don’t have a plan or an argument or a plea for more information.
Just. No.
“Yes,” my uncle says, his eyebrow lifting the tiniest amount, like I’m a child being warned. “You must.”
The wind is cool enough to nip at my cheeks, but I barely notice it right now. “I don’t think you understood what I told you earlier. He killed for me in Belgrade. He cares about me.” I leave out the part about the destructive triangle between him, his bodyguard, and me. “That was the plan, Mortimer, to make him care, and I did it. We are just now getting to the place where we can start exploiting this marriage in full, and so why change now, when the plan is working?”
Why change now, after it’s too late and I’ve fallen in love with him?
“This was always the plan, Isolde,” my uncle says gently. “This was always what was going to happen.”
“No.” The word is choked. “No.”
“I admit that I thought it would take a few more years, that we’d have more time to wring Lyonesse dry of intelligence. Maybe build our own shadow network inside it. But things have changed because Mark’s plans have changed. I’ve been informed by the Scales that Mark is planning on going after not only Ys but the Church too. And we can’t risk a rogue operator of his skill coming for the Vatican. Nor can we risk him revealing something from Lyonesse’s storehouse of information. I don’t know what he has or what he could have, but I cannot doubt that if it’s worth a membership fee, it would be damning.”
“Mark isn’t going after the Church. That’s ridiculous.” He’s never mentioned anything about the Church, other than going to Mass whenever the mood strikes and bland comments about the pope’s health.
Except…
First stop, Ys; second stop, Rome.
He couldn’t have meant…?
“Have you ever known the Scales to be wrong?” Mortimer asks softly. “In three years of being my saint?”
“No, but?—”
“Mark is a threat to the Church. We don’t know if he’s planning on attacking our people physically or through blackmail or reputational destruction or all three. He could be planning to kill the pope right now, for all we know.”
“But why?” I ask. I turn away and look at the reflecting pool. It’s speckled with yellow leaves, moving a little in the wind. “He wouldn’t—he’d have a reason. Everything he does has a reason.”
“We don’t know,” my uncle says. “The Scales is trying to find out. We just know that he’s making overtures to known adversaries and collecting early membership fees from the clergy who are part of Lyonesse.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have clergy members who are part of a kink club,” I murmur, but I’m not really interested in that part. No, my thoughts are wheeling over this conversation like startled birds looking for a place to land.
“A problem for another day,” says Mortimer. “And once Mark is out of the picture, Lyonesse will crumble anyway. We’ll make sure to scrub our secrets from the fallout, and then everything will be nicely dead and buried.”
“How could this have always been the plan?” My hands are flexing relentlessly in my pockets, like they’re seeking something to hold on to. “How could you not tell me?”
He sounds pitying again. “I didn’t imagine this would come about so quickly. I thought we were years away from the inevitable end of this project. And you are a consummate actress, but even you would struggle to play both wife and future assassin if the first role was to last for years.”
I’m numb. I’m not even cold anymore, I’m not even empty-feeling, because I feel nothing, like I am nothing, no different than the wet leaves in the pool or the damp air around me.
“I can’t kill him.” The words are thin. Small. I sound like a girl, and I feel like one right now too. Like that lost twelve-year-old staring at her mother’s casket and unable to stop the humiliating suck and groan of her sobs.
“But you must,” my uncle says. “It is God’s will, and who are we to subvert that? If Abraham was asked to kill Isaac, if God was asked to let his own son die, then who are we to resist our own time to take up the knife?”