Chapter 36 #2
“So you stood there and listened to the Storytellers imply that the murderer was acting in defense of those two specific Fates, and yet you thought nothing of it?” Emmeline’s hand fisted so tightly around her dagger, she nearly cut herself on one of the curved blades.
Her boots dug into the sand as she fought to make sense of this.
“You listened to me hypothesize that this murderer was a fanatic of Arenothos and Aevollon, hunting women tied to Anphrosia for revenge for her dalliances, and you never once questioned him?”
“No, I didn’t question him!” Roremar snapped, lurching forward as if he was about to storm toward her but had to stop himself.
Emmeline’s chest ached at the distance, but too many threads of trust had been cut, patience and respect with them.
“How could you? He’s practically my brother, Emmeline!
If you care about me at all—know me at all—you’d know this can’t be true. ”
Her throat thickened. She’d never admitted she cared for him, but perhaps actions spoke louder than words. She couldn’t deny it was true. On some level, she had grown to care for this reckless warrior who’d infuriated her at the start, but now, that thread was cut, too.
“Caring about you has nothing to do with his actions, Roremar! He’s lying to you!”
“He wouldn’t—”
“She’s right.” Desmond’s voice was the strike of a hammer on steel.
Roremar whipped toward him, and Emmeline could practically see his facade crumbling into a million pieces. See him trying to collect them all, to make sense of those two words before he shattered. The sand beneath their boots, that’s what he would become. What they’d done to him.
“Not about me being the murderer,” Desmond went on. Emmeline felt as if she was hovering over the edge of a cliff. “I haven’t killed anyone, but every fact Emmeline stated is correct.” Roremar stiffened as Desmond prowled toward her, fury lining his features.
An Angel of Vengeance stood before her, a Fate of Destruction and Mayhem, born of Valyrie herself. Her mind flitted back to the reading of the Starsearcher Angel, when she had asked about Desmond. The oil spill, the forge, the bones.
Bones as brushes and arrows tipped in gold, his secrets are blessed and abundant.
They had all but told her he was aligned to Arenothos and Aevollon with those symbols, an Angelblessed warrior, if only she’d understood.
Emmeline swallowed the chilled fear lining her throat as Desmond addressed her, “You are much more impressive than I originally expected. I thought you’d be some shy scholar or condescending tutor, driving Roremar on frivolous hunts around Lyra.
I saw his fascination with you the moment he first spoke of you, but I didn’t think there was much more to it.
Still, I wondered—still do—why Aldryn chose you.
” His eyes dripped over her black leathers, feeling like a threat as they peeled apart her defenses.
Emmeline’s heart thundered, begging not to be seen.
“There is clearly much more to you than any of us think.”
Taking a step back, Desmond turned toward Roremar. “Your little Huntress has all the pieces, Rore—and she’s smart for that because I covered my tracks well—but she drew the wrong conclusion.”
“What do you mean?” Emmeline snapped, determined not to falter before them.
No.
That couldn’t be true. It had to be Desmond. Not only because of all the evidence she’d gathered, but because in accusing him, she’d so viciously driven a blade between herself and Roremar.
The wall between them was forged by the Angels and welded by betrayal. On this side of it, a familiar echo of loneliness howled through her—one she hadn’t realized she was beginning to soothe.
Perhaps she was always destined to be lonely after all.
“What’s the right conclusion?” Roremar asked.
“I was on the cliffs that night,” Desmond began. “When you were out of your mind from drugs and whiskey, practically falling asleep in your chair, I let you believe I was sneaking off with that woman.”
“Why did you go to the cliffs? Why lie to me about it?” Roremar asked, voice stretched tight with hurt, but the sting couldn’t reach Emmeline across the wall. It wasn’t hers to feel anymore.
“I went to the cliffs to meet with someone to discuss transporting ink onto Lyra.”
“Ink?” Roremar asked.
“There are limits to how much any business is allowed to import nowadays. Restrictions the Temple Master put in place. Keeps us just at the point where we can run our businesses comfortably but no more.” Emmeline stored each fact in her mind to review later when she wasn’t tumbling through denial.
“I’ve found ways around them by tapping into other contacts across multiple isles.
I’ve built up a pretty wide network so I can do more business than my competitors.
Also means I’m breaking some trade laws that would land me in the cells beneath the Trade House if discovered by the wrong people,” Desmond seethed as if that was the stupidest rule he’d ever heard.
Emmeline couldn’t entirely blame him. The restrictions on importing ink of all things were foolish. Why inhibit Lyra’s economy when the isle was already struggling?
But she’d been right about one thing. The unclassified ink transferred from Alvan was going to Desmond. Just not for ritualistic, cultish tattoos as the War Master’s notes implied. It was unnamed because of its source, not its capabilities.
“And what about the house?” Emmeline clarified. “The one you were in tonight. I followed you there the night of the first murder.” When she’d put the pieces together earlier, she’d guessed he’d evaded her notice somehow and snuck down to the Promenade.
Desmond sighed as if he’d been hoping she wouldn’t ask that. “My mother lives there.”
“Your mother?” Roremar blurted. “But she’s back on Alvan.”
“Hasn’t been for over a year.”
“What?” Roremar shook his head, and Emmeline almost thought he’d collapse in the sand.
She interjected, “Why are you hiding her?”
“My father has a nasty temper. And he leaves bad bruises.” Emmeline’s stomach turned, dread chilling her.
“I was able to flee to Lyra when I was admitted to the Academy. My younger brother escaped to another isle. But my mother…she’d been stuck with him all this time.
Until a year ago when I was finally able to get her away. ”
“That trip you took last summer…” Roremar said, putting the pieces together.
“I was smuggling her off the isle and setting her up here with a new identity and new papers. Both of our names were supposed to be scrubbed from all records of transport.”
“They were,” Emmeline assured him. “I never came across anyone with your last name when going over logs or in the travel documents the War Master sent over.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Roremar asked his friend. “I could have helped.”
“How, Rore? You have so much on your plate already.”
“I don’t care!” Roremar roared. “You’re always on my ass for not allowing you to help me. It’s pretty fucking hypocritical of you now.”
What did Roremar need help with? What weren’t they saying?
Desmond stewed silently, turning back to Emmeline instead of responding to his friend. Spirits, the guilt-wracked piece of her wanted the ocean to swallow her up.
“The house you found me in tonight—that’s where my mother lives now,” he reiterated.
“I don’t go there often so there’s less of a chance of drawing attention to her, but when I do, I go at night.
It’s also where any illicit shipments I receive are sent, because she made me promise if I was housing her that she could do that for me in return.
She didn’t want my name or my parlor’s on the deliveries.
” He glowered. “Pain in my ass, but not worth the argument.”
“Importing extra ink means you can take more business to support her,” Roremar guessed.
Desmond nodded. “And it means I can do more imbued tattoo work. Soul bonds and shit that is typically closely regulated by the Temple Master. He’s onto me, though.”
“Falliare knows about this, too?”
Emmeline didn’t understand what would sway the Temple Master to allow that or why that revelation piqued Roremar’s interest so keenly.
“I haven’t figured out how much he knows, but you know how he works.
It’s typically more than you think.” Desmond looked at his friend with grave apology, then went on, “I do a lot of work out of the shop nowadays so none of my competitors get suspicious by too much business. Then, I drop the extra money off with my mother.”
Fates, Desmond wasn’t killing women. He was saving one from a battered home and doing all he could to keep it a secret. Breaking laws, risking imprisonment.
A streak of envy lashed through Emmeline. What she wouldn’t do to be able to care for her mother in that way.
“I’m sorry, Desmond,” she said, though she knew it wasn’t enough for accusing him of murder. “I really thought all this evidence pointed in a different direction. I meant what I said. That I’d hoped I was wrong.”
His amber eyes took on that harsh stare again, chips she could slice her skin upon. “Next time, look at the whole picture before accusing me of being a fucking murderer. I’m done here.”
Desmond stormed back up the beach, leaving Emmeline to stand in her shame.
She’d been wrong.
Brutally, crushingly wrong.
And the hurt on Roremar’s face as he finally looked at her…the betrayal turning his once-silver eyes a murky grey…that drove a knife into her heart.
“Emmeline,” he breathed, disbelief breaking her name on his tongue. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She forced herself to hold his stare across the barrier. “I couldn’t. Not until I knew for sure.”
“For sure?” He scoffed, the harshness of his features emphasized by the moonlight. “How’d that turn out?”
“I’d thought—”
“No, you didn’t think, Emmeline,” he said.
“If you had, you would have shared your theories with me. Instead, you collected this evidence in a tunnel, allowed it to stew and warp into something impossible. I’ve seen it happen a thousand times across both sides of a battlefield, but I didn’t think you’d fall prey to it. ”
The insult ricocheted off her defenses, and she yelled, “He’s your best friend, Roremar! I didn’t know how to tell you he was a person of interest without you telling him or denying it immediately.”
And she hadn’t wanted to break his heart until she had to. As desperately as she’d wanted to find the person responsible for this, a silent, miserable part of her truly had hoped it wasn’t Desmond.
Because this moment right here, Roremar staring at her with a thousand stars shattering behind his eyes—the mistrust rooting in their place—this was what she’d been trying to avoid.
Inevitable, the way her heart now shredded.
Endless ruin was inevitable after all.
“He’s my best friend, Emmeline,” Roremar echoed, voice hollow and broken. Then, he took off after Desmond up the beach, leaving Emmeline alone on the shore.
As the silence of a vacant night howled around her, she sank to her knees in the sand and let the emptiness consume her. She had been so wrong.