Chapter 59 #2
“Pretty fucking awful. And if I feel this bad, I can’t imagine how Rore feels.”
She couldn’t either.
“What could Nico even have been doing in the cells?” Emmeline wondered aloud. “Or Roremar? We fell asleep upstairs last night. When I woke up, he was just gone.”
The tug in her chest that she’d followed beneath the Trade House echoed, the sensation hollow and bitter.
“I wish there was something I could do to comfort Myrella, too,” Emmeline said, fingers curling around the corner of her journal.
“But grief like that doesn’t only need comfort.
It doesn’t go away, no matter how many people are around you.
It feeds and breathes its own life. It will take all of you if you allow it to.
” Pain wrenched through her chest as she remembered saying goodbye to her mother for the last time.
As the darkness that had eclipsed her transformed her over the years. “I worry how this will change her.”
Desmond ran his fingers through his hair, blond waves unbound and disheveled. “Grief changes all of us. Right now, we’re all undergoing it. Who knows who we’ll become at the end.”
“It will be changing Roremar, too,” Emmeline muttered, edges of the paper tearing beneath her fingers.
“I lost a friend today.” It was the rawest Desmond’s words had ever sounded. No bravado or taunting or animosity lacing a single one. “I don’t want to lose another.”
“We aren’t going to lose him,” she asserted, daring to reach across the table and squeeze his arm. “I won’t allow it. I’ll do…” She swallowed, even her magic pausing as if waiting for her vow. “I’ll do whatever it takes.”
And she would. Bare any wound, uncoil any secret, offer up every last part of herself. If only it meant Roremar got to live.
Desmond picked up his charcoal, resuming his absentminded sketching, and it felt like a truce had been called between them.
“So Rore has seen all this,” Desmond said, nodding at the table without looking up. “Maybe he’s working on his own reasoning for his arrest right now.”
“Maybe.” Emmeline sighed, the heartbreak bleeding through her. “But I was there when he was arrested. He didn’t fight.”
The charcoal slipped from Desmond’s fingers. “He just…let them take him?”
She nodded grimly, the memory of him being dragged away, eyes on his lifeless brother, carving out a hole in her heart.
“Fuck,” Desmond cursed, fist dropping to the table. “There’s definitely more to it, then. Roremar can be impulsive when he’s not being so damn responsible, and if someone was trying to take him from his brother’s body…”
“I know.” Emmeline couldn’t help the bit of defeat deepening her words.
“Why don’t you try reading since my Fates did nothing?” Desmond suggested. “Maybe Anphrosia can help.”
Emmeline shrugged. “Sure.” Her magic had been beating a drum in her chest for so long, and she hadn’t been able to read all day. It needed the release. “Maybe she’ll be more forthcoming now.”
She’d purposely pushed off any communication with the Fate of Cruelty and Adoration since the incident with the Snake Charmer. Not that Anphrosia was to blame—Emmeline had known deep down that she’d needed to go there—but she was still recovering from the scars she’d opened that night.
Now, though, she didn’t give an Angel’s wings.
Digging through her satchel, she pulled out a rose oil tincture and splashed it across her wrists and neck, as if it were perfume.
Desmond slid matches and a small oil well across the table. “Do you need—”
“No,” she insisted. “This will be enough.”
Ignoring his puzzled expression, Emmeline closed her eyes and allowed the magic pulsing within her to expand. It shifted, starlight whirling through her veins. She was transported to that other plane, somewhere between Ambrisk and the Fate Realm, somewhere she couldn’t be touched.
And she breathed a sigh of relief at the freedom.
White flames flickered around her, a deep violet sky overhead, streaked with cobalts and icy greens and wine reds. The starfire crackled, and in its midst, a rose bloomed, a celestial form rising within.
“Anphrosia,” Emmeline greeted, throat dry as a phantom serpent slithered around her body. It isn’t real, she reminded herself, but her hands trembled nonetheless.
You did as I instructed, the Fate of Cruelty and Adoration’s voice wrapped the air, sweet and sinful all at once.
“Yes.” Emmeline licked her dry lips. “We went to the Snake Charmer. He told us of the seeds being imported onto the isle, and we found the cavern. We were so close to reaching an answer. I can feel it, but…” She paused when Anphrosia tilted her head. “You saw, didn’t you?”
I already know what transpired.
“Please, it is wrong.” Her voice cracked. “It can’t be him. I know as well as I know you that it’s not.”
You do not have the full story, Anphrosia intoned. Was her voice haughty?
“I know we don’t,” Emmeline pleaded. “That’s why I’m here. I need you to tell me the parts we haven’t gathered.”
Revealing fortunes doesn’t work that way.
Emmeline groaned, mostly because it was true. Fate paths were not so simple to spill. They had to be found and uncovered, hinted at and woven. Not simply explained with the solution to changing it.
Here is what I can say, though: With the present circumstances, blood still spills. Something that has been forgotten must be found.
“Roremar is innocent,” Emmeline breathed. She’d believed it deep in her bones, but Anphrosia had just confirmed it.
None of us are innocent. Not really. The words sounded both reluctant and gleeful, an odd combination that prickled down Emmeline’s spine.
“You’re correct,” she agreed, adding silently to herself, But he didn’t do this.
Just as she was about to pull herself from the reading, Anphrosia began again, this time speaking as if Emmeline weren’t there at all:
One heart of greed entrenched in kin,
And many dancing with sweet sin.
Until Fates become of mercy,
Their choices dictating who Reigns worthy.
Was that a poem? It had a bit of a different cadence than a reading. It was more lyrical, and a bit familiar. She tucked it away to decipher later.
“Thank you,” Emmeline said.
One last thing.
“Yes?”
You claim you are willing to give anything to save this man.
Emmeline nodded.
Be prepared to lose yourself along the way.
And before Emmeline could respond, the Fate of Cruelty and Adoration broke the connection.
Her heart was pounding when she opened her eyes beneath Fated Ink, gasping. The mystlight flared and the scent of rose drowned her, the vial in her sweaty palm cracked.
“Well?” Desmond asked. Charcoal smeared his fingers as the stick clattered to the table.
“It wasn’t him.” And she grinned as she explained what Anphrosia had implied. “At this rate, if we do nothing, the killings are going to keep happening, so it can’t be Roremar. There’s no possible way. Not with him in a cell.”
“So we just wait until another one occurs and hope his sentence gets dragged out?” Desmond asked doubtfully.
Emmeline blinked at him. “No, Desmond, we are not going to wait for an innocent person to be killed in order to prove Roremar is innocent.”
She swore Desmond almost laughed. “Then what are you suggesting?”
“They won’t sentence him until the end of the festival.
Darcy told me as much. The proceedings are complicated with him being related to Falliare, so that buys us a sliver of time.
” Emmeline scanned the star maps spread before her.
Intoxicated yells echoing from the Promenade above sparked an idea.
“How drunk do you think everyone is from the first night of the Revels?”
“Most are probably passed out or on their way to it. Why?”
Emmeline drummed her fingers on the table, eyes locked on the recreations of the tattoo parlor insignias they’d begun this entire hunt with. “Because I think we need to talk to him.”