14. 13
In the week that followed, I did not take a single customer.
The day after I left the House of Pain, Eliza arrived by carriage with the trunk of my things.
I hadn’t even unpacked them into that room, and already they were back.
She didn’t try to engage me in conversation.
Instead, she passed me a note and a tiny silk bag, and left as soon as the porter had shifted the trunk upstairs. For that, I was grateful.
I didn’t open the letter until their carriage had pulled far away. When I did, I was embarrassed that my fingers shook as I broke the wax seal.
Don’t take any customers this week. Someone might be watching.
-D
Inside the bag were two coins.
Two gold coins.
Yona intended to sell my company for a few silver, with her taking half for her services and my keeping, and I would earn the rest. It was a good price outside of the House of Love, and she didn’t expect me to entertain more than a few customers a week.
Therefore, in a good week at the Eclipse, I might earn a handful of silver.
With ten silver to a gold, Davian had given me three weeks' pay. To do nothing at all.
A lot of different emotions swelled in me when I opened that pouch, and I settled on irritation.
Yes, it was generous. Very much so. But it was also his way of controlling me.
By accepting it, I was still in his thrall, still part of his game.
By accepting it, I was agreeing to delay my work for Yona again.
She was deeply confused by my quick return, as it was.
And yet, to refuse it might be just as stupid as Davian believed me to be.
If it was true, and someone had a suspicion as to our investigation, then lying low was the safest option.
There was a part of me that felt new: a rage I hadn’t felt before.
I wanted to yell at him and make him suffer in the way he had made me suffer; I wanted to cut to the core of his insufficiencies as quickly as he had cut into mine.
Every time I thought of his face, and the pain I wanted to inflict on him, it felt far too tantalising.
But since I had never wanted to hurt anyone before, I decided the darkness had to be Samiscus; influencing me as he never had before, encouraging me to his purpose with the lightest of touches.
After sighing and cursing the man in two languages—a brutish Meldoran phrase and a poetic Unnish one—I accepted the funds. Yona also happily accepted my refusal to work this week, likely because I gave her one of the two gold.
The week was entirely my own, therefore. My time hadn’t been my own in all of my life.
For the first two days, I floundered.
As a child, there was always a chore to be done, and always a punishment to be had for not doing it.
The beating I suffered for breaking eggs led to years of walking on the shells, praying that I would do everything so perfectly that no one would ever be angered by me ever again.
The way I was ignored or berated, in equal measure, made me determined to be so well-behaved that I might one day earn a line of praise.
When I ran away to Dytho at fourteen, I was only in the House of Merriment for a matter of hours before they, too, decided they did not want me. It was then that I found the House of Love, and I eagerly rose to the challenge of their teachings.
I learned everything that an Ekrissian should know; a fluent command of Meldoran, an understanding of Unnish, and a sprinkle of Gallan.
I learnt how to play the harp and the flute to a passably impressive level, though music was never my strongest suit.
Every day I was busy with singing lessons, or tutelage on the noble houses or the war effort with Vale Gallus.
There was always something to be doing, to be practicing.
Talia didn’t like an idle House. It was only on Sundays where I enjoyed a rare day of rest, and even then, I would usually end up busy.
And so, I floundered.
On the first day, I bought a strawberry tart from the bakery by my former House, hoping I might see someone come out or find a way to speak with Talia again. But the door remained closed that day, and after two hours of sitting in the square, I left to meander around the agora.
By the morning on the third day of my idling, I woke early after a languid dream of Ekris. His words, his bidding, returned to me as clearly as the first time he had spoken them.
Find the God of Fire.
I had been wasting time, wallowing in the hurt of Davian’s words. But I could not wait for anyone else to fix my problems for me.
At breakfast, I ate some bread and dates slowly, drizzling lines of honey over the crusty loaf to sweeten it.
I could tell the other women hardly knew what to make of me.
On my first night working, a devotee of the House of Pain had chosen me.
I had gone away for a couple of days, and now I was back, but not working.
I knew questions had been raised as to whether the man had hurt me, and beyond refuting that assumption, Yona had said nothing.
She was leaving it to me, and I didn’t know where to start.
So I let our meal times continue with them largely speaking around me, and treating me with a mixture of concern and agitation.
Once I had finished, I made my way to the library.
Dytho’s library was near the centre of town, one square away from the House of the Sun.
The outside was nearly as grand as the House of Wisdom itself, who lent their patronage and funding to its upkeep.
It was the largest library in all the known lands, and I knew the followers of Knessus, Goddess of Wisdom, were deeply proud of that fact.
Though I imagined only a quarter of Craeterans were literate, all of the kingdom had a respect for knowledge and our dominance of it.
The library of Dytho was open to the public, all hours of the day.
I had only been here a handful of times, and I’d never come here with the aim of actually finding a new book.
Standing in its marble entrance hall with the stacks of books too high to reach without a ladder and too deep to navigate in a week, let alone a day, I was intimidated.
I asked the clerk about books on the Ten.
She nodded without blinking, and pointed me to a wide section on the right hand side of the library. “Is there anything in particular you want to study? Our literature on the Gods spans eight aisles.”
Great. Of course. I should have realised this wouldn’t be easy.
I nodded at her weakly. “That’s fine, I’ll browse.”
She didn’t seem to find this odd, thankfully. “You can read the books in the main arena for no charge. If you need a private room and a lamp, we can arrange for payment.”
I scoured the titles in the section on the Gods for hours, looking for anything that mentioned ‘fire’ or Ragnifort. I found his creation story first.
Akaur, the God of the Sun and King of the Gods, had tried to push the sun further away, so the summer’s heat would be less punishing.
But the sun was too hot, and Akaur could not wrestle it.
He lost a finger, which fell back to our lands, and onto a fiery mountain to the north.
The mountain rumbled and spat out the finger in a heap of ash, where the clump fell on top of an ancient spring.
Here, from the ash and finger of Akaur, the fire and water mingled with the godly flesh, and formed into a person.
Ragnifort. The God of Fires and Forges, who gave his devotees the power to stoke the fires to a Blue Flame.
Beyond tales of his birth, though, the literature was distinctly lacking. His actual time in the Ten was missing from all the stories.
When it was well past noon, I realised that any texts directly on the God of Fire seemed to have been removed, or destroyed. The only information that assisted me was something that proved the futility of my research.
The Goddess of Wisdom, Knessus, was a former lover of Ragnifort.
He jilted her when he took a human lover from Astakosti, seventy-five years ago.
Over the next few years she convinced the other Gods to cast Ragnifort down, compelling him to live out his immortal and unending life in the vessel of mortals.
He could depart one body for another to avoid dying himself at the end of their years, but each time he did so, his powers would reduce, and he would never again live amongst the Pantheon.
Such was his penance. A slow decay from a God to nothing at all, for choosing a mortal lover. It wasn’t too dissimilar to my own destruction. Only I had agreed to Ekris’ terms to cast myself out for my mortal love, so I was certainly more the fool.
This retelling was scarce, a mere footnote in a huge tome. And yet, as I flicked through the authorship of the histories of the Gods, three things became quite apparent.
First, all but one of the writers was a devotee of Wisdom. The remainder was unclaimed by any God, but even he seemed to avoid tales of Ragnifort.
Second, Knessus must still hate Ragnifort, for his history to be so deeply neglected in the literature.
Thirdly, and most beguilingly, Ragnifort could change his mortal vessel.
Seventy years had passed since his deliverance to our realm.
How many times had he changed vessels? Once?
Twice? Even if someone had once discovered his mortal identity, there was no reassurance he was still embodying that soul.
I needed to discover where Ragnifort was right now, and the followers of Knessus seemed eager for him to be forgotten.
Right before I gave up, I found an archive of written news sheets. There was often something on the Gods, some blessing or prayer believed to have worked, or the next festival. I didn’t know what I was looking for. A mysterious sighting of blue fire, maybe.
The only thing that gave me pause was a news sheet with an inked summary of a crime.