Chapter 16
They stayed with Agnes for the night to avoid suspicion.
Even the elderly woman made it very clear that they would not be leaving, and certainly not first thing in the morning.
She still needed to figure out how to get them the invitations, not to mention that she didn’t want anyone to talk.
If people were coming to visit her, and if her grandson, of all people, had let them in, then they would not stay for barely an hour and then leave.
Decorum. All the flashing pageantry of what it was to be a noble. He’d forgotten what it was like to uphold standards.
There was so much gossip here, it seemed. The Pleasure District was certainly run like the city he remembered. Even in two hundred years, they might have changed what they sold, but the people were still the same.
Elric had been given his own room, and when he’d started toward Jessamine’s, the old woman had been right there to beat him back with that cane of hers. “If anyone overhears I allowed an unwed couple to be in the same room overnight, I’ll never hear the end of it. Get back, young man!”
He might have ignored her if she hadn’t called him a young man.
When was the last time anyone had called him young? Perhaps one of his siblings back when they were alive. They’d all considered him to be younger than the rest of them, but he was still an ancient compared to everyone in this household.
So he’d listened to her request and returned to his bedroom full of priceless artifacts and its comfortable bed before he decided he was rather bored.
Elric didn’t like being in a bed by himself.
He’d been asleep for hundreds of years, put there by witches just like the coven that was being built.
Too many dark memories tried to sink their claws into him, and he didn’t have the patience for them.
Instead, he wandered the halls of this sleeping household to see what secrets Agnes had hidden.
Peeking around a corner, he used some of his power to turn into shadows. At least no one would find him if they got up to get a glass of water. But as he passed by the room where all the women were sleeping, he discovered runes there that locked the door to men.
“Sneaky, sneaky,” he muttered, shaking his head at Agnes’s ingenuity. The woman wasn’t a witch yet, but she certainly behaved like one.
He found the locking mechanism quickly enough. It was a spelled stone placed outside of the door. Bending, he picked it up and tossed it into the air, catching it lightly as the runes etched on the rock flashed with the movement.
A pretty spell. An easy one, too. But he could feel that it was old and long-lasting.
Curiosity burned in his chest. He wanted to know how Agnes, a noblewoman of all people, had access to magical objects.
This woman had eyes on her the entirety of her life, and yet somehow had never been jailed for accessing such objects.
He could feel the magic, and it was faintly familiar, as though he recognized the signature from a long time ago—and it was one that rang a bell of warning in the back of his mind.
Perhaps it was time he ask Agnes herself, and understand where all the magic in her home came from.
Finding the old bat took time. She was far from the wing where she’d placed her visitors. Elric meandered through the darkened halls, seeking the only person who could give him answers. Unfortunately, he found himself far too distracted in the center of the home.
Halfway between the entrance and the back exit of this house, there was a hall of portraits. He stopped to look at them, admiring the craftsmanship in every paint stroke. But he froze when he saw a particular portrait that made him feel as though he had seen a ghost.
Olwyn had been high in the coven when he had last died.
She looked as though someone had painted her soul into the canvas, every strand of her golden hair perfectly depicted.
Her vivid blue eyes were just as beautiful as he remembered, as was the wicked grin on her face.
The artist had painted her with her signature brown hawk behind her, the golden eyes of the animal the only indicator that it was her familiar.
She’d been ruthless in life. This was the first witch to suggest sacrificing him, but not just that, sacrificing all of them.
She’d been willing to die in a blaze of glory to save the kingdom, even if it meant she wouldn’t see the end result.
A gravesinger of indescribable power, she was one of the best.
But all he could see was the knife she’d held in her hands.
How she had slit the throat of her sisters, one by one.
How’d he’d been forced to kneel there, chained to a stone altar while he begged and pleaded for them to see reason.
The sickness could be fixed, if only they would take the time to find a new resolution.
Instead, they were determined to sacrifice themselves.
As though such self-mutilation would make history look upon them with kindness and not hatred.
He’d cried, watching them all die in front of him. Tears streaming down his cheeks while their blood reached for him, stretching across the floor in banners of pain. She’d been the last one standing with that bloody knife clutched in her hands and victory on her face.
“I am the last gravesinger,” she had said as she approached him. “I sacrifice you so that all in this kingdom might be free of the gods. So that the land can right itself and this sickness will come to death with us. With you.”
He still remembered the cold slide of steel across his throat and the wicked grin of victory on her face.
“I will join you soon, Deathless One,” she’d said. “Soon, all of us will be bound for all eternity.”
The ghosts of the past screamed in his mind.
He could feel the gravesingers in their cage of his in-between realm as they rioted at the memory and the sight of their sister who had brought them to victory.
The chains around their wrists rattled in his ears like the reckoning of a tide coming to sweep him away.
“Lost in memories?” another voice interrupted him, this one rattling with old age.
He startled, shadows coiling up his wrists and spreading out from his shoulders like massive wings before he snapped them back into his body. Agnes didn’t deserve to speak with a man made of shadows, after all. He was a gentleman.
“How did you see me?”
She tapped the side of her head. “I grew up with witches, boy. They were the last of their kind, using up the magic their mothers gave them. I know how to see a hidden figure when there is one.”
He hummed under his breath, turning his gaze once more to the portrait on the wall.
He didn’t have words to describe how that history still terrified him.
How he knew that if he was asked to do it again, he would.
All of his long life had been in sacrifice for them.
There was no changing what he was made to be, even if he wished for that.
Elric barely heard her step closer to him. But he felt her hand on his arm as she tugged him to look at her.
Agnes’s face bore the markings of time. Wrinkled and sun worn, she reached up with curled fingers to gently brush her knuckles across his cheek. There was the faint feeling of coolness before she drew her hands back down.
“Tears from a god,” she murmured. “I’m sure there’s some kind of spell or potion that would use these.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“What could bring you to such emotion seeing my ancestor?”
“You’re Olwyn’s granddaughter?”
“I told you I grew up with witches. But I do not know Olwyn. She died when my mother was a child, and I was born very late afterward.” Agnes looked at the portrait, her brows furrowed as though she were seeing it for the first time.
“My mother’s stories painted her as ruthless and unkind. I know she was a hard woman.”
“They all were.”
“They had to be.”
He shook his head. “The further I get from those memories, the more I wonder if they didn’t have to be, but they chose to be.”
He wasn’t out here to have this conversation with an old woman, though. The past was in the past. There was no reason to dig it up.
“What do you want, Agnes?” he asked.
“I should be asking you that. You’re the one wandering my halls in the middle of the night.”
Elric held up the stone in his hand, the runes burning his palm. “Was this one of hers?”
“It was.”
He let it drop to the floor with a thud that echoed through his entire body. He wanted nothing to do with the magic of such dangerous women. But then again, was it even their magic that he was so repulsed by? Or his own?
The old woman seemed to know all of this was going through his mind. But rather than pry even further and dig into the festering wound of his soul, she took his hand in hers and gave him two papers. “I sent my boy out to call in a favor. These are your invitations.”
“That was rather easy for you.”
“I told you, I have many connections in this place. But I do not believe you should enter as Lady Jessamine Harmsworth and her Deathless God. Trust me when I say this, Fortuna Beaumont is a worthy adversary. It’s why she and I have battled for control over the Pleasure District for many years.
The names on those invitations are for a couple who have lived here only a few years.
They moved from another kingdom and are very new here, so few people have met them yet.
They caused quite a stir when they first arrived.
Foreign royals always are interesting. It’s a shame they died just a few weeks ago.
Use the names Farah and Martin Bloodworth when you enter, and introduce yourself as such to anyone who might ask questions. ”
Easy enough. Pocketing the invitations, he tilted his head to the side and watched as her eyes canted to the side. As though she was hesitant to make eye contact with him.
“Why are you wandering about the halls in the middle of the night with these invitations, Agnes?”