Chapter Twenty-Three #2
“In Napoleon’s army, yes. He was twenty when he left Kr?henstein Academy, where he was a master weaver.
You’re probably wondering why he would abandon such a high position in the Sarumite Order to go fight a war that wasn’t his.
He was the youngest master weaver in the history of the Academy.
Matteo, as talented as he was, never matched Falk Kühner’s skill. ”
“Falk Kühner?”
“The High Harvester is a man, after all, and he has a name. No one calls him by it anymore. It’s not a noble name, and nowadays, he likes being called a lord.
So, he left the academy at twenty because he created a pattern for a very powerful lattice that was refused by the then headmaster, Anton von Linden.
Kühner called it Obedience. The Obedience Lattice, and you can imagine what it did.
Anton von Linden brought it to the board, they had a vote, and the pattern was rejected.
Kühner made it anyway. The board confiscated it, and he was reprimanded.
Mind you, no one asked him to leave. But his values didn’t align with those of the Sarumite Order anymore, and the war promised fortune and fame.
He enrolled when Bavaria joined Napoleon’s army in 1806, and he traveled all over Europe.
He didn’t do much fighting, since he was used as a weaver and his job was to make and fix lattices that kept the other soldiers alive and gave them an advantage.
Bavaria, Saxony, Prussia, Austria, Russia.
.. Countless opportunities to raid and steal relics.
With no morals to speak of and no respect for the Sarumite Order and the Right of Quiet Possession, Falk Kühner built a collection like no other.
When Bavaria flipped on Napoleon and defected to the Coalition, he landed on his feet.
When the war ended, he started another, more horrible and insidious, fought with sacred bones.
He has them all. He massacred people to get his hands on them, and now he uses them in battle while the Order stumbles over their own rules and regulations. ”
“The apex relic the soldiers spoke about yesterday,” Rune said. “The one that drove them insane and made them eat mud. Stolen?”
“For certain. Had it been registered anywhere, I would’ve recognized it by the description.
I’ve studied the records at Kr?henstein, and they name all the known relics across the continent.
Parishes, monasteries, relic schools and academies, all share this information in the name of transparency within the Order.
But Falk Kühner doesn’t care about such things.
He hoards bones and erases their origin.
To him, it means nothing that this vertebra came from Saint Columba, or this sphenoid came from Saint Denis of Paris.
He cares about what they do, and especially what they can do for him.
It’s the way of House Hamburg and the pragmatists taken to the extreme.
I remain a pragmatist, but I don’t adhere to his views. ”
That was something that Matteo had understood.
His family hadn’t been as amenable, and Seraphina would forever wonder if things might’ve gone a different way if she hadn’t accompanied him, and stayed at the academy instead.
She would’ve been safe behind tall walls, and he would’ve spent more than three hurried days in Tuscany, embraced by his grandmother, not chased away in disgrace.
He wouldn’t have been attacked by Eisengrau and his dogs, because the timing wouldn’t have matched, and if he had, he would’ve had an apex relic with him.
Seraphina didn’t know what the hereditary relic of the da Siena family did, but surely, an apex relic, regardless of the nature of its power, would at the very least keep its wearer alive.
“When you say hereditary relics,” he backtracked, “what does that mean exactly?”
“Relics that have been passed down through generations, have a documented family chain of custody, and are protected by inheritance law. It’s not upper-class specific, either.
Poor families can own relics that have been passed down or transferred through will or dowry.
How the relic originated is irrelevant. Maybe someone bought it centuries ago or was gifted it.
In some cases, the relic comes from an ancestor.
Those are thoroughly documented because it’s a great honor to be able to say that your family tree has a saint’s name hanging from one of its branches.
Of course, there are plenty of bones that don’t have custodians, that got swept in the winds of changing history and ended up in the care of a church, monastery, or relic school. ”
Rune was silent, ruminating on the wealth of information she’d just poured into his brain.
Seraphina’s plan had been to distract him further, which she’d managed, because his hood had slipped off his head and he hadn’t noticed.
She shifted and stretched, giving a satisfying sigh when her back popped.
The ground was hard, and after sleeping on a proper mattress last night, she knew which she preferred.
She half rolled onto her back and poked his shoulder to get his attention.
“Try it.”
“Huh?”
“Rolling onto your back. The sun is out of the clouds. Let it see your face.”
“I don’t know...”
“Come on, you can do it. Just for a minute. And then we’ll go back to the White Horse and have lunch.”
“Half a minute,” he negotiated.
“All right. I’ll count to thirty.”
He held his breath and her hand for dear life, and rolled onto his back.
Seraphina knew his eyes were squeezed shut.
She didn’t comment on it and started counting, wondering if he wasn’t going to breathe for a full half minute.
He didn’t. When she reached thirty, he rolled onto his stomach, his fingers digging into the earth.
He was panting. She stroked his back and waited for him to recover.
“Shh... You did good. I’m so proud of you.”
He let out a choked, bitter chuckle. “You shouldn’t be. I’m a coward. I couldn’t look at the sun. The moving clouds... They make me feel nauseated.”
“We’ll try again tomorrow.”
They tried again for two, three, four days.
They spent a week at the inn, burning through their gulden, eating delicious meals twice a day, drinking too much beer, and sleeping embraced at night.
Seraphina didn’t ask for more, sensing that Rune was expending all his energy on their daily walks to the lake, forcing himself to lie on his back until he was able to look at the sky for longer than a few minutes at a time, and in the evening, he was exhausted.
He clung to her like a haunted man, and she didn’t have the heart to initiate intimacies that would have put further pressure on him.
Whenever he could, he scribbled with a pencil on pieces of paper but didn’t tell her what he was writing when she asked. It was part of his process to be unhappy with what he wrote until he polished it to perfection.
By day seven, he was feeling more confident and walked with his back straight and a pep in his step. Seraphina observed his shadow through the relic and praised herself for a job well done. It was time for the next challenge.
They were sitting at their usual table after lunch. They had each finished a slice of roast pork, browned and glistening with fat, and boiled potatoes on the side, everything sprinkled with coarse salt and caraway seeds.
“Why don’t you go get us two mugs of beer?”
“Me?” He turned to look at where the innkeeper’s wife and a servant girl were pottering behind the wooden counter. “You want me to go there and talk to them?”
“Yes. Do you think you can do that?”
So far, she’d been the one to interact with the women and the innkeeper himself, who was usually busy outside and didn’t talk much to his customers. Rune hadn’t exchanged a single word with anyone since they arrived, always hovering behind her and keeping his head bowed low.
He opened his mouth, and she thought he was going to say no, but he only let out an exhale, then nodded, more to himself than to her.
“I’ll try.”
“It’s easy,” she encouraged him. “Just ask them for beer, wait for them to pour it, then bring it over. I’ll be right here, waiting for you.”
“All right.”
He wiped his palms on his trousers and stood up.
After a few more seconds of hesitation, he made his way toward the counter, and Seraphina turned away, choosing to trust him instead of observing his every move and gesture.
He was doing better than ever, and he wasn’t going to freak out at the last moment and return empty-handed.
She was lost in thought when someone slid on the bench where Rune had sat earlier. She snapped out of it, but it was too late, because the stranger was already in her face, leaning over the table to whisper to her.
“Seraphina,”
She blanched at the sound of the woman’s voice.
“You don’t know how long I’ve waited for this moment. You’re never alone. For days I’ve wanted to approach you, but you’re always with him, he’s always loitering around like a fly attracted to a glob of honey.”
“Briar...”
Her old friend moved closer, until Seraphina could feel her warm breath on her face.
“Come to the lake. Alone. I’ll be waiting.”
Briar swept out of the bench as fast as she’d swept in. Like a ghost.
Except she was real, she was here, and Seraphina knew why she’d come.