Chapter Thirty-Two Nina
Trent?” I repeated, the letters on the parchment fading. They were blotted, and many had been crossed out, rewritten. Polly’s fingers were stained with it, her hair flattened in the back, her eyes wild with sleeplessness. She nodded emphatically.
She’d woken me but not the others. Not yet. I couldn’t be sure why.
“Surely,” Polly said, pulsing with some sort of awareness. “It is no coincidence.”
I reverted my eyes to the letters so that I would not need to see her face. Sometimes when I looked at her, I forgot what she was. What she’d done. “Nothing about Idia’s Seam?”
“No, nothing yet. But Nina—”
“Then, keep translating.”
Polly sighed. “There will be some holes. I don’t remember all the glyphs, and some are faded. It takes time to pull the ink—”
“Well, time isn’t on your side,” I said curtly. “Nor ours.” I began to turn away.
“Nina, wait.” Polly’s hand reached for my elbow, but retracted at the last moment. “I—I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry.”
“So, you’ve said.”
“I mean… for your mother,” she said warily, like I was a dog baring its teeth.
“Theo explained what happened. I know you went to Kenton hoping to spare her.” Her eyes pinched.
“We were all fools in the end. None so much as me.” One lip worried over the other, but she had the gumption to look me in the eye when she said, “I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but I wanted you to know, if I could undo it all, I would.
I wanted to the moment I sent that scribble. ”
“A moment too late,” I retorted. And I left Polly to return to her tiny foreman’s office with her flurry of parchment and the Stewards’ book, shoulders hunched over.
Orderlies were the only others awake at this early hour. It seemed they never slept. They carried their items to and from pallets. One woman simply went bed to bed, singing soft Crafter songs in a voice that would break hearts.
I wondered if once, three daughters had resided in this town. I wondered if it had looked the same after the enemy had come for Joan.
Two more Trent Crafters had died in the night. When morning bloomed, Patrick and Theodore carried the bodies out to the ravine, and I buried them.
Theo looked bloodless and sick. John took his hat off and bowed his head. It was then that I gave them Polly’s translation. I watched their eyes catch on the words Trent and beast and witches.
I watched confusion dawn, as it had in me.
“The beast,” Theo read. “It must mean the invaders from other shores. The ones who came in the Battle of Belavere.”
Lines deep as rifts appeared in Patrick’s furrow. “Perhaps.”
“Fuckin’ animals, in any case,” John uttered.
“Trent,” Patrick said, his thumb smearing over the word. “Their name was Trent?”
“Could it—could it mean this place?” I asked. “Perhaps this town was named after them.”
“It’s as common a name as any, miss,” John said, taking the translation from Patrick. “More likely it’s a coincidence. This could’ve happened anywhere in the Trench.”
But I couldn’t shake the feeling crawling beneath my flesh and skipping the rungs of my spine. I’d felt it the day Patrick and I hid in a cellar, and again the day of the Artisan School attack. I felt it now, catastrophe in my blood, a relentless pounding in my head.
We ate meagerly, guiltily, knowing we took from what little stores Trent had left. Then Edith came to find us.
She nodded to me first. “Thank you,” she said on a choked whisper. But she hardened her jaw, refusing to cry. “Those people—they deserved some decency.”
I only nodded. What else was there to say?
“You should be on your way,” she said next, already turning from us.
“We’d like to stay until tomorrow,” I said suddenly, and Patrick’s head turned in surprise, then John’s and Theo’s and Polly’s. “We want to help however else we can.”
It wasn’t the whole truth. I wanted time in Trent, enough to find answers. Some confirmation of the suspicion unfurling in my gut.
“There ain’t any coppers left to kill,” Edith said. “But we need scouts, and people who can fetch water and launder. There are houses on the west side, closer to the trading post, that were never searched for supplies.”
She left us to it.
“I’ll search the houses,” I said immediately to the rest. “See what there is to salvage.”
Patrick came up close, right to my side, and looked where I looked, out over the beds of the wounded, rows and rows of them. “What are you doin’?” he said beneath his breath.
“It’s not a coincidence,” I insisted. “It can’t be.”
That was how I found myself walking through the wide lanes of Trent with Theodore, who hurried up behind me.
I turned at the sound of his approach, and a groan escaped me.
“Not the friendliest welcome,” he muttered, slowing to match my pace.
“No welcome about it,” I said in answer. “Shouldn’t you be charming water from the river?”
“I set out to, but John practically shoved me aside. He’s building some sort of contraption with Patrick.”
I sighed.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“We aren’t going anywhere. I’m searching for supplies.”
He watched me as he walked. “Then I’ll accompany you.”
“I’d prefer you didn’t.”
“You’ll have to forgive me eventually,” he said softly, a whisper of desperation in it. “I insist. I’ll not give up until then.”
I turned to him, and he stopped with me. There was snow in his dark hair, on the tips of his ears. He looked a decade older than we had been in Kenton Hill.
“This isn’t the House,” I hissed. “You’re no longer a lord. Your insistence means nothing here.”
He nodded. “You’re right. But I do intend to earn your forgiveness, Clarke.”
“Harrow.”
“Nina,” he settled. “And you haven’t turned me out yet. A man has to wonder why that is.”
I kept walking, past the crumbling remains of Crafter houses and outdoor lavatories and snow-banked horse carts.
Theo followed one step behind. “I don’t trust you enough to let you leave,” I told him sharply.
“You’d be back in the House by morning. We both know your father would round you up, and you’d tell him everything. ”
“You don’t think I know how to lie?” Theo said. “That I wouldn’t do that to protect you?”
“I think you turn the shade of the seat you take,” I said. “Like a reptile.”
We came to the far edges of destruction, the houses and buildings in this part of Trent not crumbling or choked in ash. Windows were broken, and most had their doors flung wide. A lone cat walked between houses, searching as we searched.
I approached the first door and hesitated. The number hung loose. A child’s doll lay just over the threshold, its face concaved. Snow, in great flurries, had piled over the stoop. Wind howled through.
The air was too still, the snow too bright, the sky encroaching. Birds in far-off trees rabbled, ignorant to the shiver of abandonment. Without thinking, I moved closer to Theo’s side, like a child does when shadows start to take shape.
He looked at me, confused. “What is it?”
I grimaced. “It just doesn’t feel right, walking in uninvited.”
Theo raised his eyebrows at the open hallway. “Well, we can knock, but I don’t think anyone is coming to let us in.” He stepped over the threshold and looked back to find me hesitating there. He frowned. “Are you coming?”
“Don’t you feel that?” I asked him, and again, the wind swept through, sent gooseflesh up my neck.
“Feel what?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “A bad omen. Like we’re disturbing something.”
“Like a ghost?”
I pressed my lips together. He made it sound preposterous.
I thought it seemed all too probable. I would have bet Trent was full of ghosts, overspilling with them.
I stepped into the hallway gingerly, my boots crunching against broken glass.
“You don’t believe in ghosts?” I went past him and led the way up the staircase and into the first open door.
The room was wallpapered deepest green and obviously Artisanal.
Who else in the brink could afford a gilded credenza, a harp in the corner, shelves of books?
I wondered if this house had belonged to a Scribbler, or perhaps a wood Mason.
Plenty of wood to mill in this parish, or at least there had been.
“Ghosts?” Theo said. “No.”
I began opening the wardrobe doors, taking the clothing from within. “Crafters say that when you die young, your ghost lingers a day for each you missed. That’s why we grieve the death of a child so badly. We can feel them nearby.”
Theo gave a sad sort of smile. “Sometimes stories are made where logic fails us.” He was looking over the books on the shelves, his fingers running over the spines.
“And The Stewards’ Testament… I take it you think it nothing more than a story?”
He turned to face me. “I think this entire thing is a goose chase,” he said. “With no happy ending.”
“If that’s your belief, then you should go,” I said, half of me wishing he’d disappear that very moment, the other half terrified he might just do it.
“Is that what you want?” It was a real question. Vulnerable.
“No,” I said honestly. “Better the devil I can see than the one I can’t.”
Theo’s frown deepened. “I’m not your enemy, Nina.”
“You’ve acted as my enemy,” I countered, rummaging through blankets, towels, sheets. “Not a week ago, you would have seen me lashed. You’ve lied to me. Manipulated me. My mother is dead because of your father’s scheming, and you didn’t do a thing to stop it.”
“And I’m more sorry for it than you could know,” he said tremulously, biting back some emotion. “But you’re not the only one who’s been used and spat out. You are not the only one who’s lost their mother.”
I turned to look at him, at the fracturing in his eyes. His mother, who had suffered the slow death of influenza without the bluff needed to revive her.