13. Skeletons in the Dark
W hen Viola dreamed, she found herself beneath the willow tree down by the bank, a mile or so from the farm where she’d grown up. The leaves of the tree bent into the river, a delicate breeze ruffling her hair. She could taste summer.
She knew she was dreaming. She was dreaming, and she didn’t want to wake. Miranda was splashing in the water, Grandpa watching carefully nearby. Her parents were giggling in the meadow, Papa weaving crowns of wheat to present to them later.
And Seb was beside her, as he had been from the moment they were born.
I came into the world with you, Viola whispered in her bones. It doesn’t make sense for me to be in a world without you in it.
So Viola let herself lean into the dream, clutching onto Seb’s hand even though she couldn’t feel it.
She was still clutching it when the dream morphed, and the fields were ablaze, the willow tree screaming with fire. The acrid scent of smoke stung her nostrils. She held his hand as everything transformed into ashes. Heat scorched her skin, the soothing breeze twisting into a ferocious gale that fanned the inferno.
The willow tree flailed, boughs blackened by the fire, its branches reaching out like skeletal fingers. Miranda’s figure faded into the smoke, Grandpa’s protective stance crumbled, and her parents’ crowns of wheat ignited.
All burned away .
Still, she held onto Seb’s hand, even as the fire raged around them, even as her dream world disintegrated into ash. She clung to the memory of his presence, whispering through the raging fire, I’m still here, Seb. I won’t let go.
Viola awoke in the night, her sheets damp with sweat. She climbed out of bed, her side splitting, and went to sit beside the window. The forest was silent and still beneath a thick carpet of white. The storm had at last abated, though the drifts were tall and impassable.
She highly doubted that Nicodemus had any plans of killing her in the morning. Why bother saving her, if that was the case?
Why bother saving her at all?
In the past few months of chasing him, she had noticed that he tried to avoid killing—people were more likely to be hurt through their own stupidity than they were through his direct actions.
But she’d read the reports of his other crimes and seen the pictures. She knew what he was capable of. What he’d done to her fellow knights. What was the difference? What was the link?
Don’t lose your nerve, she told herself. You’re here to learn more about him—his weaknesses, not his favourite flower.
Her mind turned from Nicodemus to her friends and comrades, wondering how they were faring in her absence, her stomach clenching when she thought of Freya. Did everyone think she was dead? Or did they still have hope that she was alive somewhere, sheltering from the storm? They would have found the wendigo corpse and her torn cloak. Would they think that it had managed to devour her?
Her mind jolted, remembering the attack in more detail. There had been a woman there, a witness to this. Had the rest of the knights found her? What had she seen—what had she told them? If she’d been seen being taken by the Shadowmancer, she was going to have to spin quite the yarn about how she managed to escape in a few days’ time.
And she’d have to spin a story, wouldn’t she? No one would believe this version. No one would believe that she hadn’t tried to kill him.
Well, she’d tried. A little. For a bit. But she already knew she wouldn’t try again, not here, not unless he attacked her first. There was something wrong with the idea of killing the person who saved your life and took you into your home and fed you and offered you menstrual products. Even if they did also lock you in a library.
She sighed. She wouldn’t be sleeping again at this rate.
Needing to stretch her legs, she got up and went to the door. It was, unsurprisingly, unlocked. She dipped out into the corridor, her runed eyes giving her just enough vision to see by, aided by the windows pouring with moonlight. She drifted down the stairs, sweeping once more into the galleries, the library, the music room. She cast her eyes over everything, though it looked different in the dark—all hard edges and spectral figures.
Not far from the kitchens, she heard something scuttling. Her heart quickened, her fingers twitching for a weapon that wasn’t there.
Probably just a rat, she told herself, although how a rat would get into a castle built into a mountain, she wasn’t sure.
The scuttling increased. It sounded larger than a rat.
“Azrael?” she asked hopefully.
A skeletal rabbit hopped out onto the stone floor, completely fleshless, held together by the same faint blue threads of magic that pulsed around Cordelia’s fingers. Two long silk ears dropped along the floor. It had a tail made of cotton, but all the rest of it was bones. It stared at Viola with black, empty eyes.
“Goddess,” she breathed, “could this place be any more creepy?”
“Don’t give Cordelia any ideas.”
Viola jumped, instinctively trying to draw a sword that wasn’t there. Nicodemus appeared behind her, emerging from the shadows in his black silk dressing gown. For once, he wasn’t wearing his mask. There was some discolouration over the left side of his face, but it was difficult to make out under his hair, even with her night-vision rune. It seldom helped with distinguishing colour.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“You move like a—”
“Shadow?” He grinned. “It’s been noted. I’m oddly light of foot for a guy with a limp.”
Viola stared at him, and at the strange skeleton rabbit now curled around his feet.
“I see you met Moon Bunny,” he remarked.
“Moon… Bunny?”
“Cordelia’s first creation, although the ears and tail were my idea. He didn’t look right without them.”
Once more, bones that moved without their user having to be conscious. Had Nicodemus taught Cordelia how to do that too? It was an imitation of life both frightful and fantastic.
The Crown were right to be afraid of those with power over bone and shadow. They also weren’t right to want to kill them. Nicodemus may have had crimes under his belt, but Cordelia was another matter. The idea that Viola should have arrested her that day in the pit unsettled her more than she wanted to give weight to. She did not become a knight to persecute the innocent, and no one should be born a crime.
“Something keeping you up?” Nicodemus asked, when the pause had stretched on for far too long .
Viola nodded.
“The leg’s bothering me. Come. Let us raid the kitchen.”
He moved to the right of her, and then stopped and shifted to her left. He made no attempt to turn up the crystals or light a candle as they walked. Apparently, the moonlight suited him just fine.
The bony bunny hopped alongside them and disappeared into a room next to the kitchen. Nicodemus paused briefly at the door, smiling and pulling it closed. Cordelia’s room, she assumed.
The door dealt with, Nicodemus swept into the kitchen and plucked a few things out of the cupboards. He set a kettle on the range and set to work adding herbs and vials to a couple of wooden cups. Viola took note of where he was rummaging, memorising the weapons around her. Knives in the third drawer. A rolling pin on the kitchen island. Even the kettle itself.
Just in case he tried something.
“Pain level?” he asked her.
“Low to medium,” she told him, still eyeing the knives.
He added a couple of drops of a pearl-coloured concoction, and held up another vial. “Sleeping potion?”
Viola plucked it from his fingers and necked it back in one swift motion. She recognised the smell: lavender and mugwort. She was familiar with its properties, and how much she would need.
Nicodemus stared at her. “For some reason, I expected that you were too tough to rely on potions.”
“I am tough,” she replied. “I also need a sleeping potion. I’m unlikely to get a wink without it.”
“What’s keeping you awake?”
Viola bristled. She hadn’t expected him to ask, and was once more floored by the sheer insanity of sitting in the dark with a man she was sworn to kill while he offered her up painkillers and tea.
“You don’t have to answer,” he added.
Viola bit her lip. It was the perfect out, and yet, for whatever reason, Viola found herself not taking it. “I… I don’t tend to sleep much at the best of times. Not unless I’m exhausted.”
“Ah. Hence the training.”
She nodded, staring at the empty vial in her grip, wondering why she was still talking. Perhaps he’d slipped her a truth potion instead. Perhaps the dark just made a good mask for secrets. Perhaps she’d been holding onto these ones for so long that they were starting to float away. “There was a point in my life when this was the only thing that could get me to sleep at all,” she whispered, gesturing to the empty vial.
Nicodemus nodded, as though understanding. “Were you addicted? Because if so, I should refrain from offering you any in the future.”
Viola shook her head. “No. Not quite. I think, maybe, I wasn’t far off, but I felt it coming. I stopped. Then I had to fill the nights with something else.”
“What happened to keep you up?”
“What happened to the side of your face?”
He snorted, but he turned away from her all the same, shielding that side of himself. “Fair enough.” He removed the steaming kettle and added boiling water to cups, inhaling the scent of chamomile, lavender, and the slightly minty aroma of the droplets of painkiller.
“You know what you’re doing,” Viola remarked. “Did you train somewhere?”
“Trying to learn more of my secrets, Windbright?”
“Just making conversation.”
“I highly doubt that.” He stirred the cups and placed one in front of her, which she took without hesitation. There was no good reason to assume it was poisoned—he’d had ample opportunity to kill her already. Whatever he wanted from her, it wasn’t her death.
But he must want something, surely?
“I’m self-taught, mainly,” Nicodemus explained, relaxing into a chair. “Though Cordelia has taught me a fair bit. She was apprenticed to a hedge witch for a few years, before the woman died.”
That might explain how Cordelia’s powers hadn’t raised the attention of the authorities. Either the witch had concealed her, or her abilities had been explained by her proximity to other magic. She wasn’t controlling those bones, they were just enchanted. She wasn’t manipulating dead matter, it was just levitating. The skeletons weren’t rattling in a nearby graveyard, the witch was just practising a spell.
Viola imagined the excuses stopped when the witch died.
“So—tell me more about your life in the barracks,” Nicodemus began, sipping his tea. “Who have you got there waiting for you?”
Viola knew she shouldn’t be talking to him, that she should be keeping her guard up, but she was exhausted, and the weight of carrying everything around, all of the time, was stifling her.
It couldn’t hurt to speak, just a little, just for a moment.
Besides, maybe he’d give up his secrets if she gave up a few of hers.
“Namely my girlfriend,” Viola replied. “Although my friend Heindrich is probably worrying himself sick too.”
Nicodemus raised an eyebrow. “You have a girlfriend?”
“I do.”
“Does your preference lie solely with women? ”
“With people, actually. People who are brave, loyal, respectful, law-abiding citizens.”
“How dreadfully dull.” He sipped his drink. “How did the two of you meet?”
“She came over from Wyrmheim two years ago. Apprenticed at the House of Rain and joined our ranks about a year ago. I didn’t like her at first because she’s a much better knight than I am, but one day she beat me in a sparring match and started kissing me and I realised I had grossly misread our rivalry.”
Nicodemus snorted. “I can’t imagine there are many knights better than you.”
Viola looked down at her lap, her cheeks feeling oddly warm. She wasn’t sure whether to feel complimented or shamed. “I’m not the best,” she admitted. “Not by far. I’m not the strongest, or the fastest, my stamina is barely above average, I’m terrible at remembering to keep my runes fresh—”
“And yet, you’ve bested me almost as many times as I’ve bested you.”
“Perhaps you’re not as fearsome an opponent as you think you are.”
Nicodemus laughed. “No, that’s definitely not it. I just think you’re a far better adversary than you give yourself credit for. That way you balanced on the sails—”
“I spent three months training at a temple in Tsubasa,” Viola explained. “That’s what I do—whenever I have leave, I journey abroad and learn other styles of fighting, ways to compensate for my lack of innate strength, speed, balance…”
“Surely that alone is impressive?”
“It’s necessary,” she said shortly. Necessary to make herself better. Necessary to have something to do… and somewhere to go.
“Where will your next adventure take you?”
“I haven’t formalised any plans yet,” she said. “I have to take down this annoying shadowmancer chap, first.”
“Ha!” Nicodemus finished his cup and stared into the bottom of it. “I have a question.”
“I’m shocked that you’re seeking permission for it.”
“We’ve been sitting alone, in the dark, in a room filled with weapons—why haven’t you tried to kill me yet?”
Viola hesitated. The night made him vulnerable. Shadows had little power in darkness like this. It would be the perfect opportunity if she could just get over her qualms of killing an unarmed man who had taken her in but was almost certainly planning something.
“Maybe I’m just waiting for a better time. ”
He laughed. “Well,” he said, climbing to his feet. “If that’s the case, I better lock my door tonight and make sure I keep a light on. Good night again, Windbright. Sleep well. I’m most likely to kill you in the morning.”