Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Desmond
The capital tested Desmond’s Fates-given fortitude. Thank the Angels he was blessed by Arenothos’s prideful, determined, war-waging ass. It made it a lot easier to do the reconnaissance he needed to rather than let his mind wander.
Especially after they’d seen what happened during that tournament today, who had stood on the platform overlooking the arena, blue eyes expressionless on the surface but pained underneath, and how he’d had to suppress every damn instinct.
And fucking Fates, Roremar. He’d had no idea that was where his friend was heading when he was tossed on that cargo ship. Desmond had lost track of him that night, and he hadn’t the faintest clue how to get him out of this.
He and Roremar were a team—always better together—and now, Desmond was lost, trying to assemble the pieces even though it was always Rore who put them back together.
He’d stop at nothing to save his friend, though. Even if that meant digging into wounds he promised himself he’d leave untouched.
So, after the duels concluded, he’d written a letter he knew was a bad idea. A test of his Fates-given fortitude, for sure.
Then, when he couldn’t sit in their room any longer waiting for a response, he and Myrella hatched a plan.
The Temple Master had come to Valyn from the docks, and while Desmond didn’t necessarily have reason to suspect Falliare of anything, his recent movements were unusual enough that Desmond wanted to know what he was up to. Roremar would, too.
That was how he and Myrella ended up following a cloaked Falliare down Museum Row in the Seventh District. The facades of the largest galleries loomed over the empty street like pillared beasts, their locked doors and curtain-drawn windows hiding cruel secrets.
Desmond’s personal relationship with Aldryn Falliare was precarious. The Temple Master had recently found out he was smuggling illegal amounts of ink—imbued and regular—onto Lyra so he could work extra hours outside of his parlor and perform regulated tattoos like soul bonds.
And what had Falliare done when he confronted him?
Allowed it.
While Desmond was happy it meant he could continue to support his mother, he was waiting for Falliare’s motive to reveal itself. Being caught sneaking after him in the capital wouldn’t help his case.
The cheers and music from the festival following the duel echoed over Valyn’s terracotta tiled roofs, starlit streets rumbling with celebrations of the tournament. But Museum Row was almost entirely abandoned except for straggling groups of warriors drinking and smoking on the steps.
Hoods up, Desmond and Myrella turned down an alley wedged between the capital’s largest art gallery and a smaller museum house that currently displayed an exhibit on Gryphon Armies that used to roam the skies.
Overturned crates and rubbish lined the alleyway from the food stalls that set up outside the museums on busy days, the cobblestones uneven as they followed Falliare and tried to keep from bumping anything.
Last thing they needed was the Temple Master realizing they were here.
A medley of citrus-laced incense wafted on the breeze, and while Myrella shivered ahead of him, Desmond’s magic perked up. His mind was pummeled with paint-splashed fortunes he’d rather pretend didn’t exist.
Arenothos’s cock, Aevollon was playing tricks with him. He’d certainly be finding an incense den tonight.
He’d have to figure out what to do with Nico’s girl, feeling responsible for her after his friend’s death and not comfortable leaving her alone with how chaotic the city was, but maybe she’d like to go with. Get lost in the haze to forget her grief like he would.
Yeah, that sounded pretty Fatesdamned good.
Now if the Temple Master would hurry up…
They looped around the back of the art gallery onto a tiny cul-de-sac rimmed with single-story buildings that looked thousands of years old and oddly personal—lacking the grand antiquity of the museum they stood beside.
Myrella and Desmond paused near the stairs leading to a smaller rear entrance to the gallery, likely for staff members.
“Is that another sanctuary?” Myrella whispered as she peered over the stone rail to track Falliare.
Desmond tugged her back a step, ducking down. “Think so, little dreamer.”
Falliare disappeared into the arched doors of a building opposite their hiding spot. It’s weathered wooden frame stood between the gallery and one of those centuries-old buildings bearing a hand-painted sign that read Archival Residences. Narrow patches of grass cut paths on either side.
“Do you think he’s after another of those pieces of stone?” Myrella asked, flicking a glance up at Desmond. Her hand tightened on her satchel, where their half of whatever Falliare had purchased in the port was wrapped in colorful scarves and tucked away. “Maybe he’s collecting them.”
“I don’t know, but I swear on the Fates if he’s only here on business and we’re following him to some boring temple assembly, I’ll punch the man myself.”
“Grouchy again,” Myrella tutted.
“Not. Grouchy,” he seethed.
Myrella snickered as she craned her neck to see over the railing, a reaction she’d given him more and more over the past day as his nerves ratcheted up further with every second he was in this city and couldn’t go where instinct told him to.
It was like some addicting, poisonous habit he was suppressing.
His Fate ties trying to force fortunes of the one person he was avoiding wasn’t helping.
Desmond gritted his teeth, but Myrella dropped the topic, saying, “I don’t think there’d be any kind of temple assembly tonight. Not with the celebrations going on around the city.”
“Not any honest ones at least,” Desmond agreed. “Don’t a lot of museums here have sanctuaries attached from the days they performed bonding ceremonies and rites?”
In the early days of the Starsearchers, when Valyn was one of the only major cities in their territory and the Angel and Fates walked the cobbled streets, life had been more centralized.
Due to their protection of precious artifacts, places like Museum Row were revered as holy sites, hosted rites to Valyrie, and performed bonding rituals.
Their persisting presence was similar to how the Constellation Isles still had their prominent buildings on each isle, carved of gleaming moonstone.
Myrella’s nod was hesitant. “Yes, but why would Falliare care about any of that? Perhaps he’s looking for references for developments on Lyra?”
Desmond drummed his fingers against the stone railing, unable to find an explanation. Finally, too fidgety to stand there, he straightened. “Let’s find out, little dreamer.”
With Falliare inside the sanctuary, they scampered across the cul-de-sac, doing their best to not appear too hasty—or too sober given the state of most warriors in this damned city tonight. Desmond forced his steps to slow and stride to be lazier, his fingers fluttering at his sides.
Patience was never his strong suit, and the towering carved facade of the gallery seemed to be staring down at him. The stone gryphon poised atop its pointed roof riled his nerves.
A fountain of Valyrie surrounded by carvings of every Fate sigil bubbled before the sanctuary, mystlight lanterns swinging in the breeze and casting the entire space in archaic, haunted shadows.
They rounded the sanctuary, steps muffled in the grass. Benches were scattered around a tiny stone pond for prayers to the Angel, the weeping branches of cypher trees hiding Desmond and Myrella as they crept closer to the back entrance.
He swore his magic hummed louder beneath his skin, uncomfortable ever since he arrived in Valyn but more so now.
Desmond tipped his head back, studying the structure, and pointed to a round window set into the peak, the wooden frame chipped. A soft halo of yellow light spilled through the dusty glass, rays angled up as if glowing from below. “Bet there are rafters.”
“Probably safest for us.”
“Watch those loud steps,” Desmond teased as he grabbed the back door’s rusted iron handle.
Myrella scoffed, whispering, “I do not have loud steps.”
“You’re no jungle cat.”
“As if you’re any better, big lumbering warrior that you are.”
Desmond bit back a laugh.
He pressed down on the latch and swung the door open, holding his breath as he waited for the hinges to squeak and alert whoever was inside to their presence, but it was thankfully quiet.
“After you,” Desmond said.
They sank into the shadowed space surrounded by clothing racks and crowded supply shelves, and he pulled the door softly closed behind them, wedging a crumpled robe at the base to soften any sound and leave it propped ajar for a quiet escape.
Mystlight barely spilled in from the main room of the sanctuary, but it was enough for their eyes to acclimate. A staircase stood on their left, and Myrella quickly—fairly quietly—scaled to the rafters above. Dim voices floated to them, words not discernible through the walls.
As they emerged on the second level, Desmond was slammed with a burst of incense that clawed at his mind, tugged at his magic.
“What in the Fates?” He swallowed a cough as the fog forced itself down his throat.
Myrella stared at him wide-eyed, slamming a hand over his mouth. She shook her head but gave him a look that asked if he was all right.
His mind clouded, but Desmond nodded. Myrella seemed unaffected by the incense. It tugged at one of his Fate ties, and stringed music trickled through Desmond’s mind. Aevollon.
Why was Falliare trying to read the Fate of Artistry and Trickery? Desmond was fairly certain that wasn’t who the Temple Master was aligned to.
And this batch was potent.
Desmond jerked his head to the right, indicating that he was going to hang back by the staircase where the smell wasn’t as strong. Myrella nodded, carefully making her way around the other side of the narrow wooden ledge forming a precarious balcony.
Desmond gripped the railing, solidifying his defenses against the incense and peering around the wooden beams forming the framework of the walkway.
What he saw below had his heart fucking dropping.
Blood.
A whole fucking lot of it. Splattering stone floors. Coating the male’s body sprawled across the altar.
Beneath the boots of the two cloaked viewers and—
Falliare himself.
Based on the Temple Master’s pristine appearance, he hadn’t been the one to take that life, but he stood beside the body as if it was entirely ordinary. The mystlights in the chandelier above reflected off his silver hair and navy cloak as Falliare circled the altar.
Desmond pressed forward, squinting down at the scene even as his head spun, trying to gather all the details possible. The man was shirtless, but from what he could make out, it didn’t look like there were fatal wounds on his torso or throat.
Nothing but a mark carved across his chest—two intersecting symbols—but it was hard to make out what they were from here, especially beneath all the blood. It looked like a fucked-up ritual, sending him right back to the hours he spent helping Roremar with the murder cases on Lyra.
Desmond thought he heard the Temple Master asking how this happened and fought through the haze in his mind to listen.
“Went mad” were the only two words he was able to make out from one of the cloaked figures.
Falliare tilted his head. “We need to figure out how to stop that effect, then.”
A muffled cry bounced off the stone, and everyone’s attention swiveled to the first row of benches facing the altar. A restrained form squirmed on the floor, tears tracking down her cheeks as she inched her way into the aisle.
Her hands were bound, a strip of linen tied around her mouth, but her eyes—even in the dim light, with the incense turning his head foggy—Desmond couldn’t avoid her eyes. Or the sheer terror within them as she stared at the dead man atop the altar.
Sobs slipped around her gag as her entire body shook. And that wrecked look in her gaze—it was heartbreaking. Whoever she was, she’d loved that man.
And she’d likely watched him be ripped from her in a very brutal, inhumane way.
Went mad.
Desmond gripped the railing tighter, heart pounding. Incense gathered in a cloud at the top of the sanctuary’s sloped ceiling, pressing toward him. He fought down the readings begging to steal him. The music mounted in his mind.
If this was Aevollon incense, was the dead man tied to the Fate of Artistry and Trickery?
“She’s still useful,” Falliare said. “You can try again.”
“We will in a few days. We have to wait for the proper constellations to align.”
Constellations? The major Fate constellations had been disorderly since Emmeline turned the damn seeing chamber to rubble, but what others were out tonight? He couldn’t remember right now.
Falliare sighed, a mocking, exasperated exhale, and he brushed a hand across his jaw. “I’d advise you not to waste too much time.”
That was a voice Desmond had heard before. A slightly menacing undertone the Temple Master often directed at Roremar when there was no outright threat and he was simply offering advice.
Based on the cloaked pair’s answering silence, they understood.
Falliare left them to clean up their mess, sweeping back up the aisle and out the front door without another word.
Desmond spotted Myrella across the rafters through the fog and nodded for her to come back.
Once in the yard behind the sanctuary, the starlight peeking through the cypher branches illuminating her wide eyes flooded with terror, Myrella asked, “Do you have any idea what he’s up to?”
She clutched her satchel tighter as if trying to pull the answer from the stone carving inside.
“Not a Fatesdamned clue,” Desmond admitted. “But it clearly isn’t good.”
“They have a list of different combinations written down. Incense, I think,” Myrella explained as they made their way through the shadows in the opposite direction Falliare had gone. “I could see it on the benches from where I was standing, but I couldn’t read it.”
“Pairings,” Desmond repeated. “And there were symbols on the man’s chest.”
What in the fucking realms had the Temple Master gotten himself involved in?