19. 18 #2
“There was a lot of love between them,” Fella answered, somehow reading my question without me finishing it. She smiled, but this wasn’t the lazy cat, this was a smile of remembrance. Loss. Pain. “It wasn’t your conventional marriage, but they had known each other since they were children.”
Ekris above. He hadn’t just lost his wife. He had lost a friend. Someone who knew him before he was a devotee.
I stared at Fella, the faraway look and the sadness that edged the planes of her face. “I’m sorry.” Fella narrowed her eyes in confusion. “For your loss.”
She paused, the pipe hovering a space from her lips. Then she blinked. “Thank you.”
The front door of the prison opened, and then someone flew down the stairs.
Rather, a cloaked figure was pushed out, and rapidly somersaulted down the stairs. He regained his footing impressively well, managing to duck and roll out of it instead of fully hitting the paving.
He straightened, and lifted his hand to his face. The sun glinted off the mask, and my heart scattered. He checked his mask was properly positioned, and brushed off the dust from his cloak. Then, he started walking out to the prison’s gated entrance. With a limp.
Fella jolted out of her lean and snarled. “Those fuckers.”
They had hurt him. His face was beaten, his jaw sporting a red mark which would certainly bruise. His left eye was swelling, and there was a cut along his eyebrow. Whoever had punched him was likely wearing a ring.
I took a step forward into the road. “Ten above.”
Davian hadn’t noticed us yet; his eyes seemed entirely focused on the final obstacle in his path, the guards jeering at him from the gate.
He approached slowly, and I winced every time he favoured one leg, even though no pain pulled at his expression.
His face was blank. A gift from his patron, perhaps. The tolerance of pain.
“He’ll be fine, he’s had worse,” Fella said, as I hissed out another wince. It didn’t reassure me. “They gave him his mask back. Guess they don’t want the truth out, either.”
I opened my mouth to ask her. This could be it, the moment she let slip why he wore his mask. But something about it, on a gut level, felt wrong. He hadn’t told me for a reason. To get the information from Fella felt like as much of an undercut as the punches he had taken from the sunners.
Before I could consider changing my mind, she strode forwards across the road, to the prison gate.
A cart came trundling towards us, and its driver yelled at us, and she flipped them off as she ambled in front of the horses and only barely missed getting trampled.
I jumped backwards, pinning myself back against the carriage.
I wanted to go to Davian, but the men at that gate had let me through, knowing I wanted to speak to Petros. I didn’t want them asking Petros later about my connection to Davian. I stared here, in the shadow of the afternoon sun, and pulled my cloak lower so it shaded most of my face.
The same two men who had let me pass with a single question now grinned at one another as Davian reached them. The one on the left had asked him something, and the other chuckled. The first man asked another question, to which Davian spat on the ground. The second shoved him.
Davian stumbled, but caught himself before he fully fell.
His hand touched the dirt and his leg crumpled below him.
I saw the pain ripple across his face, then, when the men couldn’t see him.
Something about him had always felt other to me.
More than. Untouchable, bordering on immortal.
But in that moment, he was a hurt, very mortal, man.
And I realised I cared for him.
I remembered his words to me, and how he had called me clueless.
Childlike and desperate. I wondered if he wasn’t entirely right—whether caring for this devotee of Pain would be my next downfall, another string to my bow of poor judgement.
But there was no use now. He had won my care, through guile or otherwise. I hadn’t yet learnt how to remove it.
“Twats! Leave off,” Fella said as she darted over to Davian’s side.
She knelt beside him and grabbed his other arm.
She pulled him up as he grabbed onto her, her arm wrapped around his waist, and he leant on her without reservation.
The Samiscan woman glared at the sunner who had pushed him. “I’m taking him home.”
The first man piped up. Neither had moved to intervene, nor assist. “You can’t speak to a sunner that way.”
“Oh, my mistake,” she said, without a hint of remorse. She blew her hair out of her face. “Twats, leave off. I’m taking him home, valued agents of Akaur.”
They went bright red. “How dare you—”
“He’s clearly not under arrest, since you’ve pushed him out of your very doors,” she interrupted. “Am I? Do you want to arrest me for calling you a twat?”
They didn’t reply. The pain was gone from Davian’s expression.
Fella waited for a moment. “Please do. I’ll probably enjoy it.”
After a few seconds of pure floundering, the first sunner took out his baton and waved it at the pair of them. “Clear off.”
“Gladly,” Fella replied.
Together, they shuffled across the road. With Fella’s help taking the weight off his bad leg, they managed better than I would have feared.
I read Fella’s lips as she mumbled to him. “You good?”
He grimaced. “I’m fine.”
She continued to guide him over to the carriage. To me. I took a single breath as I watched his swaying movement, eyes locked in a study of the road.
Then he looked up.
I straightened, clenching my fingers around the opening of my cloak. I felt my lips part, and saw his matching exhale. He studied me from head to toe, as if checking me for any injury.
“Annie?” he breathed, as he and Fella closed the gap. “You came?”
A pang of guilt hit me that I had not come for him. Though only because I did not know of his arrest. It wasn’t hard for me to know that I would have travelled here, had word reached me. What I would have done, I didn’t know.
But I would have come.
I only nodded, my eyes tensing as I saved the explanation for another time. “I’m here.”
Of course, he picked up that I was holding something back. He looked again at the cloak shadowing my face, and glanced over his shoulder.
They were here now, him only two paces from me, and stinking of that same fishy smell I had picked up in the prison. She steadied him as he returned his eyes to me with a gaze that begged me to explain.
I wetted my bottom lip. “There was something I had to look into.”
He was ready to ask, but Fella unknitted herself from him, and hauled herself up into the driver’s seat. “Get in the carriage, folks.” She wrinkled her nose. “I can still smell the sunners from here.”
She was right. If we were to discuss anything that had happened today, I’d like to put far more distance between us and the prison. I could feel their watchful eyes as oppressively as the summer sun.
I opened the door, and climbed half inside.
Then I turned and offered Davian my hand to help pull him up.
He didn’t take it, the stubborn man that he was.
Inside, he gripped either side of the door frame and hauled himself up.
The speed of it surprised me, and we nearly butted heads as I swiftly dodged him, and fell into the bench behind me.
His hair had fallen forwards and tickled my face, and I touched the spot on my cheek absently.
He wasn’t far behind me, twisting and falling into his own seat across from me, to avoid using his bad leg.
I leaned forwards and pulled the door shut, hitting the roof of the carriage firmly. Within a second, we were on the move. I pulled the curtains shut, put my hood down, and leaned back as we trundled back into the city.
Alone. In a carriage. With Davian.
My face heated, and I knew it wasn’t the thought of intimacy that flared it. It was my own revelation of caring for him. It was a profound embarrassment that he was using me for his investigation, and I knew I had formed an unwilling attachment.
Davian stretched out his leg in the dim light filtering through the gauzy curtains, positioning it so that both of my legs were between his.
His good leg brushed mine. His bad leg was stretched out to my right.
Then he looked at me. I don’t know what he saw.
Too much, most likely. He just scanned my face, and breathed out a long sigh.
Grief, relief, something else. It was a breath that reeked of far too many emotions to name, and after my day, I could only breathe out in the same fashion.
When he spoke, it was only to say my name. Not a question. Just: “Annie.”
“How was it?” I asked him. I’d rather speak of anything but whatever was, or was not, between us. “In there?”
Davian frowned. “They still think I was involved somehow. But they know I didn’t kill anyone, so they can’t charge me with anything.”
“That’s good,” I said.
He rolled his eyes. Even after the Oath, even after the truth that he did not kill anyone had been forced from him, they still suspected him.
On what grounds? They were the revealers of crime, the illuminators of truth, the rays of justice.
There must have been some reason to suspect his involvement, and surely something greater than a grudge.
But I didn’t want to push. Not today.
I leaned my head back, and let the feeling of the carriage rock me as my thoughts tumbled and crashed like water over a cliff.
“Do you know? What happened?”
It was one of the rare times I had heard him uncertain.
Did I know? I wished I could unlearn it.
I closed my eyes, to try to block it out, but I only saw her bloated body again. Skin like a seal. I stared into my skirts instead. “I know about Jusia.”
Davian leant forwards. I felt his closeness as the shadows in the carriage moved, and heard it in the squeak of the seat below him. “You must know I had nothing to do with that.”