35. 34 #2
I wiped my tears away once more, and finally looked at the markings on the floor. The same patterns of circles and lines, but painted huge. If I lay inside the outer circle, I would not touch its edges, even spreading my limbs as far as they could go.
Eight of the nine sections had been painted in a fading brown, though one of those sections was quite a bit darker.
Fresher? The lines glowed faintly blue, casting the painted broken circles with a purple hue.
It reminded me of the mark on my back, but in reverse.
A dead black mark, trying to glow again.
Next to the unpainted final section was a crystal goblet of a deep red liquid. It was not complete, then. The small relief that brought wasn’t enough to release the claws around my thudding heart.
My eyes returned back to the goblet.
Gods. Davian’s blood? It had to be.
My stomach seized as I considered how close Camriel had been to painting that final section.
Why had he let me in at all? Why had he allowed me to interrupt his work?
He must have guessed that I had figured out his purpose.
Either he had underestimated me horribly, or part of him had wanted to get caught.
If only one wasn’t glowing, and Davian’s mark was incomplete…
“This is… Is Fella?”
I knew the answer before he pointed.
I knew it in my bones when Camriel broke down upstairs, I knew it in the implication written on the floor next to us. Then, I saw my question crumple Davian’s face, and any remaining hope died.
I followed the direction of his point. The sacks of clothing I had dismissed with tear-filled eyes. Not sacks. A person. The shape of her had been covered with a black piece of fabric, but I saw now the outline of shoulders, the curve of her waist, and the hair that peeked out from the top.
If I pulled it back, I knew what I would see. I had seen it before, in the House of Love. Gods. I could not see Fella that way, either.
I closed my eyes, and saw her grinning, holding the oenochoe of wine she’d snaffled from the taverna. “No.”
The sunner with the mark of the Sun God stepped into the room, thickly bearded with square shoulders that made him look taller than he was. We were probably the same height, standing. He looked down at us, and then at the markings on the floor. “Holy fuck.”
I stared at him with unseeing eyes, holding Davian tighter to me, my arm wrapped around his bare chest protectively.
He held some papers from the other room in his hand, and I knew he had never in his life seen anything quite like this. I think most of us hoped to live a lifetime without such horrors. His hands clenched on the papers. “What is this?”
“Something terrible.” My voice was numb. I gestured to the man in my arms. “He needs assistance.”
With his eyes unclouded by emotion, he saw the woman far sooner than I had. He stepped towards her with an urgency I might have respected had I felt anything at all.
“She’s dead.”
It wasn’t until the sunner looked back at me that I realised I had spoken the words. He had paused on the edge of the outer circle. He nodded to me, then studying the pattern below.
“Aseem suspected there might be something going on. The circles on her back,” he said under his breath. He shuffled through the papers until he found one, and then studied it. “All the symbols are lit, except for Wisdom’s section. He would have been the last, then.”
He must have held a diagram of some kind.
“Davian’s Wisdom mark is dead,” I said. The sunner appraised the man in my grip. There was no hiding Davian’s origins to this man, his mask was nowhere to be seen. “Camriel must have been desperate to try to use him. What if it didn’t work?”
The sunner hummed, and then folded the papers neatly into a pocket. “Stay here, touch as little as you can. I’ll get a physician."
“Wait,” I said.
He waited.
“That goblet. Next to the empty there.” I pointed. He followed my gaze and his nostrils flared. “Dispose of it, now.”
He paused. “We will have to study the room as it is. Something horrible has happened here and we need to understand it.”
“And unless you trust every single person who might enter here to agree with that aim, including members of my own House, then you need to get rid of that now,” I snapped.
The sunner took a breath, and I thought he might unleash some unsavoury retort. But he only studied me and Davian on the floor, then glanced up to where the exit lay. He grimaced, then he nodded.
A moment later, he picked up the goblet, and walked over to us. He dashed the goblet’s contents into the pail, then lifted it. “You have my word that this will be dumped straight into the canal.”
I flitted my eyes over him, finding no reason to suspect him of a lie. “Once Aseem has seen this room, please destroy the mark, too.”
He nodded. “Be at ease, my lady. There is time to discuss everything. You are safe now. I will get someone to see you both.”
I closed my eyes, and nodded. “Thank you.”
We remained like that for a long time.
How long, I wasn’t quite sure.
At one point, Davian opened his eyes again. He looked a little more lucid, the pupils of his eyes less dilated, and a hint of colour in his cheeks. I smiled down at him. My tears had dried into salted tracks on my cheeks.
He turned his head to the side and coughed. “Where is he?”
“Sunners have him upstairs.”
Davian shook his head. “How did you work it out?”
I smiled. “You helped me.”
Then, I told him everything. I told him about my visit to Granville, and his clue that whoever was orchestrating it all was someone with enough money to pay off a high level of debt. How his own words had come to me immediately.
Darling, the House of Pain is one of the biggest money lenders in Dytho. Perhaps the very biggest.
I had tried to dismiss the idea. But then Petros’ words had come back, too. Who else had experience with pain? Who else had their access to bodies? And then, at the House of the Sea, they had narrowed the list to someone at the Moon’s symposium. A House Leader.
I explained how I had gone immediately to the House of Wisdom, and demanded to speak to Theolis.
This made him raise an eyebrow, even in his state.
I told her everything, and asked if she had seen anything.
This was when she told me the final thing that confirmed it all.
She was frustrated, because she hadn’t seen any of Camriel’s meetings in months.
She believed that her son had warned him of her ability to watch, and that was why Camriel was always leaving into that secret back room.
Davian stiffened in my arms.
“After that,” I said. “I just had to persuade her to invite Aseem to watch my meeting with Camriel.”
Davian’s eyes widened. “And she did it? She would never reveal Wisdom’s secret like that. Everyone would turn on her if they knew she had been spying.”
I shook my head. “You’re underestimating something.”
He waited.
“Love,” I said softly. “Your mother did it for you. Just as Aseem agreed to keep Wisdom’s secret, if he could find out the truth of what happened to his daughter.”
Davian just blinked, staring blankly into the wall. I stared down at him, following every curl of that mark of Wisdom next to his forehead. I brushed a piece of his hair back as his eyes filled with tears, and he took an unsteady breath in.
He blinked once more, and the tear rolled past his mark.
Then he sniffed, and focused on me once more. “You saved me.”
I gave him a wobbly smile back, and stroked his hair. After a minute, he fell back into a fitful rest.
I could not help but look around. At the marks on the floor painted by the man that was supposed to protect and shelter him. At the body of a woman who had loved him, dearly. At the knowledge that his wife’s blood had been here, too.
This was not a pain any one soul could bear. I had saved him for a life of torment and grief that even his God would struggle to soothe.
“Did I?” I whispered.