Chapter Nineteen
Milo
Weeks after the boy’s beheading, I found Olympia at my door so early in the morning Isla was still sleeping.
I listened as she told me about the rebel symbol she’d begun to see all over the city, that it was getting so bad she thought it might be time to draw my attention to it, that she was sure if she’d seen it, the other High Houses must know about it too.
My head was aching before breakfast.
My cousin left me before the acolytes arrived, slipping out of the study I’d pulled her into to allow Isla her rest, with the excuse that she was the one supposed to escort the acolyte copying Eximius’ journal to the House of Harlowe for the day.
I reminded her to come straight to me with the copied pages upon her return this evening and watched her leave as another entered.
Pax looked exhausted as he delivered the message that had no doubt been waiting for me to wake this morning.
“Nascha wants to see you in her room at your earliest convenience,” he recited with the tired tone of a man who’d repeated that order so often he hardly knew what he was saying anymore.
I frowned. It wasn’t like my grandmother to call upon me so early in the morning.
“What happened?” I asked my cousin as I stood immediately and followed him out the door. When grandmother said ‘at your earliest convenience’, what she really meant was ‘get your ass here now’. Making her wait only ever made it worse.
“She found out about the diary at Harlowe and how we’ve been copying it,” Paxon replied, jaw tense as he refused to glance in my direction.
I sighed. This wasn’t ideal. It wasn’t as though it was a secret.
We weren’t intentionally keeping it from Nascha for any nefarious purposes.
I just didn’t want her to get her hopes up.
If my assumptions were correct and my grandmother was sending me on this fishing expedition to verify her religious beliefs before her death, any false leads could have a devastating effect on the faith she loved so greatly.
Paxon split off in another direction at the end of the hall while I continued on to the matriarch’s room.
I raised a brow at Cleo who stood outside, but my cousin only shook her head once and knocked on the door behind her.
Nascha’s voice called out a moment later and then I was striding inside while Cleo shut the door behind me.
“You sent for me?” I asked after a moment of watching her standing by the window, eyes closed and face upturned toward the sunlight streaming in as she so often did in the mornings.
“You found a diary written by Eximius prior to the madness and didn’t tell me,” she said. It wasn’t a question which meant she’d already discovered what we’d done and verified her suspicions by someone else, likely Paxon if the way he refused to look at me just before this was any indication.
“Yes.”
Her eyes opened slowly as she turned to face me and that serene smile vanished in favor of a small frown.
“Why?” she asked carefully.
“You’re too invested,” I replied.
She scoffed and shook her head as she turned away from the window and made her way back across the room to her closet, nightgown trailing on the floor behind her.
“What have you found?” she asked, her mood far more sour than it had been when I’d entered.
“Not much of anything,” I answered honestly.
“Most of Simi’s sane records are of diminishing resources due to the impending uprising and concerns regarding his family’s inability to take the rebels seriously.
So far, we haven’t found any mention of anything that might have caused the man to go suddenly mad. ”
Nascha nodded and, though her back was to me as she sorted through the available clothes hanging in her closet, I could sense the disappointment permeating the space between us.
“Alosia and Valin are in,” she spoke after a moment, any trace of discontent vanished from her authoritative tone.
“I’m awaiting a response from Rainier and Chasina.
Had I known we already had a relationship established with Harlowe, I would have sent my request to join the council through one of my own grandchildren rather than a Lynx acolyte. ”
The bitterness was still there, underlying the authority. I decided to ignore it as I responded.
“That’s good,” I said.
“Have your wife request an update from her grandfather,” my grandmother ordered. “We need to have an idea of what sort of witnesses Raghnall has found and if we need to step in and source our own as well.”
“Isla already spoke to him about that. He’s got a handful of lower ringers willing to talk as well as the priests who presided over the Culling ceremony. They were in a righteous fervor about the Viper patriarch sullying their precious holy day.”
“More than I expected.”
“They should be put under guard.”
Nascha’s gaze shot to me as she dropped the blue dress back to where it had been hanging and turned to face me as though I’d lost my mind.
“By what enforcement?” she asked. “Cosmo has control over the Guardians.”
“Not all of them,” I replied, hoping that was true but not having any real basis for the judgment other than the feeling that they couldn’t possibly all remain on the side of a man who’d beheaded a fifteen-year-old boy in front of his mother.
“But if we can’t trust the Guardians, we’ll do it ourselves.
We have plenty of First Ring sons and daughters who’ve spent their whole lives training to fight and compete in the Trials.
They should provide adequate support. If nothing else, the sight of a First Ringer hanging around a witness might keep Cosmo’s associates from arranging any unfortunate accidents before the trial. ”
“You want me to send First Ringers down to the lower rings to protect lower ringers?”
Nascha blinked at me as if wondering whether all the time I’d spent reading the rantings of a madman had begun to affect my mind in much the same way. A fury sparked within me at that expression.
“Are you proposing we lose our chance to convict a murderer of his crimes because of our own prejudices?” I asked, tone burning with challenge.
My grandmother stared at me as if she no longer knew me, the corners of her lips slanted in an unforgiving frown.
“We don’t have enough bodies to guard nine witnesses,” she told me. “At least, I can’t think of nine of our own willing to do such a thing. And if you think for a second Raghnall–”
“Let Isla worry about Raghnall.”
Nascha raised a brow.
“You already trust her so implicitly?” she asked.
Her expression told me everything I needed to know about what she thought of my trust, how foolish she believed I was being.
“Perhaps you’re just infatuated. Newlyweds so often are.
Trust cannot be found between a woman’s legs, Milo, not even those of your wife. ”
I bristled and, before I could stop myself, blushed.
I hadn’t been between my wife’s legs, not in the weeks since our marriage or ever before, but my grandmother didn’t need to know that.
Her warning was clear, as was the fear underlying her words.
She worried I was losing my rationality to my emotions and perhaps I was, but it certainly wasn’t lust driving me.
Nascha sighed then, closing her eyes and shaking her head once more before wobbling toward a closed cabinet inside her closet I knew contained her jewelry.
“I never got to give you your wedding present,” she said then.
I just blinked at her, feeling off-balanced by this conversational whiplash.
“I don’t mean to be crude, hafid,” she told me, voice gentler than before.
“I’ve simply seen far too many men fall to the seduction of a woman and I know your gentle heart.
You want to do right by your wife, as any good man would.
You’ve already done more for her than any before you, assuring her succession and more thoroughly tying our Houses together as you have, but you mustn’t forget your own place in favor of hers. ”
I nodded and did not speak the argument rising within me. I hadn’t forgotten my place. Nor had I forgotten hers.
“When I rose to the seat of Matriarch, my grandmother pulled this from her own neck and gave it to me. She told me the same had been done for generations. Either the wife of the Patriarch or the Matriarch of House Avus herself had worn this around her neck for as long as anyone could remember. I never wear it out and about anymore. It’s too ostentatious for the image I’ve curated of the city’s kindly old grandmother.
But I wear it every night. It makes me feel closer to her, to a family that once was and has long since been, to our ancestors.
My grandmother died a week after she gave me this and I’ve cherished it since.
I had hoped…I wanted you to have it, to give to your wife. ”
From within the cabinet, she pulled out a pendant set on a thick silver chain and dangling at the end.
It was an amulet the size of my palm, a wide circle with spokes sparking off at odd angles.
Most noticeably, it glowed. I didn’t mean that it was so shiny it reflected the light in a blinding way.
It actually emitted a soft glow from deep within the cerulean gem trapped inside.
The air around it was tinged a pale blue and seemed to be disturbed in an unnatural way as she handed it to me. I took it hesitantly, carefully.
“What–” I started. “How–”
“No one knows,” she replied, anticipating my question before it came. “I asked the same thing myself. Do you want to know what my grandmother said?”
I nodded as I reached for it and took it gently by the chain, dangling the amulet in front of my face so the blue light illuminated my eyes. There was an engraving around the edge in a language I didn’t understand. Something about it was familiar but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what.
“She said it was lucky,” Nascha told me with a smile. “That’s why it glows. It’s some sort of ancient artifact left over from the gods, the real ones.”