Chapter 8 Forgotten Coins
· · · ·
Forgotten Coins
Auria Marriosan dreamed of the Havenwood.
Errant curses flew around a rotted cabin, oddly festive, like twinkling Sancsari lights.
A bloody starburst spread over the captain’s silver cloak, a terrible blooming rose, the unfurling of crimson petals slow, grotesque.
The roof was ripped from the hut as an apathetic owl flew overhead.
Mages turned to statues, and as the kingpin and the captain died in the same breath, silence smothered the night.
Saffron was there, in scarlet, her very presence an open wound. She hauled Auria out of the cabin, away from the dizzying confusion, from the roars of grief and the fallen bodies, and then Auria was in the aphotic dark of the forest, and then she was running.
These images and recollections shifted in her dreams—or rather, her nightmares. They gained new contours, depth and sentience, claws and teeth.
The captain’s body whorled into a single curl of white-silver smoke then evaporated.
A stone statue fell atop Auria as she tried to flee, crushing her legs, breaking them into a thousand tiny fragments of bone.
Saffron was telling her something ruinous.
A gas mask filled with blood, and this blood morphed into ruby wax melting over an envelope’s seal.
A killing spell pronged into Auria’s chest, and she spent many moments dead before being jerked back, like a fallowwolf hauled out of a chasm on a leash.
She shuddered awake, every nerve ending blazing, as though moments ago she had been on the frontline of some awful war. Darkness still shrouded her chambers; she’d only been asleep for a couple of hours. Last night’s reading material lay crumpled on her pillow.
Her eyes seared with exhaustion after many nights of shallow, haunted sleep. She found herself devastated that it was not yet morning, that there was nothing she could do but sit in the muddy trenches of her own dreams—or memories, whichever they may be.
Neither in sleep nor in consciousness could Auria make sense of the happenings in the Havenwood. Of Saffron’s presence there, in a Bloodmoon cloak, and yet seemingly committing to neither side, even endangering herself to help Auria flee.
There was a warped, layered quality to these memories, the sense that other scenes were tucked inside like forgotten coins in a hidden pocket.
She longed to take them out and examine them, but kept finding that the pocket had been sewn shut, that she couldn’t find the seam.
Every so often, though, she would feel their shape and heft through the fabric of her mind.
Rolling onto her back, she focused as hard as she could on those forgotten coins, tried to summon a seam through sheer force of will.
But the bedroom was sharpening around her, and her senses were brightening and blinking awake, and the further she emerged from her dreams, the more difficult it was to feel the heft of the lost memories at all.
She rolled over in bed, but did not sleep another moment.
Auria’s early morning walk to the hospital wing was too long, illogically long, fatigue pulling the corridors long and gummy as warm toffee.
Sunlight poured through the tall arched windows over the creamstone floor.
Outside was a blue, grainy morning, textured and gauzy and swollen.
Then again, maybe a migraine was coming.
Before the headaches usually came a kind of distortion, the world bulging and peeling like old wallpaper.
She hadn’t even been able to pick out a scent for the day.
As a lifelong prude with little interest in sex, perfume had always been her preferred source of sensory pleasure—nothing, not even ginger tea, filled her well quite like it.
Her collection was vast, an apothecary cabinet filled with tiny, colored bottles from all over the world: varouli and fyrr from Marayat, sweetlemon and rekari from Koura, rosemarroa and opalberry from Irisi.
Auria chose a fresh perfume every day, so that they might never lose their potency.
But that morning, she couldn’t even bring herself to shower.
Perhaps it was this stale aroma that made Paliran so displeased to see her.
Then again, Paliran was never overly thrilled when Auria walked through the hospital wing doors.
It wasn’t that the Chief Healer disliked Auria, per se.
It was that the detective had been hounding Paliran every day for weeks—ever since Tiernan had been reported missing.
Paliran was Tiernan’s mentor, his first point of contact in the Order, and Auria was laboring under the notion that even if Tiernan was in such peril he could not reach out to his betrothed, he might at least attempt to send a message to a higher-up.
“How is she?” Auria gestured to the comatose form of Nissa Naszi, her greatest rival and least favorite member of the cohort she’d graduated with.
Naszi’s warm brown skin had a sallow undertone, and she’d lost a startling amount of weight, atrophying from a leanly muscled warrior to a scrawny street beggar.
Paliran, who looked as exhausted as Auria felt, raked a hand through their caramel-colored hair. The engraved gold and silver bangles on their wrists jangled, and their violet cloak hung rumpled from broad shoulders. “Stop with the farce. You don’t care about Naszi.”
“I do care,” Auria said, somewhat petulantly.
While the two had always been at each other’s throats, Auria wished the Eqoran would wake soon.
With Saffron apparently participating in organized crime, and Sebran and Tiernan both missing, it was rather petrifying how quickly their cohort’s number had dwindled in the year post-graduation.
And besides, some light antagonism from the dragonesque Wielder might actually be welcome. Most others in the Order were treating Auria as though she were made of gossamerglass, prone to shattering beneath the trauma of the Havenwood. They perhaps had a point.
“There is no change to Naszi’s condition,” Paliran answered, patience carefully measured, precisely performed. “And I have heard nothing from Flane. And my shift finishes in—oh, approximately ninety-eight seconds.”
“Anything from Dallar? Any new leads? Any—”
“Ask him yourself.” Paliran’s tone was soft, yet brusque.
The two mages were retreading old ground, and Auria knew she was annoying—she’d always been aware of how grating others found her sanctimonious nature, her constant needling for answers, her meticulous approach to studying, her pious devotion to the law—but in the light of all the grief and uncertainty, she could not quite bring herself to care.
“I have asked him myself,” she muttered. “Many times.” Dallar was overseeing the investigation into Tiernan’s disappearance, and he’d been staunchly tight-lipped, treating Auria like any old civilian rather than a fellow Silvercloak.
“On the official clock, perhaps. But he drinks at the Glory’s Edge most evenings after work. Try approaching him after his sixth pint of bitterale. Once his shoulders have dropped and his pupils start pointing in different directions, he might be more willing to talk.”
Auria nodded gratefully. “Thank you.”
“Of course. I hope you know, Marriosan, that I want to find him as much as you do.”
“No, you don’t.” Auria fought to keep the warmth from her eyes, which were prone to leakage at the best of times. “Nobody does.”
“It’s a rumor, Marriosan. Just a rumor.”
Dallar was indeed slumped over his sixth pint, pale jowls flecked with gray-blond stubble, eyes pink and overly dilated.
The Glory’s Edge was dimly lit, deliberately grungy.
A vast mural of Parlin the Great scaling a snow-capped mountain adorned the back wall, callously graffitied to add a comically large vock.
The tavern’s booths were made of poorly patched leather, stained tables lit by flickering evercandles.
Auria loathed the place, but a lot of senior detectives viewed it as a cultural institution.
It was older than the Order of the Silvercloaks, older possibly than time itself, and the maroon carpet older still.
“But you’re treating said rumor like a real lead?” Auria asked, perched at the bar and cradling a mug of ginger tea spiked with flamebrandy. Warmth spilled down her gullet and into all four corners of her chest, but the feeling of hollow cold persisted somewhere far deeper.
Daller shrugged unevenly. “At this juncture, rumors are all we have.”
“Please, just tell me.”
A muscle twitched in Dallar’s jaw. He took another long, slow draw of bitterale. “He was—well, supposedly.” He trailed off, staring into the bottom of his glass.
Auria thought she might go insane if she had to live for one more minute without answers. “Supposedly what?”
“Informing for the Bloodmoons.” Dallar grimaced. “We think he cost us the raid on the docks, leaked our presence back to the scarlets. As for his role in the Havenwood…we’re piecing it together. He was marked missing days before that, but he might have gone into hiding.”
The cold in Auria swelled, overflowed.
Tiernan was a rat?
As soon as she heard the words, it felt completely, terribly plausible. Auria was horrified, disgusted, and yet not shocked, in any real sense.
“Hiding. There’s a possibility…?”
“Until a body is found, there’s always a possibility.”
“What will happen if he does come back?” Auria whispered, overcome with a fear she couldn’t quite name. “Will he—if it’s true? Will he go to Duncarzus?”
Another grimace, stony, jaded. “We’ll weather that storm if it breaks.”
Auria nodded, noting with vague horror that she was crying.
“Don’t let it tarnish the way you think of him, alright?” Dallar laid a fatherly palm on her shoulder, squeezed a little too firmly. His ale-split gaze landed involuntarily on her missing ear. “The scarlet fist is a frightening thing. Stronger mages than Tiernan have cowered beneath it.”
Auria—who was so righteous, so devout to the law, theoretically willing to die for her ideals—swallowed hard. “He’s the reason Nissa is…”
“Yes.” A nod, a sigh, a swig. “Get some rest, Marriosan. You look like mareshit.”
The walk back to the precinct was short, but she took it slow. Her half cup of spiked tea blurred her vision at the edges—she’d never been good at holding her liquor—and she was grateful for it, the smeared membrane between her and the terrible thought that Tiernan might have been a traitor.
She drew in long, cool breaths of the night air, forced herself to look up at the beauty of the starred sky, instead of down at her dragging feet, instead of fixating on all the hideous implications of Tiernan’s treason.
She zoomed out of the situation, imagined herself as a frostowl gliding over some distant moor, so far above the suffering of magekind.
She pictured herself as a velvine, which she’d always loved, pattering along some high rooftop and—
—she almost tripped over it.
A supine figure lying outside the precinct.
She stumbled back, righted herself.
Looked down at the figure—no, the corpse.
The night canted sharply. Auria’s breath came in short stitches, her blood flowing hot and thin and strange. A black wall of horror rose within her, towering, vertiginous.
The body lay in the gloaming like a marble statue, silver cloak pooled around its torso, a wedge of moonlight draped over a pale face, an imprecision to the cadaver’s stare, a defiant clench to its papery fist, all the contours so familiar and yet so strange, the sight both utterly unfathomable and entirely inevitable.
The bottom fell out of her belly, and then her soul. It was only once she fell to her knees beside her betrothed that she noticed the note pinned to his chest—hammered through his rib cage with a rusty nail, the violence so gratuitous, so ugly and cruel.
This is what we do to Silver rats.