Chapter 24 What Is Lawful, What Is Right
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What Is Lawful, What Is Right
“Why in the name of all the hells are you crying?” Nissa groaned, as though Auria’s tears were a personal affront.
Auria was sobbing too hard to respond.
“You don’t even like me. Disdain would be too generous a word.
” Nissa sighed, resting her head back on three stacked pillows.
She looked, quite frankly, appalling. Her usually shiny black hair hung around her sallow face like lank tendrils of seaweed, and her collarbones cut severely through her pale blue tunic.
There were bleeding pinholes in the crooks of her elbows from when she’d woken up, spotted the intravenous fluids, and pridefully yanked them out.
“I know,” Auria whispered, tasting warm salt.
She took a seat at Nissa’s bedside, and a velvine leapt immediately into her lap, sensing she might need a breath of pleasure.
Auria stroked the creature’s sleek black fur, its piercing purple eyes surveying her face. “I abhor you in most meaningful ways.”
“You must have been so bored without me,” Nissa went on, the antagonism bolstering her by the minute, like a plant who’d spent many weeks without water and was suddenly being fed.
“Something like that.”
“Come on, Marriosan. Why are you so overcome?”
Auria looked around to avoid meeting Nissa’s dragonesque gaze.
The hospital wing was dotted with golden lanterns and fur pelts, its walls adorned with salacious murals.
Orchestral music played softly from an unseen source, and every bedside table and medicine cabinet was stuffed with bowls of candied citrus peels and honey-roasted chestnuts.
Beyond the arched windows, a sickle moon hung over Atherin.
“I thought I’d lost everyone, alright? Two months ago, we were all still together as a cohort, bright-eyed and full of wonder at what our futures might hold.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“But now…my grandfather is dead, the captain is dead. Alirrol too. Sebran is missing in action. And Tiernan…”
“Karvas told me. I’m sorry.”
“Are you?” Auria laughed bitterly. “You thought he was a weak-chinned fool.”
“Well, yes. But poor bone structure and a predilection for cowardice does not a deserving victim make. Sebran’s missing?”
“Failed to report for duty in Carduban last month. Vanished into thin air.” As Auria dabbed at her teary face with her cloak sleeve, she caught a whiff of that morning’s perfume: currantpalm and cocoa.
She often felt like the only mage on the continent for whom sex was not appealing, but the rich, heady scent sent a lick of pleasure into her well.
“Hells.” Nissa stuffed several crescents of sugared grapefruit rind into her mouth at once, so that her next words sounded gummy. “He’s so obsessed with honor and duty. He’d never abandon his post willingly.”
“Exactly. But we have no real leads.”
Nissa swallowed, then drank enough water to sink a small fishing vessel. “Aspar too. Fuck. How can someone so powerful do something as mediocre as die? Do you think I’m allowed to smoke in here?”
“I think not.” Auria gnawed the inside of her cheek. “So you’ve been briefed on the Havenwood.”
“Indeed. Honestly, the trouble you all get into without me.”
“Are you still on the assignment?”
“I am.” Nissa’s golden eyes fixed onto Auria. “You’ve been moved to the Whitewings.”
“Yes.” The single syllable was hard, raw.
“Bet you love that. Bet you think none of us will work hard enough on the Bloodmoons.”
Auria saw no reason to deny her nature to one of the people who knew her best. “When will you be back to active duty?”
“Within the next five minutes, if they won’t let me smoke on the ward.” Nissa grimaced, her face more lined than it had been before the dock raid, her usually luscious lips dry and chapped. When she shifted in her bed, her mouth let loose an involuntary grunt.
“Are you in pain?” Auria asked, leaning forward, though to do what, she wasn’t sure.
“Not from the curse. It’s my monthly bleed. Did you know that they don’t stop just because you’re in a deep coma? I find it thoroughly unreasonable.”
Auria frowned—her own bleeds were light and relatively painless. “They trouble you that much?”
Nissa clenched her jaw, her gaze growing a little foggy. “It feels like my lower belly is in a vise for days. I often vomit, sometimes can barely stand. Every few months, it makes me feel so low that I consider hurling myself from the highest tower at headquarters.”
Sympathy softened something in Auria—her migraines made her feel a similar way. “I had no idea.”
“Only Saffron and the Healers know. Paliran keeps offering me whiteroot for the pain, but I daren’t get addicted.
And Saffron…she’s prone to saying things like this is no way to live.
It makes me want to smash something. A life spent in pain is still a life.
Or at least, that’s what I work so hard to convince myself.
And besides—we live in a world where pain is power.
Maybe I’m only me because of it. Is that a fucked-up way to think?
Probably.” Nissa blinked once, hard, as though suddenly realizing where she was—who she was talking to.
“Why am I telling you all this? Did you slip me a truth elixir? I always knew you were a manipulative shrew. Or has the injury dealt a fatal blow to my stoicism?”
But at the mention of Saffron, Auria had ceased listening.
She looked around the ward. It was relatively full, but the curtains between beds had been enchanted with muffling charms for privacy.
“Saffron keeps trying to contact me. By wand, chasing me down busy streets. Claiming she’s deep undercover.
She was at the Havenwood in a scarlet cloak, and she was on the docks the night you were almost killed.
” Auria studied Nissa’s face for a reaction, but the flame-hearted Wielder had stilled.
“She claimed the only people who knew were the captain and…you.”
Auria might as well have struck Nissa hard across the face. The latter mage winced. “Hells, Saffron. She’s trapped in there without Aspar. Did Aspar really not inform anyone…? Hells. Hells.”
A terrible pit yawned open inside Auria. “It’s true?”
“I don’t know if I should—”
“If it wasn’t, you’d deny outright.”
Guilt poured into the gaping hole in Auria’s chest. The way she’d treated Saffron back on Broad Row, the things she’d said…
Saffron was undercover. Saffron had run out of allies, run out of people who knew the truth. And Auria had turned her back, shut her out. Shamed her, belittled her, threatened her.
Nissa sat bolt upright in bed. “We have to get her out.”
“I can’t get involved,” Auria whispered. “Jebat told me to stay in my lane, keep my hands clean of the Bloodmoons.”
Nissa stared at her incredulously. “You see, this is why I so loathe you.”
“Rules are rules, and—”
“Doing things by the book doesn’t necessarily mean doing them right.” The gold lanterns on either side of the open windows flared into wilder, hotter flames, as though responding to the emotions of the powerful Wielder in the bed. “Especially when the very people who wrote the rules are corrupt.”
“Did everyone know about Dematus except me?”
“Who said anything about Dematus?”
“Karvas, then.”
Nissa raked a hand through her oily hair. “There is something crooked about the new captain. I don’t think you were transferred off the Bloodmoons because you were too close to it. I think you were transferred because you’re too good at your job.”
“Maybe so, but—”
“Hells,” Nissa all but spat. “If Tiernan was trapped in a deadly undercover assignment with no one on the outside left to believe him, wouldn’t you want me to help you extract him? What do you care most about? What is lawful, or what is right?”
“As a future Grand Arbiter, I have to say what is lawful.” Auria dipped her chin, feeling anything but proud of her answer.
“Fuck you, Auria.”
The pure vitriol in Nissa’s voice stung Auria like acid.
She fought the urge to cry afresh—it would only piss Nissa off more.
“We are never going to be able to bring down the Bloodmoons with the likes of Karvas and Dematus at the helm. To make a real difference in this city, this country, I need to rise through the ranks, effect change on a higher level. And to do that, I have to be flawless.”
Nissa shook her head, disgusted. “It could be decades before you earn the Highcloak—if you ever do. Are you suggesting we just let Saffron rot until then?”
“I’m not suggesting we do anything. You can and should help her. But I’ve been ordered to stay away from the Bloodmoons, and that’s what I plan to do.”
“Fair enough.” Nissa slumped back against her pillows, curling her fingers around a phantom achullah. “Tiernan died a coward, and you always were made for each other.”
Auria blinked, stunned by the depths to which her rival would stoop in the name of landing a blow. “Saints, you’re a vicious little cunt.”
Nissa laughed, then, a bitter, rolling thing. “Wow. The great Auria Marriosan, swearing like a sailor?” She closed her eyes, as though she couldn’t bear to look at Auria any longer. “Fetch me Jebat, will you? I need someone with a spine to know the truth about Saffron Killoran.”