Chapter 31 Stakeout
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Stakeout
Auria spent the first stakeout slotting recent events into troubling place.
If Karvas was indeed corrupt, his order to destroy the Whitewings made awful sense.
With violence between the whites and the scarlets escalating, and rumors of improved Whitewing organization and structure circulating, it was clear that the mages in white were one of the biggest threats to Bloodmoon reign.
So if Karvas was a scarlet sympathizer, he would want the whites gone—and he would want his best detectives working to make that happen.
Auria took a sip from her flask of c?nnafyr and peered across Fallow Grange at the thus far deserted hub of purported Whitewing activity: an abandoned building on a street of otherwise happily occupied townhouses.
It stuck out like a rotten tooth, all shuttered windows and wild weeds.
Having been used as a plague house during the Zayel Fever outbreak of 1108, no landlord or tenant would come near it.
The Vallish believed that death lingered, left a shadow on the world where it occurred, and so the location of so many gruesome deaths was not a fit abode for a well-heeled individual.
There had been a stretch of time a decade ago in which it had been overrun by desperate squatters and addicts, but even they abandoned ship after a while.
Now it was Auria’s job to determine whether the Whitewings were using the place as a simple drophouse or something more sophisticated. A headquarters, a central base. A jail for their hostages, a place of torture and death, as befitted its bleak history.
She was situated by the window of a tall townhouse adjacent to the hotspot, sitting in a saggy armchair slightly too short for her to see comfortably over the windowsill. The hideout smelled of damp wood and inkmouse droppings.
It was four hours after darknight, and she hadn’t spied a single soul.
This suited her, strangely. Since the deaths of Tiernan and her grandfather, she’d found it so unfathomable that the world continued to turn without them.
Whenever she heard laughter, saw children playing or chariots racing or crowds cheering, she felt such a profound sense of separation between herself and the rest of humanity. She had been altered, and they had not.
To walk through the streets of Atherin was to see the shadow of the life she should have been living.
The new coffeehouse on Parlin Place where she and Tiernan might sit and read together—he loved graphic novels, she loved law journals.
Dallo Tander’s latest play at the Royal Theater, which they’d bicker over—Tiernan would declare it pretentious tripe, when really he was irked by Auria’s infatuation with the lead actor.
The blossoming Cherrymarket, where they so often strolled to visit Papa Marriosan at his famous gelato stall.
If Auria extended the astral tendrils in her mind, she felt she could almost cross entire planes of reality, could haul herself into the version of the world where these two wonderful mages had both survived.
Almost, but not quite.
So the quiet, the stillness, suited her just fine. She could allow herself to believe the rest of the world had stopped with her. That she had been given the luxury of a great pause in which to process, to heal. Not that such things felt remotely possible yet; it was all still too raw.
Auria drained the last of her c?nnafyr, wishing she’d brought more. She would be spending at least a moon cycle of nights in an empty, pitch-black room with nothing but her own thoughts for company.
After discovering Tiernan had been compelled, Auria felt less squirming shame over the way he’d died.
He’d had no choice. She missed him so much it was like a toothache in her heart, and yet if she relaxed enough, let go of her inhibitions, she found that she could…
talk to him, in a sense. She had spent so many countless hours chatting to him that her subconscious could perfectly replicate the exact pitch of his voice, could predict what he might say.
Tiernan. I miss you.
—Oh, I miss you too, my love. I am so sorry to have failed you, to have left you.
It almost made her laugh, that her mind so effortlessly conjured his self-deprecation.
You didn’t fail. But you did leave. And it hurts.
—Tell me how you are.
Tears stung at her eyes.
Every day is so hard now.
—I know.
I miss the old me. I’ve never felt this kind of despair before.
My whole life, I believed everything would work out.
Goodness would prevail, justice would prevail.
It’s not that I thought I would never experience loss, it’s just…
I thought I’d handle it better. That I was strong enough to always find the light.
But I am broken, Tiernan. I am broken by the loss of you.
—I’m right here, Aury. Every step of the way. In your head, and your heart. Just beyond your ken.
Next, Auria “spoke” to her grandfather.
Many might think that the loss of her betrothed was a deeper wound than the loss of a mage in his early eighties, a life naturally winding down, but it was the exact opposite.
She missed Tiernan terribly, but she had also lived most of her life without him.
She had never had to live without her grandfather.
He’d held her in his arms as a babe, watched as Auria’s grandmother healed the cuts and grazes on the crying child’s knees, enlisted a gleeful Auria in his gelato recipe development.
Auria remembered one fit of the giggles that lasted four straight days after he’d been overzealous with the active ingredient in his strawberry cream fizzle—neither of them had been able to look at each other without peals of fresh laughter.
Papa.
—Sweetling. Oh, don’t cry, my sweetling. I’m alright. I really am.
But the way you died…you must have been so afraid. So hurt.
—It happened so fast. I’m not in pain anymore.
Where are you, though?
—Simply elsewhere.
Auria shook her head fiercely. It was the part of death she’d never been able to comprehend—the where.
Where were they?
Where were they, where were they, where were they?
Worshippers of the Saints believed that when a mage’s body died, their soul was transmuted back into raw magic, which could be used again—for a spell, for nature, for another soul.
But Auria had always bucked against that idea.
While many found peace in the thought that their loved one was all around them as an arcane force, Auria couldn’t bear the notion of her grandfather being recycled into a simple cloak-mending spell.
Forgetting that she was not talking to her grandfather in any real sense, she found herself asking:
When you passed, what happened? Where did you—
Before Auria could parcel her existential questions so that they could be neatly answered, there was a smudge of movement across the dark street.
A figure in the night, passing through the pools of warm light spilling from the occupied houses, until they reached the plague house. Auria fumbled for her binoculars, lifting them to her face so fast she almost crushed her eye sockets.
The man wore a plain navy cloak over a handsome navy doublet, and dark auburn hair hung around a pale face in perfect waves.
He lifted a goldenjade pocketwatch, frowned down at it, then peered up at the plague house with an expression of grim determination.
He strode up the front path, weaving between the dead weeds and gnarled tree roots.
As he raised a hand to knock, the door opened inward, and the mage in navy stepped over the threshold and disappeared.
Pulse pounding, Auria set down the binoculars and picked up her best quill. She paused, considering how to describe the mage she’d just seen.
There was something distantly familiar about him, something that chimed in the well-ordered recesses of Auria’s memory. She cross-checked her rigorously documented mental files, landing upon the source of the recognition within moments.
During her time at university, this mage had given a guest lecture on the role of prophetic visions in the justice system—how they might be admitted as valid evidence in a trial when they were so hard to prove or verify.
It had been a titillating seminar, and Auria still reviewed her notes from time to time, just for the pleasure of it.
Yes, that was him.
The King’s Prophet.
What was a Highcloak doing in Atherin’s criminal gutters?