Chapter 16 The Fiction of Her Own Purity #2
The chamber was cold. She knelt to touch the ash in the hearth. It was old, more like dust. Not from earlier that day, and maybe not from any time recently. It lent credence to the rumor he was bedridden, but even a dying dog could bite.
Elloven started on the tips of her toes, but the tapestries trapped the sound of her footsteps, so she walked normally.
She moved from the sitting room to another, similar room, just as flamboyant and needless and empty as the last. A third was the same, differentiated only by a desk spanning half of the back wall. It looked about as used as the hearth.
She stopped at the next doorway. It opened into a more somber space, heavy dark curtains shut and tied tight.
There were several tables full of various items, basins and tinctures and rags, evidence of convalescent care.
In the corner of the mirror’s reflection, she saw the end of the bed, the thin lump of blanket in the shape of upright feet.
The putrescence of disease was powerful.
She longed to open a window and let the air in, but the reek of his fading life galvanized her.
It reinforced the injustice that had built her world, perhaps all worlds, that a man like Sestinn should enjoy almost nine decades while pure souls like her brother barely had two.
She ran her fingertips along the basins and bottles, to allow herself one more moment, one final composure before she slayed another of her monsters.
“Who’s there? Claire? Eve?”
Elloven opened one set of curtains to make use of the moonlight. “Are those your nurses or your victims?” she asked and approached the end of the oaken bed, stepping intentionally into a place where the light would reveal her. “Or both?”
Sestinn was indeed frail, half the man he’d been when she’d last seen him: eyes sunken, flesh thin, mottled, and nearly translucent.
His lower jaw had shifted to the left, and he couldn’t quite close his mouth.
His arms lay straight atop the blankets as though they’d been positioned there by someone, and his fingers were gnarled inward, like he had the desire to make them claws but not the strength.
She would not have recognized him if she’d seen him out of context.
“I know you.” His shaky voice rattled in his throat and off the tongue. “How do I know you?”
One final insult. He and his son had harmed so many girls and women that he couldn’t even keep them straight. “You knew me. Your son knew me better though.”
“You’re not Claire or Eve. Wait. You’re.
.. Castien didn’t tell me... I signed your divorce decree, so why would you.
.. or are you my granddaughter? Your name escapes me, dear.
Some things go and some things remain. I don’t get to choose.
” He squinted, his bony nose scrunching.
A thin tension spread across his face, and his eyes dilated.
He slid his hand along the quilt, toward the table and a bell he could ring for aid.
Elloven retrieved it herself. She placed it near a basin and sat on the side of the bed nearest the arm still pointing toward the nightstand. Revulsion crept up, and she reverted to an old habit, tapping and counting with her fingers on her outer thigh. “Has it come to you yet?”
“Abbess.” Gone was the doddering, confused old man. In his rheumy eyes was the diabolical schemer who had made the Reliquary the mainstay of his corruption, ruling from the shadows.
“Yes, that’s what they called the young women punished for the actions of men,” Elloven said bitterly. “A means to atone for our waywardness, they said, like it was a choice.”
“What...” His throat rattled when he cleared it. “Where is my son?”
“Don’t worry, you’ll see him again soon,” she replied.
Gertrude’s knife cooled against her hip.
Chaos whispered in her ear. But Elloven didn’t need or want either.
If she was going to take a man’s life with clear intention, she would choose the most basic weapon of all.
She would feel every second of his death.
As he waned, she would rise. “Say my name. Tell me you remember. Say it aloud and I’ll make it quick, though you don’t deserve it. ”
“I don’t...” His head shook on the pillow. The moisture pooling beneath his lid was infuriating, but she couldn’t spiral. Not there. Not then. “It was so long ago.”
“For you. For me, it was yesterday.”
“I don’t understand.” Tears spilled toward his temples, dropped onto the pillow. “You weren’t... one of mine.”
Elloven leaned close. “I came to you, Sestinn. I fell to my knees and begged you, as someone I believed to be a man of honor and duty, to make your son stop. To help me. Do you recall what you said to me?”
Sestinn shook his head.
“‘Embrace your fortune, girl, for he tires of the others far quicker.’”
His crooked jaw snapped together. A bit of drool escaped the corner. “Eleanor. Baron Hawthorne’s girl.”
“Close enough,” she whispered through gritted teeth. “You know who I am, which means now you know why I’m here.”
“To kill me.”
Elloven nodded. “And then your son.”
“No.” He coughed, and more spittle bubbled up. “No, not my son.”
“His death, I’m afraid, will not be so merciful.”
“I can pay you. My banker... His name—”
Elloven clamped her hand atop his wet mouth.
His eyes, swimming with fear, quivered in their sockets.
There was a wrongness she’d felt from the moment she’d sat next to him, but until she actually touched him, she hadn’t known where it had come from.
She imagined her hands around his thin neck as he died, confused and crying, and it left her hollow.
There’d be no joy or reclamation of power.
He was pitiful and pathetic, but to die unable to fight back?
He and his son took their pleasure from exploiting vulnerability, but if she killed Sestinn—any man who was this defenseless—all she’d leave with was an even deeper hole in her soul.
It wasn’t right, not for her. She’d missed her opportunity by about ten years.
“I don’t want your money. What I need can’t be bought.”
He gasped for air when she removed her hand. She couldn’t look at him another second, not even through the haze of tears. It was time to find Castien, who would fight back and then some.
But she couldn’t know what Sestinn was still capable of. If she slipped out and he screamed or managed to knock something over to get his guard’s attention, she’d be caught.
Elloven hurriedly searched the bottles, reading the labels for something that would be of use.
She chose the one labeled “Henbane & Seed of Poppy,” grabbed a spoon, and returned to his side.
He stared, indolent, as she slipped two spoonfuls into his chattering mouth.
It didn’t take long. A few minutes later, he was asleep.
Elloven shook out her trembling hands. She held onto the table’s surface as she knelt, her head bowed, breathing through pursed lips. She closed her eyes with a pathetic whimper.
How could she have known he’d be so far gone as to not even remember? There was still Castien, and he would put up the fight she’d come for, but Sestinn had blunted her enthusiasm, made her vengeance feel small and misspent.
But she didn’t have time to overanalyze, and if she waited too long, she might not have the conviction either.
Elloven pulled herself up and together. In the mirror’s reflection, she wiped her tears and straightened her posture, then returned down the same steps she’d used to get there.
Gertrude wasn’t there, and she was glad for it, because she didn’t want to explain her failure.
The flour-drawn map was still fresh in her mind as she started toward Castien’s office.
She traveled down a servant’s passage, then into a long hall, where the office was supposed to be.
She drew the blade as a precaution, but she wouldn’t use it unless she had to.
Elloven watched a guard walk the other way and waited for him to patrol far enough not to turn back.
She had no trouble finding her way because the office stood out from the other entrances.
The doors were exactly as Gertrude had described and yet didn’t quite do them justice.
The smooth ebony was startlingly out of place, even there, and the carvings gave her pause: nude women, in various poses, their mouths and eyes gaped in pure terror.
A monster’s tableau right there, for everyone walking by to see, day in, day out.
Any hesitation disintegrated with the violent, resolute chill that ripped through her from the blades of her shoulders to the tips of her toes.
Elloven shoved open the weighty doors, staggering into the room from the force of her entry.
Every gasp of breath left her lungs at the sight in front of her.
Castien was slumped over his desk, his face askew in an expanding pool of blood.
Behind him was Jesstin, his dagger still raised as he looked up and directly at her.
She went slack. Her knife clattered to the floor.
Jesstin wiped his face on his arm, leaving a diagonal slash of blood across his nose and cheek. He said nothing, a strain tightening his jaw, his stare fixed to her as though he’d seen a ghost.
Then he tossed his dagger to the side, smacked the desk as he marched past it, past her, and disappeared into the hall without a word.
Her questions never formed. Jesstin was gone. He’d been there, and now he was gone. She hadn’t imagined him, and she was certainly not imagining Castien slumped dead over his desk.
She spun again right as Jesstin charged deeper into the keep. Probably headed to pay Sestinn a similar visit.
Maybe, Elloven considered, flustered... Maybe Castien wasn’t dead yet. Maybe there was still time. She raced over and lifted a limp arm, checking for a pulse she already knew she wouldn’t find, but even if she had found one, it was over. It was done.