Chapter Eight
If she told anyone, she would die.
“The Bastion Weave is a class A ward lattice of military application that I worked on for the better part of my career and finished six months ago.
Headmaster Wolff asked me to sew six of them and not one more.
We placed them inside the walls of five cities: Landshut, Schrobenhausen, Pfaffenhofen, Neuburg, and Ingolstadt.
These cities will not fall. They can withstand a siege for however long the Bastion Weave is intact, undiscovered, and unremoved.
The sixth lattice is in the wall of Kr?henstein Academy, in case the one protecting the city fails.
But none of them will fail. The pattern does not have a kill-stitch, and all six lattices were made by my own hands, with no assistance from a shard technician.
It is a pattern that is unregistered and unknown to anyone aside from Headmaster Wolff and myself.
The only rendition of it exists within the pages of this journal, split into parts and hidden between sketches and observations.
Only a master weaver would be able to put it together and recreate it. Its shape is that of a trebled chevron.
To ensure that neither of us shared this secret with anyone, the headmaster and I decided to take an oath over the sacred mandible of Saint Tacmund.
If we break the vow, the consequence is death.
Moreover, the secret takes residence in the person it was confessed to, and that person shall keep it, or they will die as well and pass on the curse.
This is all. Now that I got it out, I’m feeling better already.
My mind is clear and my breathing even. The tension is leaving my muscles.
The toll of the Oath Relic is great. I knew it when I agreed to use it, but I didn’t think for a moment that it would crush me so.
The secret wants to come out. The voices scream in my head day and night, until I catch myself opening my mouth to speak it into the world and lay the curse upon anyone who will hear it.
We will soon arrive at Kr?henstein. Two more days on the road, then the headmaster and I will ease the toll for each other, as the oath wants to be spoken of.
Locking ourselves in his office and recounting the strategy we’ve used to ensure that the five cities and the academy will never fall into the hands of the Blasphemer makes the toll bearable.
I should’ve known I wouldn’t be able to carry it on my own. I should’ve never left for Tuscany.
Now, to burn these pages.”
Matteo had, in fact, not burned the pages.
Seraphina slammed the journal shut. Slowly, she set it aside, unfolded herself from the workbench, and moved to its edge, feet planted on the floor, hands on her knees. With her back straight, she stared at nothing in particular, just straight ahead, blinking normally. Her vision was less blurry.
She heard Idris come in, and she turned to him. He lit up, dropped the shovel and rushed to her, placed his hands on her cheeks to tilt her head toward the light of the fire.
“Look at you! I missed your beautiful, blue eyes.”
Seraphina smiled. She’d missed him too. She took in his dark skin, high cheekbones, his black hair cut close to his skull, his full lips and clean-shaved jaw. He never missed a shave, not even in the direst of circumstances.
“Any pain?” he asked. “How well do you see?”
“Well enough,” she said.
He laughed. “Seems like you’ve done some reading already, so I believe you.” He motioned at the discarded journal. “Anything good?”
“Oh, I just learned about this lattice–”
She stopped abruptly, her hand clamped over her mouth, her eyes wide and fixed on Idris, who lifted an eyebrow at her reaction.
“What lattice?” he asked.
Seraphina shook her head, not removing her hand from her traitorous mouth.
“Are you all right?”
She jumped off the workbench, grabbed Matteo’s journal, and with her back to Idris, opened it and ripped off the last few pages. She scrunched them up and threw them in the fire.
“Seraphina?”
She watched them burn and didn’t utter a word until they were ashes.
“I’m all right,” she said. “I… I don’t know what came over me.” She touched her temple. Her hands were shaking. “Today was a lot.”
“I agree. You need to rest. Close your eyes for a bit. I’ll make you some tea. Or would you like a cup of warm beer?”
“Beer, yes. That’s what I need. Thank you.”
Despite his suggestion, Seraphina couldn’t sit still.
She paced the barn, rubbed Bramble’s neck to distract herself, paced some more.
She muttered under her breath without realizing she was doing it, as if she were trying to figure something out, as if she’d just been given a mathematical problem, and she couldn’t find peace until she solved it.
“What’s that?” Idris asked.
Her head snapped up. “N-Nothing. Don’t mind me.”
He gave her the cup of beer, and she gratefully curled her fingers around the warm metal. Idris drank water, which he’d achieved by melting snow earlier and boiling it.
“We nearly have a cleared path,” he said. “I’ll work for another hour, then we can eat.”
“Yes, that sounds good. I’ll prepare the food.”
He gave her an indulgent smile. “Don’t push yourself.”
“No, I want to help. For once.”
“All right. You can make your own food if you want. I don’t need you to cook for me, though.” He winked at her and grabbed the shovel. “You’re not my wife.”
Seraphina shook her head because her eyes weren’t yet ready for a roll.
Organized as ever, Idris had built a makeshift kitchen near the fire.
She found the pan he used to cook her meals, cut a generous slice of smoked pork, and threw it in.
It sizzled and filled the barn with the delicious smell of fat.
She added beer and a piece of hardtack, thinking how nice it would be to have some vegetables.
There was a sack of dried peas, but those were for Idris, who could barely eat anything that the army supplied.
Since he’d come to Bavaria when he was fifteen, it hadn’t been easy for him.
This was pork country. The pig was on every plate from the lowest tavern to the highest table.
Kr?henstein Academy had students from every part of the known world, and its kitchens knew to set aside portions before they touched what they weren’t supposed to. The world outside was not so careful.
She set melted snow to boil so she could soak a handful of peas for him. Her hands shook as she tried to focus on what she was doing. The fire was too low, so she added a log to it. She winced when a splinter got under her fingernail.
What was she doing, acting so natural, like her world hadn’t just been tipped off its axis?
A tremor started in her chest and spread through her torso and back.
She stumbled on her feet and grabbed onto the edge of an overturned crate they used as a table to steady herself.
Her teeth were chattering, her hands shaking.
She held them in front of her eyes, fingers splayed, and blinked in disbelief. She couldn’t control herself.
A whimper escaped her throat, and she doubled over and dry heaved.
It was all his fault. It was all Matteo’s fault. She understood now. It was as clear as day. Clearer, even!
He wrote the secret in his journal, failed to burn the pages, somehow forgot the journal when they left Langenbach, and the tavern keeper’s boy, Kaspar, read it.
She was willing to bet on her own life that when Kaspar read Matteo’s confession, their carriage was attacked on the road to Ingolstadt.
Matteo died because that was the punishment of the Oath Relic.
But it didn’t end there. They took his body and chopped it into pieces for the High Harvester to use in his experiments.
And Seraphina… They raped her, took her eyes, and left her for dead in a ditch.
He did this to them. To her!
Seraphina covered her mouth with her hand as she sobbed.
Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes, and now her vision was even blurrier.
She smelled burning food and rushed to take the pan off the fire.
The water boiled over and nearly extinguished the flames before she managed to snatch the pot and pour half of it over her trembling hand.
She cried out but didn’t let go. Once the pot was secure on the crate, she dumped peas in it, refusing to let Idris down just because she was losing her mind.
Why didn’t Matteo burn the pages like he always did?
Something or someone must have interrupted him. She couldn’t fathom how distracted he must’ve been to leave his precious journal with all his pattern sketches behind.
It was the toll. The mandible of Saint Tacmund, also known as the Oath Relic, was one of the most dangerous and vile apex relics held in the academy’s strongroom. Few people had access to it, and it was never taken out to be displayed in the museum or at festivals.
Saint Tacmund had served as a confessor in a small parish, south.
The year had been 1634. One winter, a man came to him at night and unburdened his sins.
What the man confessed was not a sin against God; it was political.
His enemies came for Tacmund before the sun rose.
They held him for three days. On the first day, a soldier ordered him to speak, and he did not.
On the second day, a captain came and sat across from him.
“I’ve broken harder men than you,” the captain said. “Tell me what he confessed, and I will let you go home.”
Tacmund said nothing. By the third morning, he was barely recognizable. The men looked at him and understood that no amount of time or pain was going to open his mouth, so they brought him before the other prisoners they held and hanged him in the open air.
The power of Saint Tacmund’s relic was great.
So, the toll for using it matched its greatness.
Seraphina couldn’t believe that two brilliant men had made such a stupid mistake.
Both Konstantin Wolff and Matteo da Siena had known perfectly well what they were getting into.
She understood how crucial it was that no one found out about the lattices in the walls, that the information never got to the Harvester.
But still, using the Oath Relic had been irresponsible.
Now, Seraphina carried the secret. She also carried the toll. If she told anyone, she would die, and the secret and the toll would be passed on to them.
She fell to her knees, head hung low, and the next thing she knew, tears were running down her face and landing on the backs of her hands as she dug her fingernails into her thighs.
It was the first time in two years. She could cry again, so she allowed herself to break, to let out all the hurt, frustration, and betrayal that she felt.
Matteo hadn’t done it intentionally, but it was still his fault.
It wasn’t fair to her that he’d made a choice, and his choice had put her through hell.
She’d almost died once, and now she could die again.
The man should’ve loved her, not tried to kill her twice!
She ugly cried until she was so exhausted that she couldn’t sit upright anymore and collapsed on her hands, forehead pressed to the floor. That was how Idris found her. He rushed to her, helped her stand, and walked her to the workbench.
“We must leave,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Tomorrow. Even if it snows or hails, I don’t care. We leave.”
He pushed strands of hair out of her face.
“The weather is looking good, so we will leave.”
Seraphina nodded.
“Would you look at that, though? Your eyes work perfectly.”
She smiled between tears.
Rune. She needed to find him.
He had Matteo’s hands, which gave him Matteo’s master weaver skills.
He could even play the piano exactly like Matteo, with the same technique, making the same mistakes.
Rune had told her that he knew things – foreign and contradictory, things one man couldn’t have known at once. Seraphina wondered… Hoped.
What if deep within Rune, in the place where bits of Matteo’s consciousness resided, there was a buried memory of the oath?
Matteo had been her destruction. Perhaps Rune could be her salvation.