Chapter 12 War’s End
It was an old Morish proverb:
Silence before the wolves approach is better than the silence afterward.
The next morning, as Leena waited for St. Silas outside the confession room, she expected his punishment. With a heavy heart, she anticipated it.
None came.
In fact, St. Silas regarded her with only indifferent civility; that odd look he’d given her in the carriage the previous night had completely dissipated from his face by morning. He acted as if Leena holding a gun on him was a commonplace matter, not worth even a mention.
She knew without a doubt that it was a charade.
St. Silas didn’t forgive. He tended to his wrath like he tended to all his business—quietly, watchfully, until the perfect moment arose. Then he struck like a predator hidden between the vines.
Leena would hold her breath until then.
St. Silas’s hair was wet, the thick strands slightly curling at the edges. He still wore his overcoat, the heavy leather boots flecked with mud, and he held a riding crop in his left hand. A newspaper was tucked beneath his elbow.
He did not waste a moment on polite greetings. “The morning confessions are canceled.”
This was unprecedented. She didn’t dare ask for a free day, knowing St. Silas would never allow this. Especially when tomorrow she was due to see Rami. She did not want to remind him of this, especially when she had changed the date without asking for permission.
At her surprised expression, he continued, “There have been riots in Ridgeways.”
“Riots?” she said incredulously.
All the city factories were located in Ridgeways, the ever-present soot blackening the bricks until it left the district looking burned. That was where Leena used to work before entering her contract with St. Silas; she’d spent days there bent over scalding laundry basins.
St. Silas dropped the newspaper into her hands. The front page blared:
Commander Yosif Takes the Capital.
Algaraan Malik in Chains.
The War Is Over.
Leena stared dumbly at it, the words blurring in front of her eyes. The war was over? Just like that? The same war that had seen her family forsaken, thrown to foreign lands, her mother buried in strange soil?
It seemed impossible to Leena that it should end with so little prelude, but the article went on to state that Commander Yosif and his fighters had breached the capital, imprisoned the noble families that had not managed to escape the city, and found the Malik hiding in an oil barrel.
A few sentences tagged onto the end announced that Commander Yosif would be giving a speech the following morning to outline his plans for a new government.
“Are congratulations in order, Miss Al-Sayer, or commiserations?” There was no real interest in St. Silas’s voice as he watched her with his head tilted, hands in his pockets.
He knew her opinions on the war and had heard her whispered words of encouragement to the rebel captain captured within the depths of Newtorn Prison.
He knew that treason lay in her heart, her sentiments staunchly anti-monarch and anti-King, but Leena would not give him any more access to her thoughts than he already possessed.
Especially the kind of thoughts that would see her hanging from the gallows.
Stiffly, Leena folded the paper and handed it back to him, although she longed to read it again when she was not so stunned.
Most of all, she longed to safeguard it as proof that even though she had been born with war in her veins, it did not always have to be that way.
That there was peace in her future, as there was for her homeland. That she would have peace.
It took effort to keep her face neutral in front of St. Silas’s watchful stare, and the small muscles around her eyes ached from it. She circumvented his question with one of her own. “Why are there riots in Ridgeways?”
“Can you not guess?” St. Silas’s brows rose faintly, vaguely indicating the newspaper. “Inspiration is a dangerous thing.”
Leena understood perfectly.
Still, she wanted to hear it confirmed from St. Silas’s mouth.
She wanted to hear him say that all the small changes she had noticed lately taking root in Golborne would lead to something.
That these protests would not falter and be extinguished like her father’s hopes of a union.
“You think the Mors will one day overthrow their aristos?”
St. Silas must have sensed that Leena was rummaging for his own views on the matter. His smile was brief, a grim incline of the mouth. “Either way, Miss Al-Sayer, I will profit.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “How so?”
He shrugged. “War breeds secrets.”
She was no longer surprised that he spoke of bloodshed in terms of commerce, in tallies and profits. “And if war does not come to Morland? If the aristos remain in power?”
“Undoubtedly, I will continue to turn that to my advantage as well.”
All Leena wanted to do was return to her chamber and ruminate on this new world she had awoken to. She bowed to him. “If that is all you need of me, Mr. St. Silas—”
“That is not all.” St. Silas’s voice stopped her before she could make an escape. “Make your way to the carriage, Miss Al-Sayer. We are going to visit Lord Avon’s old house in town.”
—
It was an elegant mansion in the exclusive Maybury District, whitewashed, with ivy trailing the bricks and a trim garden with cut hedges.
St. Silas had managed to procure an invitation, and he took her through each room over and over again until Leena was so exhausted she swayed on her feet.
She’d known from the moment they’d stepped into the house that it was bereft of ghosts, but she’d forced herself to work past her fatigue in hopes that she might be wrong.
All the while St. Silas paced relentlessly on the wooden floors, his steps echoing across the domed ceilings, as restless as a phantom. As the butler gave them the initial tour, his expression grew darker.
“Have you been to this townhouse before?” Leena whispered to him as the aging butler showed them the family portraits of the new Lord Crawford who’d purchased the house in Maybury after Lord Avon’s death.
The Saint’s nod was short and succinct, designed to repel any further questions.
Still, Leena persisted. “What was the reason you visited the first time?”
He gave her a quelling look, and Leena said no more.
On the carriage ride back to his residence, his mouth was tight with displeasure as the silence grew heavy. He stared stonily out at the rapidly filtering landscape, from the mansions that littered the opulent Maybury District to the throughways that became progressively more cobbled and narrow.
It took longer to return to the Northern Quarters than normal.
The soldiers who patrolled the gates between the districts demanded papers from every carriage after that morning’s riots.
They stopped the carriage whenever they caught sight of Leena’s Algaraan features through the window, but waved it on once they recognized St. Silas.
Unsurprised but still annoyed at how being accompanied by St. Silas had made an otherwise horrendous journey smooth, Leena instead focused on breaking the silence with a question that had been plaguing her mind all day. “Are you searching for Lord Avon due to his connection with the Wake?”
The twilight bathed St. Silas’s face in a bluish glow. He dragged a hand downward from his forehead to his mouth, and it occurred to Leena that he looked exhausted. She wondered what he did between forcing confessions from his customers, tormenting those who lied to him, and hunting dead nobles.
She was not surprised by his cold silence so she pressed on, listing points on her fingers.
“This is what I know so far about Lord Avon: He was the last of the Avon line. He led the Wake for an unknown purpose, but presumably to restore wealth. He was mysteriously murdered—a fact that has been well hidden. Upon his death, he lost Weavingshaw to a Mr. Martin, a tradesman who was able to purchase the estate very shortly after Lord Avon’s passing.
” She looked him squarely in the eyes despite his lack of response, not quite fully believing the next point.
“And as far as we are both aware, he left behind nothing of value to tether him to this earth—no object or person.”
She tugged an escaped strand of hair behind her ear in exasperation before continuing.
“And here we reach an impasse. If you remain cloistered in your beastly dark tower, reticent in all your answers, I will have nothing more to go on and we will likely spend our entire lives searching for a ghost that may have never been here to begin with.”
If a pistol could not drag answers out of St. Silas, perhaps logic could.
The carriage had, some minutes ago, reached its destination, yet they both continued to sit in the cold, neither one making a move to leave. Outside, one of the horses stamped an impatient hoof on the street, puncturing the silence between them.
All the impatience St. Silas had shown in the townhouse returned, and he glanced at his timepiece as if this conversation was taking up too much of his time.
Leena didn’t allow his action to discomfit her. She sat rigid on the seat, waiting for an answer.
When he did give it, it was a single word—as if that could explain everything. “Weavingshaw.”
“What about it?” Leena asked over the sudden thrash of rain against the window.
“Lord Avon was going to lose Weavingshaw due to generations of accumulated debt. The lands around the estate are unsuitable for farming, and the waters are too wrathful to fish. Even the coal from the mines is not nearly enough. That’s why he created the Wake, to ensure his hold on the estate.”
Leena’s hand gripped the seat cushion. The rest of her was very still. “He traded prisoners, like cattle, for a house made of mortar and stone?”
“The Avons would have sunk to any form of depravity to keep hold of Weavingshaw,” he replied, and perhaps by this point he’d heard so many sordid confessions that the degradation of the prisoners didn’t faze him. “They consider it the house of their blood.”
“I cannot imagine that sort of devotion.” Leena was an immigrant’s daughter. She’d be lost in the streets of her homeland, a foreigner in the cities her ancestors built.
She thought of Lord Avon’s portrait—the golden noble drenched in privilege but who had still been unsatisfied.
St. Silas claimed that His Lordship had died from a sword through the heart, and Leena suddenly wished that it had been a convict who had done it.
That a disfigured form of justice could still exist.
Riots seemed suddenly to be not enough.
“Then Lord Avon must be in Weavingshaw,” Leena said with growing certainty.
“I can only imagine how the deceased Lord would feel about the object of his obsession being purchased mere months after his death.” She shook her head and continued almost to herself, “If what you say is true, Lord Avon must be irrevocably tied to Weavingshaw—in life and in death.”
St. Silas allowed her to muse out loud, his attention focused outside the window, on the gray courtyard alight with a single flickering lamp.
Then he nodded once.
“Martin holds an annual hunting party in a few weeks’ time at Weavingshaw. I have already arranged it so that we will go as his guests.”
Leena tried to stifle the sudden ignition of hope that flared in her chest. “You’ve arranged it already? If you have known all along that we were going to visit Weavingshaw, why did you not tell me?”
“I am not obligated to alert you of all my plans, Miss Al-Sayer.”
“How have you managed to get an invitation?” Leena asked, but didn’t wait for a response. “Let me guess: You have blackmail material on Mr. Martin.”
“Does it matter? We will have our admission before the start of winter.” His mouth was a thin line. He seemed irritated by her, more than he usually was when she asked questions. In fact, even more than when Leena had held a gun to him. “Must you wear that scent?”
Genuine surprise brought her head up. “What scent?”
“The lavender,” he said curtly. He did not glance at her, his stare still firmly planted on the gray courtyard outside. “The perfume you’ve been using to interrupt my confessions.”
It was such a sudden change of subject that it took Leena a moment before she cleaned her expression.
She had worn it in the beginning to spite him, bringing the scent of floral growth to his barren confession room.
When she had realized that it did nothing to alleviate the burden of confessing, it had just become a part of her daily morning routine, a comfort amid the fear.
She folded her arms. “If you are implying that I am using it to distract your con—”
“I am not implying it. I am stating it as fact.” The words seemed to be forced from him. “I do not condone any distractions in my consultations, Miss Al-Sayer.”
“No one has taken notice of it.”
“I have taken notice. That is enough.”
He stared at her for another long moment. “Can ghosts smell?”
She furrowed her brows, unsure what exactly he was asking and for what purpose. “Not that I am aware,” she replied slowly.
He acknowledged her answer with a curt nod before throwing the carriage door open, descending swiftly and holding out a hand to her. “Even now,” he said, as she took his hand with a gloved palm, his skin still searing through the layers. “You are a distraction.”