Chapter 73
Seventy-Three
Sorcha
It was my first day back working when the letter came through.
My first day pretending that the whole world hadn’t ended the minute Lucy stopped breathing.
My first day trying to convince myself that I could still read with the blurry blotches of color flickering in my left eye.
My first day doing much of anything besides curling in Neal’s lap and letting him attempt to soothe the ache that had implanted itself permanently in the pit of my now childless belly.
“You’ll want to read this one yourself, lass,” Ansel said, knocking on my office door then letting himself in and pushing an envelope across my desk.
“Eye’s not cooperating today,” I replied. “Summarize.”
“They found him,” Ansel said. “They found the original cult leader. Still alive. Still recruiting. In Svensksund, Finland.”
Less than two days trip from Iksura’s Inner Court palace near Kingisepp in Russia.
“Disturbingly close to Iksura,” I replied. “Is he in custody?”
Ansel nodded.
“Then get him here,” I instructed.
“He’s already on the way,” Ansel said, then paused, brows knitting together. “I don’t want to presume but . . .”
“You literally do nothing else,” I replied. “Go on.”
“You’ll leave interrogation to me and the guards?”
“What and not give you the chance to manhandle me and say my marriage was a mistake again?” I snapped in reply. “Punch one prisoner and suddenly I’m the problem.”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Ansel said. “Now you have a very disgruntled telegram from an Elven couple in Tibet with a Naga that seems to be backing their local organized crime syndicate. Have fun with that, lass.”
The prisoner arrived from Finland six days later, an unassuming man with straw-blond hair and ice-blue eyes, probably between sixty-five and seventy years old. His worn grey-brown suit was torn in places, stained with what might have been blood, and there was a greenish bruise fading on his cheek.
“He put up a fight?” I asked the guards as they led him down to the barn where Ansel had been preparing an interrogation chamber for days. The guard nodded in response. He was one of Ansel’s favorites, named Christopher, another Irishman maybe two decades older than Neal.
The sheep and donkey were less than amused at being driven out of their home, and now spent the better part of their day standing on our patio baaing and braying their discontent.
Attempts to calm them down, even magical, had proved largely fruitless.
I shuddered, wondering how they’d behave once Ansel and Christopher started making demands and drawing blood.
“You letting him sit and get hungry, cold, and tired first, or are you going in today?” I asked as Ansel followed the guards in from the cart path.
“Hungry, cold, and tired,” Ansel replied. “Too important to rush it.”
“Neal and I are going out with a few of the local farmers to the pastures over on the east side of the island tomorrow morning,” I said. “Get your work done then. Report back with news by dinner.”
“Understood.”
We returned for supper the next night to find Glen, Christopher, and Ansel seated out in the front yard. Ansel’s knuckles were bloodied, expression defeated.
“You should have come and found us if something went wrong,” I scolded the moment we were in earshot.
“Nothing’s properly wrong, lass,” Ansel replied. “We broke him. He’s talking. It’s only just that he only speaks Finnish.”
“He only speaks Finnish?” I repeated. “And this is the first anyone has realized that?”
“We roughed him up and got him in a wagon. Put a gag on him. Didn’t hear him talk until we got here,” Christopher explained. “And then he was damn tight-lipped the first four or so hours. But when he finally started? It was all gibberish.”
“Do you speak Finnish?” Neal asked, his tone cautious but hopeful.
I shook my head.
“Could you learn?” Glen suggested.
“It’s a bizarre language,” I replied. “Hardly related to anything. So no. Not without it taking weeks at a minimum.”
I racked my brain for a solution—finding a willing translator for something that obscure could take months, word would get out, Iksura would ask questions. If we wanted to act? We needed to move quickly.
“I have an ethically questionable but potentially useful thought,” I finally said. “Remember the girls from Estonia?”
“What, the kids Iksura orphaned?” Ansel asked.
I nodded. “Estonian and Finnish are sister languages, Uralic. They won’t be able to understand all of it, but maybe enough?”
“So you’re suggesting we send someone down to Bath and functionally kidnap children to have them translate for a man we’ve just tortured a confession from?” Neal stared at me in disbelief.
“Ansel’s rubbing off on me.”
“So exactly how rough is our prisoner looking at this point?” I asked Ansel as I went through the correspondence with the young Elven couple who’d hired on our two refugee girls down in Bath.
“You don’t want to know,” Ansel muttered from his place across my desk. “Why?”
“Because we’re about to drag two children in to translate what he says,” I replied. “Children who have had more than enough trauma for one lifetime.”
“So you’re suggesting we give up?” Ansel raised an eyebrow.
“I’m suggesting I transcribe.”
“Do I need to remind you that the last time I let you at a prisoner you clocked him in the nose?”
“Do I need to remind you that he confessed immediately after?”
“You’re still not well,” Ansel argued.
“I’m well enough,” I said. “And I should be able to transcribe, even if I don’t know what he’s saying. Phonetics work across languages far better than actual vocabulary.”
“I hate this plan.”
“So do I,” I agreed. “Now tell me what time to come down to the barn.”
It was worse than I anticipated in every single way.
The barn smelled like shit and blood. I was awestruck for a moment that my stomach didn’t immediately try to turn itself inside out at the stench.
Then I remembered why the too-familiar nausea had abated, and the aching hollowness returned.
I’d cry about it later—cry at my baby’s grave and apologize that I’d condoned torture to try and get justice for her death.
The old man was blood streaked, one eye swollen shut, and his nose clearly broken—repeatedly, recently.
Ansel and Christopher had him tied to a chair and stripped to his drawers.
A ragged purple scar that looked like a bite mark marred the left half of his lower abdomen.
He was trembling. Though with how my breath fogged the air down here by the coast and the stark, dark circles under his eyes, I couldn’t be certain if that was fear or cold or fatigue.
Christopher kicked the leg of the chair, and the old man started talking, fast, almost indecipherable.
I scribbled down what I could and prayed that it would be enough.
Akhila and Vetri Chettiar were being far too nice to us.
Records said that one of my father’s emissaries had sponsored their immigration from Tamil Nadu to Bath fifteen years back, before the war in India started.
Apparently, they felt they still owed the Outer Court for the kindness.
So they’d taken in the Estonian refugee girls and started teaching them a trade in their fabric shop without question or hesitation.
And now they’d picked up their lives with all of two days’ notice to bring the girls back, refusing every offer to let one of our guards make the trip instead.
We quickly learned that the younger of the two sisters—Tiiu—couldn’t read yet, in any language. But the older one—Anna—was going through my transcriptions with admirable patience and dedication. After a few hours work, she looked up, eyes wide and worried.
“Lady Sorcha?” she asked. Her voice had a tremor in it that I didn’t like. “This is about demons.”
“Well, that settles that,” Ansel muttered.
“Do you want to think about how much trouble you’d be in right now if you’d kidnapped the wrong man?” I hissed in reply, low enough only he could hear.
“Haven’t been wrong yet.”
“Neal, take Akhila, Vetri, and Tiiu down to see the donkey,” I said. “Would you?”
Neal looked uncertain for a moment, like he was debating leaving me alone—he’d clung like a shadow since I came back from transcribing. But eventually he conceded and herded them out—leaving me, Ansel, and Anna.
“Ansel, give us space,” I instructed, and he too ducked out.
“I wanted to tell you something good,” Anna said, voice breaking, the moment Ansel closed the door.
“You’re here to tell me what the paper says,” I replied gently.
“Its contents are not your responsibility, and you don’t need to feel any guilt or any shame for translating them.
Anna, this work that you’re doing now is going to save people’s lives.
All I need you to do is write out what those notes say in English. ”
“Can I just say it out loud?” Anna asked. “I don’t want to see it in my own writing.”
“Makes no difference to me,” I said. “Start when you’re ready. Take breaks when you need to.”
And so she cleared her throat, looked at the page in front of her, and began. “He says he started getting unsigned letters with a symbol on them. It seems like from the way he’s talking you all know what the symbol is?”
I nodded for her to continue.
“He got a lot of letters over a lot of years. And he started to dream about the symbol, then to draw it when his mind wandered. First, he drew it on blank paper. Then, a few months later, he accidentally drew it instead of signing a check. Then one day, he started scratching it into the wall with his nails. That symbol had blood on it. And a white light came out and from it emerged . . . I don’t think you spelled this right, but I think he’s saying a purple flaming bird?
“The bird gave him a piece of coal that didn’t burn his hands when he touched it. And when he held the coal, he could see the future. Lady Sorcha, that’s bad. We’re not meant to see that!”
“I know, Anna,” I agreed. “Everything he’s saying is bad. But by translating it for me you can prevent more bad people from doing more bad things. Alright?”
The young girl nodded, then continued, “He started to experiment with the coal and then with the symbol itself. If you used blood to draw it, then a creature would come out. Sometimes they were big, and sometimes they were small, and sometimes they brought gifts that would give you magical powers. He told all his friends, everyone he knew, he traveled sharing word about it and giving people instructions. He built up a following. He got people to pay him to even try and use the symbol to chase after the magic. But the powers didn’t last long.
And the creatures had a taste for blood.
One day, he says only last week, he drew a big symbol with the blood of a cow he’d slaughtered on the stones of his courtyard.
A giant black dog emerged with pincers like a beetle. It tried to . . .”
Anna trailed off, swallowed hard, then finally choked out, “It tried to bite him in half. He hasn’t tried to summon anything with the symbol since.”
“You did well,” I assured her. “You want to burn your notes?”
She nodded. “I want to go see a priest.”
“You can do that too.”
“We still don’t have a link to Iksura,” I said.
“But we know where and how the cults started and why the portals are opening at such high frequency now,” Ansel said. “That’s worth a lot.”
“So what are we going to do about it?” I asked.
“What I do best,” Ansel said casually. “Get the monsters to stop doing monstrous things.”
“And in this case, the monsters?” I prompted.
“Are the cultists every bit as much as the demons they summon,” Ansel replied.
He went out to the barn with Christopher one last time, bearing a note that Anna had translated for us. It read:
You may not think you fear death. And that’s probably true.
But you’re hardly well acquainted with it.
But once a snapping turtle bites off your first finger?
You’ll find you’ve become very afraid of your second one being bitten as well.
Familiarity breeds contempt. If you spread the word that the symbol is poison and spend the rest of your days discouraging its use?
Then you will never gain that familiarity.
If not? A snapping turtle will be only the start.
Ansel put him on a rowboat off the coast the next day.