by T L Greylock
“Very. I said I could protect you in Arconia. He’s the reason I can say that.”
“You would trust him to keep his word? A moment ago I would have sworn you despised him.”
Manon thought for a moment. “I would trust him to protect you if I asked it of him. Because that would tighten the hold he has over me. Yet another thread binding me to his will.”
Luca hung his head.
“Don’t feel guilty. I have accepted this. And he would have done it by other means, if not through you. He’s very resourceful. And very well informed.” Not well informed enough to know of a horde of stolen Licenzan gold in the Barca family mausoleum, Manon reminded herself. But well enough to know her father had been trying to collect the Alescuan reliquaries, a secret he had admitted having shared with no one.
“What does he have over you?”
Manon looked at Luca, her fingers idle on the reliquary, unsure how to answer that question—or if she should or wanted to. The answer was mired in her conflicting feelings about her father and the Archduke’s promise to reduce his sentence.
In the end, she chose a truth that revealed nothing.
“I don’t really know.”
To her relief, Luca didn’t probe further. The hunter simply nodded and resumed building the fire, as though he had asked a question about the weather in Arconia or whether she thought the sea was blue or green—and as if she had given a perfectly reasonable, logical answer. Manon couldn’t remember the last time her words—her feelings—had been accepted without argument, silent judgment, or willful misunderstanding.
As she watched Luca’s fire spark and grow, the small flames eating at the wood hungrily, Manon’s finger ran aimlessly along the curls of carved ivory on the underside of the reliquary. She brushed over the aberration in the ivory three times before she realized she was feeling an irregularity. Sitting up straight, she leaned close to the light of the fire, holding the box on edge so she could see the bottom better. Luca said nothing, but she heard him go still and knew his attention was fixed on her.
The flaw was small but, now that Manon had the feel for it, unmistakable—and it was growing softer under the warmth of her skin. Manon looked up at Luca.
“Wax.”
Wordlessly, Luca extended the smaller of his two blades to her, hilt first. She accepted it, but first held the box closer to the heat of the fire, as close as she dared without risking scorching and charring the ivory. As it softened, the tiny wax plug began to reflect the firelight, and Manon judged it ready. Tucking the box between her knees, she applied the tip of the knife gently to the edge of the wax. It resisted for a moment, then gave in, and Manon lifted it free. Carefully, she removed the plug from the knife blade and set it aside to be reinserted later, then she returned the knife to Luca. At last she examined what the wax had concealed—a small round hole no deeper than the length of the fingernail on Manon’s littlest finger and a narrow slit in the ivory at the bottom of the hole, unable to accommodate, Manon judged, anything thicker than a heavy piece of parchment or a piece of metal thinner than the point of Luca’s small knife blade.
Manon glanced up to find Luca’s face close to hers, his eyes intently focused on the reliquary and her discovery.
“I suppose it was foolish to hope it might be that simple,” she said. “Unless you happen to have whatever key this requires.” To her surprise, Luca didn’t laugh or smile at her attempt to lighten her disappointment.
“Not a key, no.” He straightened abruptly and paced away to where their packs rested against a log. One of the horses grazing nearby greeted him with a snort, but the hunter had no response for the mare or for Manon when she tried to ask what he was looking for after he crouched next to his pack and began to rummage through it.
When he returned to kneel next to Manon, he held out a small metal tool. “I don’t know if it will work,” he said, a strange sort of sheepishness in his voice and expression.
Manon smiled. “Considering I have nothing of use to offer in this situation, I’d say you’re contributing a great deal more than I am.” She took the tool, a narrow rod just slightly longer than Manon’s fingers and with a small hook on the end, and turned it in her fingers. “If you weren’t the most honest person I’d met in some time—honest to an irritating fault, mind you—I might be tempted to think this was meant to pick a lock.” She gave Luca a sidelong glance and laughed when he blushed, the color rising to his cheeks made all the more fierce by the light of the fire.
“You’re not far off,” he said, shifting onto his other knee. “I had it modeled after a lock pick.”
“You designed this?”
The hunter nodded. “Needed some additional tools to help fine tune traps. We target sick animals, you see, or overpopulated herds, to keep the Principe’s forest healthy. But if you want to take down an old wolf, left behind by his pack, you don’t need the force of a bear trap.” Luca glanced down at the tool in Manon’s hands. “To tell you the truth, I’d rather we didn’t use traps at all. There are ways to hunt what we need to hunt without risking catching other animals, healthy animals. But the Principe insists.”
Manon nodded. “Powerful men and women have a way of getting what they want. The Archduke would have twisted your words until you agreed with him—and on top of that made you feel it was all your idea in the first place. The Principe seems more blunt in his methods, but equally effective.” After a moment’s hesitation, Manon lifted the reliquary from her lap and handed it to Luca, along with the tool.
Luca looked at her, already shaking his head and leaning back on his heel.
“I want you to do it,” Manon said. When he didn’t take the reliquary, she turned one of his hands palm up, her eyes fixed on his, and set the ivory and gold box on it, then slid the tool across the ground between them. He broke eye contact with her and stared down at the small piece of metal for a long moment, then plucked it from the earth.
Manon watched him take a deep breath, watched his shoulders rise and fall, and then watched as he tested the narrow slit, probing for resistance and finding none. The tiny hook disappeared inside the ivory. It was, astonishingly, a near perfect fit. Manon felt a shiver of anticipation and covered her mouth with one hand.
Luca glanced up at her. “I think I could turn it to the left.”
Manon had no words. She could only nod her permission.
There was no physical change in the box, no audible click of a mechanism sliding free after three hundred or more years—three hundred years! The magnitude of what Manon was witnessing was not lost on her and some piece of her, she realized, was expecting the box to burst open in a flash of dormant Carrier power. But the Alescuan box, despite its grand exterior, despite its former owners and their passion for spectacle, remained unchanged—that is, except for the fact that it was open.
Manon never quite saw it open. Her mind conceived of the lid—for suddenly there was a lid where before she had detected no seam—being closed and then, with no in between, open. The triumph and satisfaction she should have felt was diluted, muted, as though a great distance lay between them and Manon, and she, at the end of a rope, could just feel their vibrations. In their place was the unsettling certainty, descending on her like a heavy fog, that whatever was in the reliquary, indeed, the very thing itself, did not belong in the world of the light and the living.
That moment of strange understanding flashed through Manon at the same time she realized Luca was trying to hand the reliquary to her—and both were followed quickly by the desire not to touch it. And yet she reached for it. After all, it was just a box.
The interior of the reliquary was lined with red silk. A single item lay on that luxurious bed. A disc, sized just right to fit in Manon’s palm. Bronze. Unremarkable. But for the curious pattern of black grooves and markings on its smooth, cool surface.
“You know this thing?” Luca was looking at Manon, not the disc, trying to comprehend her silence.
She shook her head slowly,
and then her tongue caught up to her mind. “It is a nameless, meaningless thing to me,” she said. “And yet I have seen one of these before.”
Not just seen. Held. It was still in one of the pockets of her coat, the small interior one, worn close to her chest since that day at the Barca mausoleum, the day she destroyed her brother’s tomb for the sake of mysterious words spoken by her father. Worn over her heart—but forgotten.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“Sounds like the most excitement I’ll have all day.”
“With all due respect, my lady, my answer is no.”
Gabriel stood before Eska, arms hanging from his sides as though he didn’t quite know what to do with them. His stance suggested strength and determination, but his upper body appeared to be far less certain. All told, the engineer looked terribly uncomfortable.
“I know it could cost me my employment,” he went on, “but I won’t leave you here.”
“Gabriel,” Eska began, nearly taking a step toward him. She stopped herself and sighed. “I am sorry that you think I would cast you away from Firenzia over this. But I must urge you to reconsider. Go home. Let this madness I’ve created pass. You do not deserve to be caught up in this.”
Gabriel’s arms at last came across his chest and he seemed to settle in to his refusal. “Neither do you.” It was laughable as counterpoints go, but Eska began to see that she would have to tie him to a horse to get him to leave the Vachon Valley, perhaps even render him unconscious, and this she would not do.
“All right,” Eska said. Gabriel’s furrowed brow smoothed over instantly. “But,” she added, holding up a finger in admonishment, “no one else. I’m holding you personally responsible for that. No one else even mentions staying behind. Not even a whisper. Not Cosimo, not Bastien. Is that clear?”
Gabriel nodded—as though they both didn’t know Bastien would do more than whisper.
Perrin would be staying, of course. He was too weak to travel and had been sleeping peacefully since Valentin departed the afternoon before. Eska had no desire to disturb the rest that had eluded him, but his low food intake was quickly becoming her primary concern. Already his cheeks were hollowing out and Eska was sure he weighed less than he had upon their arrival in the valley. If his appetite did not return with some vigor, and soon, he would not have the strength to fight off the illness attacking him.
Leaving Gabriel to relay Eska’s decision to the rest of the crew, Eska fetched the Alescuan reliquary from her room and then returned to Perrin’s bedside. She settled into a chair covered in embroidered fabric, positioned so she could catch the warm breeze through the tall window she had cracked open that morning, and began to examine the ivory box.
It was not identical to the box she had accidentally opened that night on a rooftop of Arconia. That much was clear. That one had a tri-horned griffin leaping off the lid, and swords lining the sides—a deadly reminder of the identity of its first owners. While running across rooftops and leaping over a narrow alley, the Iron Baron’s thugs in pursuit, her mind on making it home in one piece rather than on the box that was too awkwardly sized to hold comfortably in one hand, Eska had shifted her grip on the reliquary to hold it by one of the ivory legs—which promptly clicked and twisted in her grasp. She had dropped the reliquary in surprise and skidded to a halt to collect it. Her heart pounding from exertion, Eska had taken a moment to examine the suspect leg and saw that it had twisted to point inward and was now shorter than the other three, having pushed up into the ivory belly of the box.
She had pushed in the other legs.
Of course she had—and with more enthusiasm than she ought.
The box had slipped from her hands once more, flying open as it nearly landed in a gutter. The small bronze disc within had skittered across the tiles of the roof, coming perilously close to disappearing over the edge and into a private courtyard below. Eska had collected it quickly, which resulted in her second unexpected discovery of the evening. As she had picked it up, the moment the pads of her thumb and fingers came into contact with the edge, she witnessed the bronze crumple into a ball—which, very decidedly, it should not be capable of doing.
The strange phenomenon had halted Eska in her tracks as she collected the reliquary, the thugs momentarily forgotten. Frowning, she tried to pry it apart and reshape it, but the bronze, naturally, resisted all such attempts. At last, as the shouts grew louder and she became aware of the sound of someone climbing a drainpipe, Eska resorted to shoving the bronze ball into her undergarments—the stomping that flattened it once more would come later, when she had a moment to breathe in the darkness of a temple garden before reaching the Decadronum and the Lordican. She had just enough forethought to close the reliquary, thereby removing evidence of tampering, and then she was running again, this time to the northern side of the roof, where a conveniently placed balcony, followed by an equally convenient garden wall, helped her descend into an alley.
An alley that happened to have a large man with a club waiting in the shadows.
The upshot of that rooftop chase and subsequent confrontation with Thibault de Venescu and his band of brutes was that Eska had never had a chance to properly look over the reliquary.
This one was astonishingly beautiful, as the other had been. The ivory was smooth and flawless beneath her fingertips, the gold inlaid in intricate curling vines and flowers. A solid gold stag with ornate antlers pranced in relief across the top. The box had four animal feet of solid gold, each one different from its neighbors—a wolf paw, an owl’s talons, a boar hoof, and a bear paw.
The feet didn’t move.
Eska frowned and set the box in her lap, then immediately picked it up and repeated the motion, trying to determine if it was just her imagination or if the reliquary was noticeably heavier than the first one she had held, and if it was, what that might signify.
Sighing, Eska’s gaze drifted to the window and the gentle waving of the tree branches beyond. She could smell bread wafting up from the kitchen and the faint murmur of voices—Gabriel’s and Bastien’s, she realized—drifted into the room as well.
She turned her attention to Perrin, though she doubted he could hear her. “The Alescuan kings and queens were clever and brilliant,” she mused, finding a familiar rhythm in speaking her thoughts out loud, “but imbuing six reliquaries with six different methods of opening seems far too subtle for their tastes.” Albus would chide her for such speculation, of course. Eska had no means of knowing the other boxes were different from the two she had held in her possession. But it felt right when she said it. “Puzzles weren’t their style. Destruction and chaos, yes. But irritating puzzles? I can’t imagine the Princess Above the Sands engaging in such frivolity, not when she had empires to crush.”
She wished for more information on the Alescuan reliquaries. They were legendary, relics of the dynasty that had brought fear and devastation to much of the known world, revered for their history but hardly more than children’s stories in their detail. Eska had no sense of their origin or how they came to belong to the family.
But most of all, Eska wished for Albus. She missed the back and forth, the question and counter question. She missed his ability to challenge her thinking and propel her to greater insight.
Perrin stirred within the blankets and Eska, reliquary in hand, went to the bed, hoping to encourage him to take a drink of water. As she sat on the edge of the bed, his pale face twisted into a grimace. Eska reached out a hand to feel his forehead, but the moment her fingers made contact with his skin, his breathing increased drastically, his pulse an unnatural flutter in his throat, his chest rising and falling with each shallow gasp and hurried exhale. Eska drew back, fearing another attack of pain and muscle rigidity, but he quieted quickly.
Frowning, Eska retreated to the window and set the reliquary down, then returned to the bed and tried to wake Perrin. She doused a cloth in a bowl of water, wrung out the excess, and folded it against his forehead.
“Perrin,”
she said, her hand on his shoulder. “Perrin.”
He woke slowly, emerging from sleep as though from a great distance, but Eska was glad to see him attempt a smile when at last his eyes focused on her.
“You need to eat something,” Eska said. She helped him sit up, sliding tall pillows behind his back, and then held a glass of water to his lips. He drank greedily, which pleased her. The way he leaned back, heavily, and with a small sigh, after he had finished did not. And yet he made a valiant effort to chew and swallow a few bites of bread slathered with fresh butter, a slice of peeled apple, and half a piece of cold wild boar. The act seemed to exhaust him completely, but he surprised Eska by asking for a bath.
“I feel grimy,” Perrin said. “And I don’t imagine I smell like a bouquet of flowers.”
Eska shrugged. “Noses can go blind to bad smells after enough exposure.”
Perrin laughed, a weak laugh, but enough to make Eska smile.
“I don’t think we should attempt the tub,” Eska said, imagining the arduous process of getting him to the bath chamber and navigating the slippery porcelain tub and tiles. His last journey down the hall to relieve himself had been a lengthy affair. “But what if we bring in a small basin of hot water and wipe you down?”
Perrin made a face. “You make me sound like a horse.” He sighed. “If you think that’s best.”
“I’ll start heating the water.” Eska pointed to the tray beside the bed. “There’s more bread if you feel you can manage it.”
Perrin stopped her before she reached the door. “Have you opened it yet?” He was looking at the tall chair by the window. Ensconced within the chair’s embrace, the gold detail on the reliquary gleamed in the sunlight streaming through the glass.
Eska shook her head. “Perhaps you’d like to try?”
“I’m unlikely to succeed where you have failed, but even failure might take my mind off,” he trailed off and gestured broadly at himself, at his pale skin and the shape of his legs beneath the blankets, “all of this.”
