“Are you alright?” Simple, genuine concern. Brow furrowed as he examines me.
“No.” I don’t realise it’s true until I utter the word. There’s suddenly a lump in my throat. Weariness combining with the emotion that has drained me today, this whole past week. My missing arm and aching heart. I put my head in my hand. The tension that has been with me since talking to Emissa this morning finally leaking out. “No, Eidhin. No. I’m not alright.”
There’s a massive hand on my shoulder. I look up to see Eidhin crouching in front of me. Eyes locked to mine.
“Whatever you need,” he says quietly.
I grin at him. A couple of tears leaking down my cheeks but I’m not ashamed. He sees I believe him, nods. We settle opposite each other, the low-burning candle on the table between us.
“So.” Eidhin locks his gaze to mine. “You need my help.”
“What gave it away?”
He spreads his hands. “I am very good at reading people.”
I smile. A proper smile, this time. It’s an expression I haven’t felt much, recently. “I saw Emissa today.”
“Oh.” He shifts. He knows she attacked me during the Iudicium, left me for dead. I had to unburden that much on him before Callidus’s funeral.
“Oh,” I agree grimly. “She tried to explain herself.”
He studies me. “I am worried that you said that as if it is not a joke.”
“She was very apologetic.” I give him a half smile and he snorts, the equivalent of a laugh from him. “Don’t worry. I haven’t suddenly decided all is forgiven. But …” I sigh. “It’s complicated.”
So I tell him. He already knows about the ruins near the Academy, but I relate my journey to the other side of Solivagus, to the red dome and inside it.Ulciscor’s drive to find out what happened to Caeror. The Labyrinth beneath the mountain and Ulciscor’s threat to put me in a Sapper if I didn’t run it. What happened beyond it.
It’s awkward, at times, as I search for the right words and phrases in Cymrian. Stilted both by the language and the emotion of what I’m reliving. But I’ve already told Ulciscor almost all of this. I hold myself together well enough.
I want to keep going. Tell him the final piece of the puzzle about Relucia and the Anguis, my birth, my real identity. My real name. But trust is not just earned by individuals. It cannot always be simply parcelled out. I liked Emissa. Maybe even loved her. And she was hiding things from me just as surely as I was hiding things from her. Telling Eidhin would unburden me in the short term. Perhaps help him understand me more deeply. But he does notneedto know.
I don’t for a second believe he would betray me, but some secrets are simply best left buried. So about my true self, about the Anguis, I say nothing.
I finish with Veridius’s claims about the Cataclysm, then what happened at the Aurora Columnae, then Lanistia and my encounter with Emissa today. What she said about the blood test. It helps, I realise as I finish. Juxtaposed with the utter madness of everything else I have been through, her claims—Veridius’s claims—feel at least as though theycouldbe legitimate.
Eidhin doesn’t speak throughout, doing little more than nodding occasionally. By the end, my mouth is dry and throat raw.
He considers me for a few seconds once I’m done.
“Huh,” he says eventually.
“It’s a lot.”
He processes for a little longer. Stands. “Another drink?”
“Please.”
He pours us both a glass. Hands me mine and then sips his, an oddly delicate motion from a man his size. Still thinking. “Perhaps this is why the Principalis was so interested in theddram cyfraith,” he says suddenly.
I frown. The “Right to Death,” roughly translated. The code Eidhin’s people lived by, before the Hierarchy. “What do you mean?”
“He asked many questions about it, at the Academy. As did Sextus Carcius. Over the course of many months and always as part of another conversation, but enough I thought it was strange.” He says it calmly, but I can hear the reluctance in his voice, the resistance to even mentioning this to me. “Theddram cyfraithspeaks of the Cataclysm as a cycle. An inevitability of balance. Veridiuswanted to understand its history. How its tenets came about. But for that, I didn’t know enough to help him.”
“Who does?”
“My father.”
Silence. I shift. Hesitant to bring it up, but I am his friend. I should ask. “Have you spoken to him, since the Academy?”
