“N-No. They don’t bother me… I can just wait…”
She got to her feet and pulled at the rope.
“I don’t want to hear it. You will shut up and strip.”
He muttered something under his breath but got up and started working on the buttons of his cloak.
Briar shot him a glance, then turned around, shaking her head. As if she were ever interested.
Chapter Seven
His grave was the bodies of revenants.
Every time she dozed off, Seraphina dreamed about the men she’d controlled with the thrall relic, about the specific things she’d made them do. Sometimes, it was the two soldiers who’d told her and Rune about Project Prometheus and took them to Schloss Ewigheim. Other times, it was Captain Mayer, forced to watch as she pressed the dagger to his throat, compelled to accept his own death without moving, without trying to escape it. Then, it was Rune.
Rune, whom she’d forced to kiss her. Rune, with the ledger open before him, reading out loud, between tears, the words that had broken them apart.
He hadn’t wanted to. She’d made him.
Three days and three nights. The storm raged outside, and Seraphina huddled on the workbench that had become her makeshift bed, near the fire. Sitting or lying down, it didn’t matter, her back hurt perpetually, and her limbs fell asleep if she didn’t shift them every few minutes. She stayed awake for as long as she could, talking to Idris or asking him to read to her from his anatomy book. She listened to him pray five times a day, clean after the horse, feed and water it, cook for her and himself. He took care of everything while she shivered and whimpered like a wild animal every time sleep took her and she woke up from a nightmare.
Those where she was an outside witness were bearable. Hovering like a ghost, watching herself give orders and the victims stand to attention and execute them. The dreams that shattered her were the ones where she saw through the victims’ eyes, heard their thoughts, felt their terror and impotence. Rune was always the worst. If she was lucky, she’d dream about people from before she’d had the relic, when Madame Rothenfeld hadbeen its mistress. They weren’t less nauseating, but at least they hadn’t been Seraphina’s puppets. Though the things Madame Rothenfeld had made some of them do often had Seraphina vomit the little she’d eaten in a bucket Idris had strategically placed by her side.
Even so, she couldn’t stand to be separated from the vomer bone. As soon as she could walk on her own after the surgery, she’d dug it out of her cloak and hidden it in the pocket of her dress. She often caught herself running her fingers over it or squeezing it in her hand, as if she constantly needed to make sure it was there and she hadn’t lost it.
“You are healing surprisingly fast,” Idris had said on the second day, when he’d changed her dressing.
She’d shrugged.
On the third day, he’d frowned, still impressed but suspicious.
“And here I thought I’d have to concede and reimplant the atlas vertebra.”
“It’s better this way,” she’d told him. “I stole it from the nuns, and when we reach the convent, I’ll have to give it back and hope they forgive me.”
“You stole it?” Idris had tsked in disappointment. “You’ve changed so much.”
“Not by choice,” she’d said through gritted teeth and left it at that.
The weather calmed, but they were snowed in, so on the fourth day, Idris grabbed a shovel to clear a path. It took him an hour just to open one of the doors a crack so he could begin the back-breaking work.
Seraphina felt useless. She walked around the barn and did light exercises to reengage her stiff muscles, brushed the horse and spoke to it in hushed tones, and gave it a name. Bramble. Was it too obvious? Perhaps. It reminded her of Briar and her beloved Nettle, and every time she whispered the name in thehorse’s ear to get him used to it, she felt an ache in her chest that was also sort of warm and soothing. Because she knew that Briar was out there, and she had Rune. Sure, she was taking him to Saint Vivia’s for her own purposes, but that didn’t matter. Two things Seraphina knew for certain. One, Briar was capable and Rune was safe with her. And two, Seraphina would get him back. What the nuns might want with him was of no consequence, as long as she got there in time and reclaimed what was hers.
That night, it snowed again. Idris’s reaction was to clatter the pots a bit harder as he cooked dinner, but other than that, he didn’t complain.
The next day, he checked her eyes, carefully removing the Anodyne Band and unwrapping the bandage.
“Are you sure you don’t have another relic implanted somewhere?” he asked. It was intended as a joke, but not quite. “Because it looks like I can remove the sutures.”
Seraphina’s hand was in her dress pocket, squeezed around the vomer bone.
“No implants, I promise.”
Idris had always been against it. It was true that greater and apex relics had tolls, and some of them had influence over the user beyond that simple cost. It had been observed over time that these things became exacerbated once the bone was placed under the skin. The advantages were immeasurable: quick healing, protection from illness, sometimes life extension. But were they worth it? Idris didn’t think so. But his belief went deeper than science.
Seraphina remembered a debate they’d had at the academy, where her friend had told her that as a naturalist, he believed that a person’s potential to become a catalyst after death was a latent biological trait inherited through certain bloodlines, a trait that led to one or a few of their bones becoming infused with power. This scientific understanding should’ve clashedwith his religion, but it didn’t. As a Muslim, he also believed that God designed it. Allah created the world and everything in it – the stars, the tides, the human body, and the magic that slept in certain bones. To study the mechanism was to study God’s handiwork, so to dissect a catalyst was not to defile the sacred; it was to read the book that God had written in flesh and marrow. But to implant a relic, a bone of the dead into a living body… That was a different matter.
Idris didn’t impose his views on anyone. Seraphina knew about them because she’d asked.
