It was the toll. The mandible of Saint Tacmund, also known as the Oath Relic, was one of the most dangerous and vile apex relics held in the academy’s strongroom. Few people had access to it, and it was never taken out to be displayed in the museum or at festivals.
Saint Tacmund had served as a confessor in a small parish, south. The year had been 1634. One winter, a man came to himat night and unburdened his sins. What the man confessed was not a sin against God; it was political. His enemies came for Tacmund before the sun rose. They held him for three days. On the first day, a soldier ordered him to speak, and he did not. On the second day, a captain came and sat across from him.
“I’ve broken harder men than you,” the captain said. “Tell me what he confessed, and I will let you go home.”
Tacmund said nothing. By the third morning, he was barely recognizable. The men looked at him and understood that no amount of time or pain was going to open his mouth, so they brought him before the other prisoners they held and hanged him in the open air.
The power of Saint Tacmund’s relic was great. So, the toll for using it matched its greatness. Seraphina couldn’t believe that two brilliant men had made such a stupid mistake. Both Konstantin Wolff and Matteo da Siena had known perfectly well what they were getting into. She understood how crucial it was that no one found out about the lattices in the walls, that the information never got to the Harvester. But still, using the Oath Relic had been irresponsible.
Now, Seraphina carried the secret. She also carried the toll. If she told anyone, she would die, and the secret and the toll would be passed on to them.
She fell to her knees, head hung low, and the next thing she knew, tears were running down her face and landing on the backs of her hands as she dug her fingernails into her thighs. It was the first time in two years. She could cry again, so she allowed herself to break, to let out all the hurt, frustration, and betrayal that she felt. Matteo hadn’t done it intentionally, but it was still his fault. It wasn’t fair to her that he’d made a choice, and his choice had put her through hell. She’d almost died once, and now she could die again.
The man should’ve loved her, not tried to kill her twice!
She ugly cried until she was so exhausted that she couldn’t sit upright anymore and collapsed on her hands, forehead pressed to the floor. That was how Idris found her. He rushed to her, helped her stand, and walked her to the workbench.
“We must leave,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Tomorrow. Even if it snows or hails, I don’t care. We leave.”
He pushed strands of hair out of her face.
“The weather is looking good, so we will leave.”
Seraphina nodded.
“Would you look at that, though? Your eyes work perfectly.”
She smiled between tears.
Rune. She needed to find him.
He had Matteo’s hands, which gave him Matteo’s master weaver skills. He could even play the piano exactly like Matteo, with the same technique, making the same mistakes. Rune had told her that he knew things – foreign and contradictory, things one man couldn’t have known at once. Seraphina wondered… Hoped.
What if deep within Rune, in the place where bits of Matteo’s consciousness resided, there was a buried memory of the oath?
Matteo had been her destruction. Perhaps Rune could be her salvation.
Chapter Nine
She could smell the fresh grass, damp with morning dew, growing free and wild toward the sun.
There was smoke on the north-western horizon. Not long after leaving the barn, Idris had to steer Bramble away from the main roads because of troop columns moving north. The farm roads they were forced to take slowed them down, the cart bumping over uneven tracks and Bramble struggling over ice. They were approaching the front line. At this point, Seraphina would’ve left the cart and crossed on foot, but she knew it wasn’t an option – and neither advisable – to leave Idris without his medicine chest.
They were silent as they trudged forward for hours. Seraphina was in the back, fighting sleep. Idris had tried to start a conversation a few times, but she’d answered him monosyllabically. Not because she didn’t want to talk to him. One of their endless debates would’ve been a great distraction right now. But she didn’t trust herself to speak. The night before, she’d barely slept. Nightmares of people under the spell of the thrall relic had mingled with whispers of Matteo’s secret that now belonged to her. A few times, she’d jolted awake, breathing fast, terrified she’d been talking in her sleep. She stayed awake for as long as she could, listening to Idris’s even breathing a few feet away from her.
Until she understood more about how the second toll she’d managed to acquire worked, it was better for her to keep her mouth shut, lest she said things she didn’t mean to. Especially when her mind entered a restful state, barely hanging on to wakefulness, she had the urge to fill the silence with half-formed thoughts. She’d never had an issue keeping secrets and had never been the type to gossip. Now she felt like one of those giggly fools at the academy – girls more interested in boys thanin bones – who had to spill a juicy secret as soon as it was whispered in their ears.
Seraphina had dozed off again when musket reports snapped her back to consciousness. She sat up, moving closer to Idris. The sound carried across the fields. Her friend pulled at the reins to stop the cart and consider their options.
“East,” he said.
“It seems to be the only way.”
It sounded like a real fight, and quite close to where they were. They had to find a way around it.
But a detour east soon proved impossible. It meant crossing a frozen stream with banks too steep for the cart. So, they pressed on along the stream, were forced west again by the impracticable terrain, and when the track crested a low rise, they found the village they’d been trying to avoid right in front of them, about two hundred yards down the slope. Smoke rose from two of the rooftops, they heard shouting and the crack of muskets, and people running to put down the flames.
Idris reacted quickly. He jumped out of the cart, took Bramble’s reins, and directed the horse into a stand of bare birches, away from any line of sight. Seraphina got off too, her eyes narrowing to look in the distance. Her vision was improving, but details were fuzzy, and sometimes her brain needed to process longer to understand what she was seeing.
