Idris stared at the new relic, his hand reached out to touch it, but he changed his mind at the last moment and pinched the bridge of his nose instead.
“Another one,” he said. “The atlas vertebra is in the medicine chest. Should I put this one with it?”
Seraphina’s eyes widened. “In the medicine chest? What’s wrong with you? I thought you kept it in your satchel.”
“Not seeing in the dark doesn’t bother me,” he said. “I don’t wear relics on my person. Aside from lattices, I’d rather not have much to do with bones.”
“We could lose the medicine chest! The whole cart with all that’s in it! That was so irresponsible of you, Idris. I told you that bone has no toll.”
“And what about this one? What does it do?”
“Well.”
She sat next to him, her palm open so they could both look at it. It was so small, it was hard to think it did much at all.
“I don’t know what saint it came from, but it is an apex relic I found implanted in a… questionable place. Don’t worry, its keeper was long gone when I removed it.”
Idris shot her a look. “Are you trying to tell me in a lot of words that you desecrated a grave?”
“Rune helped. I knew there was a relic, why leave it buried? It would’ve gotten lost, for decades, or forever. And a bone like this, in the right hands, can do good.”
He didn’t seem convinced. In fact, the more she talked, the less receptive he was.
“All right, it’s a thrall relic,” she said, letting out a sound between a groan and a sigh.
Idris jumped out of the cart, his hands going to his head, his eyes not leaving her as he started pacing.
“I discovered what it does by accident. It works like this.” She averted her gaze, just in case it might misfire. “I make eye contact, address the person as ‘you’, and that gets their attention. I say the order, and they just do it. Whatever it is. Of course, I would never…” She looked back at him and saw that he seemed fine, not in her thrall even a little bit. If nothing else, it was the opposite. “It was useful for getting in and out of Schloss Ewigheim without being questioned.”
“Captain Mayer,” Idris said. “Found dead. Did you–”
“He was one of the four. He deserved it, and the only thing I regret is that I did it fast. I should’ve drawn it out.”
He processed this for a minute.
“Wait. You were shouting ‘you, you’.” He went pale when it dawned on him. “You could’ve saved them. All of them. And I stopped you.”
Seraphina joined him in the snow. She dropped the relic in her pocket and took his hands in hers.
“You couldn’t have known, and I didn’t have time to tell you.”
“You should’ve fought me harder.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter now. It was a bad strategy anyway. It would’ve exposed me. Us.”
“But all those people… They didn’t have to die.”
She smiled. “So, you agree with me. A relic like this can do a lot of good. In the right hands.”
“What about its toll? And don’t tell me this one doesn’t have one either, because you’d be lying again.”
“No more lies. It has a toll, and it’s unpleasant but manageable.”
He cocked an eyebrow, waiting for her to continue.
“Dreams. Every time I sleep, it shows me the people who were manipulated by it in the past. Mostly, it’s about how the relic was used before I got it.”
“The dreams you told me about. They torture you.”
