“Nothing too dire,” Idris said. “You can go now,” he told the man.
No one protested. The soldier was more than happy to put distance between himself and the man he surely called a ghoul, and the nurses had better things to do, like cleaning the blood he’d sprayed everywhere, and washing their hands.
Idris grabbed a bucket and gently placed the bundle that contained her eyes inside. Seraphina guessed it must’ve beenfilled with snow, which Idris packed lightly around the cloth. When snow and ice were available, nurses and doctors made sure to have them handy.
“We can do it here,” he said. “Now. It’s better to not wait.”
“No.” Seraphina stepped closer to him, keeping the relic trained on the shadows of the two nurses that were moving about. “Not here.”
“Sera–”
“Send them away, pack what you need–”
She was interrupted by the soldier who was in her thrall, who’d once again found her, and once again, didn’t have Rune with him. He burst into the tent, panting, struggling to catch his breath. He was covered in mud up to his knees, which she registered because the women immediately started scolding him.
“I couldn’t find him,” he wailed. “I’m sorry, I tried, I’m sorry… Please, please don’t…” He didn’t know what he was begging for. “Just… please.”
Seraphina could swear she felt the relic vibrate in her pocket – a small shudder of satisfaction at the man’s misery. She gritted her teeth and reminded herself for the hundredth time since she’d come into its possession that the more one used an apex relic, the worse it got.
“It’s fine,” she said, keeping her tone neutral.
On the inside, she was screaming. Where was he? It was all her fault. Stupid. Selfish. Shrew. She’d betrayed him, abandoned him, lost him.
“Tell me what you know.”
The soldier swallowed hard, his throat clicking. “There was a woman. They ran away together. They were seen…” He coughed. “They were seen near the northern wall. But I don’t know… I don’t know if it was him, because the others are talking about a revenant, and you never said…”
“It was him.”
She felt a shift in the air. The nurses stopped what they were doing, and next to her, Idris froze, not a muscle moving as he processed what this piece of information meant. He hadn’t asked who she was looking for. Now he would.
“Describe the woman,” Seraphina demanded.
“I didn’t see her with my own eyes, but the others say she was short of stature, with black hair and with a… like a… um…” He started gesticulating wildly, pointing at his own forehead. “Cut short here, across. Straight, like a line. The way the French wear it. Or the children.”
His description was far from eloquent, but it did the job. Seraphina could imagine Briar with her fine, black hair tied in a high pony at the back and cropped straight above her arched eyebrows. With her brown eyes, three flecks of gold in her left one. She’d never seen her, but she knew her. She’d run her hands over her friend’s features in their shared room at Saint Vivia’s Convent, learning the curve of her thin lips and the slight bump on the bridge of her nose. Briar had told Seraphina what she looked like, down to the number of freckles on her cheeks and the mole above her upper lip that she hated.
“She was limping, too, like she was hurt. I don’t know… I don’t know if that helps. And the revenant had no eyes, indeed.”
Seraphina heard Idris swallow hard beside her. She counted to five. She would’ve loved to count to ten, but there was no time for such indulgence. She turned to Idris, and in a level voice said:
“Please, pack what you need. We must leave. Now.”
“Seraphina…”
She reached out and took his hand in hers. Her fingers wrapped around his, feeling how smooth and clean they were, how they never trembled, no matter the battles he fought inside. The hands of a surgeon.
She tilted her head so Saint Vivia’s relic was trained on his face. His eyes met the place where hers should’ve been, where they were going to be once he reattached them. He parted his lips, and Seraphina parted hers, waiting for him to speak first.
In her pocket, the vomer bone vibrated in anticipation of a wrong answer.
Chapter Three
Some dreams are of the body, not of providence.
Making assumptions when she couldn’t know what the man before her thought was a dangerous thing. Even so, Seraphina made a mental list of what Idris knew so far.
That she had defected to the High Harvester. That Matteo was dead, and she’d lost her sight sometime in the past two years. That she was looking for a revenant of all things, and the creature coincidentally had no eyes while a pair of them was waiting in a snow bucket. She couldn’t remember if she’d told him they were hers, but she had suggested that someone else had worn them. In the chaos and relief of discovering it was him – her old friend from Krähenstein – she hadn’t paid attention to those first things she’d revealed to him.
