Ulli raises their eyebrows as a soft chime hums through the room. “I see. Conrad, that’s the coroner. I’ll be right back.” They slip out the door.
There’s a dull, aching silence. Then I can’t help myself; I put a hand on Emeric’s sleeve. “Hey. Junior. Whoever did this, they don’t stand a chance. You had me figured out before you even got to Minkja, now you’ve got me and Ragne to help. Andshecan turn into a bear.”
He lets out a shaky breath, and I don’t know if it’s a laugh, but it might be in the same genus, and I can work with that.
Ulli returns with a grim-faced woman in a doctor’s apron and gloves who I surmise is the coroner. She hesitates at the sight of me. “Conrad, is . . . is this your . . . ?”
Emeric recoils from me like he’s been caught red-handed in the candy jar. “Just—just my consultant,” he rasps hastily, all but hiding the arm I’d touched behind his back. “For this case. I’ll vouch for her.”
I manage a wordless nod. In the last ten seconds I’ve whipped from sympathy to embarrassment to indignation to a mélange of all three, garnished with a flicker of bewildering warmth at being vouched for. Any attempt at articulating that is going to come out as a mortal scream.
“Very well.” The coroner removes her gloves and produces her own notebook. “We’re still conducting the standard tests, but preliminary findings suggest Prefect Hubert Klemens’s death was a homicide. The cause of death seems to be a single knife wound to the heart. A prefect-issue knife was left in the wound, so it’s likely to be our murder weapon.”
“One of his own?” Ulli asks as Emeric covers his mouth with his hand.
The coroner tilts her head. “At this point, I say yes. It was the iron knife, and that was the only one missing from his set. Furthermore . . .”
This, I realize later, is when I should have listened to Fortune’s warning.
Cloudy misfortune begins to press in at the edges of my sight. I can’t fathom why, and despite everything, I don’t want to leave. Not now, not with Emeric like this. He came back for me last night, I owe him this much.
“. . . it’s custom to leave coins for the Ferryman on the closed eyes of the deceased . . .”
Ice locks around my heart. I remember Emeric in the alley last week, laying out the facts of Yannec’s death:His own knife.
“. . . however, we found a single red penny . . .”
Yoursignaturepenny in his mouth.
“. . . in his throat.”
My breath catches.
When I look to Emeric, he’s staring at me, face marble-pale.
“I don’t—I couldn’t—” I stammer.
Emeric’s voice goes thin as a razor and sharper still. “A red penny?”
I take a step back. He catches me by the forearm.
My heartbeat rattles my veins faster and faster. The words come out pitchy, andscheit, it sounds too much like my gobsmacked yokel voice but it’s real, it’s real, it’s too real. “It wasn’t me, I didn’t go anywhere last night, I don’t, Ididn’t—”
I am back in Castle Falbirg, I am swearing I am not a thief—
There’s a terrible, betrayed fury in Emeric’s face. “How long have you been lying to me?”
“I’m not, I swear!”Don’t panic don’t panic don’t panic—
“What did you do to him?”
Ragne drops between us, a snarling black wolf. Emeric lets go as Ulli and the coroner stumble back into a couch.
I can’t breathe. They don’t believe me, they won’t ever believe me, I’m going to get caught, I’m going to—going to—
Break my own most vital rule.
I panic.
