Chapter Text
“Scholar Carim. Visitor.” The door rattled open. He was made to strip off his gloves and turn for them to chain his hands behind him before they’d let him out.
Ascelin was getting real sick of visitors. They broke up the tedium of the cell fine, but they were tiring and he hated being seen like — this. The last glimpse of his reflection had been ghastly. But he’d asked to see Ludwig, so… he’d deal with it, he supposed.
The Huntress shoving him along was a Swordhunter in the White Church set, sort of chubby, with freckled skin and coppery hair. Ascelin vaguely recognised her; she had a maternal air, a honeyed tongue, and an annoying adherence to regulations. Needless to say, usually someone he avoided. Her specialty was… hell, what had it been? Her field of study didn’t intersect his in any way to make her noteworthy.
He kind-of-maybe regretted that now, but it wasn’t like he’d known everyone. Made sense Ludwig didn’t want people who owed him favours guarding him, besides. What a hassle.
She pushed him into a room with someone already settled at the table inside, and said into the dark, “I can give you half an hour.”
Ascelin shot her a look back for that, and found her already locking the door. She walked off without so much as a glance back.
Another cell. Underground somewhere, with water dripping and a window too small to squeeze out of letting in the sunlight. One occupant and it wasn’t the Holy Blade. Too small for that, like most folk — they were barely Ascelin’s height, which made them either a tall woman or a smallish man, and already sitting. Hood pulled low. Someone he knew, or someone who didn’t want to be recognised by anyone else in the gaol? Probably not related to his request to talk, then. (Related to Xenia? She’d made noises about coming back to hear his answer; was this it?)
His visitor was a Crow, judging by the cloak and the weapon — Blades of Mercy, too short to be useful against most beasts. Those were for killing other men. Crows were Hunters of Hunters, and not all of them were affiliated with the Church. He didn’t see anything on this one he recognised, or not immediately. Just little things — someone he’d seen before and was struggling to place.
His fingers flexed. They didn’t let him wear the gloves when he left the cell. He didn’t know how Ludwig had swung him keeping the gloves at all. He missed them something awful right then, in a new room with a new problem.
He kicked out the chair across from the Crow with his foot and sat down gingerly. Couldn’t sprawl with his hands chained up, not unless he wanted to sprain or break something. It was a pain. Presentation was important, though, whatever he could scrape together under the circumstances.
The Crow shifted. Tan lips under the hood, quirked to the side like he’d done something odd. Familiar again. Made him think of being a kid and getting sword lessons in the courtyard… He hated that, pushed it away as soon as it occurred to him.
Ascelin scowled at his company. They might not have been his old teacher, but his annoyance at her transferred easy enough. The hood moved a little, stilled, and he figured the light had caught his face — everyone stared at the scar. The Crow would, too.
Ragged scars or burns were normal for Hunters. A line neatly bisecting the face was not. The Crow’s mouth drew down.
What the Crow said, eventually, was: “What happened to you?”
The voice jarred against his ribs. It was husky, deep enough that he hesitated to guess the sex. Ascelin’s heart thumped and he didn’t understand it. Deep voices weren’t strange, and people always asked about the scar when he left it out. Shouldn’t bother him like this.
“I did. What’s it to you?” After he said it, he drew his lip back from his teeth. Having his face uncovered felt almost worse than going without his gloves. All of it felt pretty bad. Defanged and declawed and… this, after everything, a man stripped down and made harmless. Almost harmless. He supposed he could still kick and bite, if it came to it.
(It had better not come to it.)
The Crow hesitated a long time, lips twisting and twitching. “… suppose it doesn’t,” they said, then, “You know me, kid?”
Ascelin snorted. “No.”
Another hesitation. “Alright.” The Crow leaned back in their seat and heaved a sigh. “Verisimilitude,” they mumbled, meditative, and increased his sense of vertigo by the process. “Call me Dirk.”
Dirk. Thrusting dagger, or a blade you hid in your boot — dearg was a term from out on the moors. Ascelin arched his brows. “Hell of a nom de guerre.” He made the tentative decision to gender his company based on it. Something awful masculine about naming yourself knife. Kinda verged on overkill.
The Crow’s lips pursed again. “Most folk aren’t keen on asking, and it does the job fine.” Under the able, his boot drummed a tattoo against the other foot. Nervous or rushed? Careless? What was that about, exactly?
“Why don’t you tell me about what’s going on?” the Crow asked, and put his hands where Ascelin could see them; a little smaller than Ascelin’s own, clad in leather gloves. Ascelin guessed they were hiding signs of scourge. Seemed probable with so much of the body covered, even in a darkened cell.
It dawned on him that the Crow was likely looking for the same signs in him that Ascelin was scanning them for.
Well. Usually he was the one on the other side of the table. Wasn’t this something. “Frenzied,” he said, having decided to be blunt. “Or the clerics said. Never had it hit like that. I blacked out. Came to in the catacombs. Then I came topside and got arrested for a murder spree. Funny.”
“Funny.” The Crow didn’t seem to agree, which Ascelin counted against them. You really needed a sense of humour to survive this line of work. “Did you commit a murder spree?”
“Prolly not.” Ascelin had considered it seriously for most of his time in the gaol and again at the trial. “The kids I was carrying would’ve noticed. Timeline’s awful tight. An’ I figure someone would’ve dusted me during the killing, too… my luck ain’t great, and my body’s pretty fragile.” None of this was a secret.
“Quick on your feet, though.” The Crow sounded too firm on that count, like they were speaking from experience instead of rumour. It annoyed Ascelin a little.
Ascelin clicked. “Bullets are quicker.” He reclined as far as he could without crushing his hands to the back of the chair and tilted his chin up, so they could get a good look at him. Pale skin and hair a mess, but his eyes were clear and he knew it.
The Crow looked back at him; their shoulders dropped a fraction. Ascelin took it as confirmation of something, anyway.
“No. I didn’t kill six Hunters. If you want someone blood drunk, you’ll have to keep looking.”
“I don’t want someone blood drunk.” The Crow’s fingers twitched against the tabletop. “I want to know what’s happened that I came back to you in a cage, fledgling.”
Ascelin’s skin crawled. “Hey, we just covered I don’t know you. Ain’t sporting to hold the advantage, is it?”
The Crow must’ve had a hell of a sense of fair play, since he didn’t laugh in Ascelin’s face for that one. Instead he hesitated, enough that Ascelin could see it — again. Sighed, again.
Ascelin felt his scowl return. “If you’ve got somethin’ to say, go ahead and say it.”
“Would you leave with me?”
It hadn’t been what he’d expected. Ascelin shut his mouth and let his expression meld to neutrality. As far as traps went, it was atrocious. The plan was checking if he was blood drunk, asking if he’d committed a spree killing, then graduating to an offer of treason. Yeah. Okay. This sort of heavy-handed bullshit stunk of Xenia.
He didn’t think any Crows would come around her, but maybe he was wrong. Or maybe she’d just offered something good enough to overcome the distaste. “Leave.”
“Yes.” The Crow moved a hand to the hood and drew it back a fraction. Enough for Ascelin to see beneath; a Hunter of middle age, clear-skinned, unscarred at least above the jaw. A flash of yellow bright as lamplight from catlike eyes, gone again when he flicked the hood back into place. Ascelin stopped breathing.
The Crow said, “Leave. With me. Would you?”
Recognition curdled into revulsion; that he was here, that he’d asked, that Ascelin hadn’t known him because of time and distance and a fucking alias. Dirk. Dagger. Of course. Who did he know that fought with daggers?
He should’ve ended the conversation there. Fuck off. You’re dead to me. You’ve been dead a lifetime. He wanted to. He opened his mouth to say it.
“You can’t ask me that now.” was what spilled out, instead, and, “Please, you can’t.” because what he wanted to do, at least as much as curse the offer, was agree — was take the key and walk out the way he should have done from the Orphanage, oh, a lifetime ago. And he didn’t know where to go from that, so he made himself stop talking and tried to think past the pounding in his head.
The Crow pushed up from the table and unfolded to full height, taller than he’d thought, all legs and coat and—damned, damned, damned—Walked around. Put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it, gently, something grounding. Kept his body where Ascelin could see it.
“That a no, kid?” Another long sigh. Ascelin wanted to say he sounded like he was deflating, but the words wouldn’t come past the feeling in his chest. He could be gone. He could… leave this, leave everything.
(Where did he go if he left everything? He’d cut all of himself away for the Choir. Voss, Giroux, Vorona, all people he’d left willingly, or people who’d left him, or he’d turned his back when they could reach out a hand — always something, something, something.)
(Xenia stood at the edge of his mind, always, painted lips thin and a hand on the cane. Writ on his soul like an epitaph: remember who made you, remember who you belong to.)
(The only way out was one of them dying. Right?)
The thumb rubbed circles against the edge of his collarbone, dredged up a cemetery’s worth of ghosts. Memory intruded. Here in the cell and standing outside the Orphanage — in the Chalice Dungeons — in the dark below the city standing over a coffin and hearing someone murmur I know you aren’t scared. That’s why I’m here to watch over you.
He… could have left, once. Before he cut everything away. If Voss or Giroux had found him, before the aptitude tests. If Giroux had come to take him from the Orphanage. If Vorona had held out a hand and said Come with me, he would have gone into the night without hesitating. But he’d been Ascelin, a nameless ward of the city, and now he was Choir Scholar Carim, and now he had something to hold onto besides hope. A reputation, and friends, and…
And… a kid he’d promised to help. To keep safe, if he could. Ascelin shut his eyes and cursed. “It’s a no,” he muttered, and felt mad for it. The smart thing was choosing himself.
He’d always chose himself. He’d told Xenia. What was he thinking? “Yeah. Appreciate the offer, but it’s come fourteen years late.”
With that decision made he could think a little clearer. Past the hate-relief-longing, suspicion crept in. He couldn’t breathe and he couldn’t believe in it. Because Dirk had the face and the voice and the hands of someone who’d walked out of his life, and because people didn’t come back when they left you, and because there was a monster around that stole faces. Ascelin was alone in a room with someone in a hood, and who fucking knew? He barked a laugh. If it was the fetch he was staring down, then he was fucked. That was easier to reason through. The wretched thing was a sadist; it liked to ask permission before it gutted you. “You can’t be surprised. When have I ever told you anything you wanted to hear?”
Another sigh. The thumb kept rubbing circles. He waited for the hand to turn to claws, but the moment didn’t come. “I’m not sure you’d recognise what I wanted if you saw it, kid.” A drawn out pause while the Crow played at comfort. “I’m giving you a choice. It’s always the same one.”
“Let you in and die quick or tell you no and claw for living?” Ascelin’s fingers flexed against the bindings. The Crow’s mouth quirked under the hood, bemused looking.
The pause drew out. When Ascelin shifted focus to the Crow’s face, there was an expression of befuddlement crossing it that Ascelin could clock even with the shadows and the hood. “… no,” Dirk said, before making a visible decision not to ask. “That’s—not quite… no.” Another, slightly more awkward, pause. “Love or sympathy. That was the choice.”
… huh. Almost fifteen years and that still pissed him off. What were the chances the fetch knew that one? Not high, he didn’t think. If it had known about this… probably it wouldn’t have been stupid enough to play at Ludwig.
When he turned his head he didn’t meet his death. He could smell blood and weapon oil, and wool and cigarettes, and it was the last that was the worst because it convinced him. His breath caught again, hooked against his ribs and lingered, withering, until the world was black on its edges.
People weren’t supposed to come back, when you lost them. Maybe that was why he couldn’t breathe. The long, ugly business of everything else pressed against his teeth, and he wanted to tell it. Half an hour, whatever was left of it, wasn’t enough. And even with the time he didn’t have the words. This was something beyond him.
He would try, anyway. He’d been sitting in the dark thinking long and hard about what he couldn’t do, who he’d shaped himself after, how he fell short. He… needed to try. For his own sake, he needed to do something.
When had he last believed in anyone besides himself? His voice sounded hoarse. “It’s not that I want to stay. It’s just… There’s—there’s a kid. Xenia wants him. For spite, maybe, I don’t know, I’d been keeping him from the Orphanage. She came around asking me to pass him over to make this stop—” he saw Dirk’s mouth press to a thin line. “—I told her no. But the kid wants his sister. If I can’t help him find Vasya—if someone else offered information…”
The hand on his shoulder tightened, and Dirk’s lips turned down, and Ascelin’s breath came out as a hiss. “Help him,” he pleaded, with love and sympathy playing in his mind on a loop. “I’m probably past it — it’s my own mess. But keep the kid alive. He doesn’t deserve to go down with me.”
Dirk’s hand went tight as a trap against his shoulder, tight enough to bruise, to cut and ground him. Ascelin focused on it. It was the last thing he had besides himself, and gods knew what he could do besides dig the hole deeper.
Anastas was forced through another round of questions which he only escaped by virtue of bursting into tears and vomiting.
Which was kind of awful, and worse because when it was over he didn’t feel much of anything. He wasn’t scared. He was tired, and he was — thinking. A bad combination. Voss dragged him back to the safehouse. Drogomir and Bedelia were furious and worried.
Anastas went to bed and slept until late in the night.
The afternoon replayed in his dreams. Ascelin tearing out his throat while the Huntress watched. Anastas pulling the trigger and blood spraying the cell. When he came up to the bars, a wolf behind them instead of Ascelin — a wolf in Choir robes, made bloody — a clawed hand in his, over and over, and red dying white until it was shining crimson.
He woke up in the dark, heart pounding. Alright — so the fear was there, still. He stared at the ceiling. The marks on his hand had scabbed up, were already healing when he peeled back the bandages. Lots of tendons in the hand, blood vessels, everything — they were delicate, easy to injure, mutilate, ruin. His were intact. Why were his intact? Ascelin playing, or Ascelin making a point he didn’t get? He brought the wound to his mouth, and inhaled, then took out the note and sniffed the long-dry stain on the paper.
His mouth watered. He shifted into the light from the window and read the faint blurred lines of the address until it was burnt into him.
Ludwig wasn’t sure what he was walking down to. Carim, obviously. The report about him scratching the Volkov boy had made Ludwig a little leerier than otherwise. A volatile hunter was dangerous. A cornered Choir Member…
Well. He dearly loved Laurence. But he wouldn’t categorise him as sane, or predictable, and the Choir were all cut from the same cloth in the end.
His sense of caution was not assuaged when he opened the door to Carim looking contemplative.
“Hey, how do you feel about people coming back from the dead, anyway?”
“… good morning, Carim.”
Carim’s lip drew back from his teeth, which was familiar and settled a little of Ludwig’s nerves. “Is it? Couldn’t tell from in here, hard to say underground. Nevermind. Dead. Alive. What do you think about that?”
It was going to be a productive meeting, clearly, all of his concerns had been the products of an ill-rested mind. Ludwig pulled the chair across from Ascelin out and sat down. “The chalice dungeons certainly bring a great deal of questions about entropy to light. Besides that… I think I’ve seen Laurence get up after something punched a hole through his chest. Most anything is possible. Though I would allow that usually, dead things becoming living again are somewhat… altered.” The Pthumerian servants came to mind. Laurence had some rather gristly ideas, however efficient Ludwig agreed they were.
The servants were, admittedly, preferable to making new Hunters. Or losing Old ones. “Is this about your research?”
“No.” Pause. “Maybe. Always, kind of, not directly.”
Promising.
“The song’s hit a snag,” Carim added, apparently in the spirit of being informative, a spirit which very rarely infested him and which Ludwig usually had to make arrangements for the inducement of. He tilted his head to the side and waited. Carim went on, “It keeps mixing things up when I raise them and making something else, not really what I wanted, I—maybe I told you this before, it’s all running together, hell, that’s not important now.”
“I read your notes,” Ludwig supplied, in the name of fostering cooperation. “You sent them to me. After we first discussed the safe house.”
“Oh. Oh, right.” Carim slumped forward a moment, breathed hard, and rallied. “Right. Okay. But people coming back from the dead. Chalice dungeons. Alchemy, state changes, that’s—yeah.”
“You’re prevaricating.” Ludwig needed to sleep sometime today, unfortunately, which meant that he couldn’t let Carim ramble himself out. As… interesting as it would assuredly be.
Carim’s shoulders slumped further. “Yeah.” He sounded rather defeated this time. “Look. I didn’t kill them.”
Ludwig pursed his lips and glanced at the door. “I’m aware, though it does bring me some relief to hear it from your mouth. You did kill someone.”
“Across town, yeah, I don’t remember but the kids did mention.” Carim waved a hand without raising his head. “Not important now. Or. I guess it is. Am I on trial for that too?”
“No.” Perhaps if things weren’t growing rather desperate, or if this tribunal had anything to do with murder at all. “Xenia was stripped of her office for accusations of abusing subordinates, pending investigation. Her supporters seized an opportunity to smear the subordinate she abused. Six people turned up dead, the ward is in an uproar. No. A man dying across town will only become relevant if they find a way to put you in the Cathedral and that alley that the press will print.”
“Press ain’t discerning,” Carim muttered, then shrugged it off and moved on. “Right. Fine. Whatever. If we’re doing this.”
They’d been in the process of it for several days by then, but Ludwig refrained from saying so.
Carim started to talk. And… talk.
The picture he painted was a rather interesting one, if almost as gristly as Laurence musing deep in his cups. Ludwig let go of his worries about sleeping, for a moment, and leaned in to listen.
“We have a limited supply.”
Third time he’d heard as much, and he was getting tired of it. “Every other Choir member has one.”
She didn’t look impressed with this. “And they had to wait for theirs. Unless you have supplies you’d like to disclose to the lab…”
Ascelin gave it up with a disgusted huff. He’d been an initiated member for well on nine months, since his thesis had been published. He’d spent most of the interim reworking it into a book. Xenia had never really seemed… happy with him, since he’d become a Hunter, but she’d at least been civil. Distant.
It wasn’t nice, because Ascelin didn’t get nice things for long, but it was liveable. The weird little inconveniences less so.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t used to being told no. On the contrary, the issue was seeing everyone else get yes. The Choir were the highest scholars in the Church. The point of becoming one was getting access to what he needed — whatever he needed — to make his survival worthwhile.
And he was still being told no.
On his way out of the offices and through the Grand Cathedral, a Choir initiate — still in black robes, no blindfold helm, no white manteau — materialised from a group of parishioners and flagged him down. “Scholar Carim. You’re wanted in the Lumencourt.”
Ascelin nodded once and changed direction for the stairs everyone called haunted. He mostly found them peaceful.
The Lumencourt was the informal name for the garden outside the Grand Cathedral’s gallery, across from the Orphanage. Ascelin had taken sword lessons here from Vorona, a few years past. He hadn’t been finished growing then. He flexed his fingers and thought, detached, that he didn’t feel much bigger beside the colonnades.
The area was barred off by initiates, which never meant anything promising. He was let through without question. That was… a little more in line with what he’d been taught to expect, about what being a Choir member meant.
The scent of blood hit him first. Seawater after. His hand went to the blade on his hip. Xenia hated seeing the sword, but Ascelin wasn’t strong enough to wield a Kirkhammer then and he hated the cane before—before. So he’d stick with what he did best.
Besides that. It came in useful more often than it didn’t. He didn’t get called on to sort out beasts, not anymore.
There was a mess of blood, heaving bodies. Someone turning to beasthood. Not finished, yet, but a little closer to what he’d become a Hunter for. He drew the Blade and broke it in two.
“Carim.” Xenia on the edge of it, untouched. Always. Ascelin looked at her and felt the void in him yawning open, gnawing, gnawing. There was a beast in the field and he couldn’t focus because the most dangerous thing was a woman in court shoes and a walking dress, bloodless and watching with heavy-lidded eyes.
“You’ve become adept a cleaning messes.” Xenia’s gaze flickered to the beast. “There’s been an outbreak in the Orphanage. Of course, I can’t enter it.”
The lie sat between them. Ascelin didn’t acknowledge it, and the beast was cowering instead of lunging, and he understood that it was best he not look lest it be someone he recognised.
“So you’ll go in my stead.” Xenia flicked her off-hand forward. “Patient zero. Sort it.”
“Yes, Conductor.”
That was a right mess. Not the first one. He sorted out a lot more like that for her.
(That one… he was pretty sure Lucosta had been the one to receive the remains for autopsy. He didn’t know if that mattered, but he remembered, so he mentioned it anyway. Let the Holy Blade make something of it. Ascelin was pretty sure he knew what he’d seen, and he’d been trying not to look.)
Voss had tripped over him not long after that, and Ascelin had tried to chase him off. Done a shit job of it, he guessed, because one of the other Choir members started asking questions after. He denied everything.
She waited til he’d pissed her off to bring it up. He’d been arguing about something, got too ornery. He remembered her sitting behind the desk while he stood like a petitioner (was a petitioner) with her lips going thinner and thinner. And then her hand went up, immaculate leather on delicate looking fingers glowing faintly in the light from the window. Ascelin stopped talking a breath late.
“I wonder if you were always this stubborn,” Xenia said it low, dangerously calm, and he’d learned to keep his words between his teeth when she sounded like that. But quiet wasn’t what she wanted. “Perhaps I should ask someone who knew you before.” She leaned forward. “You had a cousin, Ascelin?”
His fists clenched. Irritation flooded him. “No.” His voice was flat. “No cousins, ‘les Giroux got up to makin’ some while he was in the city.”
Her lip curled back at his accent. Reckless, stupid. He was just angry.
“I’m sure Hunter Voss would have something to tell me,” Xenia pressed, cold as ice, like she had her finger on the pulse of him. “He’s sitting exams soon—”
“He’s an idiot.” Ascelin’s own voice was flat. “Barely keeps his numbers straight. I felt sorry for him. Ain’t my cousin, ain’t the same as friends.”
“That’s terribly cold. I wonder what he’ll have to say about it.”
A twinge that was maybe pain. He buried it. “Tell him whatever you want. Doesn’t matter a bit to me.”
He risked sending a note by messenger, later. Voss sent a reply that Ascelin burnt rather than keep, and Voss didn’t turn up dead after a Hunt. It was something. It wasn’t enough.
It was everything he had.
Research and hunting were the only things he had to look forward to, and he threw himself into them. His thesis wasn’t a cure. But inoculation was something, a little piece of a puzzle they could use to, maybe, manage something of worth—
And hunting. Hunting was a simple pleasure of something he could do well. Find his prey, chase it to ground, and see it dead.
There was a rush you got from killing things. Nothing else like it, except maybe making a connection from disparate points of data after hours pouring over notes, or the blood. Ascelin chased that high as far as he could. He was good at it.
Even when the prey wasn’t anything anyone could be proud of, he knew how to make it clean and quick. The messes he cleaned up for Xenia, he figured he owed them that much.
(“And what did you do with the remains?”
“Buried them, as I was allowed. There’s… some places out in the woods, if I was told to dump ‘em. But if someone wanted the bodies for study, I mean…”
“Of course. Go on.”)
But he’d had a point dredging all this up, hadn’t he? Ah… right. He wasn’t the only one.
He did figure it out, eventually. He wasn’t special. The Choir ran on favours. Ascelin was just doing a fraction of the normal work. Della told him, eventually, not long after she’d got her Call Beyond. He’d asked how the hell she’d managed to achieve that when he’d been waiting most of a year, and got back a guarded look. She almost didn’t answer, and he almost pushed, and then there was a hand in his capelet, and Della dragged him to an alcove and told him.
“They want leverage.” Della had a look on her face that he thought was frustration. He’d been trading her favours since Byrgenwerth, and recognised another as it passed between them. She didn’t say what or whether he owed her for it: “They don’t know what you’re going to do when you break. Of course they won’t give it to you.”
He remembered laughing. “What? That’s stupid. They already know that.”
He’d thought that. He’d thought.
He cleaned up the kids that weren’t fast enough, weren’t bright enough, weren’t lucky enough. More initiates became Choir members. More initiates got full privileges, most of them got their godhead, and it dawned on Ascelin that he’d got the robes and the title and he was still at Xenia’s heel and Xenia’s pleasure, and that she wasn’t above withholding things he wanted to make a point.
He didn’t know the point by then. But surely she was making one.
He decided to make one back. Maybe that was the problem with him. He’d branched out his favours, to start, got some acquaintances in other factions. One thing had led to another and he’d got it in his head somehow that he wanted the Swordhunter badge and then, well, Swordhunter was already halfway to a knighthood, wasn’t it?
(A little, huffed laugh. “On a whim, you…”
“Call it whatever you want.”
A pause. “Did you keep records?”
“… well, yeah. Who do you think you’re talking to?”
“You never showed me.”
“Would it have helped?”
“… I suppose we’ll find out together. Finish the story.”)
Vasilissa pushed him for the Radiant badge. She liked something in the idea, rode his ass about developing strength alongside skill and arcane knowledge. It was neither fun nor restive, but there was something about it he relished, the challenge or the look of approval Vasya would fix him with when he’d done well or… something… he didn’t know.
It hit him sometime in the middle of lugging crates around the ward that he’d fallen past liking Vasya and Drogomir and into something else entirely, something past tolerating and past convenience and he’d, actually, miss them if something happened. Which was a revelation somewhere up there with seeing himself in a silverglass and having the ghost of his mother look back, eyes red instead of green, or the feeling in his chest when he crossed paths with Voss. Something to hold, something to hide away.
He got the badge and made his point. Xenia made hers back. Ascelin hadn’t realised he was signing up for a rematch.
Which was how he’d found out that dodging for three minutes was much more viable against someone who didn’t cast A Call Beyond on you.
(“She what.”
“I came back.”
“How many times—”
False-casual, because he was bringing enough of himself to bare without examining this too: “Mais, you expect me to keep count of that?”
“Carim.”
A clearing of the throat. Eyes averted. “… twenty-four, I think. Maybe five with the last?… it’s hazy.”
“You’ve been a Hunter for the Church less than fifteen years.”
Shuffling. Thinking that really, it’s a shame that no one will dare impose time limits on a prisoner’s meeting when Ludwig is the one meeting them. Lies are safest, and he settles back in them. “You remember something like that? I’m touched, boss.”)
He’d got a few hits on her for the trouble. It wasn’t like when he was an unarmed child, and knowing he’d get it worse for fighting didn’t stop him from trying to swing. He remembered thinking may as well go for the throat and that was when she’d cast and when he’d realised, abruptly and awfully, why he’d never get the damn thing. Localised meteors. The more arcane knowledge you had the harder it hit. Ascelin could have killed Xenia if he had his hands on one of those. He probably could have killed anyone.
(“Wait. I remember this write up. She had you flogged.”
“Yeah. I walked back to the flat without anything above the waist.”
“She said you’d resisted discipline, not a murder attempt.”
“You’re surprised?”
“I’m angry. Why does it surprise you that I’d be angry?” The chair’s legs scrape the ground and echo off stone. Ludwig’s eyes are lime-green, edging to yellow, and his teeth are white and sharp when he bares them. “My Hunters aren’t posts for her to sharpen her claws on.”
Ascelin thinks, in the distant way of someone in far over their head: oh. He’s finally lost his temper.)
(The story kept going. He’d decided this. And Vorona had taught him: Never hesitate on the follow-through.)
It was the night after that Ascelin was escorted from his cell. His hands were chained in front of him, instead of behind. Simon — his lawyer until the guy opted out — and two Radiant Swordhunters waited outside his cell.
“For the record,” Simon told him in a quiet aside, on the way to the path out of the city, “Confessing to new crimes without consulting your attorney beforehand is generally considered inadvisable.”
“You want me to keep stuff from the Holy Blade?”
Simon gave him a long, judgmental look for that, lips pressed thin under his moustache. Ascelin smiled at him, because he looked like shit and he felt like shit but at least someone else was having a worse day than he was.
His levity left him when he crossed over from stone to pine-needle strewn earth. He sucked in a breath he hadn’t known he’d needed. It had been the better part of a month since he’d last walked these woods. Pine and resin, smoke and gunpowder, mud and shit and animal musk. He almost staggered from it.
“Carim?”
“Fuck. Sorry.” He raised his hands to scrub his face and made himself, hesitating only a little, start to walk.
He showed them the grounds for failed experiments. The places Ascelin had buried corpses when he could and dumped them when he couldn’t. Simon looked — interested wasn’t the right word, exactly, but his body had gained a tautness Ascelin recognised from hunting with hounds. Alert, listening.
“This is what you meant to show us? It’s…” Colourful. Varied. Grisly.
“Most of it.” Ascelin turned his eyes away from the hollow. “Careful. Some of them have ranged attacks. Hey—how good are you with that bow?”
Simon’s attention swung almost fully to him. Ascelin’s skin crawled. “Well enough to catch one Choir Scholar,” Simon said, and his voice was pleasant but the promise was steel. Ascelin leaned against a tree and breathed.
“You’d shoot your client? That’s cold.” He turned his gaze to the woods further from the dumping ground. “Nah. Was gonna see if you liked your chances of taking a deer before we keep goin’.”
“A deer.”
“Yep.” Ascelin clicked his tongue. “Been a hot minute since I got out this way. Deer’ll be welcome.”
Simon took the bow from his shoulder to string it.
They found a deer. Simon downed it with two shots, one that spooked it and the other before it could run far. Ascelin agreed to haul it himself, let his other guard drape it around his shoulders and caught the legs in his bound hands. Messy, not field-dressed, probably covered with ticks. It was what it was. They’d need the deer more than he needed to stay clean, and it didn’t matter if the guts were a little fouled up by the time they got there. “Alright. Time for the rest.”
Simon’s alertness had edged, quietly, into a keen attention that nearly vibrated the air around them. Maybe he wouldn’t quit, Ascelin considered; not if he was like this. Wanting to claw up every ugly revelation they’d left buried in these woods. The failures.
Though he wasn’t happy, Ascelin caught himself smiling. He brought them past the village with a side path, skirted traps with half his mind on the caves ahead, near the outskirts of the city.
“Don’t go past the entrance til you’ve checked nothing got up to the ledge,” Ascelin directed, and got a twitch of the shoulders from Simon and a murmured agreement from the Swordhunter. The Swordhunter stepped inside first, paused, and called a clear. Ascelin and then Simon followed. A chittering growl crawled up the walls to meet them, louder with reverb, until it was a symphony of hisses and snarls. There were bright blue eyes staring up from the dark, refracted on dim glowing waters to make a dozen false copies.
(The child he’d tried to bring back, and made into something wrong in the process — this was where he’d left it. The song that had caught the ear of a God, and they’d answered. Maybe there wasn’t trouble with the composition, Ascelin considered, and felt a throbbing in his head, and did not linger on the thought after.)
Simon walked to the edge and looked. He stared at it for so long that Ascelin was waiting for the guy’s resignation as council. Or maybe for that bow to be turned on him. Simon tilted his head to the side, slowly, without raising his focus from the bottom of the cavern. “… Well. That’s quite a secret, isn’t it.”