Kanrel lay on his bed, observing the woman sitting on the floor, her back against the wall. She still wept, and uselessly, she kept drying her tears away, but new ones kept emerging despite it.
All that Kanrel could see in this moment was but a child. Although she obviously wasn't one. But it was as though she had reverted to one, for she had no other way of expressing and dealing with her own emotions. He sighed. The woman had held a sharp hairpin directed at him, yet he found nothing to condemn her actions. She had clearly done something that she had quickly learned to regret.
They stared at each other for a while, until Kanrel felt that Orfia had calmed down enough; only then did he speak to her: "Was there something that you wanted to talk about?"
Orfia only stared at him. Her eyes and face were still red. She had begun fiddling with a golden ring that was on her forefinger. She clearly wanted to say something, but had grown unable to say anything at all.
"Is it something to do with your brother and how he... passed?"
The woman's eyes focused on Kanrel as she returned from her internal struggles. After a while, Orfia nodded.
Kanrel uncovered himself from beneath the layers of blankets; all he wore was a long robe that Roslyn had provided him with. He stepped toward the woman and offered his hand to her. She looked at him and his hand, but made no gesture to accept it. There was much suspicion in her gaze.
So Kanrel tried to smile. To reassure her. "It is better that we find a place to sit down. I suppose that we'll be having a very difficult conversation, Orfia."
She blinked, then at last, accepted the offered hand. Kanrel helped her back on her feet. Their hands quickly departed soon after, and Orfia gestured for Kanrel to lead the way.
They stepped out of the room into the hallway and made their way into a small living room. It was a homely space, with a table and a few chairs around it; a window directly above it that offered a view of a wintry Atarkan street, where people were already out and about this early in the morning. Though it could've been midday, Kanrel had no clue how early or late it might have been.
Kanrel pulled a chair and offered it to Orfia, but she went to the other side of the table and instead pulled a chair for herself, only to sit down soon after. Kanrel was left standing behind his chair for a moment. He, too, sat down.
Orfia had already turned her gaze toward the frozen window and the figures she saw passing. It made Kanrel wonder whether he had ever been a dark figure in someone else's window; just a passing silhouette of the absence of light. Often, it must have been, when she, or many like her, or Kanrel himself, had found themselves behind a window, looking in or looking out.
Gently, Kanrel knocked the wooden surface of the table. And finally, Orfia looked at him. Her blue eyes had returned to what they must have always been; her face had lost most of the red, though a layer of blush still remained, which Kanrel suspected was makeup. And although she looked at him, or rather toward his general direction, her eyes did not meet his.
Kanrel casually floated a pair of cups and a jug from a shelf just behind Orfia; the woman stared as they came into her view, and she seemed startled. Her shoulders tensed up, but when water suddenly emerged before her, as though flowing into one spot, into a ball of liquid, which Kanrel then placed inside the jug, her posture slightly eased. Even in a moment like this, there still remained wonder in her.
Kanrel took the jug and poured water into the cups. Then he took a long sip, finally washing away the dry feeling in his mouth and throat. Gently, he placed the cup back onto the table. Orfia stared at his every action, but still refused to drink.
"Where would you like to start?" Kanrel did not know what else to ask, or where to begin, even when, just yesterday, he had explained much of his life to people who had never known him so deeply.
The woman swallowed. For a while she said nothing. Then, in a voice worn flat: "I know most of it already. I've read the investigation reports. I've read them so many times by now that I could almost recite them word for word."
"The three murders and the state their bodies were found in. Tarin Burani, with her tongue ripped out. Henan Ushien, with her eyes removed from their sockets." She paused; her brows twitched. "My brother, and his ears torn off."
Kanrel said nothing at first. There was something terrible in hearing it spoken the way she did. She had stated it as though one would state a simple fact like the color of grass, though without any wonder for its many shades or its beauty when it might be at its most lush. Though no beauty could be found in such a detail, there never should be. Just horror instead.
"You knew him," Orfia said. It was not quite a question. Her eyes finally found his, and she held his gaze without blinking. "You were there. You saw him."
Kanrel shut his eyes for a moment; as he thought, remembering things of so long ago, his brows furrowed. When he opened them again, he found that he could not lie to her, and did not want to. "Your brother... I didn't really know him. I honestly didn't know much about him at all before... his death. I had seen him around. I knew him by his family name. That was all."
Orfia's expression darkened.
"We found his body in Yviev's room," Kanrel went on, trying to sound and to be more gentle. "She told us only later that he had been her betrothed. We had been friends for months by then, she and I, and we had gone through much together in our priestly education—but we never talked of such things. I suppose if we had been friends before the Ritual, we might have."
Orfia leaned slightly toward him. "The files say he was found with the others. That it was one killing, three bodies. That he was..." She stopped.
"Connected," Kanrel said quietly.
"Connected." She said the word as though it disgusted her. "To her, to Yviev. That's the reason the files give. That he happened to be 'connected.'"
Kanrel was quiet for a moment. "Yes," he said. "That was the reason. He was connected to Yviev, and Yviev was connected to me." He hesitated. "He was unlucky, Orfia. That was all it ever was."
"Unlucky." She spat the word out. "My brother had his ears cut from his head and stakes driven through his limbs, and the reason... the reason, is that he was unlucky?"
"I'm sorry," Kanrel said. A simple truth it had been. He did not wish to lie to her; it would give neither of them anything. "I don't have a better answer. I have wished, many times, that there had been one."
She looked away, back to the window. For a while neither of them spoke.
When she spoke again, her voice had gone flat once more, her armor back on. "Tell me the parts that aren't in the files. That's why I'm here. The files led nowhere, and the rumors say too much, and none of it is true, and I—" She stopped herself. "Tell me what happened. All of it. The parts your mother, that the Priesthood, kept out."
Kanrel drank the rest of his cup. His hand managed to stay steady. For how long? He could not say.
"We were suspects, the three of us. Myself, Yviev, Yirn. There was no evidence, so we were not charged, only forbidden to leave the Academy while the investigation ran its course. It ran nowhere." He turned the cup on the table. "And so we were treated as murderers regardless. The other students, the faculty. They called me a murderous nameless who had strayed from his adoptive mother's grace. So we decided to solve it ourselves; if only to clear our own names."
"The first thing we did was work out how each of the killings tied back to us." He drew a breath. "Tarin, and her tongue. Weeks before, after a class, I passed a wall where someone had painted that my mother was a heretic and a false Herald. And Tarin happened to walk by as well. She said something, I cannot remember what exactly, but she caught herself and apologized to me for it. I think her tongue was taken for that. For the thing she said and took back."
"And Henan." His hand found the jug. "Henan was the one who mattered to him."
"To the killer, that is. She had tortured Yirn as a child; mistreated him when they were both young. It had been his 'job', to be beaten in her stead. Her eyes were taken, I think, because she had once looked at him and seen nothing worth sparing. Only another nameless thing to be used." He poured, and this time his hand shook, and he did not try to hide it. He drank the cup down in one.
Orfia watched his hand, but said nothing about it.
"And Jeso?" she asked. "The ears. What was the reason for the ears?"
Kanrel was quiet.
"You said there was a reason for the others. The tongue for speaking. The eyes for looking. What did my brother hear?"
"I don't know," Kanrel said. "We never found out. Perhaps he heard something he shouldn't have. Perhaps it was only for the sake of the point the killer wanted to make. Perhaps it was for the sake of distracting the investigation or implicating Yviev as a potential culprit, and Jeso just happened to fit the part." He looked at her and spoke as honestly as he knew. "I think the truth is that the pattern needed a third, and your brother was the third. I think the ears meant nothing. I'm sorry."
Orfia's jaw worked. She did not weep now; she had gone past it, perhaps.
"Go on," she said.
So Kanrel told her: the marks that led them down, Henan's downturned gaze, the weeks in the cellars drawing maps and getting lost; the storage room of old remedies, the jars of eyes that were not Henan's; the withered rose petals and the scripture on the floor.
"We thought it a riddle at first," he said. "We spent days in the libraries looking for any mention of such carvings. It was Yirn who suggested we use the eyes from the jars." His mouth tightened. "So many of the discoveries that pushed us forward were his. None of them made much sense, even then. I told myself it was desperation. A man wanting his name cleared."
"We found the passage, managed to somehow open it, and then... we descended."
And there Kanrel stopped, because the memory took him. The walls, the engravings running down into the dark, the history of a people carved from beginning to end. The arrival of the Angels. The defeat of the Wildkin—the Kurikulai, as he now knew to call them. And on one great door, carvings in a language he had not been able to read, that he now wondered might have been the tongue of the Atheians, or of the Kurikulai before them—
"What does this have to do with my brother?" Orfia's voice cut through it.
Kanrel came back to the room. To the cup in his hand, the frozen window, the woman across the table who did not care, and was right not to care, about the ruin of empires. "Nothing," he admitted. "It has nothing to do with him."
"Then keep to what does," she said.
He nodded. He tried to keep it short after that.
Beneath the Academy there were chambers older than the Academy. On their walls, the history of humanity and its first meeting with the Angels; the war with the Wildkin; and beneath that, older, the history of another people entirely. A room carved floor to ceiling, and three great stone doors that would not open to muscle or magic. The floor beneath the carvings dark with old blood. They had thought, at first, it was the victims'.
He did not tell her what he had done with the blood. Collected it, boiled it down to a dark dust. He did not tell her the thing that shook him even now, more than the doors or the bodies: that the ruin carved into those walls was the ruin of a whole world, brought down by Ignar and the Angels, and that he had stood in it, barely a man, and understood none of it.
"We found how to pass the doors," he went on. "All three of us stepped toward them at once. On the far side, more chambers, more history; and a room with a table, and a chair, and on the table a note and a jar. The note was a manifesto. A call for the nameless to rise. It named the Angels and the Herald and the Priesthood as lies, and spoke of another truth... another god, another magic, the true one." He paused. "In the jar were Henan's eyes."
"We climbed out through a storeroom, and did not break its lock, for fear of warning the killer we were close. Days later there was fresh graffiti, the same call to revolt, and this time Tarin's tongue was nailed to the wall beside it."
"Then it was Yirn," Kanrel said, and he gritted his teeth on the name, "who pushed us further. He asked whether we had seen anyone suspicious the day the bodies were found. And so easily, he turned us all toward Ewen Oidus."
"Our professor. She taught us coding, and magic. We broke into her room to be sure, and found Jeso's ears in a jar there, planted, though we did not know it. We could not accuse a professor openly, so we made a plan. We lured her out of the city, into the hills, and held her with an entrapment code so far beyond us that the three of us had to cast it together. And we questioned her."
"It did not take long. Oidus had no motive. None of it held; nothing made sense. It had only ever been Yirn, steering us, discovery by discovery, toward the answer he wanted us to reach." Kanrel's voice had gone low. "And then he revealed himself. He need not have. I think, had he chosen, he could have yet fooled us and walked free of all of it. But he showed himself, and he came at us with cultists at his back."
"We fought. We won. He died there, with most of them." Kanrel poured the last of the water. "That is all of it. That is what happened to your brother."
The woman stared ahead. "You're leaving things out."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I swore not to speak of them. All of this, in truth—the chambers, the hill, what we found below. My mother had us vow to keep it buried, and to lay all of it at Yirn's feet, and keep the rest simple."
Orfia's eyes narrowed. "Then how do I trust any of it? Everything you've said could be a story the Priesthood gave you. A story your mother gave you."
Kanrel scoffed softly. "It could be. But things have changed. I have changed. And it has been so long that what we buried is about to come up on its own, whether the Priesthood wills it or not."
"What do you mean?"
He leaned closer. "The sky, Orfia," he said, almost a whisper. "I fear the old prophecies are being fulfilled at last."
Her expression barely shifted, but enough that he knew she believed him, at least for now.
Kanrel leaned back. "Ask Yviev if my word isn't enough. She'll tell you the same. And if that isn't enough either, I'll take you down to the chambers myself and show you. It isn't as though anyone else knows they're there, or could stop me."
The woman raised her cup at last, and drank. Then she reached into the depths of her gown and drew out a note, folded small. She looked at it a moment, then at Kanrel, and set it on the table between them.
Kanrel read it. And an uncontrollable cough rose out of him. An embarrassing thing. "Where did you find this?" he managed, once he had his composure.
Orfia shrugged. "Roslyn found it, I think. Folded inside a book."
"Ah. Yes." He looked at the paper as though it might close itself. "I had forgotten all about it."
"Explain it."
Kanrel swallowed. "I'd prefer not to."
"Explain it."
"Well, I... Yirn." He sighed. It was a difficult thing to say, but as that name left his lips, the rest followed. "He was my friend, once. And I—I loved him. Despite everything he had done. But I could not forgive him. And I could not forgive myself for not seeing sooner the road he was walking. For not turning him from it while I still might have. I regret the way he died. I regret all of it. All of it, I regret."
"I fear that for a long time I blamed myself far more than I ever blamed him."
"He betrayed me. He killed three people... two of whom had nothing to do with his grievance." His eyes moved, briefly, to her, and away. "But even so. I should have known. I should have been a better friend to him."
"It is a complicated thing. With so many what-ifs that I cannot say what I might have been, what the world might have been, if I had only managed to move him. To change him enough that he might have let go of the beliefs that took him, or the vengeance that was the root of all of it."
"So I suffered. I suffer still. I will go on suffering, with all of it." Kanrel felt his eyes water, though no tears came; only the lump in his throat, not for the words he could not say but for the simple human need to weep. He cleared his throat and drank, and the lump stayed where it was. He looked away, out the window, at the figures passing.
"Orfia... Know that the crime has never been forgotten. Not the victims, and not the murderer. The ones who were there still remember. Yviev remembers. My mother. Oidus. And I."
"And if you have come here to lay blame on Yviev, or on me, then place none of it on her. Place all of it on me." And only then did he turn his gaze back to her.
For a long moment Orfia did not answer. She looked at her own hands, resting open on the table. The hands that, a few hours before, had held a sharpened pin to the hollow of his throat.
"I came here to hate you," she said at last. Her voice was very quiet. "I have hated someone for so long. I dressed for it. I brought a thing to release it from me." A breath. "And you won't let me. You sit there and take all of it onto yourself, and you tell me my brother died for nothing, and there's... there's no one left. Yirn is dead. You blame yourself worse than I ever could. There's nobody to hate."
She stood. She did not look at him. "Then what of me? What of my father? Who are we to... blame?"
The silence held for what felt like a winter crawling by.
"I find that I can't blame either of you," she said, at last. And it was not forgiveness; for it wasn't a thing she could so easily forgive, even when nearly two decades had rolled by, and the memory of her brother's existence was as faint as the red sun climbing the horizon. Instead, it was nothing more than a thing she'd set down for now, instead of grasping it tightly against her chest, suffocating as the thought would come by at the sight of remembrance. "I only wanted the truth. That's all I wanted."
She crossed to the door. She stopped there, her back to him, her hand on the frame. And just before she opened it and stepped through, she said:
"Thank you."
And with the door closing behind her, silence at last arrived. Somewhere far off, the bells of the Cathedral roared the arrival of midday.