Soulkeeper Page 29

  “Was that a pun?”

  “Was it funny?”

  “No. Leave the puns to Tommy, please. You’re no good at them.”

  This time she took the lead as Devin trailed.

  “I thought it was a little funny,” he grumbled quietly to himself.

  Flowers were not the only decoration within the garden. As they wound closer to its heart they passed more and more statues carved out of smooth white limestone. Jacaranda studied them, fascinated. They were all of people, most of them children in the nude. The way they were posed implied motion despite their stillness, and she could not believe how much emotion she could read into their little faces. Mouths open with laughter, eyes bright and dazzling, their arms flung out to the side as they ran, tumbled, and climbed.

  “How does one learn to carve so intricately?” she asked. She touched the head of a babe suckling from her smiling mother’s bosom. They’d entered a series of tall hedges, and the statues had shifted from children to adults engaged in mundane, daily routines. “These feel like thoughts made real.”

  “I couldn’t tell you the individual steps,” Devin said. “But I do know it is a skill like all other skills. Miss Valber could carve these statues because she carved hundreds of others like them, just not as beautiful and flawless. Time and practice. Hardly the sexy answer most want to hear, but it’s the truth.”

  “Speaking of sexy,” Jacaranda said as they turned a corner through particularly tall hedges to discover a statue of a man carrying an enormous boulder upon his back and shoulders. His erect penis was prominently displayed, not helped by the statue being placed on a pedestal so it was at eye level. That the penis was swollen and round for the first half of the length, and thin like a reed for the second half leading to the tip, was not lost on either of them. A lone word, burden, was carved across the pedestal.

  “This one is definitely… interesting,” Devin said.

  “Indeed,” Jacaranda said. She adopted a flat, careful tone. “So what emotion do you think she wished to convey with this piece?”

  Devin tilted his head to one side.

  “Erections can come at even the most inopportune times?”

  Jacaranda felt laughter threatening to escape, and she clenched her jaw as tightly as she could to hold them back.

  “Maybe we should bring Tommy here,” she offered. “He could use the inspiration.”

  “You mean he could add another penis to his repertoire?”

  Giggles escape through her teeth. She couldn’t contain herself any longer.

  “Had Miss Valber even seen an erect penis?” she asked. “Dear Goddesses, it looks more like a chicken drumstick.”

  Devin tilted his head the opposite direction.

  “Maybe that was the intention,” he said. “Just trading one cock for another.”

  That did it. She was done. Jacaranda laughed and waved her hand in front of her as if warding away the bulbous monstrosity.

  “Please, let’s go,” she said as she recovered. “I don’t want to look at that thing anymore.”

  “Careful turning more corners,” Devin said. “You might poke your eye out.”

  Goddesses help her, that set her off all over again. They passed more statues and flower arrangements, but she barely noticed them. When she exited the garden she felt refreshed and alive. There was so much to the world that had been denied to her, not through Gerag’s orders, but by the very nature of being soulless. Witnessing the careful thought and dedication of the sculptors felt like waking up a limb that had been asleep for two decades, only without the pins and needles.

  “Where to next?” Devin asked.

  “You still think we might find a mummer or two at one of the markets?”

  “I do.”

  “Let’s go, then,” she said. “Far too much of my life was spent without laughter. I’ve catching up to do.”

  They did indeed find some mummers, a trio surrounded by a crowd who alternated between singing songs and performing with puppets from behind a thick curtain strung between two trade stalls. They kept their songs bawdy and their performances silly and crude. The city craved something lighthearted to forget the dread of the changing world, and she did not blame them. Jacaranda laughed and sang along with the crowd.

  Once that was finished Devin bought them little pies stuffed with vegetables, and they ate as they walked eastward to the river. At one of the piers they found an unoccupied bench and sat so they might rest their tired legs. Jacaranda felt like they’d traversed half the city, though she knew that was nonsense. Londheim was enormous, and she had seen only a tiny fraction of it. Instead of intimidating her, it only filled her with determination to see that much more, to experience everything the winding streets and crowded buildings could offer.

  Jacaranda shifted slightly so she sat close enough to Devin to lean her body against him. Together they watched boats lazily drift across the water. The touch of Devin’s body against hers, even if just shoulder to shoulder and elbow to elbow, caused her heart to race. Was it nervousness, fright, or revulsion? She didn’t know. An insane desire to kiss him flashed through her mind. How might he respond? Would his lips be soft, his touch tender? Or would they be rough, aggressive, just like… like…

  The desire died instantly. Jacaranda clenched her jaw and fought down the revulsion. No, damn it, not now. Not when she was happy. As if in rebellion to her own mind she looped an arm around Devin’s and embraced it.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Today has easily been the best day of my life.”

  “You’ve not had too many for comparison,” Devin said. “But I’ll happily take the default win.”

  She pulled away. Her heart hammered inside her chest hard enough that she wondered if Devin had felt it. Goddesses above, was this the sort of thing people dealt with daily? No wonder men and women rambled out poetry for hours and wrote countless stories about love and courtship. It was so confusing and exhausting, how else might one figure out what the fuck was going on?

  “It’ll be dark soon,” she said after several more minutes of watching the river. “Should we head home?”

  Devin stood, and she stood with him, assuming that was a yes. Instead he paused a moment, inwardly debating something.

  “You probably should,” he said. “If you’ll forgive me, I won’t accompany you. There’s something I need to do first.”

  “And what is that?”

  “I’d rather not say. Even we Soulkeepers need some privacy on occasion.”

  Jacaranda was surprised by the response. He… he wouldn’t tell her? Why wouldn’t he tell her? Was he hiding something? Did it involve her? The deluge of wonder and curiosity was thoroughly new and unexpected, and it took her a moment to collect herself.

  “Oh, all right,” she said, and smiled as if not bothered in the slightest. “Stay safe.”

  “You too.”

  He hesitated a moment, as if still deciding something, then bowed low. The grand sweep of his arm and the removal of his hat made it seem like he bowed before a queen.

  “Farewell, milady.”

  “You’re such a fool,” she said, but she offered him her hand anyway. He kissed it gently upon the knuckles. The warmth of his lips upon her skin sent a pleasant tingle up her arm and down her spine.

  “What can I say, you bring out the fool in me.”

  Devin replaced his hat atop his head and casually strolled away. Jacaranda watched him go, her feet rooted in place. She couldn’t believe how strongly the desire to follow pulled at her chest. She didn’t just want to know where Devin went, or why he preferred to go alone, she needed to know, almost as badly as she needed air in her lungs. She bit her lip. Her inward debate lasted but a moment before she followed after Devin at a sufficiently safe distance. She had extensive training at stealth and trailing another unseen. What harm could there be in satisfying a little curiosity? Besides, if she did her job right, Devin need not ever know.

  Devin stopped at the entrance to a large, gate
d patch of land. Well-cut grass formed a wide barrier between the fence and the rest of the city, for no one wished to live or work so close to a graveyard. A nondescript iron fence surrounded the triangular lot. A shack was built just beside the front gate, a lone torch hanging from its corner to illuminate the entrance.

  “Why are we here?” Jacaranda whispered as she watched from afar. Devin knocked on the gate, waited a moment, and then warmly greeted an elderly man who stepped out from the shack. They talked for a bit, too distant for her to make out the words. Eventually the old man returned to his shack and Devin wandered deeper inside the graveyard.

  Jacaranda circled the fence, an eye on Devin the entire time. He seemed to have an exact destination in mind, for he did not wander or tarry. She vaulted the fence once he was far enough in, then followed. There was nothing to hide behind, so Jacaranda had to rely on the darkness and Devin’s blind spots to remain hidden. She slowly approached, coming as close as she dared. Devin was before her, kneeling at one of seemingly hundreds of unmarked graves. The ground was flat, the grass cut low, so she hunkered down and slowed her breathing to a crawl so she might listen in.

  Devin carefully set three candles to form a triangle about the patch of ground. He used a knife from his belt to carve connecting lines in the dirt between them. All the while he remained completely silent. Jacaranda feared her breathing might be detectable in such a quiet, somber place.

  “By your will, not mine,” Devin whispered in prayer. Jacaranda knelt lower to the grass. A pang of something tightened inside her chest. Guilt? Awkwardness? Something about peering in on such a private moment felt wrong to her, but in a way she couldn’t hope to express. If not for her fear of alerting Devin to her presence, she’d have left then and there.

  “By your power, not mine. By your grace, not mine. Please, Sisters. Let this be the final reaping hour for her. Overlook her no more. Take her soul into your hands. Alma, Lyra, Anwyn… please, take her home.”

  The reaping hour came. Jacaranda knew by the thin beams of blue light that shone in the distant dark, souls shooting to the sky throughout Londheim. Devin prayed louder, pleading, begging. Whatever he desired, it was surely not granted, for the heartbreak was evident in each and every tired word he prayed. She blinked and discovered that tears had swelled in her eyes. Why did she feel this sorrow? It wasn’t hers. Whatever Devin suffered, it was unknown to her, but it hurt her heart all the same. An impulse to go to him flooded her, and she took a single step before realizing she’d done so.

  One step, that was all, but the soft crunch of grass was enough to turn Devin’s head. Jacaranda froze. She felt like a rabbit before a wolf. He said nothing, and she had nothing to offer in return. His shoulders shook as he took a long breath in and then let it out.

  “Go home, Jacaranda,” he said. His voice trembled.

  “I only wished to…”

  “Go. Home.”

  She retreated out of the graveyard and over its iron fence, all the while a burning heat lighting up her neck and face. By the time she arrived at Devin’s home she’d mostly recovered. Tesmarie snoozed upon a padded shelf, and Jacaranda made sure not to wake her as she retreated to her room and locked the door. She was still awake when she heard Devin come home. Jacaranda sat atop her bed with her legs crossed underneath her and her head resting in her fists. She stared at the door of her room, wondering if he’d knock. Wondering if her stupid mistake would forever tarnish all the joy they’d experienced throughout the day.

  No knock. Just quiet. Jacaranda did her best to sleep, but it came in random, uneven fits. They said nothing of it the following morning. Jacaranda doubted they ever would.

  CHAPTER 27

  Adria led the early-morning prayer with the handful of volunteers inside her church, but her mind was elsewhere as she asked the Sisters for mercy and guidance throughout the day.

  I’m not asking for certainty, Devin had told her that morning. All I’m asking is for legal precedents involving soulless. We need to know what future Jacaranda might have.

  There were no precedents, though. That was the entire point. When the first soulless appeared decades ago they’d been small in number and cared for by the church. Faithkeepers prayed over them constantly, and Mindkeepers searched through old tomes for answers. None came, and nothing changed. The soulless lived and died, and that was that. As the number of soulless grew, so too did the burden of feeding and housing them. The textile mills in the north had been the first to sue for the right to employ soulless, and many industries quickly did likewise. Every legal decision was based on the accepted premise by both church and state: The soulless were human but not truly human. They were akin to expensive livestock, with strict regulations to prevent abuse and cruelty.

  Her prayer ended. The mostly female group scattered. Some would cook meals to share with those still bunking inside the church. Others would gather donated bread from bakers to bring to the families housing refugees. Two elderly sisters collected the previous day’s clothes and washed them in tubs behind the church. Keeping everyone fed and clean was a tremendous task, and Adria knew she couldn’t have done it all alone, not even with Faithkeeper Sena’s help.

  Normally Sena was in charge of the morning prayers, but she’d not returned since the previous day. Her absence bothered Adria greatly. Given her encounter with the enormous owl, and the Soulkeepers’ search for whoever was murdering keepers, Adria feared the worst had befallen Low Dock’s Faithkeeper.

  “Would you like us to fetch more water from the well?” one of the refugees asked her as she walked the center aisle, pulling her free of her thoughts.

  “If you could, please,” she told him. The man nudged his husband beside him, who lay on the pew with a pillow over his face.

  “Wake up,” he said. “Time to earn our keep.”

  The other man grunted and made a rude gesture with his hand.

  “You volunteered us, didn’t you, you asshole?”

  “Such fitting language for a church,” Adria said. The man lifted the pillow, saw her watching him from behind her mask, and paled.

  “Shit. Uh. Sorry. Sorry. Sisters forgive me.”

  The two men hurried for the door. Adria paid them no mind. Currently she was daydreaming of a few minutes of peace and solitude in her room before she began her own errands. When she heard the two men stop at the door and call out a greeting, she realized her solitude would have to wait.

  “Good morning, Faithkeeper,” they said in unison.

  Adria spun to see a disheveled Sena offering them both a polite nod. Dried mud covered the bottom of her normally crisp white trousers. Her fingers were bandaged. Adria kept her body still and relaxed, not wanting to give away her worry to the rest in the church.

  “Welcome back,” Adria said, as if Sena had been gone for a few minutes on a morning stroll.

  Sena walked right past her on the way to her room.

  “We must talk,” said the older woman, and Adria followed.

  Sena sat atop her bed, flung her jacket off beside her, and then stared into nowhere. Adria patiently waited. Whatever trauma she’d endured, she’d tell it at her own pace.

  “I was… attacked,” Sena said after a long while. “He looked human, but he wasn’t. And my prayers, they… they…”

  Adria sat down beside her and gently put her hand over Sena’s.

  “Take your time,” she said. “I’m here to listen. All else can wait.”

  Sena described her night, starting with leaving the Creshan mansion. Adria kept silent, but her mind reeled at the thought of a man able to change flesh to gold at a mere touch of his hand. When the Faithkeeper told of the brilliant sun summoned by her devotion, Adria wanted to weep. She wasn’t alone. She wasn’t the only one with this power.

  “And now I’m here,” Sena said as she finished. “What do we do, Adria? This is far beyond my expertise.”

  “The devotion,” Adria asked. “Do you think if you recited it you might re-create the blinding light
?”

  “I don’t know,” Sena said. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking it’s time we speak with a Vikar. There’s too much we don’t know that our superiors might be able to illuminate.”

  “And if they do not believe?” Sena asked. “Or worse, believe we’ve sold our soul to the void and become Ravencallers?”

  Such a thought should have been ridiculous, but Adria remembered how frightened she’d been the first time she healed another. These gifts shook the foundations of the mind. Who could predict how a man or woman reacted to that?

  “We’ll reveal ourselves to Vikar Thaddeus,” she said. “He’s a friend. He knows I’d never give in to such blasphemy.”

  “I shall trust your judgment,” Sena said. “Let us not delay. If we leave now, we can catch Thaddeus at the Cathedral of the Sacred Mother just after his morning prayers.”

  Adria and Sena sat beside one another on an ornate hickory couch with padded white cushions. Seven candles flickered in the chandelier above. In the northern tip of the cathedral, within the heart of the Deakon’s Garden, was a mansion known as the Old Vikarage. The three Vikars of Londheim, plus the Deakon himself, all shared the extravagant abode, affording them ample opportunities to discuss with one another the overwhelming work required to oversee the Keeping Church’s presence in West Orismund. The two keepers sat in one of many little rooms with bookshelves, chairs, and couches meant for sipping tea and quiet reflection.

  “It’s not too late,” Sena said softly. “We can still walk away.”

  Adria shook her head. No, enough was enough. This feeling of secrecy and paranoia had to be dealt with or she’d lose her mind. It was time her Vikar knew of the power they, and potentially hundreds of others, wielded with their prayers. After they’d insisted on the importance of their coming and demanded a private audience with Thaddeus, a novice had finally relented and brought them to the Old Vikarage. There they sat, two cups of untouched tea cooling before them, as they waited.