Chapter 42 – Unsettling

Valentina and Innogen turned onto Mill Gate Road, where the street vendors were packing up their stalls.

“I’m starting to get a little scared of him,” Innogen said quietly.

Valentina shoved her hands into the pockets of her coat. “He’s our friend.”

“Yes. And if he keeps this up, in two years he’ll be an Illuminator who’s one hundred percent convinced that any cruelty is an acceptable price for saving souls.” Innogen looked at her, and there was a hardness in her eyes. “He doesn’t know what we are to each other, Val. And if he did, he’d consider it a sin that endangers our souls. What do you think a man would do who’s convinced that he’s saving the souls of the people he loves by protecting them from themselves?”

Valentina didn’t answer right away.

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either. But I sure as hell don’t want to find out.”

“She’s right,” said Vyxara. “You can’t afford sentimentality when your survival is at stake.”

“I’m not just going to give up on Crispin,” Valentina thought. “Not yet. We’re friends.”

She unlocked the front door and stepped aside to let Innogen in.

“Are you staying the night?” she asked.

Innogen slipped off her damp coat and hung it next to the door. “If I may.”

“Of course you may,” said Valentina, closing the door behind them.

~

Innogen had already flopped lazily into bed while Valentina was still fetching wine for both of them. She had bought a supply of expensive red wine from Clairmontine especially so she could offer Innogen something for a change.

“Here.” She handed Innogen the cup and lay down next to her. “This is the one Madame Dolorosa recommended to me.”

“Oh, it’s good.” Innogen took a second big sip. “Madame has excellent taste.”

“In some things.”

Innogen giggled softly, and the tension of the evening began to slowly dissipate and they started gossiping. They mocked the ridiculous little fur hat with a mink tail that Dean Valemont had worn that morning. He had looked like a fat ferret breeder. And about Ignacio Flintside, who hadn’t been paying attention in Veilford’s seminar and had therefore given such a spectacularly wrong answer to a question that the professor had been left speechless for a moment. That certainly didn’t improve Ignacio’s chances of doing his master’s project under Veilford.

“And you?” Valentina asked. “Do you already have an idea for your master’s project?”

Innogen frowned. “To be honest… no. You?”

“A thousand. But I don’t really like any of them yet.”

After that, they talked about their ideas for quite a while, until eventually Innogen set her empty cup on the side table and pulled Valentina toward her.

This time, she kissed Innogen first. The kiss was gentle and warm and tasted of wine and… of home.

And then they disappeared under the blanket, and the world was reduced entirely to themselves and their naked bodies.

Valentina was still surprised and delighted by Innogen’s tender passion. She let herself go, letting Innogen do as she pleased, savoring the caresses of her hands and lips and returning what she could, and it was good and it was right and it was exactly what she wanted in that moment.

And then, just as Innogen’s breath on her neck grew warm and irregular and faltered, an uninvited thought shot through her mind.

A thought of the Eye of Deceit in its iron case beneath the floorboards of her study.

And of the Corrupted Essence that Hobkin was currently procuring for her.

And of the demon in her head, who right now, at this very moment, was feeling everything she felt, every touch, every shudder, every wave of heat that Innogen’s fingers set off inside her.

Innogen knew so much about Valentina. She knew about Cosimo and the Violet Delights and shared her with Lorenzo and so many men, but she didn’t know that she also shared her with a demon who lay, in a sense, invisible between them, in every night they spent together.

“Some secrets protect the people from whom they are kept,” said Vyxara, and the voice was so soft it was barely more than a mental whisper. “Not just the ones who keep them.”

What a convenient truth that was, turning every lie into an act of care.

Valentina held Innogen closer, kissed her forehead, her temple, the spot behind her ear and down her neck and pushed the thought away as far as she could, while she herself reached her climax and clung desperately to Innogen.

Afterward, they lay still together, Innogen’s head on Valentina’s shoulder, their legs intertwined

“Val?”

“Hm?”

“I’m so happy.” Innogen’s voice was heavy. “This year feels so different from everything before. I feel like for the first time I’m really…” She searched for the right words. “Alive. Myself. I think this is the best time of my life.”

A brief laugh, warm and a little shy. “So far, anyway. I think what I’m really trying to say is… I love you.”

Love, a sense of responsibility, and guilt roared in Valentina’s heart, and she couldn’t tell which voice was the loudest.

“I… I love you too.” Valentina’s voice sounded a little choked up.

She was the reason for Innogen’s happiness, and yet she had secrets that could destroy that happiness at any moment.

Vyxara was silent. The demon left her alone with that feeling, and Valentina didn’t know if she should be happy about it, because it meant that even Vyxara realized there was nothing clever to say right now to ease her worries.

~

The following afternoon, Valentina left the auditorium after a three-hour seminar with Professor Veilford, during which he had introduced them to a geometric group whose properties were so confusing that even Crispin, who usually had no trouble with complex mathematics, had to ask for clarification twice.

A small group of first-year students was waiting for her outside the auditorium entrance.

“Excuse me,” said the boldest of them, a tanned girl with a thick blonde braid. “You’re Valentina of Palewood, right? The winner of the Greystone Competition two years ago?”

“That’s me.”

“We’re entering the Greystone Competition this year,” said the girl, and her four companions nodded so in unison that it looked as if they’d rehearsed it. “We wanted to ask if you might have some advice for us?”

Valentina had to smile. She remembered the ambition, the fear, and the desperate desire to win with which she had entered the competition back then.

“Hmm, let me think. The most important advice I can give you,” she said as she walked across the courtyard, the first-year students in tow, “is not to make your project too complicated. You impress the judges first and foremost with elegance. If you solve a simple problem with a simple pattern, that beats a complicated pattern for a difficult problem that you only half-understand, every time.”

“And what was your project?” asked one of the young men, a slender fellow whose hands revealed that he hadn’t worked a day in his life.

“A water purification pattern. It’s not particularly glamorous, but it worked and proved to be extremely useful. The judges appreciate it when they see that someone is thinking about practical application and that’s also what matters most to the duke.”

The first-year students nodded eagerly and asked more questions, and Valentina answered them patiently. At the intersection with Bread Gate Road, the students said their goodbyes to return to their dorms at the university. The tanned girl with the thick blonde braid thanked her effusively once more, and Valentina wished them luck and turned left.

Once she was finally alone with her thoughts again, she returned to the geometric group that had been occupying her mind since Veilford’s seminar. She turned the geometric configuration back and forth in her head, trying to visualize the axes of rotation, and-

“Valentina.”

Something about the way Vyxara’s thought entered her consciousness made her sit up and take notice immediately.

“To your left. At the edge of the market square, next to the cart with the pumpkins.”

Valentina didn’t slow her pace, but her eyes wandered to the left, past the woman packing up her pumpkin cart while chatting with another market vendor.

There!

The same figure in the worn-out coat with the hood pulled low over the face she had seen the other day. This time, however, not in the alley across from her house, but here, less than three minutes from the university gates.

As far as she could tell from under the hood, the guy had his gaze fixed in the direction of the university gate, not on her. But still…

Valentina stopped and pretended to be looking at the display of a stall to her right. She picked up a small bag of dried mint, sniffed it, and watched the figure out of the corner of her eye.

The figure glanced cautiously in her direction, noticed that she was watching him, and abruptly turned away, stepping into the stream of people.

Valentina put the bag of mint down and immediately turned right onto Tanner’s Alley, which curved around the market square, and lifted her skirts slightly as a tanner’s apprentice flung a bucket of water in a high arc into the gutter in front of her.

“Forgive me, Milady, I didn’t see you coming there!”

She turned once more, passed through a narrow passage between two warehouses, and reached the other side of the market square to intercept the hooded figure. But no one came.

She walked back to the spot by the pumpkin cart and paused for a moment where he had been standing. The ground was dirty and wet, and she could make out indistinct footprints in the soft mud, but they could have been the footprints of a hundred different people who had stood there today.

She activated the Sight.

Her gaze shifted. The Essence lamp above the entrance to Tanner’s Alley glowed with its usual steady shimmer. On the wall of a merchant’s house was the faint echo of a perfectly ordinary old protective pattern that had been carved into the stone at some point.

But no demonic presence whatsoever.

She dropped the Sight again.

Whatever that figure was, it was human and mundane, and strangely it seemed like that was more unsettling than the alternative.

“I’m revising my opinion,” said Vyxara. “That wasn’t a coincidence.”

“No,” thought Valentina, setting off again and looking around suspiciously. “Once is a coincidence, twice is a pattern.”

“The question is, what kind of pattern? Is someone watching you specifically, or is someone just watching something related to you?”

Valentina turned onto Pinfeather Lane and instinctively checked the alleyway across from her house, but of course, no one was there. She ran through the possibilities in her head.

An agent of the Illumination? Possible. Eastwald had been removed from Bridgewater, but the Illumination had a long memory and a long reach. However, she couldn’t quite imagine the Illumination hiring ragged figures to lurk around in hooded coats.

Was it perhaps someone connected to the black market dealers Hobkin had contacted on her behalf? But that didn’t quite make sense either. Why would a dealer be spying on his client?

A customer from Violet Delights maybe, who had somehow managed to figure out who she really was? That would be unsettling, but perhaps the most harmless explanation.

“The next time you see him,” said Vyxara, “use Essence Listening. If he’s talking to someone or even just muttering to himself, you might be able to identify him.”

“Assuming I can get close enough.” Valentina unlocked the front door and stepped inside.

“Then you’ll just have to let him get closer, or work your way closer to him without him noticing.”

Valentina locked the door behind her and wondered if she should tell anyone about it. Innogen, perhaps. Or she could write to Lucian, Cosimo’s spymaster. He surely had experience with such things.

But what should she tell him? That a hooded man had stood near her twice and then walked away? Lucian would take her seriously, but he would also tell her that a hooded man in a marketplace was no proof of anything.

“It’s too early for that,” Vyxara agreed. “And we don’t want to alarm Cosimo either. But keep the possibility in mind. And be careful in the meantime. Take different routes. Watch out for people following you.”

“That’s exactly what I will do.”

“Caution costs almost nothing, but carelessness can cost everything.”