CHAPTER 16

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Dark, charred ruins crowned the hill where once the college had towered above Karantec.

Rieuk stood staring at the devastation that had been his home for seven years. His throat had gone dry. His palms were cold and sweaty. He wished he had not been forced to come back. He laid his hand on his breast, gaining reassurance as he felt the slumbering Ormas quiver at his touch.

The cottage where Rieuk had last seen Hervé’s daughter happily playing with her tabby cat had a sad, neglected air. The windows were boarded up, slates had fallen from the roof, and weeds were sprouting up vigorously all over the little garden.

A neighbor was sitting out by her front door, shelling peas.

“Can I help you?” she called in a loud tone that suggested help was the last thing she wanted to offer.

“I’m looking for Madame de Maunoir.” He hoped she would not recognize him; the thick-lensed spectacles and white-silvered streak in his hair gave him the air of someone older than his twenty-two years.

“She’s long gone.”

“So I see. Would you happen to know where?”

“What’s your business?” The woman put down the bowl of peas and scraped the empty pods from her apron into a bucket beside her chair.

“I’m a lawyer,” said Rieuk. “I have news for her.”

“Well, she’s gone, and good riddance. Her husband was involved in some bad business. Last I heard, he was tried and burned with his treasonable books. No more than he deserved.”

The barely disguised loathing in the woman’s voice shocked Rieuk. The people of Karantec used to accept the magisters, taking a certain pride in their unconventional residents living on the hill. The Inquisition’s campaign had changed all that.

“So you have no idea where we might find Madame de Maunoir and her daughter?”

“They followed him to the city. That’s the last we heard of them.”

“I see that the house is empty.”

“No one will live there. They say it’s cursed.” The woman stood up, wiping her hands on her apron. “Is it a legacy, then? Has she come into some money?” There was an unpleasantly avaricious gleam in her eyes.

“I can divulge nothing, except to my Madame de Maunoir,” said Rieuk, looking at her coldly over the rims of his spectacles.

“She had a sister in the capital. That’s all I know.” She took up the bowl and shuffled inside, slamming the door behind her.

Around the back of the deserted cottage, a shutter had been prised open and hung at an awkward angle, one hinge detached. Rieuk leaned over the windowsill and peered inside. He hardly recognized the interior of Madame de Maunoir’s neat and pretty cottage. Someone had scrawled obscene graffiti all over the whitewashed walls. A few fragments of smashed china lay on the dirt-smeared tiled floor.

Rieuk turned away, wishing he had not troubled to look.

 

There were armed Guerriers out on patrol in the streets of Lutèce, and the very sight of their black uniforms set Rieuk’s nerves on edge. It had taken him several days’ intensive research in the records at the Hotel de Ville to discover Madame de Maunoir’s family name, and several more days to trace details of any surviving relatives.

“And why should I talk to you?” Lavéna Malestroit stared at him with unconcealed hostility. “Isn’t it customary with lawyers to put their business in writing first?”

“Very well, madame.” Rieuk turned away. “We’ll find some other way of contacting your sister.”

“M—my sister?” Rieuk heard a catch in Madame Malestroit’s voice.

“Didn’t I say so? It’s to do with the title deeds of her cottage in Karantec…”

“You’ve had a wasted journey. My sister is dead.”

“Dead? Then you must be caring for her daughter, Klervie?”

Rieuk saw Madame Malestroit swallow hard. She seemed to be finding it hard to speak. “Klervie—is gone, too.”

Klervie was dead?

“I should have taken the child in.” Madame Malestroit began to sob. “After my sister died, that money-grubbing landlady couldn’t even look after a little girl for a day or two. She turned her out. Oh, her story was that she’d sent Klervie to find me, but the child never arrived. I was told that a fair-haired child was seen nearby with a—a man. All they recovered was a shoe, her little shoe, muddy and bloodstained.”

“She was murdered?”

She nodded, one hand pressed to her mouth, as though even speaking the words aloud made her want to retch. “Sick, evil pervert, preying on children. They never caught him.”

So Klervie was dead. The image of the bright-haired child smiling up at him faded, tainted by the news of her sorry end. He retreated, stammering an apology. “I—I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”

 

Rieuk sat down at a café in the nearby square and ordered coffee and a brandy. He rarely drank spirits but he was so shaken by the news that his hand trembled as he raised the glass to his lips. He drank the brandy down in one gulp, grimacing as it burned his throat. He had left without asking the weeping Madame Malestroit whether her sister had left any effects behind, let alone what had become of them.

Yet if Azilis had been in that house, surely I would have sensed her. I felt nothing. So where do I look for her now?

Hervé de Maunoir’s book could have been sold off to an antiquarian bookseller, a private library, a university…A long and difficult search lay ahead of him. He ordered a second brandy and drank it in slow, ruminative sips, savoring the taste of burned sugar, wondering as he watched the passersby what new identity he would be forced to take. Scholar, collector, even Inquisition spy…?

Was it just chance, or were all the lives Azilis had touched fated to end in tragedy?