Death After Death-Chapter 354 - Stirrings of the Soul

Simon relayed the men’s order to his cook, then took the backstairs up to his room to retrieve a few things. If they’re going to track her, then I need to mark her and give them an alternate target, he reasoned. In this case, the target is my horse. Let them chase it around for a few days, and maybe hope she got eaten by a bear.

As a plan, it wasn’t complicated. The hardest part would be convincing Aranna to cooperate. She clearly knew something about magic if she was in this position. Simon had no way of knowing if they were hunting her because they thought she was a witch, or because they wanted to make her a silent sister, and he wasn’t likely to find out until all this was over, either.

That’s another concern, he sighed internally as he raced down the stairs. If she’s a witch, what might she have done to any of us already? It was a fair question, and while he wanted to believe the best about someone he’d spent so much time with, it gnawed at him as he re-entered the common room.

“The food will be out soon,” he explained before telling the men that he wanted to fetch his best wine for such honored guests.

No one showed any sign of suspicion at that. Why would they? The Unspoken were used to having their asses kissed, and he entered the basement without any issues and approached his barmaid's hiding place.

When he opened the small hidden door, she looked like she’d seen a ghost and immediately demanded to know what was going on in hushed tones. Simon ignored that and said, “Later. For now, we have to keep them from finding you.”

“But—” she protested before he interrupted her again.

“Just trust me,” Simon said, watching her eyes widen as he pushed her down into the nook. “They’re using magic to trace you so—”

“So you’ll use it to hide me?” she hissed, obviously terrified by the idea. “Are you mad? If they find me like this, they’ll think I’m a witch for sure.”

“Better they don’t find you at all then,” he said, pulling down the shoulder strap of her dress on one arm and moving aside her hair to expose her tan, coppery flesh. “I have Leon going north. I’m throwing away my best horse to provide you a good alibi, so don’t waste it.”

In truth, Simon didn’t know if this would work, but the only alternative was bloodshed. He might be able to kill every one of the white cloaks upstairs, but even if he succeeded, it would be as good as burning this life down, and he had no wish to do that just yet. Aranna, Bessa, and Leon weren’t family, but they were close enough, and he felt like he was finally starting to approach the breakthrough he’d been waiting for.

It was unfortunate that he was doing so in the very shadow of the Unspoken he wished to join, but he had no control over that timing. Right now, the only thing he had control over was the small brushstrokes he was making.

The brush he had in hand was made for watercolors, not ink, but it worked well enough, and it only took a few quick motions to mark his barmaid with the words of lesser null. He added the word lesser because he didn’t want to drain too much of her life. Depending on how their search went, the White Cloaks could be here for days or even weeks on and off, and he didn’t want to burn any more of the woman’s time than he had to.

Even when he finished putting away the tools, she looked at the mark like it was a bug, or perhaps a spider ready to bite her. “Don’t touch it,” he said. “Certainly not when it's wet, and even after. If you smear it, it will stop working.”

“What’s it do?” she asked with a voice filled with dread. “Did you just… Is my sou—”

“If I wanted to steal your soul, don’t you think I would have done so the last time you got drunk?” he laughed, but she didn’t think the joke was very funny. “Anyway, all it does is shield you from magic. You’ve never been safer from magic than you are right now. I…”

He started to stand as he heard the sound of someone coming down the stairs, and whispered, “I’ll bring you food later. Just wait, and don’t touch the mark.” Then, Simon moved the shelf back into place and pulled two bottles of wine free just in time for the Unspoken to approach him.

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“You were taking so long that we thought perhaps you might be up to something…” the man said. His tone said he was joking, but his eyes said he wasn’t.

Simon opted to go with the former and answered, “Just looking for the perfect wine for dinner. You’re welcome to search down here if you don’t believe me, but I’m not going to make your commander wait any longer than I already have.”

With that, Simon turned around like a man with nothing to hide while his heart hammered in his chest, and a few seconds later, the other man followed him. That was a victory, but he didn’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet. He had a long night ahead of him with all of this.

Fortunately, he was not expected to provide many answers. He was, after all, an innkeeper, not a suspect, and he knew from experiments with the mirror that his aura was a perfectly acceptable pale white. Dangerous as they were, these witchhunters had no quarrel with him. So, he spent the night playing obsequious host and listening in where he could. Still, what he learned was not definitive either way, between bites of food and calls for more ale.

She was a runaway. He’d guessed that correctly, but from another woman who these men had accused of witchcraft. A few lifetimes ago, he would have dismissed that as pure ignorance, but now he had no way of knowing without examining the evidence closer, and that wasn’t available.

It wasn’t until the meal was finished, and half the men were close to drunk, that they finally went upstairs to the room that Simon assured them belonged to her and tried their blessed artifact, which was nothing more than a disguised version of Simon’s dousing rods. The incident didn’t make him think of his dousing rod, though. It made him think of the healing relics he’d been using for the last couple of lives.

While they didn’t use any artifact for that exact purpose, he’d probably gotten the idea from them on some level. He certainly used the better version of the magical swords they used most of the time. Still, it was interesting to watch them try to divine the location of someone with magic.

For all the time I spent with them, I barely know how they work at all, do I? He asked himself as they repeated the ritual again and again without result, as their frustration mounted.

“Does that mean she’s dead?” he asked finally.

“Death is one possibility," one of the warriors admitted before his commander added, “But magical trickery is far more likely. Come, if we cannot find her, we will find the horse she rode off on. Show us to the stables.”

Simon hid his smile as he took them outside and showed them the stall his horse was usually in. He complained bitterly about the loss, but really, he was elated that he’d anticipated their moves so easily. That’s what happens when you spend a decade studying divination magic, he gloated silently.

All of the men took off within the hour, but by morning, they’d returned. They returned Simon’s horse, for which he thanked them with a fresh keg of beer, but they found nothing else to show where Aranna might have gone.

They weren’t satisfied with just that, though, and came back time and again searching for more clues. Each time they did, though, they found the same dead ends. The rumors said she’d left, and the magic they unwittingly used said that she couldn’t be found, and all the while Simon polished tankards and offered to help wherever he could, the one they looked for hid safely in the basement below.

He wasn’t able to get down to visit her for almost two full days that first time. He felt bad about that and was sure the poor woman was starving, but there was nothing he could do when he was being watched so closely.

Simon wasn’t able to get answers out of her on that short break, nor on any of those that followed for the next week or so. As tense as his time was dealing with the men, he had to remind himself that her time was worse. I’m not the one hiding down in the dark like a rat, he told himself whenever he grew annoyed with the charade.

He reapplied the mark of nullification twice, just to make sure that it was still clear and readable despite how dirty his barmaid was getting, but she was never as fearful as that first time. She didn’t ask how it was he knew magic either, or if he was going to sell her out again. She obviously understood that if he was going to sell her out, he would have done it that first night.

So, no matter how many times he came down to bring her food and water and take away the bucket that served as her chamber pot, she endured, first with a sort of silent exhaustion, and later with something more akin to a bored stoicism. He waited until the Whitecloaks had been gone for three days before he told her it was safe to come out, but even then, it was in the middle of the night, and there was no way she was returning to work any time soon.

“I should flee south again, while I still can,” she insisted as she stood there wobbly, but Simon forbade it.

“Nonsense,” he told her. “We’re going to do two things. First, we’ll sneak you up to my room for the next month or two, until we’re sure they’re totally gone, and while you’re there, you can tell me why they wanted you so bad and who Esmella is, or at least was, and what she’s got to do with you.”

Aranna seemed startled that he knew that name, but she didn’t say anything. Instead, she merely nodded and took his hand as she left the basement for the first time in a week.