APIBAGS Chapter 20

"When Lady Rohanson finishes her prayers, bring her to the knights' reception room. Uriel will be with her."

On his way, Gabriel passed word to a knight to escort Lady Evangeline over.

The Pharalos Knights had their own building erected right beside the Grand Temple—understandable, given their temple affiliation. She'd expected something close to the Grand Temple's magnificence, but the building turned out to be surprisingly plain.

"Ah. There it is."

The closer Henna drew to the knights' offices, the more vivid her imagination became about the worst possible outcomes.

Gabriel might have been glad to finally have a lead on the case, but Henna felt the opposite—a growing unease that pressed against her ribs. She and Kanna were the ones who'd witnessed Donau's death. And now another witness had appeared? If the painting was the problem, would the witness be from the painter's side? Though did there even need to be—

And moreover, they'd come from a convent. Henna had no idea what this witness could possibly have seen, and the not-knowing made it worse.

'Surely they didn't see Lady Evangeline kill Donau. The door was wide open that day; if they heard the noise and came closer...'

The office door opened like a sentence being handed down.

Inside sat three knights including the Raphaela she'd just encountered, along with someone in a nun's habit who was presumably the informant. The moment Henna registered that face, she spoke the name before she could stop herself.

"Daisy?"

Daisy—who people said had gone blind and been bundled off to a convent like unwanted luggage—looked back at Henna. She had grown noticeably thinner.

"Henna. Why are you here?"

"That's my line. They said you'd gone blind..."

The rumors had spread that Daisy had lost her sight and been sent away to a convent. That was why Henna had been so frightened when she first took Daisy's old position. She'd half-convinced herself that Daisy was probably already dead and Lady Evangeline had spread the story to handle the loose ends.

But looking at her now, Daisy hadn't gone blind at all, and she didn't appear to be seriously hurt.

So Daisy was the witness. Henna's head threatened to crack open from a headache she hadn't anticipated. If it were anyone else, she might have pushed toward claiming they'd been mistaken. But Daisy had been Lady Evangeline's closest personal maid until just recently.

The people at the Rohanson estate kept their mouths closed for two reasons: the allowances distributed by the butler, and the ever-present weight of Lady Evangeline's existence. But Daisy had already quit. If it was her— She would expose everything, starting from the dead Lady waking up in her coffin.

That couldn't happen. If the temple's people learned the full story and decided to move against Lady Evangeline— Henna wasn't worried about any harm coming to the Lady herself. It was that the role of "Evangeline Rohanson" was what kept the Lady in check. She was terrified of what would happen once that constraint ceased to mean anything.

What could she do? She needed to keep Daisy quiet.

"Did you quit the estate?"

Henna shook her head, and Daisy's face went white.

"Leave as soon as you can. Wait—wait. That on her neck— Henna, who is that?"

Daisy was pointing at Kanna.

"My little sister."

Her neck? Daisy was looking at Kanna's neck. There was a red line drawn across Kanna's throat—Donau had put it there, and since Kanna kept refusing to have it treated with holy water, it had simply stayed.

Daisy pressed her hand over her mouth as though she might be sick.

"Your sister?"

Henna nodded at Daisy's echo.

"Your sister... works at the estate too?"

"Yes."

With each answer Henna gave, another shade drained from Daisy's face. The hand clamped over her mouth trembled steadily, and so did her eyes.

That red line across the throat was unmistakably the trace of the demon Daisy had summoned. The demon had a particular cruelty: it liked to slit people's throats and then stitch them back together. Without that thin line on the skin, there would have been no way at all to know whether the person had died.

The demon had asked Daisy to guide it to the Rohanson estate. Daisy had obliged. The demon had arrived at the Rohanson estate without incident, and had apparently done harm to the people there.

She'd suspected this, in the abstract. Having the victim appear directly before her was a different kind of thing entirely. That the victim turned out to be the blood relative of a former colleague made the guilt heavier.

"What have I done—what have I—"

Shaken, Daisy stumbled sideways, and the knight beside her moved quickly to steady her. Daisy slapped the hand away sharply. Then she looked at the knight she'd just pushed off as though he might turn on her at any moment, and backed away.

It looked to her, in that moment, as though the knights might do exactly that. And Daisy was not without guilt herself: she had summoned the demon; she had killed Father Berga.

"I think I should be going."

"What? What do you—"

Daisy had come to the Grand Temple to verify the painting Father Berga had supposedly seen. She had confirmed the ominous summoning circle in it, and had resolved to give testimony in order to have it removed.

Of course she hadn't intended to confess everything she'd done, so the testimony had been assembled carefully—truth and plausible fiction braided together.

"Everything I've told you is all there is. Isn't that sufficient?"

Gabriel looked to the knight to confirm. The knight nodded. Gabriel accepted the sheet on which Daisy's testimony had been laid out in neat order and skimmed through it.

It stated that Father Berga at the convent had used the summoning circle to call up a demon. Several of Father Berga's misdeeds—attributed to demonic influence—were listed. It also noted that searching the priest's room would turn up evidence.

Turning to the next page, he found material concerning Evangeline Rohanson. Given that Daisy and the others here had apparently spoken to one another, Daisy had evidently worked at the Rohanson estate at some point. This seemed to be testimony from that time.

Gabriel glanced quietly at Henna and Kanna, then turned the paper face-down without a word. That explained Daisy's distress. She'd encountered people from the Rohanson estate again; of course she was frightened.

"This has been most helpful. I'll look into the rest myself."

At Gabriel's permission to leave, Daisy's shoulders dropped with visible relief. Father Berga was already dead; there was no guilt in assigning him the blame. The misdeeds she'd described were things Father Berga had genuinely committed, and in truth, he really was the one who had drawn that summoning circle first.

Daisy's purpose had only ever been to get the ominous painting taken down. She'd done her part.

"Raphaela, see her out to the temple entrance."

Daisy understood that refusing even this would look genuinely suspicious. She nodded quietly.

As Daisy brushed past Henna, she whispered—barely, carefully—at a volume so small that not even Kanna, standing directly beside Henna, could have caught it.

"Henna. That's not your sister."

She couldn't explain the full story. The knights were right there. And she was afraid—afraid of hearing from Henna's own mouth the words: because of you, my sister died. So that was the best Daisy could do.

Daisy looked at Henna's dead sister, and at the single orb drifting beside her. She hadn't expected to see it again outside the estate. The small mercy was that it no longer frightened her quite as much as before.

Perhaps because they were inside the Grand Temple, it wasn't operating at its full strength. And in Daisy's experience, those eyes couldn't hear. Whatever she'd just whispered to Henna, they hadn't caught it.

Daisy hurried out of the reception room, afraid of meeting that gaze.

Henna watched Daisy's retreating figure leave under the knight's escort, then quietly reached out and took her sister's hand, holding it tight.

"Henna. What did that person just say?"

"Nothing."

Whatever Daisy said, Kanna was Henna's one and only sister. When Kanna had filled with something bright and wrong at the sight of dead Donau. When she'd called that monstrous painting beautiful. No matter how broken Kanna was, no matter what she thought—to Henna, she was only her beloved little sister.

That was right. It had to be.

"Did your prayers go well?"

Yes. I had a perfectly magnificent nap.

I couldn't exactly tell a holy knight that I'd slept through prayer time, so I just nodded awkwardly.

The prayer room Uriel had taken me to was apparently a private room frequently used by the nobility—and since the clientele tended to be wealthy, the interior was correspondingly extravagant. I'd pictured something like a solitary cell, but not at all. Warm, comfortable, thoroughly lovely.

Big windows poured sunlight in, and from somewhere—I couldn't quite tell where—organ music drifted through the air. I'd closed my eyes and pretended to pray, and at some point that had simply tipped sideways into drowsiness, and then into sleep.

No gods in the dream, either. A transmigrator's bonus—a private chat with the divine—was clearly too much to hope for. They'd given me the language patch late and dropped me into this body at the last possible moment; it was unreasonable to expect additional perks. I'd been running my optimism engine on fumes.

"Have I kept you waiting long?"

"Not at all. Some worshippers pray for hours."

I'd worried I'd slept too long, but apparently not much time had passed. It would be nice if there were clocks in the temple, but there weren't—not in the prayer room, not anywhere. The inconvenience of no mobile phone. I should probably acquire a pocket watch.

"Ah—the Commander is waiting at the knights' building. Your companions are there as well. I'll take you over."

Henna and Kanna were already done looking at the painting, apparently. And they'd waited for me rather than returning to the estate? That was—

Is this friendship? My chest did something warm and slightly inconvenient.

I slapped the drowsing Jelly awake. He'd been nodding off beside me. Thwack. Technically he'd also waited, so why was he so irritating?

Since I was at the temple anyway, I'd used some of the gold coins I'd brought along to stock up on holy water on my way out. Ten bottles, and still had money to spare—I'd grabbed coins more or less at random before leaving the estate.

"Impressive, my lady. Even several years of my wages couldn't purchase that quantity."

Uriel said this from beside me with the enthusiastic approval of a shop assistant angling for commission. I couldn't tell whether he was a knight or a holy water salesman.

I made Jelly carry the bottles. Jelly refused with the full-body rejection of someone being asked to carry plague barrels.

"You want me to carry this...?"