Chapter Text
In his dreams, he’s always running to her.
He has had this dream before, too many times to count (Inaccurate: thrice at the end of December, ten times in January when she didn’t meet him in Helligbrücke, seven in February, five in March, twice in the last month. Initial increase and subsequent decrease in frequency suggests relation to anxiety/potential insecurity regarding Vanja’s… well, everything.)
She’s always darting through a crowd on a snowy cobblestone lane in Minkja, just out of reach. The best is when his subconscious mind conjures glittering night, lanterns twinkling off stained glass and her sharp wicked laugh trailing in the air like smoke, daring him to catch her without piercing his hand on the thorns.
This version, though—the sky hard, flat, and pale as a white penny, fear like a chisel in her wild eyes, guilt and shame yoked to his back—this is the one closest to wretched memory. This one is the worst.
He needs to tell her he’s sorry. He doesn’t know what for. (A consistently shifting variable: For letting her go. For holding her back. For saying she’s beautiful, which she thinks is a trap. For thinking her guilty. For thinking her innocent. For asking about her mother. For chasing her to begin with.)
This time, he doesn’t know why until they’re at the staircase up to the viaduct, and he’s snagged her by the arm. I need to say I’m sorry, he pleads. She’s twisting like a fish on a line, only to go eerily still, staring back at him.
For what? she demands.
And the words spill out once more, so fresh he can still taste her skin on his lips: I love you, Vanja. And then: I’m so sorry.
The world shifts, smears with night. Vanja is a blur reaching for him—he knows the feel of her palm along his face like the road to his old hometown. He sees her mouth move, the sounds mere drips of ink touched to wet paper, diffusing into the dark.
The bed is uncomfortably warm when Emeric begins to wake.
The initial fracture through his sleep is the whisper of cinnamon and orange rind and roses; dreams never have a smell, but Vanja does. Her bed does. The lines they crossed together the night before do.
They waft through his teeth, igniting memories like incense. The pressure of her shaking fingertip drawing the circle into his hand. The signposts of shed clothing trailing to the bed. The intoxicating weight of her on his hips, her hair bleeding through his fingers as they moved this way for the first time like a dance, like a landslide, like a forge. He thought he might die in beauty and devastation, and gladly drew her to him.
But this morning warmth is—static. Wrong. Not radiating from Vanja, whose sleeping form is his landmark every dawn; this is omnipresent, almost oppressive beneath the blanket. The dissonance finally pries his eyes open.
He never knows how to explain the world without his spectacles, how it’s sometimes a relief for the world’s edges to soften and simplify for a bit, how he’s learned to read fogged lines and uncertain shapes to divine their nature from obscurity. (Theory: This is, at least in part, how he has managed not to bungle things too terribly with Vanja.)
Neither does he know how to explain why Vanja is nowhere in sight. There’s only a wasteland of empty linen divided by his outstretched arm.
When he lifts his hand to reach for his spectacles, a spot of red blooms against the pillow beneath it.
No, not red—copper.
His worst instincts surge. This is January all over again, this is the fight in Dänwik—
Emeric tamps those memories down by rote, then forces a quiet laugh.
Vanja must already be up, and this is her own crude joke, her calling card as a thief. He can perfectly picture her irresistible smirk as she tucked the red penny under his palm. Doubtless she’ll spend the rest of the day cracking jokes about stealing his virtue and the like, and he’ll pretend to be indignant and huffy, and they’ll both enjoy it tremendously.
His spectacles settle on his face, and the world too settles into clarity. The penny’s face affirms the culprit: She always leaves them crown-side up. It’s not the only culprit he spies. The unpleasant heat is coming from the funny little iron door left ajar in the chimney, presumably to keep him warm in her absence.
That’s how she operates, after all, and how she snuck into his heart like it was a window he forgot to lock; he simply woke up one day and found her already making herself at home. The hardest truth he knows is that kindness is a choice. To most people, cruelty comes easier, and Vanja carries the scars of that. Yet in a thousand ways, great and small, she chooses singular grace. She’ll stop for a frightened little girl, feed a hungry stray, push him out of his own claustrophobic head when he needs it, a compass rose among fickle windvanes. She might do it with a vulgarity on her tongue and a trick up her sleeve, but the dreadful part is, he thinks he likes it that way.
Then Emeric spots a small heap on the crate-turned-bedside table. The silver of a message mirror, the pewter of an amnesty token, a prefect courier token he’d given her in Rammelbeck, the vial of sedatives he entrusted to her…
It’s… odd.
(Not that odd if one factors in the clear connecting thread between all of them. Emeric, however, is electing to ignore it.)
It doesn’t have to mean anything. Vanja woke up before him, left—
He’s plunged abruptly back into Helligbrücke, reading and rereading the letter that said she wasn’t coming after all, telling himself uselessly it wasn’t the end, that this wasn’t about him—
Emeric stuffs those thoughts back where they came from. This isn’t January, this is different. They’ve been through too much in the last month to leave any room for doubt.
Instead, he pushes himself up, stretches as much as he can in the tiny lean-to, and tries not to wince at climbing back into yesterday’s breeches. The alternatives are the pair of breeches utterly demolished in the confrontation with Marthe Ros’s ghost, or the two pairs he never got a chance to wash while nursing Vanja through the aftermath. Maybe now with Vanja recovered and his case paperwork off to Glockenberg, it’s time to sort out his dire laundry situation.
He tells himself that that’s why her rucksack is missing. It waited like a loyal hound by the stool he’s haunted these last three days; he memorized the pattern of stitches and stray threads between Vanja’s bouts of delirium. He’s not certain when, or even if, to tell her how many times she cried out for her mother in her fever dreams.
But now the bag’s gone too.
Emeric adjusts his glasses, studying the room, mouth tightening as he compiles what he knows. Vanja left her calling card penny, which means she went on her own terms. She took her rucksack; motive unclear. Before she left, she removed some objects from her bag, all of which are connected to the prefects.
Motive… unclear.
Only a fool would pretend ignorance of what this looks like. But—this is Vanja. There’s always more to the story. He’s learned better than to assume he has all the pieces when it comes to her.
He feels the reasoning strain as he wrenches the assembled facts into innocuity.
Theory: Vanja got up early to wash her clothes, so they could dry in the May morning sun. She removed things from the rucksack to avoid spilling them in the water.
Supporting evidence: Red penny. (Unclear.) Pile on the bedstand. (Circumstantial.) Missing rucksack. (Circumstantial.) Missing Vanja. (Insufficient.)
Conclusion: Vanja’s left him—
No.
Conclusion: He should find where Vanja’s gone off to.
That is, for the moment, acceptable.
He pockets the penny and finishes dressing, a familiar stiff anxiety creeping into his ribs. It’s a quick walk around the back of the Ros brothers’ house, but when Emeric reaches the front door, he hesitates.
On the one hand, he’s spent the last month traveling with two of their sisters and courting one, and capped it off with a surprise visit to the family home for a wedding. Perhaps that’s enough to merit walking in without knocking.
On the other hand, Udo Ros looked ready to pop his head off like a cork before they left Hagendorn at the start of April. The wedding was cut short by the fake god who’d claimed Emeric, and whose cult slaughtered all of Udo’s lambs. And, crassly, Emeric may have spent a beautiful and lifechanging night with the girl he loves, but… he isn’t sure how soundproof the walls of the lean-to are. There is a nonzero chance that Udo and Jakob have a working idea of what transpired between him and their baby sister.
Considering part of Emeric is fixed on someday becoming their brother-in-law—a part of himself he staunchly refuses to process because he has been with Vanja for a sum total of two months—this requires some discretion.
He spends at least two minutes on the doorstep vacillating between knocking (no, too formal) or walking in (absolutely not, too presumptive) before Udo Ros yanks the door open (shit.)
“Are you coming in or not?” Udo grunts, as if he’s not bodily obstructing the doorway. Out of the corner of his eye, Emeric sees Jakob Ros tactfully draw the curtain back over the window.
“Er,” says Emeric. “I—I’m looking for Vanja?”
Udo’s eyes narrow like a portcullis winching down. “Why.”
“Saints and martyrs, at least feed the lad before the interrogation.” Jakob drags his brother back, then hands Emeric a rye roll. “We saved breakfast for you two. Is she meeting you here?”
Emeric does his best to refrain from wringing the roll until it reconstitutes into dough. “She wasn’t in when I woke up.” The brothers trade a look and he adds quickly, “I don’t suspect—that is, I’m sure she’s fine, she left a penny behind as a joke.”
The brothers Ros only trade another near-identical look.
Emeric elects to ignore that as well. “Is there a place people typically use for laundry nearby? Her rucksack’s gone too—” oh damn everything, he knows how that sounds, but it’s different this time—“so I thought I’d start there.”
Jakob’s eyebrows lift. “Most people use the stream outside, on the bank with the flat rocks. But…” His gaze darts to a hutch across the room. There’s a waxy bar of launderer’s soap on a shelf, notably dry.
“Vanja might be off helping one of the neighbors.” Udo’s tone has shifted. Consolatory? That seems improbable. “She blames herself for all this mess.”
“Right.” Emeric ducks his head. “If you see her, would you please…” What, exactly? Ask her where she’s been? Keep her in one place until he can catch up? “…let her know I’m looking,” he croaks. Then he spots an empty bedroll by the far wall. He frowns. “Proctor Kirkling’s gone too?”
“Caught a ride to Glockenberg before dawn with Helga,” Udo answers, and Emeric doesn’t know if it’s better or worse that it doesn’t involve Vanja. “Said she ought to be back tonight.”
“Right,” Emeric says, acutely aware he’s repeating himself, but his brain is struggling to meet the sudden demand for small talk as anxiety strangles the supply lines. “I’ll. Well. Thank you for breakfast.”
He finds the place Jakob described downstream. A few villagers are scrubbing at stained linens against the rocks, but Vanja is not among them. None of them have seen her either. One recommends to check the longhouses, another to ask the innkeeper, a third to see if she’s back at the stave church to press Leni for answers.
Vanja did the last one yesterday and didn’t seem inclined to return. He picks at the rye roll as he walks to the longhouses instead, thinking of the story of the lost children who tried to leave themselves a trail of breadcrumbs in the woods, and only fed beasts in the end.
Vanja is not in the longhouses. She is not at the inn, nor does the innkeeper know where she’s gone. Nor is she at the baker’s, the smith’s, the weaver’s, nowhere. The stave church is dark when he passes.
Emeric is running out of excuses for where she might take all—most—of her belongings. He is also running out of bread.
He forces himself to sit in the town square to eat the rest of the roll and down a flask of water. It sits in his stomach like a peach pit, his jaw aching.
He doesn’t have the full story.
This is Vanja. Vanja.
Vanja, who summoned one Low God, revived another, and cut her own mother off from their world, all to save him. Who he still owes a better I love you than the clumsy mumble against her throat last night, if she was even awake to hear it. Who may not have said the words out loud herself, but—but he thought—hiding in the corner of her smile, in the way she said his name, he thought he’d found it there—
Emeric stands abruptly, refills his flask from the stream, and walks into the woods.
He calls for the Briar Hag. She does not answer; it was a long shot anyway. He’s not sure if Vanja’s aware of how she seems to attract gods and monsters, how they pay her heed in a way most mortals, even prefects, rarely receive. With the interloping Scarlet Maiden gone, though, their business with the Hag is concluded.
He crosses one more way to find Vanja off the list, tries not to dwell on how few options are left, and heads for Boderad’s Gorge.
Vanja’s still processing everything that happened with her mother. Maybe she wants to revisit the site where Marthe Ros fell for the last time.
Maybe he wants to hold out for the handful of hours it’ll take to hike there and back. Let himself believe this is anything but the worst, most obvious answer.
Each footfall through the beech and hawthorn sows a question as Emeric makes his way to the gorge. Did he do something wrong last night? Did she regret it, being with him? Was it—was it bad, and she didn’t know how to tell him?
I love you, Vanja. I’m so sorry.
What if that was too sudden, too fast? What if she wasn’t ready to say it back, and—
An old, old memory of Hubert Klemens flaps a hand. You’ll drown in a sea of what-ifs, he always chided. Focus on what is.
The what-is is worse. Emeric does his best to drown them both.
When he reaches the bridge spanning the gorge, it’s empty. Of course it is. Far downriver below, he sees Ilsza of the Rivers strolling the waters like a road, but Vanja isn’t with the revived Low God either. The lights of Boderad’s hellhound eyes stare up from the Kronenkessl, unblinking and fixed on him. The last meal it had was the lantern housing Marthe Ros’s ghost.
Centuries earlier, it feasted well on fools vying for the bridal crown lost below the waterfall. Something tells Emeric that one bitter ghost did not sate its hunger.
From here he can see the deserted sacrificial bridge, the bank of the pool where Vanja was willing to give the most vulnerable part of herself just to save him, once again—was that it? Did she realize he needed her more than she needed him, and cut the deadweight loose—
In the depths of the Kronenkessl’s dark waters, he sees a dim wink of coronal gold.
Before he knows it, he’s backing away toward the footpath that led him here.
More what-ifs spin from his imagination as he winds his return to Hagendorn. Vanja wanted to visit her godmothers after being cut off from them for so long. Vanja went to Helga with a question about something they did last night. Vanja wanted to do something illegal, and even though odds are he’d silently approve, she left behind anything he could use to track her so he’d have plausible deniability.
Vanja was up to something he couldn’t even comprehend, and she’ll be waiting for him to get back, laughing at the fool who went all the way up to the gorge looking for her instead of sensibly occupying himself in town.
It’s well into the afternoon when he numbly sets foot back in Hagendorn. He ought to be hungry, but the calcified knot in his stomach grants no quarter.
Vanja is not waiting for him.
He marches to the stave church, past the tanner standing guard. Leni is huddled inside, wincing at the daylight as he throws the doors open. “Where is she?” he demands. “What did you say to her?”
She gapes up at him. A beatific smile blooms over her face. “The false prophet is gone?” she breathes, rhapsodic.
“What did you say to her?”
Leni only lifts her face to the rafters, eyelids gliding shut. “Thanks be to the Scarlet Maiden, by whose grace this ground be cleansed…”
“Conrad.”
Emeric whips around. Proctor Kirkling stands in the doorway, the shadows masking her expression. She’s returned from Glockenberg.
His voice breaks as he scrapes out, “Vanja’s gone.”
That impossible consolation reappears, this time in the proctor. “I know.” After a moment she gestures. “We need to speak privately.”
A hornet’s nest of theory and suspicion roars to life in his skull as he follows Kirkling to the Ros brothers’ home. Did Vanja go with her this morning? Was there an issue with Prince Ludwig? Did she leave the penny just to say she was all right?
Where is she?
Where is she?
Why would she—how could she just—?
Udo and Jakob are speaking at the kitchen table in low, hushed voices when Kirkling leads Emeric inside. “We’ll be outside,” Jakob tells Kirkling as they pass, with an uncurious resignation that tells Emeric they already know what’s coming. Something about the quiet in the house feels as stifling as the heat of the morning once the door shuts behind them.
“Sit.” Kirkling pulls a stool up to the table.
Emeric shakes his head, hands wringing. “I’d rather—”
“I think you should sit down,” she says in a tone that isn’t a warning so much as a terminal diagnosis.
This is when Emeric allows himself, finally, to consider his worst instincts without reservation.
He thinks of the trail he’s walked all around Hagendorn today, searching for Vanja; he wonders if this is what it feels like, to look back and see even the meager crumbs of hope have been stolen away.
It turns out Kirkling is right. He needs to sit down.
He folds himself into a chair and rattles out, “Why did you go to Glockenberg?”
If a civilian asked Hubert what made Elske Kirkling an exceptional prefect while she was active, he would list off standard traits such as a keen eye for details, impeccable intuition, and a sense of justice you could build a fortress on. But when Emeric had asked, Hubert included one more detail; perhaps he found it unseemly for the average questioner.
“Never play cards against Elske,” Hubert laughed. “Face like a blank slate. She’ll clean out your coin purse faster than a landlord.”
Now, Emeric wishes he could see any sign, any at all, that Kirkling’s about to tell a lie.
Kirkling draws a breath and meets his eyes. Her voice is carefully level, like he’s a wild animal caught in a snare. “I was up late last night at the May-Saint Feast. On my way back I saw Miss Ros—”
He can feel the rope closing. “Was she with anyone?”
“Conrad—”
“Did she seem—alert? Aware of what she was doing?” He’s grasping for crumbs, he knows, for the gods’ sakes she left her penny but maybe he missed something—
“She was alone,” Kirkling answers, “seemingly of sound mind, but heading toward the road with her rucksack.”
Emeric can feel Vanja’s hand on his face in the night, see her mouthing something, the preamble to oblivion—
“I tried to stop her, but… by the time I caught up, she was gone.”
Villanelle. That was the shape of her lips. He’d started to wake and she used the sedative pills to make sure he…
He couldn’t follow.
“I went to Glockenberg this morning to try to intercept your paperwork,” Kirkling is saying, like that matters at all. When he stares at her, uncomprehending, she winces. “Conrad… your Finding declares her innocent.”
And there it is. The snare pulls tight.
He said it himself yesterday: That’s it. You’re in the clear. He told her the paperwork would be sent off that afternoon.
He told her all this mess—her cult, her mother’s ghost, the damage to Hagendorn—wouldn’t have a single consequence for her. He’d written her way out himself.
She used him.
Vanja got exactly what she wanted from him; she took the lie—gods, she took it all the way to their bed. She was his first—first everything—and he’d been nothing to her but a way out.
No, less than that.
Something to leave behind.
Kirkling’s still going. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t able to reach Glockenberg in time, the paperwork was already on its way to Helligbrücke. I never meant to put you in this position. This isn’t the test of impartiality I thought it would be.”
A test of—Emeric snaps, “Because now I have to charge her.”
That perfect card face isn’t cracking. “Because you can’t, Conrad. Your Finding—”
“I have new evidence,” he rasps, mortified by the wet choke in his voice. His spectacle lenses are beginning to speckle and fog. He can’t feel the tears through the fire searing over his face.
“Do you?” Kirkling asks. “The case you prepared shows Miss Ros was not complicit.”
“I was misled.”
“About the facts of the case?” Kirkling pushes. “Or about the nature of your personal relationship?”
He has no answer for that.
“I wanted you to at least have time to reassess, but as your proctor…” Kirkling’s expression fractures, just for a moment. “I believe Miss Ros was a victim of her mother, no more and no less. Your first Finding was correct, and met our standard of duty. You are far too good a prefect to change it solely because your courtship ended.”
No, that’s wrong, this isn’t the end—
He’s in Helligbrücke, holding her letter; he’s back in Dänwik, wondering if she’s about to walk away because he fouled it all up; he’s staring into the Kronenkessl at the edge of the gorge, wondering what killed all those other fools first, drowning in the torrent or being torn to pieces for someone else’s desire—
Vanja is gone.
He swore that if she wanted him to find her, he would.
And she doesn’t.
The red penny isn’t a cruel joke or a vague reassurance, it’s her checkmate in a long, cold game. She only leaves them at the scene of a crime.
She wants him to know it was her, all her.
And even now, he can still see the crook of her grin, still taste her skin on his lips, every memory sawing down his veins. Even now he still wants them, her, more.
Emeric doesn’t know he’s in motion until he’s pushed through the door, striding toward the bridge. His lungs are burning, Kirkling is calling after him—the sunlight shatters too bright on the water, the air catches coldly on tracks down his cheeks—
He tears the penny from his pocket and hurls it into the stream.
Staggers to a halt.
Then—
Lurches into a run, splashing into the water, falling to his hands and knees, what a damned fool he is, how could he throw her penny away, how could he be such a fool, how could she, how could she, how could she—
She doesn’t want him to find her. She doesn’t want him to chase her.
She doesn’t want him.
If you’ll have me—
She won’t.
That night, in his dream, he’s still running, running, running, always after her.
Every time, it ends with him lost in the cold and the thorns, chasing her laugh, always out of reach.