The Timeseer's Gambit (The Faraday Files Book 2) (11 page)

Olivia hummed thoughtfully.

Chris weaved.

“What about Virginia Landon?” Olivia asked. “And Georgiana Edison, and Lachlan Huxley. I don’t suppose they were also… disappointing?” And as priests began speaking all at once, Olivia held up her hand and pointed at a young man with clear blue eyes and well-coiffed hair. He could have been handsome, if he weren’t so lanky, and if not for the impressive mole on his right cheek. “You were Virginia’s Youth, yes? Tell me, what’s your name?”

“Brother Tibault Horne, ma’am,” the Youth said. Chris couldn’t help but note that the younger priests seemed to embrace their surnames more, as if hesitant to let them go. He couldn’t imagine Georgie abandoning hers. She’d had so much pride as an Edison.

“Was Virginia a liar? A thief?”

“Gods, not at all, ma’am.” Brother Tibault shook his head.

“Hmm.” Olivia tapped her lip with one finger. Chris turned his page. He’d weaved more than Olivia could ever possibly need, but there was so much information he was almost overloaded and had lost his ability to sort it on the fly. “All right. Tell me about the day she died, then.”

The Youth looked surprised at this change of direction. He shook himself, stammering for a moment, and then folded his arms and hunched his shoulders. “It was… just another day,” he said quietly. “We did all of our work, as usual. Godsday, it was, so we performed services and then there were the petitioners who needed us after. It was spring, so there were a lot of young men looking to court young ladies. And young ladies looking to catch the eye of young men. With all that traffic, Virginia and I were much in demand, but…” He shot a glance at his Mother.

Olivia snapped her fingers. “Excuse me, yes, look here, that’s a good lad. You’re not talking to her. You’re talking to me. ‘But’ what, exactly?”

Brother Tibault looked away, his jaw working silently. Finally, he sighed and shrugged one shoulder. “Virginia wasn’t much for any of it,” he said. “She wasn’t interested in being a priestess. She said it was forced on her, you know? She wanted to be… something else.
Anything
else. Though that makes it sound as though she complained all the time, and she didn’t. Not at all! She was just, you know.”

“I don’t know,” Olivia pressed.

Tibault’s lips thinned. “She was… sad. Sad
all
the time. She wouldn’t leave her room if she didn’t have to. She cried a lot. She slept whenever one of us didn’t drag her into the sun. That day was just the same. The Church was flooded with petitioners for Maerwald and Cwenraed’s favour, but I was handling it alone. She sat in the corner and seemed confused whenever anyone approached her. After they left, I tried to talk, but she just went to her rooms. Locked the door and stayed in there all day.” He hung his head. “I woke up when I heard the sylph. Side of my room got torn right off in the whirlwind. Went to Virginia’s room, and she was already…”

Olivia nodded thoughtfully. Chris watched her. Her wheels were turning, and he thought he understood what direction they were moving in. He turned to his book.
Bad priests
?

Olivia made a gesture indicating Tibault should sit. He did. Her pointing finger went to Georgie’s holy family, with the cowering youth who seemed so much younger than he logically had to be. She didn’t point to him, but to the Mother. Chris had noticed her when they’d first come in. He flipped back to see his notes. The Father of their group had given the Youth and Sister Penelope a look, and the Mother had scraped her chair away from him, putting a gap between them. He was good at picking up social cues like that. And at interpreting them. There was a disagreement between the Mother and Father, and today’s events had exacerbated it. He wondered if Olivia’s selection was random or if she’d noticed it, too.

Maybe he was teaching her something.

“Was Miss Edison a good Maiden?” she asked, face a picture of perfect innocence.

The Mother shook her head. “No,” she said, and the Father exploded.

“Damn it to hell!” he said, standing and shaking a finger in fury down at her. “Isn’t it enough, all the things you’ve told Penelope about the poor girl? You’re going to stand there and say, straight-faced, to
law enforcement
, people who should be trying to get justice for her, that she was just a bad egg?”

“She was cruel!” the Mother replied fiercely. She pulled closer to the ginger youth, who was cringing away from them both. “She treated Calum poorly from moment one and you know it as well as I, Abner!”

“Calum!” the Father snorted. “Always about Calum! The last thing he needs is you and Penelope doting on him, letting him think it’s all well and good to be a shrinking milksop acting half his age! Georgiana did her best, and she was coming around faster than you ever did! A little more every day, she was becoming a good priestess. A good Maiden. It’s
you”
―and he jabbed an accusing finger at the young man, who burst into tears―“who hasn’t the first idea how to perform your duties!”

The Mother leapt to her feet. “Leave him be!” she cried.

“Stop defending the worm!”

“Oh dear,” Olivia said quietly, leaning over and pitching her voice just for Chris. “I seem to have caused a bit of a row.”

Chris was used to Olivia’s tactics, but the delight in her voice still made him squirm. He felt sick watching the young man cry as his “parents” screamed at one another, arms shaking, faces red. He tried to transcribe, but the argument became more and more vague and esoteric as they continued, and he wasn’t sure Olivia wanted him to, because she tuned them out as if they were just buzzing insects. She walked to the corner where a white-faced Grandmother Harriet had moved to wrap her arm protectively about Sister Elisabeth, who hadn’t stopped crying since Chris had first seen her lurking in the hallway behind the statue of Deorwynn herself.

“Mister Huxley?” she asked mildly.

Grandmother Harriet shook her head faintly. “Lachlan was… lovely,” she said, stunned, looking at the chaos around her with eyes wide. “He was a model Youth in every way.”

“I can’t believe he’s gone,” Sister Elisabeth breathed. “He was supposed to be my husband.” She looked up at them, and her eyes were bottomless pits of despair. “He was perfect.”

“Hmm,” Olivia said. She turned to Chris with a fanged smile. “Well. That’s interesting, isn’t it?”

He supposed it was.

o are they lying about Lachlan?” Olivia mused. “Or is it really unrelated?”

She was pacing the floor of her office, a nightly routine for her. Chris sat behind his desk, notebook in front of him. She often requested clarifications about things that had been said, done, or observed. This was as much a part of his job as any other, being the person whom she talked to―or rather, talked at―at the end of a long day. She said that he was the best she’d ever had, that she’d never had her thoughts in such perfect order.
He
thought that it was flattery designed to keep him near her. He suspected the truth was much simpler and a great deal harder for her to admit: she liked him, and she didn’t want him to go away.

“Three out of four of them were apparently terrible in some way or another.” Olivia tilted her head,
hmm
ing to herself. “That said, most people are terrible in some way or another, aren’t they? I’m not used to speaking to people who suffered a loss three
months
ago. Perhaps that’s just the way people speak of the dead once enough time has passed. Recognizing their flaws.” She whirled to peer at Chris. “You had staff growing up, didn’t you? I imagine your mother was a very poor cook, in that case.”

“My mother’s table was
perfect
,” Chris snapped, and then realized what she’d done. He folded his lips. “
Don’t
do that,” he growled.

“That was very helpful, Christopher, thank―”

Chris held up a hand and Olivia actually stopped. He met her eyes. “Don’t do that,” he repeated, quieter.

She stared at him. He saw the gears turning in her head. Her instinct was to flounce away and mock his sensitivity. He watched her war with herself. And then watched her shrug and roll her eyes and let out a huff. “Fine,” she allowed.

For Olivia, that was miraculous. Chris smiled.

Olivia glared and then averted her eyes. She hated acknowledgement of what she called her “inevitable but still shameful softening” toward him. She fell back into her rhythm, pretending it hadn’t happened. Well, fine. That was allowed.

“
Not
a natural consequence of passing time, then,” she said, turning on her heel to pace the other way. “It’s interesting, isn’t it? Three of four, and it’s only the most recent still extolling the virtue of the deceased. But it
could
be a coincidence. After all, it’s not as if any of these people
volunteered
to be priests. They’ve all just been funnelled to the darkest possible outcome for their lives. A little crankiness is within normal parameters, isn’t it?” She hummed. “Still…” And then she nodded once, firmly. “I think that it’s related. I do. Maybe if Lachlan weren’t killed so differently from the others, but when you factor that in…” She tapped her nose, grinning. “Those finely tuned Deathsniffer instincts, you know.”

He smiled back. “I’ve learned a bit about them,” he allowed. Olivia’s hunches were never wrong. Off-base, sometimes. Misdirected. But never wrong. Once upon a time, he’d resented her abilities. They were subtle and intangible, and yet she was more valuable to society than he was. But he’d spent a lot of time around truthsniffers the last three months. In fact, between Maris, Olivia, and assorted police officers, he’d spent
most
of his time around them. And he’d started to appreciate the value of what they could do. Chris was sure that without truthsniffers, Tarls would still be guarding stone castles with swords and spears like their neighbours. Spiritbinders may boast that society had been built on their shoulders alone, but the truthsniffers designed the wonders the spiritbinders built. There was something to be said for your first guess usually being right.

That was why he’d started asking one question when he and Olivia sat down for this first night of review. “First guess?” He smiled.

“First guess…” Olivia tapped her chin. And then sighed. “I don’t know. Is that terrible, Chris? I know, I always have a first guess, but I really bloody
don’t
this time. If it were just Lachlan Huxley dead, then I’d say it was his Maiden. She secretly didn’t like him and wanted to trade for another model. Why? Just too many tears! It was almost showy!” She sighed. “But throw in the other three bodies,
and
that it was a spiritbinder―it all gets… muddy.” She shook her head. “No one involved with this
is
a spiritbinder! Why would a spiritbinder want to kill priests?”

Chris had no idea. In all honesty, he found himself every bit as perplexed as Olivia. He tapped the pile of papers on the desk beside him. “Maybe we’ll find something in here.” The receipts from every ‘binder who’d done work in the four affected churches. What the priests lacked in record-keeping for their faithful, they made up for in organizing their finances.

Olivia raised her brows at him, icy eyes twinkling. “Maybe
you’ll
find something in there,” she corrected, and when he opened his mouth to protest, raised a hand. “Oh, no! You’ll not talk your way out of this one! Any amount of paper-pushing I can get you to do for me, I will.” Olivia had to file her own official police reports, which she complained about endlessly. She’d tried to teach him to weave a reproduction of her hand-writing, which could put them both in prison. Needless to say, Chris had not complied, which had led to hours of Olivian histrionics. “You’ll take the whole stack home with you tonight, and you’ll check and double-check for overlap.”