CHAPTER XII

My husband pored over my notes. He was patient with me, even if what I had given him was an indulgence and could only help us find small pockets of stain. I had given him notes from Rachel’s wandering. It’s nothing we can use, I said.

We don’t know that, yet. Better to know too much.

We see too much; we know too much. I hate that about cities. Too many smells and small gestures screaming truths they’d never admit to Erin or Imam or anyone else.

I see you.

I see you. Jona’s memories wrap around a feeling and won’t shake loose, I have to pick at it. I have to pry.

Memories wrap around feelings. You share a feeling with him, and it hardens it. Write it out, if only to finish with it. It won’t hurt us to know too much. Salvatore has been alive a long time, and can live a little longer, still.

If we could have found them out sooner… If anyone had…!

“I know.”

That’s all he said of it. He returned to my notes, and Calipari’s maps, and letters written to temples about supplies and lingering stains. Salvatore eluded us, still, and Rachel seemed as if she had never existed outside of Jona’s mind.

I wrote it all down, even if it amounts to nothing but my own peace of mind.

***

Arresting Aggie got her away from the other nuns, out of the convent, and into a closed carriage. It didn’t open her mouth. She looked ill. Jona and Calipari sat across from her, ready to block the doors with their bodies. She faced the front, and looked from one man to the next. She didn’t know what was going to happen to her now. Nothing had ever prepared her for this. She watched, in daylight, from a carriage window, a street that she had seen from the convent’s windows in daylight. She said nothing.

Jona winked at Sergeant Calipari. “So, how long you been busting out of this convent?”

She said nothing.

Jona laughed. “I can tell you’ve been busting out at night. The nuns don’t see it. I do. You’ve been chewing redroots. Your lips and your teeth got the stain of it. Someone give them to you, or do you buy them by yourself?”

She got paler, if that was even possible. “I…” she took a deep breath, “I buy them.”

Sergeant Calipari raised his eyebrows. He cocked his head, and nodded at his partner. Jona never had a reputation as a clever fellow. He was a brute force kind of guy. For the few moments, Jona saw this sudden praise in his sergeant’s face, and he forgot what he was really doing. Then, he remembered what he was about to do, to protect Salvatore.

“Your secret’s safe with me,” said Jona. “If I was in there, I’d bust it down brick by brick. How do you leave?”

“Some of us stole keys,” she said. The convent girl facade melted away. She slouched, crossed her legs, and leaned against the door. “I’m stamped. Got any redroots, now?”

“They’re illegal,” said Calipari. “How many girls?”

“What?”

“How many sneak out?” Calipari pressed.

“Everybody does it sometimes,” she said. “Even the matron mother.”

Sergeant Calipari laughed. “You got a fellow?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Only one?” said Jona. “We’d love to meet any fellows you got running around with a convent girl. Maybe he’s buying your redroots, and you didn’t even know he’d be in trouble for it.”

She had to think about that. Her mask cracked a little before it came back. For a moment, she looked like a novice again, instead of some tough kid. “I got me a few fellows,” she said. She didn’t know what would happen to Salvatore if she said anything, so she was playing tough, saying nothing. Jona knew the name would eventually come out. Calipari could break her down if he had a chance at it. And then it was all over.

She looked Jona boot to face. “You like to dance?”

“I do,” said Jona. “Look, we had to arrest you, and I’m sorry about it. We needed to get you away a while, ask you some questions. No other way to do it. Want us to process you, too? Keeps you out of the convent a few nights.”

“I’ll pass.”

Jona and Calipari glanced at each other. Calipari was trying to hide a smirk. Jona nodded, slightly.

Calipari leaned forward. “You go out last week?”

She laughed. “No,” she said. “You?”

“When’d you last sneak out?”

“I don’t remember,” she said. “It’s been a while.”

Calipari snorted. “Funny, you admit breaking out but not the other night. Girls getting out are smarter. Know better. A fellow in your bedroom is a reason to scream for help. You just went back to sleep. That’s what you said to the matron mother, isn’t it? Help us make this whole stupid thing go away, or we keep riding this carriage to a station house.”

“Keep riding. Imam’s flock won’t abandon me.”

“Imam know of your redroots and sneaking?” said Calipari.

“I’ll get whipped,” she said. “That’s between me and them. Doesn’t involve the king.”

Calipari scratched his head. “Jona, this is a lot of trouble over a little thievery. We should just test her. Only thing matters to anyone is the demon blood.”

“How do you test for demon blood?” Jona knew exactly how. He had hoped Calipari was clueless, so Jona might have a chance to devise a plan before anyone could involve the girl.

“I know how,” said Calipari. “Of course we’ll have to get some blood from her.”

The girl curled her lips, and crossed her arms. “Now you’re just trying to scare me. You can’t hurt me like that. Imam’ll…”

“We don’t need anyone’s permission,” said Jona.“You’re in the hands of the king’s men. We could cut your throat and throw you from the cabin and no one would even find out you were dead.”Jona pretended to yawn. He smiled gently at her. She really didn’t understand the men who could invade her sanctuary, drag her away, who would hang her if she earned it, maybe even burn her alive. She seemed to believe they might cut her throat, the way she was looking at them. Of course neither Calipari nor the king would allow that. Calipari chimed in. “We could kill you now and say you were fighting us.”

Jona touched her nose with his outstretched finger. “We’ll take your blood, girl. We’ll take anything we want in the name of the king.”

She looked out the carriage. Her fingers clenched against her own skin. She was hugging herself, covering her body with her arms. “Can we just get this over with?”

Sergeant Calipari leaned back. He pushed his leg all the way across the cabin, as if in a slouch, to block the door on his side. Jona took his lead and angled over a little, to get better cover of the door on his side.

“Personally don’t like to rough up the pretty ones,” said Calipari. “My man Jona has no problem with anything like that. Just this morning he slammed a seneschal over one little remark. Old guy, too. Couldn’t fight back. Servant to a mighty lord and still nobody can do a thing about us once we set our mind on it, and the king likes us that way.”

The girl looked out the window. She said nothing at all. The carriage rolled down the road.

“Say something,” said Jona.

There was nothing.

“You’re protecting someone, and it’s going to get you hurt. Lord Sabachthani knows for a fact someone with a demon stain did it. Some demon child took his dog.”

Again, nothing.

Jona balled up his fingers. He leaned in close to show his fist to her. Before she had time to think about what it meant, he popped his knuckles into her nose. It broke. Blood spattered from it. “I’m doing this for your own good,” he said. “The sooner you talk, the sooner we can get whatever you’re protecting and do the same to him.”

She held her breath. She held her nose. Blood spilled over her white knuckles.

Sergeant Calipari frowned at his partner, and pulled out a dirty handkerchief. He pressed it into her nose. “Lean your head back,” he said. “Come on, lean your head back. It’ll help stop the bleeding.”

Her trembling hands clutched the handkerchief against her face. She breathed again, in little gulps like gasps. She was crying. She clutched at her nose and curled into the corner of the carriage. Calipari gently reached forward to tilt her head back. He held her nose a while. She cried.

Jona didn’t do anything. He put his boot up on the seat across from him to block the door with his leg. He wiped his fist off on his pants, then leaned back with folded arms.

He needed to ride her fear all the way to the moment where she might give up Salvatore, then keep her from it. He needed to do this for his mother’s safety, and his own.

He should have felt awful about it, and he did, but he knew he was supposed to feel more awful than he did. His disgust was like a crust of ice melting as soon as it floated to the surface of him, gone in moments.

***

Sergeant Calipari opened the carriage door for the girl. “Come on inside,” he said, gently. “Need you inside right now. We’ll knock you out and carry you if we have to.”

They wouldn’t have to. She was broken. She obediently stepped out of the carriage. Jona held the station door for her, Calipari following right behind. Blood was all over her face, and all over her robes.

Sergeant Calipari led her by her arm through the empty station house to the interrogation room. He closed the door on her, leaving her alone. Calipari didn’t turn around right away. He stayed at the door, holding the knob, and breathing slowly. Finally, after a long pause, he turned to face Jona.

“Why’d you hit her like that, so hard, so soon?”

“Not so insolent now.”

“Not so talkative, either.”

“We have to test her blood, anyway,” said Jona. “We got plenty of blood. We find no stain, she’ll be scared enough to tell us any other girls sneaking out. Nice open wound for us to work loose.”

“Yeah, well, hand me some fresh paper from that desk.” Calipari pointed to an empty scrivener’s desk next to the doorway, its occupant out playing corporal in the Pens.

Jona turned to reach the paper, and came back around into Calipari’s fist like a brick wall falling down. Jona’s nose cracked, broken. Sergeant Calipari pushed Jona’s hands with the clean paper up against his bloody face like a handkerchief. He got some fresh paper for himself.

“Stay out here,” said Calipari. “I’m going to set the girl’s nose in a minute. I’ll come back out for yours when I’m done.” said Sergeant Calipari. “You can wait a while, like she did.”

Calipari’s hand had streaks of Jona’s blood on it. If there was a candle nearby it might catch fire. If he rubbed it on a handkerchief, the cloth would be moth-eaten by the end of the hour, and ash by the end of the day. The paper was already falling apart in Jona’s hands. He tried desperately to keep the blood from his jacket. He had a couple spare uniforms his mother had sewn to hide how fast he went through shirts, but they were all at home.

Jona laughed through the blood and the shooting pain. Every day was another day he could be found out, killed for his blood, burned alive for being alive. “Go wash your hand,” he said, to Calipari. He wanted to scream it. Then, an afterthought, struggling to find a reason the Sergeant would do it. “You don’t want the girl to see the blood on your hand. She’s already scared.”

Calipari wiped his hand off on the fresh paper and tossed the crumpled sheet into a rubbish bin. “Keep laughing, I’ll break your jaw, too,” he said. “And don’t pretend like you care about that girl, or I’ll break your jaw.” He was so busy glaring at Jona, he didn’t seem to notice the paper falling apart in the bin.

With the scriveners out walking patrols, there was no one else at the station. If Calipari didn’t notice, Jona’d be safe, and Calipari was about to go into the interrogation room. Calipari wasn’t going to be rummaging around in a rubbish bin staring at the blood eating through all the papers there, melting everything to ash. But if someone else came in…

Jona stopped thinking because he realized he was being lectured, and he was going to have to listen hard if he was to going to get Calipari out of the room.

“You’re a good guard most of the time,” said Sergeant Calipari. “Ain’t the first time something’s gotten to you. You’ve gone too far. You’ve been working too hard. Take a couple days. Plan something with your ma. Or a girl. Something. Just get it on my desk by tomorrow morning, and I’ll approve anything that says you’re gone a few days with no pay.”

Jona’s nose had stopped bleeding. The clots had melted into his skin around the wounded places itching with a burn even as the clots closed the wound. His wounds didn’t just hurt; the acid burned him a little, like a bad rash. He wiped away the blood with the paper he had. He didn’t have much time to hide it, and Calipari was standing right there. Jona folded it up into a ball. He shoved it in his mouth and let it settle there. It didn’t taste good. It didn’t even taste like blood. It tasted like smoke and mercury. Jona glared at Calipari when he did this. Then, he swallowed the limp, wet, fading mass whole. He reached up to his nose, and pulled the bone out from where it was snapped. Then, he pushed it back close enough into place. It made a horrible crackling and hurt worse than the punch. Jona’s eyes welled up. He clenched his jaw and felt pain all the way down to his toes. He grabbed a handful of paper for the blood coming. He held all the pain back. He held it all into just a glare. “Go wash your hands, Sergeant,” he said, calmly now. “You’ll scare the girl, you walk in stinking of my blood. Don’t want to contaminate your tests with my blood, do you?”

Sergeant Calipari winced. “You good to walk around a while?”

“I’m good, Sergeant.”

“Go get something we can use, a plant or something. I’ll hand out that handkerchief she used, and you can use that, right? Demon blood kills plants fast. That’s what I hear.”

Jona nodded. “That’s right, Sergeant.”

Calipari dipped his hand in a cistern full of water at the side of the room. He dried his hands, and picked up an empty trash bin from beside a desk. He held it up to his chest, pressing one hand into his guts. He threw up into it. “Must be getting too old,” he said. “Eating blood, you sick bastard…” He put the rubbish bin down and wiped his face clean. “You still here? I need a plant.”

“I know,” said Jona. “Making sure you’re all right.”

“You’re the one busted his nose and I’m the one sick. Get out of here.”

The two men looked at each other, neither one moving an inch. Finally, after a long moment, Jona moved towards the door. Calipari went in to talk to the girl. When Calipari was inside the room, Jona picked up the rubbish bin with Calipari’s vomit, and the one with the smoldering papers from his bloody nose. He rushed outside, hefted open a sewer grate, and dropped them both inside. He thought about changing the water in the cistern, but that would take too long. Instead, he’d just have to get a plant. He’d pollute the plant before anyone came to use the cistern, then before anyone could, the whole place would have to be purified.

Calipari was too good at interrogations to be left alone with the girl. Jona had to hurry. When Calipari came into the station house with the bloody handkerchief from her, Jona was still running after a plant. Calipari was about to leave the handkerchief on a desk and go back in to talk to the girl, when Jona ran back in, with an apple in his hand. He held it up to Calipari. “Got this,” he said.

“Will that work?”

Jona shrugged.

Calipari handed Jona the handkerchief. “If it’s clean, you tell me. Then go home,” he said, “I’m sick of you.”

“You got it, Sergeant,” said Jona, saluting.

Sergeant Calipari disappeared into the room.

Jona spit on the apple to start its rotting. That wasn’t fast enough. Jona wiped it against his sore nose, where some thick, partially-clotted blood oozed onto it. The apple withered where the blood touched it.

Jona put his own blood upon the handkerchief, just in case. He only put a little bit, to let the cloth melt a little, like a cavity in a tooth. When it looked good, he walked into the interrogation room. The girl was abashed and staring at her hands. Calipari was silent, waiting for something to happen.

Jona placed the apple on the table with the searing wound facing Calipari.

The sergeant took a deep breath. He looked up at Jona, confused. The two men stepped outside again.

“We’re testing her again,” Calipari said.

“Yeah,” said Jona. “You were the one grabbed her nose, when she was bleeding. I just punched her once. You stay here. I’ll get the plants. No one else comes in. Keep it contained.”

Calipari did not appear to be listening. “I want to be sure,” he said, to the apple.

Unspoken in the room was the promise of the wooden stake, and the fire around it. Jona was going to kill this girl. He was doing it, and it was turning out to be easier then he ever imagined.

Jona, in the street, found onion plants for sale in pots. He took three in the name of the king.

He looked down at the doomed plants. He wasn’t even sorry about these three little onions. He knew what he was supposed to feel for the girl, and it was little more to him than what he felt for these onions.

If he was a normal man, he’d be trying to save her—because she was beautiful, because it wasn’t her fault, because all she wanted was freedom in the night. He wanted to feel like someone who would try to save her. He wanted to feel something about her that wasn’t about himself.

***

I tried to keep her safe, Salvatore. I didn’t plan it, but it worked out this way. Just me trying to do something. I’m just not smart enough. What’s going to happen to your girl is my fault, you know.

What girl?

You don’t remember her?

Maybe. Remind me what her name was?

Aggie, and if we don’t do something to save her…

Wait, the convent girl, right? She was a good kid. She didn’t know what she was doing. She never did. If she’s in trouble, we should do something.

That’s what I’m saying. I’ll try to fix this, okay? You can get her out, and take her away for a while. I figure, we help her out, you and me. She’ll figure out what you really are, eventually, but she won’t go to anyone about it on account of being an escaped convict. Then, when she dumps you, she’ll be free of everything, and she can be happy somewhere new.

I want to help. I’m sorry about what happened to her. I really am. What can we do?

I’m trying. Get out of my face. My nose is killing me. I want to break your nose, for this.

Not with my blood. Stay out of my shadows, for once, blood monkey.

***

Jona dropped some of the blood from his abused nose onto the dirt around a fresh onion plants. The plant browned very slightly at the edge of its leaves, but it didn’t die right away. It would take time to get into the roots of the plant. Jona spit on it, for good measure. His spit was toxic, too, just not as toxic.

In the room, Sergeant Calipari put a few drops of drying blood from the girl’s busted nose onto the onion plant. They waited, and watched the plant. It didn’t happen quickly. It browned at the edge of the leaves, and slowly spread from there. The root sickened and melted into a dead paste. The plant collapsed.

Calipari cocked his head. He stood up, but he didn’t seem to know where he was going. He sat down again. “Imam tests the girls, doesn’t he? Anchorites test their girls?”

“Apparently, not,” said Jona. “Want me to get another plant?”

“Yes.”

The girl’s eyes were like saucers. She rubbed her stomach. She seemed to want to curl into it. What was happening was not clear to her. I imagine it would be like finding out she was a fish, and everyone knew it once they looked at her in the right light, while all this time she thought she was a person. It would take a long time to sink in. The fact that it was a lie only made it more difficult.

Jona returned to the main room, where he had set the remaining plants on one of the scrivener’s desks. He pulled the same trick with the second plant and brought it back into the interrogation room.

Sergeant Calipari was slumped in his seat. He seemed almost as defeated as Aggie did. He didn’t want this for anyone. He never wanted this in his jurisdiction. “Anything you’re not telling us?”

She struggled to find words. There were none. She closed her mouth and stared down at her stomach.

Calipari took blood from the girl’s finger this time, pricked with the edge of a dagger. The blood fell on the plant’s center stalk. They stared at the plant, waiting for it to wilt.

Nobody breathed.

The fringe of the flower curled first, and then the edge of the leaves, and then everything in the plant withered unto death.

Jona exhaled first. He leaned against the closed door. “If we find any more like you, we’ll drag them in here and burn them just like we’re going to burn you,” he said. “If anyone hid you, or helped you, they burn, too. Whether you understand it or not, that’s the way things are.” She wouldn’t betray Salvatore if she didn’t betray him right now.

She shook her head, white as death. “No,” she whispered.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” said Sergeant Calipari. “Take her to the cell farthest back. Keep her separated. Put up signs. Put up warnings. Keep the building closed down until we can…. I need to get a message to the Captain.”

Jona wrapped bindings around the girl’s hands. Would they test her again? Would it matter? As soon as Jona let the carpenter know what had happened, the Night King would speed things along. Aggie would be isolated. Her demon-stained blood was too dangerous to allow in the presence of anyone who hadn’t yet been exposed. Calipari’s testimony would be enough to stand in court, if it ever came to it, and Lord Joni’s sworn testimony as a nobleman wouldn’t hurt. But it never came to that. Demon children are not considered human. They have no right to trial. She’d burn as soon as people got tired of trying to find out how she managed to hide so long. She’d never say anything.

“And Jona,” said Sergeant Calipari.

“Yes?”

“Don’t… touch her,” he said. “Burn the plants.”

***

That night, Sergeant Calipari couldn’t sleep. He told me this himself. Calipari held a pillow in his arms the night Aggie tested true, and he imagined it was Franka, off at the edge of the city in her tavern with the son that looked to Calipari like a father. It made him sick what he had encountered that day, like running into an invisible wall. He ran a fever for three days. He coughed up blood. When he was well enough to walk, he spent hours at the temples, drinking blessed things, and sweating out the stain. He thought it was from the girl. All the station house was washed in holy water. The carriage was burned, with the clothes the men wore when she bled inside the carriage. The nuns burned her sheets and clothes on the tile roof, and the cloth popped and snapped with the wicked stain she had carried home from her nights with Salvatore.

Calipari never wrote to Franka, out where she worked beyond the city walls, to tell her that he had found a demon’s child. When he felt better, he burned his own sheets, and the mattress. He had a priest come through from Imam’s temple to clean the room for good. The king replaced everything, and paid for the priest. Reimbursement for Calipari’s expenses came with a royal seal. The handwriting under the seal was clean and precise, like a woman’s trained script. It was probably Lady Ela Sabachthani’s.

The more Calipari thought about it, the less he liked it.

And Lord Joni, who had damned this girl to spare a demon’s child, was home a few days, feigning illness. When the priest came from the king, Jona took him up to an empty room of the house, one never used anymore. Jona said he had quarantined himself there, and had already burned everything. The priest of Imam cleared the stains away from the room with holy water, not fireseeds. He didn’t realize how old and deep the stain ran. Even after one purification, flowers placed on the floor rotted in an hour. The priest scrubbed the room, floor-to-ceiling, in holy water. He offered to clean the whole, huge, empty house. Jona shook his head. He said they couldn’t afford it, and the king wouldn’t pay for it. He said he had been careful, and had planned for that, and had confined himself only in that one room, while his mother burned everything that came out of it. Jona promised to lock the room shut, never use it again until they could afford to get it really purified.

That lie reluctantly accepted, Jona went to a tavern, and then another, and then another. He pissed in the middle of the street. He lit matches and burned his own puddles of urine, like spilled kerosene. People thought it was a magic trick, like those the Sentas pulled. They cheered for it. But Jona didn’t have the face of an entertainer. If they got a good look at him, they stopped cheering and walked away.

Jona, sobered up when he found Salvatore at the next tavern. Salvatore was dancing the jewels from a teenaged girl’s neck. Jona pulled the thief away, into an alley. He told Salvatore the bad news.

Salvatore couldn’t remember Aggie’s name. He remembered she was a nun. He remembered that he cared about her. He couldn’t remember anything else.