The miraculous awakening led into an impromptu, if short-lived, party. Roel didn’t remember the coma, obviously, only that she’d been sitting in the library with Kuril and was suddenly waking up with a giant gash in her leg. The wound still looked pretty brutal. I’d been forbidden from messing with it—miraculous healing wasn’t a big part of Therian mythology. The graced allegedly had a closer connection to their ancestor gods than the normal population, so I’d kinda gotten away with my ritual, but Kives wasn’t a healer. She was the goddess of time and consequence. The wound that cripples was as much her purview as the body’s lengthy process of compensating for it.

A prayer that the wound would eventually heal would pass. A prayer that it would immediately heal would not. And if the wound did immediately heal, people would look for alternate explanations, and they’d be looking directly at me. The commander had ruled that to be an unacceptable breach of operational security.

So instead I got to watch Hadalce give her the root of some plant—for pain relief, although with a prescientific folk medicine culture there was no guarantee it’d really help—and let Roel unhappily chew. She was still in obvious pain. After the attention started to overwhelm her, Hadalce shooed everyone out. Kuril got to stay. I almost didn’t, until a look from Kuril had the vengeful doctor backing off.

“You’re back with us,” Kuril said, but what she meant was I love you.

Roel gave her a weak hug. “I don’t remember anything.”

“Ajarel saved you,” said Kuril.

“I heard,” said Roel. “I’m so tired.”

“Maybe we should let her rest,” I said.

Kuril nodded. “Rest well, mouse.” Roel gave her a small smile.

“Do you want a book?” I asked.

“She’s supposed to rest,” said Kuril.

I smirked. “Books are restful.”

“The Alcebiad, please,” said Roel.

“Ah,” I said. “Light reading.” She made a face at me.

Kuril sighed. “I’ll have them bring it to you.”

We shut the door behind us, leaving her to her recuperation. Kuril took my hand. I gave it a squeeze.

“Now comes the hard part,” said Kuril. “When we were young, our first father fell ill for three thessim. He was bedridden for most of that time and could barely walk. He was never the same afterward. Haldace tried to help him regain his strength, but he slept so much it was impossible to make progress.”

Sounded like chronic fatigue to my modern ear. A friend of mine in college had to drop out because she couldn’t manage hers. I never found out whether she got better.

“Roel will be a little stiff, but three days shouldn’t be enough for serious atrophy,” I said.

“Have you ever seen a leg wound like that?” Kuril reached down, tracing her thigh muscle. “The flesh that animates your leg is right here. With a deep enough injury, the leg fails to move at all. It will be hard for her to regain her strength if she can’t walk.”

“That’s… not good,” I said.

“No.”

We looked at Roel’s closed door. Kuril squeezed my hand and let go.

“Well,” she said. “Worry achieves nothing.”

“Actually, it keeps you motivated to solve problems,” I said.

Kuril smiled ironically. “In the Vitares family, it tends to trap you in your office.”

I gave her a hug. “We’ll figure it out.”

“Of course,” she said. “I’ll call for the priest of Gamal. And I suppose the Oathkeepers will want to speak with us now that Roel’s awake. Have you had a chance to copy those documents from the Hetjalos project?”

We both knew the answer was I hadn’t.

“I’ll get right on it,” I said. “Anything to help the House.”

“Thank you,” Kuril whispered, and whether it was to me or a prayer to the gods I couldn’t say.

*

I’d avoided the Oathkeepers last time they came around, taking an errand that got me off the premises as soon as the surveillance equipment told us they were coming. Kuril had spoken to them alone. Now I had a battle plan.

The Oathkeepers—and with my nerd brain it was so tempting to think of them as paladins—had a hierarchy of initiation, and once they were fully initiated Javei blessed them with the ability to detect deceit. It wasn’t, like, illegal to lie to an Oathkeeper, but it was pretty fucking suspicious. Fortunately for me, I had an advantage over the rest of Vitareas, which was that I’d watched my share of cop dramas and I knew everyone had something to hide. So if I looked guilty that was probably normal for them. No use stressing about that. It just meant I could keep a cooler head when it came to hiding the really bad stuff, like the fact that I was here to kill their gods and uproot their religions like a bunch of weeds.

The dude they sent was on the younger side of middle-aged, with dark brown hair and a braided beard that hung over his armor, which was of the leather variety. It wasn’t like a leather jacket—the way ancient civilizations did this was by curing the leather to make it stiff enough to take a hit from a sharp object wielded by the angry son of a neighboring town. Everything was painted with a pearlescent white lacquer that kinda made the mail look like mithril, if you didn’t see the parts where the friction of normal movement had taken the lacquer off.

There was also a wiry dude with a wax tablet and a stylus, who followed the older dude with obvious deference. He was laden with multiple leather bags, straps criss-crossing over his shoulders. No obvious armor. No non-obvious armor either, judging by the lack of clattering when he moved. We were pretty sure that going out in armor was a mark of initiation, like the junior Oathkeepers weren’t supposed to be getting in fights without Javei’s blessing or something.

The older guy introduced himself as Oathkeeper Falerior with a polite smile. His assistant, Initiate Ekoula, courteously avoided eye contact. I’d asked one of the attendants to sit with me—Mesales, who had nominally been assigned to me while I was an honored guest, but whose assistance I had heretofore avoided. Didn’t want to be a burden, I guess. Apparently, to the Estheni, what I was actually doing was saying we had nothing to offer each other.

We’d checked on Roel and found her asleep, so it was just me today.

“Roel said she didn’t remember anything about the attack,” I said by way of greeting. “Given that she was unconscious when I got there, that seems likely.”

“We’ll get to that momentarily,” said Falerior, nodding reassuringly. “I have no desire to disturb her rest. If you’ll indulge me…”

He motioned to Ekoula, who withdrew a rod from one of his carrying bags. It was dark, topped with a sigil representing an eye, and seemed heavy in Ekoula’s hands—although Falerior handled it with no apparent trouble.

“That your testimony can be trusted, I ask that you place your hand on the scepter.”

A quick comm scan revealed a divine signature on the object. Three guesses who, first two don’t count.

“It’s not, like, gonna bite me or anything, right?” I asked.

“Not in my experience,” Falerior said pleasantly. His patient gaze rested on me.

“Sure,” I said with a shrug. It was probably some kind of scan for my intentions. Fuck that noise. I activated my cloak—not too much, the blessing wasn’t that strong—and rested my hand on the eye sigil. Falerior just watched.

“I see,” he said. “Well, thank you for that, Lady Ajarel.”

“Of course,” I said. “So how can I help?”

“Can you tell us about your previous encounters with the whisper known as Lirian?” Falerior asked. Ekoula held his tablet in the crook of his arm, stylus at the ready.

“Sure,” I said, leaning forward. “We met for the first time at the arena. My friend Thala wants to reach the Kabidiad, so we were attempting to enroll him here. Lirian showed up and basically warned me not to do that or else bad things would happen.”

“What kind of bad things?” Falerior asked. His face was totally open, the very model of polite attention.

“Nothing specific,” I said. “Actually, I told her that if she was going to threaten me she should just do it directly, and she said no.”

“So she didn’t make any explicit threats,” said Falerior. I didn’t like his tone.

“Just give me a second,” I said, trying to pull up the recording of that day. “She said, don’t enroll him in the Renathion, because there are competitions and there are competitions.”

“And you interpreted that as a threat?”

“Yes!” I insisted. “She was very threatening!”

“I believe you,” he said. The openness on his face hadn’t changed at all. He was definitely lying.

“Okay, so, uh, next time, I went to a ball, and she tried to throw me out of it.”

“Did she threaten you then?”

“Not exactly, but Roel got attacked. And she sponsored Thala, and Lirian doesn’t want that for some reason.”

Now, the exact words were true, but I was still kind of edging my way around the fact that Lirian didn’t have anything to do with the attack. That was fine. We’d run through the possible scenarios and decided a blessing that detected deception would probably look for something in a narrow range of signatures, and I had the countersignals for all of them preprogrammed into my hand amplifier. I’d flicked it on when I started lying.

“I heard there was a challenge at the Jenerretes’ Starlight Ball,” said Falerior. “Was that between Lirian and you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “She, like, tracked me down. Lady Obol even tried to get her to stop it, but she wouldn’t.”

“I see. She must have arrived very late, then? I heard the ball ended soon after.”

“Uh, no,” I said. “I was hiding from her. For like a couple of hours.”

“You hid from an alleged whisper for a couple of hours.” There was not an ounce of suspicion in his voice.

“Um, yes. Also, she’s going around calling herself Lirian of Silence. I don’t think anyone’s contesting that.”

“Not much of one, is she?”

“That’s what I said!” I waved my hands irritably.

Falerior smiled politely. He was kinda getting on my nerves.

“Is there anything else you’d like to share?”

I wasn’t sure whether to mention the first real attack, since it would be all sorts of sketchy. I decided to stall for time. “Mesales? Can you bring us some wine, please?”

“Of course, Lady Ajarel.”

Falerior turned to me expectantly as she left the room. Okay, that was a horrible way to stall. You know what, fuck it, Kuril had probably mentioned that I’d been attacked already.

“Uh, before this attack, Lirian tried to stab me in an alleyway. It was during a Renathion. My food was drugged to make me go to the bathroom, then she jumped me when I left the arena.”

“You’ve made a truly remarkable recovery.”

I’d kept the hand amplifier off for that, so he should know I wasn’t making up any of that. But he was still sitting there with that dumb attentive look on his face while Ekoula took notes.

“It wasn’t that bad,” I said. “Relatively speaking.”

“Evidently,” he said, nodding. What did he want?

“Uh, then there was the attack a couple nights ago.”

He continued staring at me for a long time. I just stared back, getting increasingly uncomfortable. When it was clear I wasn’t going to say anything else, he shifted and spoke up again.

“I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with many from the House,” he said pleasantly. “I’m glad I finally had the chance to get your version of events. I’ve heard you sounded the alarm on that night. How did you know to do so?”

“Uh, there’s a trick from back home,” I said, sticking with the story I gave Lirian. “It lets me know if she’s around.”

“Mm. I see. Can you demonstrate it for me?”

I glanced around the room as if inspiration would just be waiting on the wall or something. No dice. Eventually I just gave up and told the truth. “Uh, no.”

“Pity,” he said in apparent infuriating sincerity. “How fortunate that you were prepared for her.”

“She did stab me.”

“It was quite rational to be prepared, yes. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.”

Like hell, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.

“So, you raised the alarm and then…?”

“Uh, I grabbed a decorative sword from the hallway and ran after her. Roel and Kuril were unconscious in the library, and Lirian had a knife to Roel’s throat. She wanted to ask me some questions.”

“How thick was your sword’s blade?”

I blinked. “What?”

“The width,” said Falerior. “From edge to edge.”

“Uh,” I stammered, holding my hands out. “Like this big?”

He nodded. “Pardon my interruption.”

“Why do you want to know that?” I asked. “Wait, you think I stabbed Roel?”

“Did you?” Falerior seemed genuinely curious, and not at all like he was accusing me of stabbing my almost-aunt.

“No!” I yelled. “Why would you even think that?”

“You’re the only one who saw her that night,” he replied, as if discussing the weather. “Whispers get blamed for all sorts of things.”

“I saw her,” I said. “She was here. I’m telling the truth.”

“No one said otherwise.” He smiled. His face looked very punchable. “What did Lirian ask you about?”

“She wanted to know how I knew where she was. I didn’t tell her much, just that it was a trick from home.”

“It’s never good to give information to an enemy,” said Falerior.

“Exactly,” I said. “But I had to keep her talking so she didn’t hurt Roel.”

“Keep her talking until when?”

I switched the hand amplifier to not-lies again. “Until I could figure something out.”

Falerior nodded again. What an agreeable fucking man.

“How did she escape?”

“I fucked up,” I said. “She asked where I was really from. She thought I wasn’t really from Salaphi. I, uh, got cheeky, I guess. I was really stressed out and wasn’t thinking clearly. She did this thing where she spat on her knife, then cut herself, then stabbed Roel. We’re still not really sure what that was supposed to do. She escaped in the confusion.”

“That is what whispers do best,” said the Oathkeeper in a reassuring tone of voice. “I had heard you came from Salaphi. Is that not true?”

“Kind of,” I said, thumbing my hand amplifier. “I’ve moved around a lot.”

“My condolences,” said Falerior. “News of what happened there has even reached out here.”

“What happened, exactly?” I said, playing innocent with technological assistance.

He looked slightly surprised for a moment.

“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you,” he said. “Lady Ajarel, Salaphi was destroyed. Alcebios took them all.”

“What!?” I said. “How—”

I wasn’t sure what to say, but I had to be convincingly upset about this—well, actually, I was upset about this, but how did I communicate that to the smiling bastard across from me? I would have liked to sink slowly back into my seat, but I hadn’t had the presence of mind to jump out of it in shock.

Mesales saved me from my dilemma by returning with the wine.

“The hospitality of your House is great,” said the Oathkeeper in a formal tone of voice, before switching to the pleasant tone he’d been using for this whole interrogation. “However, perhaps it would be best if we resumed this later.”

“Of course,” I said, somewhat shaken.

*

I watched them leave the House. Remotely, from the safety of my bedroom. Were Oathkeepers like Lirian? Would they notice the cameras?

“What did you think of Lady Ajarel?” Falerior asked his aide.

“Nervous,” said Ekoula, eyes flicking as he recalled. “Shockingly informal. She didn’t trust you. She gave a lot of incomplete answers.”

“Remember that attitude,” said Falerior. “You just met your first whisper.”

Fuck.