The Timeseer's Gambit (The Faraday Files Book 2) (31 page)

“A lady can’t confide all her secrets in either her mother or her daughter,” Olivia agreed, when Mother Greta took her time replying. An unsubtle effort, but effective.

“It’s not strictly
against
precepts.” Mother Greta was quick to clarify. “It just… bends them a little bit. We…” And she sighed, slumping. There it was. They had broken her open. “It’s just so much better when we mingle. Just for one day a month, on―”

“Ah.” Olivia’s eyes lit up. She flicked Chris a look and he nodded, weaving. “On the Maerday immediately following Hallowed Godsday. Your single day of rest, when the world isn’t watching.”

Mother Greta nodded. “It’s all Grandmother Eugenia,” she said. “Apparently, it started when she was only a new Maiden. She had a bad Mother. She wanted to talk to other girls her age, to take strength from their struggles. So she… bent the rules.”

Olivia laughed. “You mean,” she said, “that she broke them flagrantly, sneaked out, and made friends on her own time. I can’t imagine she convinced the Crones and Elders at the time!”

Mother Greta flushed and looked away. “She’s a good woman,” she said. Her voice was defensive. “The best of us. She knew that, in time, Maidens would become Mothers. Mothers would become Crones. She didn’t need to convince the elders, not really.”

“Ah,” Olivia said. Chris watched admiration dawn in her eyes. “A
patient
woman, then. Turn your entire generation to your cause. The previous one will die soon enough.”

Mother Greta said nothing, but she flinched faintly at the phrasing.

Chris stepped in. Olivia’s edges were beginning to rub up on the poor priestess. They’d lose her if he didn’t blunt those sharp bits. “You knew the deceased Maidens and Youths personally, then?” he asked delicately.

“Ah, no.” Mother Greta wrapped her hands around her teacup, looking down into the dark liquid. “Not exactly. I knew them by reputation. From their Mothers and their Fathers. But―”

“Ahh.” Olivia’s smile was slow. She shot Chris a look he recognized.
Get all this down.
“You don’t want to tread
too
close to violating those precepts. And so apart from Grandmother Eugenia, who organizes all of this, you keep to your own age group. Isn’t that right?”

Mother Greta visibly hesitated. Then she nodded. “Yes.”

“So,” Olivia leaned back in her chair. “All the dead―
and
surviving―Maidens and Youths knew one another.” One finger tapped against the inside of her own elbow. Chris watched her mind work. “Hmm. How many families attend this… mingling?”

“There are twelve holy families within Darrington itself,” Mother Greta responded immediately. “And then there are six from the surrounding boroughs that are also included in the…” she echoed Olivia, “mingling.”

“So,” Olivia calculated, “thirty-six in attendance for each age group, provided each position is currently filled.”

“They always are, these days,” Mother Greta said. Her voice echoed with a hollow sadness.. “Every time we’ve met, the younglings who were taken from us have already been replaced. Barely a month. The world has gone mad, hasn’t it? Just twenty years ago, I waited a year and a half for a Youth to join me in the Church. The position just sat empty with no one to fill it.” She made the sign of Three and Three herself, which Chris echoed without thinking. Olivia shot him an amused look and he flushed.

“Well,” Olivia said. “I’ve managed to puzzle something out.” Chris watched her savour her revelation. “The Maidens and Youths who were murdered were all killed within a week of your
mingling
.”

Mother Greta started. Her teacup clattered and tipped. She gasped, leaping to her feet as tea spread across her lap. The cup fell to the floor, bursting into a shower of porcelain. Old newspapers immediately began to soak up the steaming liquid. “Ah!” she exclaimed.

“You didn’t realize,” Olivia said, shaking her head. “You were the one who saw these were murders, and you still didn’t see the pattern.”

“Oh, dear me!” Mother Greta picked at her habit. “This is altogether―I need to change this as soon as possible, how―”

“I need to speak to the Maidens and Youths,” Olivia said, ignoring her. Chris sighed and went to fetch napkins from the tea trolley. “All of them. Boroughs and all. Today would be ideal. Can you do that?”

Mother Greta gave Chris a thankful look as he handed her a large cloth napkin. She scrubbed at her habit, sighing when the stain did not come out. “I… perhaps? I would need to contact Grandmother Eugenia. It… it would be highly unorthodox. This is not the day of rest. All the churches would be without their Maidens or Youths on a Calday afternoon.”

“Well,” Olivia said, giving Chris a smile of approval as he came over with broom and dustpan. His job was terribly ignoble. “If you don’t, I’ll have to go through my police supervisor. That could take a long time. You could be entirely without an entire Maiden or Youth before it comes through. Though I suppose they’d be replaced quickly enough, if that’s what you want…” She showed a little of her canines as she said that. Chris shot her an incredulous look, stomach twisting. Mother Deorwynn
.
She could be
heartless
.

And didn’t it always work? Mother Greta held up her hands. She looked stricken. “How could you―no! No, that is absolutely the last thing anyone wants. I―” She sniffed, and turned her face away. Olivia’s lips twisted and she averted her eyes. She liked to upset people. She didn’t like to make them cry. Tears made her deeply uncomfortable.

“How soon can you do it?” she asked. Chris swept the little shards of pottery into the dustpan, murmuring that Mother Greta should not move until he finished, lest she lodge porcelain in her shoes.

“I suppose… three hours?” Mother Greta said.

“Make it two and a half,” Olivia corrected her, and Mother Greta was so flustered that she merely nodded. There were tears on her cheeks, and Olivia intentionally did not look at them. “That will do, Chris,” she said, and he didn’t bother to correct her and say that he was quite sure some shards had escaped under the chairs. The office was a disaster in any case. It would all need to be fixed.

A choked up Mother Greta made her farewells and slipped out the front door. Chris made the sign of the Three and Three to her as she left, but she didn’t seem to see. The office seemed curiously quiet once she was gone, and then Olivia stood up from her chair, gathering a stack of papers as she did. “This is all going to need to be dealt with,” she said, but for once, it didn’t seem like she was ordering him to do it. So he just nodded.

They started balling up the papers and thrusting them into overflowing rubbish bins. Olivia worked quickly and seemed to relish the movement, as she always did when something was stewing in her mind. Her hands and feet were like cloudlings bound to her mind, generating the energy that powered her brilliance.

When Chris bumped into her with a load of papers and gave her an apologetic smile, she didn’t return it. She studied him very intently. His smile fell. “Olivia?”

“All right,” she said finally. “I lied.”

Chris blinked. “Excuse me?”

“You keep asking who I thought did it. I told you that I didn’t have any ideas. I lied.”

“Then who―”

“Not anyone specific, mind you,” Olivia said. She looked through the papers she held. “But I just spent an entire night scouring the headlines for the last four months. Anything to do with Livingstone, the reformists, the traditionalists, the Floating Castle… that
seems
correct, doesn’t it? Spiritbinder business. But it all
felt
wrong. I knew I was looking in the wrong place, I just
knew
it. And the moment I turned my attention to the church…” She shrugged and reached up to comb a hand through her hair. It still hadn’t reached the length it had been before the fire on Grapevine Street, but it was getting there. “It just felt right.”

Chris tried to separate what she meant. “Then you think another priest―” he began.

Olivia smiled faintly. “Right from the first moment, and the more I realize how complex and incestuous and tangled that institution really is, the more right it feels.”

“But a priest couldn’t do the unbinds,” Chris pointed out. “What
makes
a priest a priest is the fact that they don’t have
any
proficiency. And we already established that it needed to be a spiritbinder to be a murder.”

“I know,” Olivia agreed. “That’s why I lied. It doesn’t make any sense at all, does it? But this, right now, is the first time I feel like we’re actually onto something that
leads
somewhere. Alfred Pritchard, Theresa Edison, they were all just distractions. Logical steps leading to a plausible conclusion. But this?” She put a hand to her belly. “This makes my
gut
feel like we’re onto something.”

“A spiritbinder could work with a priest,” Chris said quietly. “For money, or… or something else. I don’t know what. But I suppose it’s possible a priest is ordering these murders for their own agenda.”

Olivia nodded. “That’s my current working theory, too,” she said. “It’s the only thing that makes sense, isn’t it?” And she smiled faintly. “Did you buy yourself lunch with my royals?”

“No,” Chris said, his stomach dropping into his feet. No, he hadn’t bought anything. The thirty royals were nestled against his heart, which is what he’d actually traded.

“Good,” Olivia chirped, turning away. “Well, as soon as we get this place somewhere presentable, I have a mind to go back to that adorable little spot by Heart Church. This time, you can actually eat your meal instead of sullenly letting it go to waste!”

ood afternoon, purportedly holy young people of varying age and sex!” Olivia called out to the packed room, and thirty-five pairs of eyes blinked back at her.

Mother Greta and Grandmother Eugenia had arranged the gathering, as promised. The day of rest symposium usually took place in a rotation of the empty halls of the borough churches, where it would not be immediately noticeable to outsiders that the priests were all congregating. Today, there had been no time to drive an hour out into the pastoral outskirts of Darrington. All the Maidens and Youths had simply been brought to the largest and most central church: The Cathedral of the Blessed Heart of the Holy Family.

They stood in the same room where Chris and Olivia had become acquainted with the affected families, and Chris recognized some of the faces he’d noted on that first day. The small, ginger, freckled Youth who had been paired with Georgie, for instance. Calum Rowe. He was seated very closely to the Maiden who had replaced Georgie, who Chris’s notes reminded him was named Penelope Daniels, the most recently appointed priest of the lot. Sister Penny positioned herself like a watchful dog over Brother Calum, who made himself small and practically curled into her side. He recognized the beautiful Sister Patricia and her handsome prince of a Youth, sitting close together once again. The tall, lanky, and mole-cheeked Brother Tibault and the buttoned-down, serious girl who sat at his side.

And Sister Elisabeth. Chris avoided her searching gaze. He couldn’t be pulled into the tide of her fresh wounds. If he thought of Fernand right now, he’d remember the crimson bathwater. He’d feel William’s echo of the knife biting into his wrists. He’d think of how Fernand would react upon learning that Chris had bartered Rosemary to a monster.