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Over and over again, Rook had told herself she'd make time to visit the bathing pool at the Diamond. She deserved a personal day after everything going on—just enough to take the edge off. Now, she was about to sully it in a way she hoped Teia could forgive her for. Just long enough to know if any of this blood was his—that was all Rook had asked for, and the other woman had given it to her without a single question.
Maker, Teia had even helped her drag Lucanis' half-conscious body through the back halls of the Cantori Diamond, kept out of sight from prying eyes, and safe from any lurking threats.
Neve had gone off on Illario's trail the moment everything went to shit in the Chantry. There was no way she hadn't also heard the surprised way Zara addressed Lucanis' cousin as amatus. Rook's lip curled back in distaste—the way the term of endearment looped through her head in the witch's voice soured the word for her, and made it acrid on her tongue.
Lucanis' head lolled in a terrifyingly limp way as she and Teia laid him down alongside the faintly steaming bath. Rook felt a cold curl of fear rising in the back of her mind, but stuffed the feeling back down hard out of sight where it belonged. She had survived Ventus. She could survive this.
Slow, shallow breaths shuddered through his chest. He was alive. That was enough, for now.
"I will leave someone outside," Teia said quietly, gripping Rook's shoulder where she was still crouched with a solid squeeze. "Have them call for me personally if you need anything more. Take care of him."
Rook nodded silently, and smoothed blood-slicked hair away from Lucanis' forehead. She knew she hardly looked much better after fighting tooth and nail with Zara in the Chantry. Her robes were soaked through, drying sticky with congealed plasma and clots that filled her nose with a coppery tang. Frankly, she wasn't sure she had ever felt more disgusted over the state of herself in her life, but Lucanis was much worse off.
Once the click of the lock echoed through the chamber, she slowly began to work her way through the logistics of how to go about… this. She worried her lower lip with her teeth only briefly in thought. One by one, she peeled her gloves off, and tossed them aside, trying to not look too closely at the stains beneath her nails. Her sticky outer layers came next, falling unceremoniously to the cool tile in a wet heap. The robes were likely a loss as well, a thought that prickled at her in faint irritation.
Her boots were salvageable, at least. Hopefully.
"Oh, Lucanis," she murmured under her breath as she knelt back beside him. Truthfully, she was not excited about the prospect of peeling him out of wet leather. There was probably a lewd joke in there somewhere, but the waning adrenaline of the fight with Zara, combined with the fear that some of this blood belonged to him left her feeling hollowed out in a way she hadn't felt in a long while.
Rook would not trust anyone else to do it. Submerging him clothed in the tub might not be the most dignified way to go about it, but there wasn't much dignity in being knocked cold from blood magic, either.
Blood magic. Kaffas, Illario wasn't a mage.
A soft, wounded noise hitched in Lucanis' throat, and for a brief moment she thought he might actually wake—then his head rolled back again, eyes flickering beneath closed lids. Spite had not made another appearance since the Chantry, a thought that needled at the back of her mind like every other detail she was trying to piece together.
Rook hooked her hands under Lucanis' arms and pulled, dragging him along into the shallows of the bath. Blood wept from both of them like steeping tea leaves, clouding the clarity of it in her wake. There was probably a more logical way to go about this whole process, but she found she could not quite get her head on straight enough to think it through clearly at the moment.
"I have you." Rook had no way of even knowing if he was conscious enough to hear her—not with the way his entire body was dead-weight as she did her best to work around him. Still, she kept her tone as even and calm as she could bear to manage.
He heaved a deeply shuddering breath at her words. All she could do was ease him back to the sitting step along the side of the bath, and try to keep his head above the water.
For a moment, she cradled her palm carefully against his cheek. It was uncomfortable seeing Lucanis so helpless. Each shallow breath that shuddered through his body made her chest ache in a way that made her want to take her knife straight to his cousin's throat for what he'd done. Family or not, it was unforgivable—
Rook wrenched the thought out of her mind, forcibly putting Lucanis at the forefront of her attentions. She went to work, unbuckling his numerous straps and belts to peel away the leather of his outer layers first. The water quickly turned its own muddy shade of red, making it impossible for her to see anything much beyond the surface.
A faint flicker of purple flashed beneath his eyelids, and then was gone again. Rook furrowed her brow as she worked.
It was probably better that Lucanis was completely out. Rook was halfway through slicing off the drenched undershirt from his chest—with one of his own knives—when the thought slipped through her mind. She paused long enough to adjust how he was propped against the side of the bath, and then ran her hands over the bared skin of his shoulders and torso to seek out any major injuries before she continued.
Nothing jumped out at her—only the drag of her fingertips through the coarse hair that ran down his chest, and disappeared past the waistband of his trousers.
"Venhedis," she hissed. Rook collected Lucanis the best she could, and pulled him a little further away from the rust-clouded water to she could get a better look. Teia might actually kill her for the state of the place once she was done.
"Rook?"
Lucanis' head lolled to the side, eyes just barely open. The bleary expression he wore betrayed nothing of what he was thinking, nor that he even realized where he was. With the way his hair hung down in his face, damp and stringy, he almost looked the way he had when they'd first rescued him from the Ossuary.
That thought stung something deep within her rib cage.
For a long moment, Rook stood frozen in place in the middle of the bath. She hadn't exactly expected him to come to—not right at this moment, at least, when she was trying to remove his clothing as clinically as she could to check him for injuries. It would be just her luck, though.
"Lucanis," she said softly, her hand easing flat against the plane of his chest. "You—"
The way his fingers closed around hers—like he was cradling something too fragile to risk holding too tightly—stopped her train of thought in its tracks. When he turned her outwards, and brushed his lips against the pulse-point of her wrist, Rook's stomach did a little flip of its own accord.
It was utterly ridiculous, the way he made her feel. The two of them were soaked to the bone in bathwater and gore, and here she was with butterflies.
"Stay with me," she murmured, "You're alright."
He murmured something quietly in Antivan, a string of words she could not make out. Lucanis began to still as he trailed off, and then slumped back into unconsciousness without further fanfare.
The place where his lips touched her skin burned like she'd been branded by fire, and Rook stood with her hands braced against him for several minutes until she was certain he was not going to wake up again.
She let out a long, tired sigh.
His pants were a little easier to peel off of him than his leather cuirass, at least. Rook slid her palms down his narrow waist and the lean muscle of his thighs, forcibly setting her mind only on the task. He placed his trust in her time and time again—it was not something she would take for granted, no matter the clearly mutual feelings that simmered between them.
Satisfied at the lack of open wounds Lucanis possessed, she eased his head back enough to begin to rinse the clotted blood from his hair. Her own would wait until they were all back at the Lighthouse—once she knew he was safe.
Maker, she was going to kill Illario. With her own hands, if Lucanis didn't stop her. How stupid he was, to have thrown away his cousin's life to the Venatori—and Caterina's too, if the threads she was starting to connect were right.
She had to get her hands on Zara's body. It was the only way she could think of to obtain irrefutable proof of what Illario had really done. If Zara's sect of Venatori were working with the Evanuris, it was even more prudent to collect more information. It wasn't the most palatable approach—but Emmrich had the skill to do it, and frankly she was tired of the long game they'd been playing. When Lucanis was awake, she would broach the idea to him.
Rook realized that she had been idly combing her fingers through Lucanis' hair, long rinsed clean of soap that she did not remember applying. She stilled, fingers slowly tracing down the side of his face to rest at the corner of his jaw. His breathing had evened out, and his pulse beat steadily at his throat. There was no telling how long he would be unconscious for, but at least he had stabilized for the moment.
The lingering scent of bergamot and cedar wafted up from the water—it covered up the metallic tang of gore, but it wasn't his scent. Rook nose scrunched at the thought, already missing the notes of leather and vetiver from his cologne.
"Alright, pet, out we come."
It was probably for the best that she was alone with him here—there was no easy way to haul him out of the water with any of his little remaining dignity left intact. With a great splash, Rook hoisted him up and onto the tiles again. She eased his head down, cradled carefully in her hands.
There was a high likelihood the towels left here were for guests, but Rook had an inkling that Lucanis' wallet could take the hit if Teia was actually upset about it. With a bit of maneuvering, she managed to get him mostly wrapped and covered. There were ridiculously luxurious for towels, really.
She was just grabbing another to sop up the worst of what was dripping off of her, when there was a faint knock at the door. Rook tensed, eyes flickering over to Lucanis' still form laid out on the tile like a corpse.
"Just me." Neve's voice came from the other side, worn through, and tired.
Rook let her in, and quickly locked the door behind her. The two women shared a wordless glance at the Crow on the floor. Neve's eyes slowly took in the state of the bath, the tacky, drying blood smeared across the tile, and the slow drip of water from Rook's robles.
"You two sure made a mess of the place."
"Save it, please, Neve."
Neve made a noncommittal noise in response. Even though she'd managed to stay out of the worst of the pool in the Chantry, she was still caked to her knees in gore. She was probably also anxious to get back to the safety of the Lighthouse to clean up.
"Trust me, I'm not exactly in the mood, either." She set a bundle of dark clothing on a nearby bench, and then returned to the door. "Teia asked me to drop these off when I checked in with her. I suppose it was too much to hope he'd be awake by now."
"Not yet." Rook cast her gaze over to where Lucanis continued to take slow, shallow breaths. Neve did not need to know he'd briefly woken once. "I'll get him dressed, and then we'll head back through the eluvian."
It was as much a plan as any right now, and Neve nodded in affirmation. When the door closed again behind her, the silence in the room weighed Rook down like a heavy, damp blanket.
No—that was just the way her drenched robes clung to her in all of the worst places, cooling in the air of the bath chamber, and beginning to chill her down to her bones.
She toweled herself off to the best of her ability before returning to Lucanis' side along the edge of the bath. Although Rook had looked him over in the water, she delicately pulled back the towel that covered him, eyes roving the exposed plane of his chest and abdomen just to confirm again that he wasn't wounded. His skin was still warm under her touch, his breathing steady. Satisfied, she let the towel drape back over him, and rose to collect the clothing Neve had brought from Teia.
Too many questions flit through her mind as she returned, and knelt back alongside him. Her hands ever-so gently lifted his head into her lap, cradled close. There was a scar along his lip that she traced with her thumb, her traitorous pulse fluttering. Rook bent to barely brush her lips against Lucanis' forehead, a long sigh escaping her as she did so.
There would be the need to explain the aftermath to him, once he was awake again. A part of her could already imagine the self-loathing that would come from having lost control of Spite so completely—a notion that was so absurd to her given what had happened, that she already had formed a counter-argument in her mind.
Illario was going to get what was coming to him for what he'd done to Lucanis. Rook would see to that if he would not do it himself. Until they received news from their contacts here in Treviso, however, they could only bide their time until more information came their way.
For right now, she only needed to tend to her broken-winged Crow, who cradled her heart so delicately in his hands.