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Vinanna was lying to her. Easthies had lost his mind.
She’d seen the desperation in that boy’s eyes, the misery and loss that preserved his life at the cost of another’s— that boy who had disappeared after Silver Eve, and she couldn’t help but to think that was for the best. Who knew what Vinanna would have done to him.
One of the things Luluci hated most in the world was feeling powerless, but all her training didn’t give her the power to fix this.
At least Utowin remained a friend. Vinanna and Easthies were out of the question now, the twins were too young to be burdened with such things, and Galga was gone, but Utowin at least would still make himself a welcome nuisance, sit on the corner of her desk while she tried to work, stare out the window at the ocean in silent commiseration.
“Isn’t this an engagement token? Did someone propose to you again?”
Apparently he’d started poking around on her desk— a bad sign, that she’d been so distracted she hadn’t even noticed. She took the pretty golden trinket from him and put it back on the desk, where its undue heft was keeping a stack of papers in place.
“Weren’t you the one with the whole speech about how no one wants to be involved with a Knight? And no, no one’s asked me in years. Why would I keep the token when I wasn’t accepting the proposal?”
Utowin was gawping at her. “I was joking when I said ‘again’. You’ve been proposed to?”
“Six times before I even passed the fourth test,” Luluci mumbled. Utowin might be making a comically gobsmacked face, but at least he wasn’t the kind of man to think she was bragging. Small mercies.
“Why do you have a token, then?” he asked, and Luluci averted her eyes, preferring to pick the thing back up and examine it as she had so many times before. It was a good token, chosen with care or probably even commissioned to suit the recipient. As a witch’s token, it had a spell worked into the decorative scrollwork at the sides and as such was technically a contraption, but the beauty of it and attention paid by its giver to the details was the main point. It fit almost comfortably in her palm, but had been designed for a slightly bigger hand; the over all shape was like an abstracted peony, its petals made of elegantly arranged feathers and tassels and ribbons, all frozen in motion by the skill of the sculptor.
She twisted the ring at the base and watched the ball of light emerge, glow, hover over the token. It was perfectly bright enough to read by, casting its light wide and generous, but not so bright as to hurt the eyes even when one looked directly at it. She could imagine him futzing with this spell, redrawing it until he’d found the perfect proportions.
“I found it,” she said, and Utowin raised his eyebrows at her.
“Not the kind of thing someone just drops in the street.”
“No,” she said, running her thumb up one golden feather. “It was in Galga’s pocket.”
Utowin whistled lowly. “When you were going through his effects, when the doctors were looking him over?”
Luluci nodded. She’d found the thing neatly tied up in a kerchief, and had been so desperate for any clues as to what had happened to Galga that she’d ended up tearing the cloth on one of the token’s petals as she clumsily opened it.
For a long moment, all she’d been able to think had been ‘no wonder he wanted the festival off work.’
“Think he’d just received it, or was about to give it?”
“The latter,” Luluci said, “just by how it was wrapped. And it looks like something he’d give.”
“Does his man know?”
“I don’t think so,” Luluci said, guilt clenching in her stomach. “At least, he hasn’t come after me asking for it. I was going to give it to him, but—“
“But then he started hollering about us being heartless and stormed off,” Utowin finished for her. “Damn guy. I get that he’s heartbroken and all, but it’s not like we aren’t too. Some fucker out there took our friend.”
Luluci swallowed hard, her hand tightening around the token, its edges digging into her skin. Our friend. Her friends, the people she worked alongside, the people she trusted, were dropping like flies— whether they were stolen from her, like Galga, or stole themselves away from her with their actions like Easthies and Vinnana. Even her faith in the creed of the Knights, the vitality of their mission, was slipping away from her, leaving her alone and adrift.
She placed the token back atop the paperwork— so much paperwork she had to do for this job that was beginning to haunt her— and tried to rub the pain out of her hand from where she’d gripped it too tightly.
“We’ll find ‘em,” Utowin said. “We’ll find who did that to Galga and we’ll make them pay.”
“It won’t bring him back,” she said quietly.
“I know. But it’s better than nothing.”
She thought about the shell of a man now living somewhere in the Great Hall’s residential districts, with her friend’s name and face but none of his history. She thought of how Easthies’s burning righteousness had pulled her out of her pit when she was young, and how he now turned it on his own cohort. She thought of Vinanna asking her to be her successor even as she kept her blindfolded, dancing on a string.
“It’s better than nothing,” she repeated. Pretty soon, nothing might be all she had.