I awoke slowly, to the sound and smell of water.
I was sitting in it. The water was nearly body temperature; I barely felt it on my skin. Under me, I could feel hard, sculpted stone, as warm as the water; nearby was the smell of flowers. hiras: a vining plant that had once been native to the Maroland. Its blooms had a heavy, distinctive perfume that I liked. That told me where I was.
If I hadn’t been to Madding’s place before, I would’ve been disoriented. Madding owned a large house in one of the richer districts of Wesha, and he had brought me here often, complaining that my little bed would give him a bad back. He had filled the ground floor of the house with pools. There were at least a dozen of them, carved out of the bedrock that underlay this part of Shadow, sculpted into pretty shapes and screened by growing plants. It was the sort of design choice godlings were infamous for; they thought first of aesthetics and lastly of convenience or propriety. Madding’s guests had to either stand or strip and get into a pool. He saw nothing wrong with this.
The pools were not magical. The water was warm because Mad had hired some mortal genius to concoct a mechanism that kept boiled water in the piping system at all times. Madding had never bothered to learn how it worked, so he couldn’t explain it to me.
I sat up, listening, and promptly became aware that someone was with me, sitting nearby. I saw nothing, but the breathing pattern was familiar. “Mad?”
He resolved out of the darkness, sitting at the pool’s edge with one knee drawn up. His hair was loose, clinging to his damp skin. It made him look strangely young. His eyes were somber.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
The question puzzled me for a moment, and then I remembered.
I sat back against the side of the pool, barely feeling the throb of my old bruises, and turned my face away from him. My eyes still ached, so I closed them, though that didn’t help much. How did I feel? Like a murderess. How else?
Madding sighed. “I suppose it does no good to point this out, but what happened wasn’t your fault.”
Of course it did no good. And it wasn’t true.
“Mortals are never good at controlling magic, Oree. You weren’t built for it. And you didn’t know what your magic could do. You didn’t intend to kill those men.”
“They’re still dead,” I said. “My intentions don’t change that.”
“True.” He shifted, putting the other foot into the water. “They probably intended to kill you, though.”
I laughed softly. It echoed off the shifting surface of the water and sounded demented. “Stop trying, Mad. Please.”
He fell silent for a while, letting me wallow. When he decided I’d done enough of that, he slipped into the waist-high water and came over, lifting me against him. That was all it took, really. I buried my face in his chest and let myself turn to noodle in his arms. He rubbed my back and murmured soothing things in his language while I cried, and then he carried me out of the room of pools and up curving stairs and laid me down in the tumbled pile of cushions that served as his bed. I fell asleep there, not caring whether I ever woke up again.
Of course, I did wake up eventually, disturbed by voices talking softly nearby. When I opened my eyes and looked around, I was surprised to see a strange godling sitting beside the cushion pile. She was very pale, with short black hair molded like a cap around a pleasant, heart-shaped face. Two things struck me at once: first, that she looked ordinary enough to pass for human, which marked her as a godling who regularly did business with mortals. Second, for some reason, she sat in shadow, though there was nothing nearby that could have thrown a shadow on her, and I shouldn’t have been able to see the shadow in any case.
She had been talking with Madding but paused as I sat up. “Hello,” I said, nodding to her and rubbing my face. I knew all his people, and this one wasn’t one of them.
She nodded back, smiling. “So you’re Mad’s killer.”
I stiffened. Madding scowled. “Nemmer.”
“I meant no insult,” she said, shrugging, still smiling. “I like killers.”
I glanced at Madding, wondering whether it was all right for me to tell this kinswoman of his to go to the infinite hells. He didn’t seem tense, which told me she was no threat or enemy, but he wasn’t happy, either. He noticed my look and sighed. “Nemmer came to warn me, Oree. She runs another organization here in town—”
“More like a guild of independent professionals,” Nemmer put in.
Madding threw her a look that was pure brotherly annoyance, then focused on me again. “Oree… the Order of Itempas just contacted her, asking to commission her services. Hers specifically, not one of her people.”