Damien just narrowed his eyes. With dark skin covered in even darker freckles and a tight cropping of coiled hair, he looked nervous just standing there, both hands wrapped tightly around the handle to a leather satchel, fidgeting. “Who are you?”
“Oh, right, um, I’m P-Perry, and, uh, Amma—I mean Lady Ammalie—sent me.”
“You’re a priest?” Damien looked over his robes, some god’s symbol, Osurehm he guessed, hanging from a chain around his neck. “And Amma sent you here toblessme?” Did she want him dead?
“Actually, she just told me to say that to the guards,” he whispered, hurrying away from the door. “She was pretty serious about not blessing you actually, says you follow some obscure, foreign god? I didn’t even know there was another pantheon.”
Damien frowned at him. “Ah, so you’re not a very good priest then, are you?”
“Not really since I’m just an acolyte,” he admitted with a nervous laugh, shoulders drooping. “But I want to be! And Lady Ammalie says to just keep working hard and eventually I’ll get there.”
“A bit cruel of her,” he mumbled, but the priest-in-training didn’t seem to notice, continuing his ramble.
“There’s a temple in Eirengaard I want to study at, and Amma’s going to help get me in. She wrote a letter for me and everything, I just have to pass the exams, but they only hold them once a year, and they’re coming up soon—”
Damien cleared his throat. “Right, no blessing, so why are you here then?”
“Oh, yeah! She wanted to give you this.” He placed the satchel on the ground and opened it, pulling out a flat package wrapped with a swath of grey cloth. He held it out, hesitating, and then walked up to Damien with a bit of a wobble.
Receiving it, Damien could feel the magic inside the package, stiff under the soft fabric. Though it was wrapped tightly and tucked in, he could see the pattern on it, stitched with silver thread to look like runes.
“She said be really careful opening it, and that it’s the thing you wanted, but she wouldn’t tell me what it was exactly, just said you’d know, but I do know there’s some divine magic in there because she asked me to get her a shroud from our temple for masking holy auras, and I told her that’s stealing, and she said it wasn’t if she asked me to do it, and I said it still felt a lot like stealing, and she said it’s really her stealing it through me, so I shouldn’t feel bad, but I still do feel kinda bad about the whole thing, and…”
As the acolyte went on, Damien flipped the wrapped-up thing carefully in his hands. It was the Lux Codex, it had to be, wrapped in a binding so that he could touch it. Darkness, if she could just stop being thoughtful for a little bit, he could be properly angry with her.
“…a message, but she didn’t want to write it down in case I dropped it or someone took it from me which is sort of likely because that happens a lot. Hey, that is one cute dog. I’ve never seen one so small except the queen’s, and they’re not terribly nice. How are you, fella?” The man called Perry leaned in and began toward Kaz. The imp immediately snapped at him, and he pulled back.
“A message?” Damien waved the book at Kaz to stop his snarling. “From Amma?”
“Yeah, she says, um, well I need to repeat it exactly, so”—he held his arms out, putting on a slightly higher voice—“first of all, I’m sorry—”
“Of course she is,” Damien mumbled, but the corner of his mouth tugged upward.
“—and I’m going to fix things—”
“Ever the optimist.”
“—and are you all right?”
Damien blinked back at him. “That’s a question?”
“Yes. Are you? She was really concerned.”
Damien glanced about and then nodded slowly. He supposed he was.
“Okay, good, and then she wanted me to figure out how mad you actually were as opposed to how mad you said you were by looking at you, but I’m not really the best at reading people, and she knows that, so I don’t know why she asked me at all, but she said to at least try, and even though I can’t really tell usually, you seem like you might secretly be really, really angry.”
Damien put up a hand, stopping him. “This is just how I look. I’m told I have resting villain face. Let the baroness know I am appropriately displeased with the situation but eagerly awaiting some kind of resolution which I anticipate she will…succeed at.”
Perry nodded vigorously. He muttered everything back to himself, eyes closed, then popped them open again, huge and deeply brown and full of more anxiety than Damien had even seen on torture victims. “Sure, yes, okay. I have to go tell her right away, she said come right back to her and say, so—”
“Wait. You must know Amma well, yes?”
His face changed, a little smile that was free of nerves playing there. “Since we were really young, yeah. When my mom died, I had to go live at the temple, and it turned out Osurehm had blessed me with arcana, so they started teaching me, and then my teacher came here, so I did too, and Amma would get bored during theology lessons, and even though I really actually liked class, she’d sometimes convince me to sneak out, and—”
“So, you’re local then, to Faebarrow?”
“All my life.”
