“Why weren’t you in Ingolstadt?” he asked. “Why weren’t you behind the walls of Krähenstein Academy? You should’ve never left.”
“You’re right,” she said. “Matteo and I should’ve never left. He didn’t have a choice, though. The relic war had been raging for months, and Headmaster Wolff had lost half of the board members supporting Krähenstein. When they left, they took their relics with them. People think Krähenstein Academy has powerful relics tucked away in their strongroom, but I’m not so sure. Greater relics, yes. But apex? The owners don’t declare them, let alone lend them. Not even for a noble cause. And the Sarumite Order can’t just take the relics they need. The whole foundation of the Order is that we study them, catalog them, but we don’t confiscate them or force the owners to relinquish or lend them if they don’t wish to. Unless the relics are used in harmful ways, the Order doesn’t intervene. It’s called the Right of Quiet Possession. It’s a hereditary right that recognizes relics as protected household property where title rests with the family, not the parish, the state, or the Order. Authorities cannot confiscate a hereditary relic unless a court finds proven misuse, or the family voluntarily transfers custody. Which rarely happens. Sometimes, families will lend their relics in time of need. Usually, that happens with relics that aid in healing. But relics that are truly powerful and could shift the way of the world? Those are kept secret, hidden in vaults or implanted under skin.”
“I didn’t know that. The Right of Quiet Possession,” he repeated.
Of course he didn’t. But he could recognize any lattice and probably knew how to make them too.
“If I tell you why Matteo and I left the academy, will you tell me who taught you about lattices?”
“I will. When I remember.”
She chewed on the inside of her cheek. “You remember how a Quietus Net is made, but you don’t remember who taught you?”
“My memories are... in fragments. I know the things that I know, but I can’t put my finger on when I started knowing them, or how.”
Seraphina’s hand shot up to touch his cheek, but he was faster. He gripped her wrist and tucked her hand back against her chest, holding it there. She could feel her heart beating against their interlaced fingers.
“All right,” she said. “Headmaster Wolff sent Matteo to visit his family in Tuscany. The Sarumite Order knows that Matteo’s family owns an apex relic, and the headmaster wanted Matteo to convince his grandmother, who is its keeper, to lend it to the academy. He thought that if Matteo went in person, his grandmother would relent and give it to her grandson to keep and use. When the war started, Headmaster Wolff tried to reach out to the few families he knew owned apex relics, so this wasn’t unusual, though people did whisper about him sending his only master weaver away when the Bavarian roads weren’t safe. Matteo asked me to go with him, and we were given two guards. Hartmann was one of them.”
Seraphina elegantly omitted to tell Rune how excited she’d felt when Matteo had asked her. She was in love with him, and he was in love with her, despite refusing to touch her beyond holding her hand and chastely kissing her cheek. In the years they’d been together, she’d doubted him often, but when he told her he wanted his family to meet Seraphina because he was planning on asking for their blessing, she thought she couldfinally taste it – the consummation of their devotion to each other.
As it turned out, she was the reason Matteo’s mission failed. The visit was a disaster. Matteo’s grandmother herself told him Seraphina would not be accepted by the family, and that he’d made a mistake choosing to soil his purist name and lineage with a pragmatist woman. The High Harvester was a pragmatist, the most radical of their time, and many people who followed him in his madness were like him. In the old woman’s words, Seraphina Bell would one day turn her back on the resistance and join the enemy.
“It didn’t go well,” was what Seraphina chose to tell Rune. “His family was not understanding, and we were forced to return to Bavaria empty-handed. Our carriage was attacked when we were a day away from Ingolstadt. We weren’t even in enemy territory anymore, but the four men who did it were low-ranking soldiers, self-appointed hunters who were sweeping the roads for relics to bring to the Harvester. After all, that was how the High Harvester had filled his vaults with apex and greater relics that allowed him to start the war. He’d stolen them during his military campaigns across Europe.”
“The High Harvester was in the army?”
“In Napoleon’s army, yes. He was twenty when he left Krähenstein Academy, where he was a master weaver. You’re probably wondering why he would abandon such a high position in the Sarumite Order to go fight a war that wasn’t his. He was the youngest master weaver in the history of the Academy. Matteo, as talented as he was, never matched Falk Kühner’s skill.”
“Falk Kühner?”
“The High Harvester is a man, after all, and he has a name. No one calls him by it anymore. It’s not a noble name, and nowadays, he likes being called a lord. So, he left the academy attwenty because he created a pattern for a very powerful lattice that was refused by the then headmaster, Anton von Linden. Kühner called it Obedience. The Obedience Lattice, and you can imagine what it did. Anton von Linden brought it to the board, they had a vote, and the pattern was rejected. Kühner made it anyway. The board confiscated it, and he was reprimanded. Mind you, no one asked him to leave. But his values didn’t align with those of the Sarumite Order anymore, and the war promised fortune and fame. He enrolled when Bavaria joined Napoleon’s army in 1806, and he traveled all over Europe. He didn’t do much fighting, since he was used as a weaver and his job was to make and fix lattices that kept the other soldiers alive and gave them an advantage. Bavaria, Saxony, Prussia, Austria, Russia... Countless opportunities to raid and steal relics. With no morals to speak of and no respect for the Sarumite Order and the Right of Quiet Possession, Falk Kühner built a collection like no other. When Bavaria flipped on Napoleon and defected to the Coalition, he landed on his feet. When the war ended, he started another, more horrible and insidious, fought with sacred bones. He has them all. He massacred people to get his hands on them, and now he uses them in battle while the Order stumbles over their own rules and regulations.”
“The apex relic the soldiers spoke about yesterday,” Rune said. “The one that drove them insane and made them eat mud. Stolen?”
“For certain. Had it been registered anywhere, I would’ve recognized it by the description. I’ve studied the records at Krähenstein, and they name all the known relics across the continent. Parishes, monasteries, relic schools and academies, all share this information in the name of transparency within the Order. But Falk Kühner doesn’t care about such things. He hoards bones and erases their origin. To him, it means nothing that this vertebra came from Saint Columba, or this sphenoidcame from Saint Denis of Paris. He cares about what they do, and especially what they can do for him. It’s the way of House Hamburg and the pragmatists taken to the extreme. I remain a pragmatist, but I don’t adhere to his views.”
That was something that Matteo had understood. His family hadn’t been as amenable, and Seraphina would forever wonder if things might’ve gone a different way if she hadn’t accompanied him, and stayed at the academy instead. She would’ve been safe behind tall walls, and he would’ve spent more than three hurried days in Tuscany, embraced by his grandmother, not chased away in disgrace. He wouldn’t have been attacked by Eisengrau and his dogs, because the timing wouldn’t have matched, and if he had, he would’ve had an apex relic with him. Seraphina didn’t know what the hereditary relic of the da Siena family did, but surely, an apex relic, regardless of the nature of its power, would at the very least keep its wearer alive.
“When you say hereditary relics,” he backtracked, “what does that mean exactly?”
“Relics that have been passed down through generations, have a documented family chain of custody, and are protected by inheritance law. It’s not upper-class specific, either. Poor families can own relics that have been passed down or transferred through will or dowry. How the relic originated is irrelevant. Maybe someone bought it centuries ago or was gifted it. In some cases, the relic comes from an ancestor. Those are thoroughly documented because it’s a great honor to be able to say that your family tree has a saint’s name hanging from one of its branches. Of course, there are plenty of bones that don’t have custodians, that got swept in the winds of changing history and ended up in the care of a church, monastery, or relic school.”
Rune was silent, ruminating on the wealth of information she’d just poured into his brain. Seraphina’s plan had been to distract him further, which she’d managed, because his hoodhad slipped off his head and he hadn’t noticed. She shifted and stretched, giving a satisfying sigh when her back popped. The ground was hard, and after sleeping on a proper mattress last night, she knew which she preferred.
She half rolled onto her back and poked his shoulder to get his attention.
“Try it.”
“Huh?”
“Rolling onto your back. The sun is out of the clouds. Let it see your face.”
“I don’t know...”
“Come on, you can do it. Just for a minute. And then we’ll go back to the White Horse and have lunch.”
“Half a minute,” he negotiated.
