Chapter 50: Her Eyes

The Justiciar had witnessed a great many strange things over the years, but when Kai strolled into his study covered in onion soup, with a small elderly woman cloaked in black following behind him, the old man went completely still behind his desk.

Celestine removed her veil and stared at him, and Hale slowly rose to his feet, leaning on his cane for support.

"High Priestess," Hale rasped. "I stood at the back of your funeral."

"I was aware," Celestine said. "I watched it from a window across the square. You were the only one of the clerks who did not weep."

"I was trying very hard to hold it in," Hale said.

"I know that as well," Celestine said, and Kai noticed that she almost smiled.

Hale stared at her for a long moment, and then he lowered himself back into his chair as if his legs had given out on him, and he turned to Kai with a look that was half horror and half defeat.

"Mr. Mercer," Hale said. "You seem to bring back something new every time you leave this house."

"It isn’t always something new," Kai said. "Sometimes I just come back with soup."

[It is soup this time as well. You smell of onions]

Mira showed Celestine up to the spare room, while Garrick went to find a mop to clean up the trail of broth Kai had left across Hale’s rugs, and for a little while, the house was very quiet. Kai sat in the courtyard beside the well where he had missed forty-one times, trying to think about anything except what Celestine had told him in the granary.

His mind kept drifting back to it no matter what he tried to focus on. The Mother was dying, and she had gathered up the last remnants of her light and dropped it down upon the world, and that light had fallen on him.

"Syraphim," Kai whispered. "If you’re her last light, what happens to her if I don’t succeed?"

She was quiet for a long while before she answered him, and her voice was lower than Kai had ever heard it.

[I do not know. But I believe that if I am gone, there will be nothing left of her at all]

Kai didn’t respond, because he was afraid his voice would give out on him.

Mira came out to find him there a little while later. She didn’t ask what was wrong, because she already seemed to know, and she just sat down next to him on the edge of the well and rested her head on his shoulder. The two of them sat there in silence until the sun had sunk a little lower and Garrick came out to tell them it was time to go.

They all made their way back to the graveyard that night, and Celestine walked between Kai and Sunny with her bony arm draped over the Holy Champion’s. She moved at a slow pace, stopping to catch her breath at every block, and no one rushed her, not even Garrick, who kept glancing over his shoulder at the rooftops as if he expected Liora’s men to be waiting on one of them.

The gray man was waiting at the gate when they arrived, and the moment he saw Celestine’s face, he dropped the bowl of ash he was holding, and it shattered on the path.

"Keeper!" the gray man called out up the hill, and his raspy voice was trembling. "Keeper, come quickly!"

The old woman made her way down the path so slowly that Kai had never seen anyone move that slow in his life. She stopped a few feet away from Celestine and stared at her with her pale, cloudy eyes.

"You are the woman from the empty urn," the Keeper said.

"Yes, I am," Celestine said. "And I am sorry. Your people have written my name in the ash for forty years, and I allowed it, because I was too ashamed to tell anyone I was still alive."

The Keeper was silent for a long while, and the evening wind rustled through the pale ash trees around them.

"Why have you come now?" the Keeper asked.

"This man broke through my floor," Celestine said, pointing at Kai. "And I am too old to keep living under it."

The Keeper’s pale eyes drifted over to Kai, and she smiled slightly.

"You have returned the truth to the dead," the Keeper said. "Just as I asked you to."

"Well, mostly by accident," Kai said.

"The dead do not care how it arrives," the Keeper said.

She bent down slowly and knelt beside one of the gravestones, scooping a handful of ash out of the bowl in front of it. Then she patted the ash flat on the path in front of Kai and began to write his name in it with one wrinkled finger, letter by letter, until the words Kai Mercer lay in the gray dust at his feet.

Kai held his breath, waiting for the letters to fade the way they had in the book, but they stayed right where they were in the ash, and this time, they weren’t going anywhere.

"The wind will erase it by morning," the Keeper said. "But I will write it again tomorrow night. The Ashen Twins will vote for you at the Conclave, God of Failure, and the dead will remember that you were here, even if the book does not."

Then, so quietly that Kai could barely hear them, the Ashen Twins spoke again through Divine Echo, and both of their voices said the same word in perfect unison, and the word was remembered.

[Faith gained. The Keeper: +12%. Status: Remembering.]

Princess Seris was scribbling notes in her notebook at a furious pace.

"Three and a half," Princess Seris said, out of breath. "You have three and a half votes."

"I need four," Kai said.

"You need half," Princess Seris said. "One half of one vote."

"That doesn’t make any sense," Garrick said. "You can’t vote half."

"Then he needs one more vote," Princess Seris said, without looking up from her notes. "And I hope very much that he gets it."

Kai didn’t fall asleep that night either, and he sat on the edge of his bed watching the shadows and listening to the house settle until midnight came. When it did, warm light spilled out of his chest, and Syraphim appeared sitting beside him, perfectly still, with her hands folded in her lap and her halo rings turning slowly above her head.

"I would like to meet her," Syraphim said softly. "The woman who heard the Mother’s voice. I have nine minutes and fifty seconds, and I would like to spend them with her."

Kai didn’t question her, and he walked her down the dark hallway to the guest room and knocked lightly on the door.

Celestine was awake when Kai opened it, sitting up in bed with a candle burning on the table beside her, as if she had known they would be coming. When Syraphim stepped into the room in her white dress, with her long platinum hair falling down her back, the old woman covered her mouth with both hands and started to cry.

"Oh," Celestine whispered. "You have her eyes."

Syraphim stopped at the foot of the bed, and her white eyes with their golden rings went wide.

"I do?" Syraphim asked.

"The same rings," Celestine said, in a shaky voice. "I saw them once, in a dream she gave me when I was young, before everything happened. Gold spinning inside of white, like the sun shining through the clouds."

Syraphim sat down on the edge of the bed very carefully, as if she was afraid of hurting the old woman, while Kai stood in the doorway trying not to make a single sound.

"What was she like?" Syraphim asked. "I do not remember anything before him. I only remember waking up and falling."

Celestine reached out with one trembling, spotted hand and touched Syraphim’s face, and Syraphim let her.

"She was very kind," Celestine said. "Much kinder than any of us who served her. She laughed at the most ridiculous things, and she loved the people who told her when she was wrong." She looked over at Kai standing in the doorway, and a sad smile crossed her face. "I think she would have loved him too."

"She did," Syraphim said softly. "She sent me to him."

Kai didn’t remember much about the rest of those ten minutes, only the candlelight and the old woman telling Syraphim stories about her mother, and the way Syraphim leaned closer to hear every single word. When her time was up, Syraphim faded back into Kai like snow falling upward into the sky, and Celestine lay back down against her pillow with her eyes closed and a smile on her face.

[Kai, I think I have a mother]

"Yeah," Kai whispered, and his voice gave out on him halfway through. "I think you do."

When Kai walked downstairs the next morning, he found Hale and Princess Seris already sitting at the dining table, and both of them had unhappy looks on their faces.

"The Harvest Lord’s people sent us a message at dawn," Hale said, sliding a piece of paper across the table to Kai. "Their temple lies in the farmlands past the eastern gate, and they have barred its doors to anyone who tries to enter. Their crops have been dying for weeks, and the wheat has started turning gray in the ground."

"And?" Kai asked, because he could tell there was an and.

"The Radiant Church has offered them a hundred carts of grain," Princess Seris said grimly. "If they vote against you at the Conclave."

[346 days. 5 days until the Conclave]

Kai looked down at the paper, and then out the window, where the sun was rising over the rooftops towards the farmlands in the east.

"I suppose we’re going to a farm," Kai said.