Death After Death-Chapter 355 - Backstory

The common room wasn’t empty when Simon and Aranna slunk through it toward the stairs, but none of the snoring men would ever remember their passing. He’d handed out a few rounds of free drinks to celebrate the Whitecloak’s departure to make sure of that. The free men and women of the world might respect them, or even fear them, but they had little more love for the Witchhunters than they did for witches because of how heavy-handed they could be.

None of that mattered now. All that mattered was this time, at least they’d been foiled.

Simon smuggled her up to the third floor, where his rooms were laid out, and then, when they were inside, he locked the door. He didn’t think anyone was spying on him, but he opted not to light any lanterns, just to be sure.

“First, you have to understand—” she started to say, but Simon stopped her.

“I want answers more than you know. I have my own very personal reason to hate witches, but that can wait,” he told her as he gestured to a now slightly cold meal he’d prepared for her a little while ago. “Right now, we need to get you fed and bathed. Then when you’re clean, I’ll… well, I’ve got something to replace that mark of yours. So you can put that on and then get some sleep. Your story can wait for the morning.”

She didn’t even try to argue with Simon, though whether that was because of hunger or her reluctance to tell him the truth, he couldn’t say. While she ate, he fetched two pails of water and some clean clothes from her room. She had to make do with cold water this time, but that was what it was.

While she bathed, he snagged some spare bedding, and when she was decent, he helped her put on a small choker. It was nothing but a simple bronze disk on a long leather thong, but it had a good mark of lesser nullification carved on one side of it, and it would keep the vultures at bay for now. He still didn’t like the idea of long-term exposure like this. Depending on how finely the runes were carved, she might still lose half a year of her life every decade, but for at least another week or two, it made sense.

Once she had that on, and he’d explained it to her, he started to make a bed on the floor. Aranna helped him, but when she tried to get into it, he shook his head. “Nonsense. You've slept in a closet for over a week. You’re taking the big bed, at least for tonight.”

She tried to argue, but Simon wouldn’t hear of it, and in the end, all she could do was thank him before she was out like a light. Simon stayed up longer, not because he feared her or because the floor was uncomfortable; he’d spent decades sleeping on rocky ground at this point. It was because deep down he worried that the Unspoken would be back.

Eventually, he fell asleep, and in the morning, he woke up to the smells of breakfast, not burning buildings, so he decided they were good. Aranna made noises about going down to help, but Simon shut that right down. “In a month, if we’ve heard nothing, we can think about it,” he said, “but even then we’ll have to make you some kind of disguise. I don’t think you’ll be safe here for a long time.”

“Then maybe I should just go,” she protested.

“If I thought you’d be safer out there than in here with me, I’d send you off right now with a fresh horse and a sack of silver,” Simon explained, “But here I can… Let’s say I’m very resourceful.”

“I’m beginning to see that,” she agreed glumly.

Simon locked his door behind him when he left. He rarely did that, but right now it paid to be safe rather than sorry, and though he didn’t have any regulars likely to be spies, the thought wouldn’t leave him. Eventually, sometime after lunch, he wondered if the tricky bastards might have left some kind of spy device behind. He thought it might just be his paranoia getting to him, but he still had Leon sweep and clean every room in the place and keep an eye out for anything unusual, whatever that meant.

They wouldn’t think of it as a magical scrying device, though, would they? He thought, annoyed by the hypocrisy of the organization. They didn’t use magic, only they did, denibly.

He spent the afternoon on autopilot, tending bar and taking care of patrons while he ignored Bessa’s worried looks and contemplated whether or not the best way to take down the white cloaks was just to tell them they were all using magic, just in ways that didn’t screw up their sight.

The evening, when he left the common room in Bessa’s capable hands, he went back upstairs with an extra bowl of stew, and after she wolfed it down, the story started to come out, but at least until she finished the bread he’d brought up with him, it came out in pieces smaller than the mouthfuls she was taking.

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“I don’t come from Abresse,” she explained, “But then you already knew that.”

Simon nodded slowly as her tale came together. She was from a small country across the Strait. She wasn’t exactly sure which one, either Enoral or Bhenland. They were next to each other and their people, and even their languages were similar, so it was hard to say. What she could say was that she’d been sold into slavery with the rest of her family in the markets of Abresse, but they’d been parceled out to different owners before she was old enough to remember more than her mother's eyes.

Once upon a time, that would have broken Simon’s heart. Now it merely saddened him, which was proof that he’d become too jaded if anything. He wanted his heart to break in moments like this, but he’d lived too long for that. Now he merely thought about how to solve the problem, and how they might use divination to track down her parents if they still lived.

If my sight worked, I’d know already, he told himself as he focused on his tavern maid’s words, not mystical solutions.

The sad story didn’t end there. Those opening chapters were just the beginning. Aranna was given a hard life that grew only harder as she grew into a beautiful woman. She tried to run away more than once, but she was always dragged back.

Another reason not to let divination become more common, Simon noted.

It was only when she found the witch Esmella that that particular horrible chapter in her life ended and a new one started. “You have to understand,” she explained. “She was an ugly old crone, and she made me act as bait for the men that… Well, the men she sacrificed to power her spells. That was the worst part. Not the luring them, that felt bad, but she made me watch the way she drained them, and told me… Well, if I brought her enough men, she promised to free me and help me find my family, but if I failed… Then I’d replace them.”

“You must think I’m awful, don’t you?” she asked. “You must wish you’d turned me over to the witch hunters now.”

The only response Simon could muster to that horrid tale was to hug the barmaid, which completely took her off guard. “You’ve done terrible things,” he agreed after she relaxed in his arms. That wasn’t to rub salt in her wounds, though. He just needed to start off with what she expected to hear. “But you took no pleasure in it, and you only did what you had to do to survive. I can’t change any of that, but I… No, we can focus on making sure you have a better future.”

She started to cry then. First, she merely wept, but after a few seconds, the sobs racked her body. Simon gave it a few minutes to let those bottled-up emotions out. Then he got her a handkerchief so she could clean up. Only then did he start in on questions in earnest.

It wasn’t quite an interrogation, but it was close. He bombarded her with questions, follow-ups, and clarifications, making her repeat her answers several times. He felt sure that she must have thought she was lying to him, but it wasn’t that at all; he was just trying to see the big picture through the ideas of someone who didn’t know what was important.

First, he asked about the way she managed to escape without being cursed or killed in the process, but that was the topic he was least interested in. She slipped away the night that the whitecloaks attacked her former mistress. She didn’t see anything that happened after that.

“I lived in fear for weeks that she’d escaped justice and would rip out my soul like she did with the men she entertained,” Aranna confessed. “I still dream about it sometimes.”

Since Simon had heard more about the event from the white cloaks in his common room, he switched the topics to what really mattered to him. How did she cast her spells? What were her rituals like? Do you bear a witch’s mark?

As it turned out, she didn’t. She even offered to let him search her body when he was skeptical, but he knew that those could be internal as well as on the skin, so he demurred for now at least, preferring to focus on the dark and loathsome rituals that the witch conducted.

She performed her evils in the outskirts of Abresse, where Esmella worked under the guise of a madam. She had a few other women as guests who might have been a part of her coven, Aranna wasn’t sure. What she was sure of was that most of the women who worked for her were actual prostitutes, and only a few girls like her lured sacrificial victims. It was an ugly story.

“She said we had dark souls,” Aranna said at one point, “But she never explained it. Do you know what that means? Am I born to be an evil person?”

“You aren’t,” Simon assured her as he took a moment to process some of the details from the ritual sacrifice of the witch’s victims. It was nothing at all like the witches of Charia. They sipped at the soul for months or years, but Esmella? She devoured the lives of men whole in minutes in a ritual that was as gratuitous as it was perverse.

He shook his head to clear it as his mind lingered on some of the darker details his barmaid had shared. “You weren’t born to evil,” he assured her. “Everything I’ve seen in you tells me you’re a good woman, but the color of your soul.. Well, that’s mostly the quality of your life, and it sounds like you had a pretty awful childhood.”

The two of them talked late into the night, and on many of the nights that followed. While those discussions started as one-way interrogations, they eventually became two-way discussions. After he had her draw all of the magic symbols she could remember, she started to press him on certain topics as well. How did he know magic? Was he a warlock? Did he consort with warlocks? Simon told her the truth, but not all of it. He trusted her that much; for better or worse, their fates were bound together on this run.

No one could handle the truth of his existence anymore. He barely could at this point. He already had too many lives he remembered only by reading about them in his own hand, so he’d be hard pressed to expect anyone else to keep everything straight. For now, it was enough that he knew a fair bit of magic, and that he wanted to help her, and everyone else if he could.