Colette looked at Aris for a long moment after Elysse pulled the robe back up.

  Not at the sigil. At him. With the expression of someone recalibrating something they thought they'd already placed correctly.

  "You're the one," she said.

  Aris looked at her.

  "The boy from the lower district," she said. "The one with the Eido that treats dungeon debuffs. The ones the guild healers can't touch." She paused. "I've heard about you. The Compact's medics mentioned you twice in expedition debriefs. There were Wanderers who came back with conditions they couldn't treat and ended up here and left without them."

  "That's me," Aris said.

  "They called it miraculous," Colette said.

  "They were being generous," Aris said. "It's just Void. It does what it does."

  Colette looked at Elysse. At the robe covering what was underneath it. Then back at Aris, and the recalibration in her expression had completed itself into something heavier.

  "And you can't treat this," she said.

  "Not fully," Aris said. "Void's Hand pushes the progression back. Holds it. But the sigil itself isn't going anywhere." He said it plainly, the way he said things that were true and uncomfortable. "Every time I apply it I can buy more time. I can't remove the source."

  Colette looked at Elysse.

  Elysse looked back at her with the grey eyes that still held nothing of what they should have held, patient and present and completely without the history that Colette was looking at her through.

  "It's my fault," Colette said.

  "Colette—" Elysse started, with the instinctive comfort of someone responding to distress in a person they didn't know, which had its own particular quality.

  "I should have been there," Colette said. "A captain goes with her party. That's the first thing, the most basic thing, the thing that doesn't change regardless of the circumstances." Her voice was even but only just. "If I had been there I could have—"

  "What," Edric said.

  He had come through from the kitchen at some point, quietly, the way he moved through the building, and was standing at the end of the bench row with his hands folded and his expression carrying the specific weight of a man who had already had a long conversation with the person he was looking at and was prepared to continue it.

  "What would you have done differently," Edric said. "With cracked ribs. On Floor 46. Against whatever took fifty-three capable people in a single night."

  Colette looked at him.

  "We spoke this morning," Edric said. "On this bench. Do you remember what we said."

  A silence.

  "Yes," Colette said.

  "Then," Edric said, "stop looking backward at a door that is closed and look at the one in front of you that is open."

  Colette pressed her lips together. Looked at the statue. Looked at Elysse.

  "Yes," she said again, quieter. "You're right."

  She straightened. The Aurel cape settled back into its correct position across her shoulders with the reflex of someone returning to themselves after a brief absence. She looked at Aris with the directness of someone who had put something down and picked up something else and was ready to use it.

  "What are you planning to do," she said. "About her condition. And what can I do to help."

  "We have a lead," Aris said. "On an item that might be able to identify who placed the sigil. If we can find the source we can find a way to remove it." He paused. "It's going to require going somewhere and spending money we don't have on something expensive."

  "How expensive,"

  "We don't know yet. Possibly very." He looked at her. "As her captain you'd have access to—"

  "I had access," Colette said. "The guild bank was frozen this morning with everything else. I have my personal funds and nothing from the Compact."

  "How much—"

  "Enough for a week of reasonable expenses," she said. "Not enough for very expensive."

  "Right," Aris said. "Well. About that. I was planning to go with Elysse to a—"

  "Has Aris come back yet?"

  The voice came from the entrance, carrying through the open door with the ease of someone who had never found a reason to lower their volume near a church and wasn't starting now. Footsteps on the threshold, the particular sound of boots that were good quality and knew it.

  "I'm here," Aris called.

  Kai came through the door with one hand in his grey coat pocket and the other pushing his black hair out of his face with the casual gesture of someone who made this adjustment regularly and had never considered addressing the underlying cause. He looked at Aris, looked at Elysse on the bench with the acknowledgment of someone who had heard about the patient and was confirming the details, and then his eye moved to the bench behind her.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  He went still.

  Not completely. Just the specific stillness of recognition, the half-second pause of someone whose eye has landed on something and is processing what it means.

  The red hair. The armor. The cape.

  "Aris," Kai said, in a tone that had not been in his voice a moment ago. "Why is there an Aurel in the church."

  "She's the captain of the patient," Aris said. "Elysse's guild captain."

  Kai looked at Elysse. Looked at Colette. The processing continued behind his one visible eye with the quality of someone who had arrived at a conclusion and was deciding what to do with it.

  "Right," he said. "We should go. Market opens early and if we wait the good stalls will be—"

  "I'm coming with you," Colette said.

  Kai looked at her.

  "No," he said.

  "She is my guild member," Colette said, standing. "Whatever you're going to do on her behalf, I have both the right and the responsibility to—"

  "With respect," Kai said, in a tone that was doing the absolute minimum required to justify the phrase, "this doesn't concern you."

  "She is a member of the Aurelian Compact," Colette said. "Her condition concerns me directly and personally and I intend—"

  "The Aurelian Compact," Kai said, "doesn't exist anymore."

  The nave went quiet.

  Colette looked at him.

  "From what I understand," Kai continued, with the specific flatness of someone delivering information they have decided the other person needs to hear, "as of this morning you are a former captain of a disbanded guild with no official standing, no guild bank access, and no mandate to speak for anyone."

  "Kai," Aris said.

  "I'm stating facts," Kai said.

  "You are being—"

  "I'm being accurate," Kai said. "Which is more than nobility usually manages." He looked at Colette with the direct gaze of someone who had decided that the usual social management of this kind of conversation was not something he was going to participate in. "I know what noble houses do. I know how the Aurel family has managed its interests in this city for the last thirty years. The market monopolies, the guild licensing fees that somehow always benefit House Aurel's affiliated traders, the council seats that have been in the same four families since before anyone in this room was born." He paused. "So when a member of that family shows up in a lower district church the morning after losing everything and suddenly wants to help, I find myself wondering what the actual reason is."

  "The actual reason," Colette said, and her voice had acquired a quality it hadn't had in the nave before, something with an edge to it that had been sharpened by three years of guild captaincy and council chambers and rooms where she was regularly underestimated, "is that she is my guild member and she is injured and she doesn't remember who she is and I will not sit in this building while people I don't know make decisions about her condition without me."

  "People you don't know," Kai said. "People who found her. Carried her out of the dungeon. Brought her here. Treated her." He looked at Aris briefly. "People who have been doing the work while the Aurel family was busy losing fifty-three Wanderers in a single night."

  Colette went very still.

  "You," she said, quietly, "do not get to use them."

  "I'm using the facts—"

  "You are using the deaths of my people," Colette said, and her voice had dropped to the register that was more dangerous than the raised one, "as an argument in a conversation about whether I'm allowed to help someone who served under me. Those are not the same thing and you know it."

  "I know that noble houses don't do anything without a return on it," Kai said. "I know that generosity from an Aurel has terms attached that don't get mentioned until they're convenient. I know—"

  "You know nothing about me," Colette said.

  "I know the house name," Kai said. "In my experience that's enough."

  "Then your experience," Colette said, "is limited."

  "My experience," Kai said, "includes watching House Drent price every independent arms dealer in the lower district out of the Veilmarket through licensing agreements that the council, which your family sits on, approved without a single dissenting—"

  "I was seventeen when that vote happened," Colette said.

  "The name on your cape was in the room," Kai said.

  "Kai," Aris said.

  "Aris, she's—"

  "Kai."

  "She's going to slow us down and cause problems and the moment there's something in it for her family she'll—"

  "I said," Aris said, with the specific patience of someone who has been patient for a long time and is now done, "enough."

  Kai looked at him.

  Colette looked at him.

  Aris looked at both of them with the expression of a person who had been standing in the middle of this for five minutes and had come to a decision about it.

  "You," he said to Kai, "have made your position clear. Three times. We heard it." He looked at Colette. "And you've made yours. Also clear." He looked at both of them. "What neither of you is doing is helping Elysse, who is sitting on that bench listening to this, which is not what she needs right now."

  A silence.

  "ENOUGH."

  The word came from the direction of the kitchen and it filled the nave the way the nave had probably not been filled since it was built, arriving without warning in a volume that Edric's normal register gave absolutely no indication of being capable of. It moved through the space and found every corner of it and came back and the curtains may have moved.

  Everyone in the nave stopped.

  Edric was standing at the end of the bench row with the expression of a man who had been patient for the right amount of time and had now decided that time was over. He was not large. He was not physically imposing. He was a grey-haired priest in a slightly damp habit and he was looking at Kai and Colette with an authority that had nothing to do with any of those things.

  "You are in a church," Edric said.

  His voice had returned to its normal register. That was somehow worse.

  "This is the house of the Architect," he continued. "People come here because they are broken or frightened or lost or in pain and they need somewhere that holds them without conditions. That is what this building is for." He looked at Kai. "I don't care what you think about noble houses." He looked at Colette. "I don't care what you think about arms dealers from the lower district." He looked at both of them. "What I care about is that there is a young woman on that bench who came to us injured and cursed and without her memories and what she is currently receiving from the people who are supposed to be helping her is an argument about politics."

  The nave was very quiet.

  "In the name of the Architect," Edric said, "you will both stop."

  Kai looked at the floor.

  It was not a small thing. For a person who did not lower his eye for anyone it was not a small thing and everyone in the room understood that.

  "Fine," he said. Flat and honest, without grace but without resistance either.

  Colette looked at the statue above them. At the extended hand. She breathed once, slowly, and when she looked back at the room she had put the edge away.

  "I apologize," she said. To Edric. Then, after a moment, to Kai, which cost her more and she didn't hide that it cost her. "For my part in that."

  Kai said nothing for a moment.

  Then: "Same."

  It was the minimum possible and he knew it and she knew it and Aris knew it and it was going to have to be enough for now.

  Elysse, on her bench, looked at all four of them with the grey eyes that read everything.

  "Are we going," she said, "or not."