Chương 462: Chapter 457 - Demanding personas

"An invitation, you say?" Scarlett searched Raimond's face.

"And why, precisely, do you think that I am the person to ask?"

"Did I ever say I thought that?"

"You are asking me."

"It seemed a pleasant conversation starter."

"It is not."

"No? Then I suppose we have little choice but to pretend I never mentioned it, lest we invite some dreadful awkwardness to sour this otherwise cherished acquaintance." Raimond looked forward, hands clasped behind his back. Scarlett was left watching as he continued down the hall at a leisurely pace, as if the discussion really hadn't touched on anything of consequence. She wanted to sigh. Her [Garments of Form] activated, teleporting her next to Raimond.

The priest's eyebrow rose briefly, but he merely smiled and kept his gaze fixed ahead.

"I hope you'll pardon the indiscretion, but I couldn't help overhearing you mention something about slaying a certain dragon to Miss Livvi," he said.

"That must have been quite the adventure. Quite the haul, too."

"It was," Scarlett replied.

"Should I have expected any less of our illustrious baroness?"

"No."

"Modest as ever."

"You were the one to lavish praise." Scarlett led the man around a corner, her tone remaining cool.

"Are you feigning ignorance today out of your usual habit of dissembling, or is there some proper reason for it?"

"Hmm?" Raimond blinked.

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean." Scarlett eyed him from the side.

"Is it related to the Augur's revelation? Did you perhaps promise Deacon Solnate that you would not share its contents or speak with me about it?" His expression turned innocent, though the smile at his lips sharpened. Scarlett faced forward again.

"Remind me never to expect you to honour the spirit of a promise that you make."

"I would rather not."

"Hmph." Her brow tightened. While the situation with the Augur could present an opportunity, it also raised the question of how much gods like Ittar knew about her plans. Had Mistress done something to inform them? If so, what exactly? Technically, Scarlett hadn't even confirmed with the woman that she would work with her, though she knew Mistress was operating on the assumption that she would.

"Oh?" Raimond murmured as they passed one of the windows overlooking the estate's inner courtyard. Scarlett stopped beside him, peering through the glass at what had caught his attention. Seated on the bench at the courtyard's centre was the phantom dragon, and circling around it—darting back and forth among the cluster of blooming flowers gathered around the bench in a two-metre radius—was the sprite, its blue, half-translucent wings shimmering like fragments of coloured glass.

"Baroness, that is…?"

"An experiment," Scarlett said.

"Into what?"

"We will have to see." The Loci had 'requested', and for now, Scarlett was just letting it proceed on its own. But the flowers hadn't been there the day before. She continued down the hall.

"I see," Raimond murmured behind her before catching up.

"On an unrelated note," he said, "what happened to that masked young lady?"

"Do you mean Nol'viz?"

"Yes."

"I released her."

"And why is that?"

"Would you have preferred it if I killed her?"

"Quite the opposite." Scarlett glanced at him.

"Her release was bartered for. I profited sufficiently to allow it." Raimond considered her.

"Are you not worried she will return to oppose you?"

"That is a possibility."

"But nothing more?"

"No." Scarlett waited to continue until they had passed a servant carrying a tray of folded linens. The woman dipped into a quick curtsy, and Scarlett offered a slight nod in return.

"Do you intend to attend the celebration for the Empyreal Barrier's completion?" she asked once they had entered a quieter stretch of hall.

"I do," Raimond answered.

"Several members of the Quorum will be attending, in fact."

"Does that include Deacon Davenport and Deacon Townsend?"

"It does." A brief silence passed between them.

"Have you made any progress in dealing with him?" Scarlett asked. Raimond showed a thin, humourless smile.

"Some. Depending on whom you ask."

"Good for you."

"You sound as if it barely concerns you, Baroness."

"It does not."

"How heartless."

"Hardly. I have concerns of my own, and I have already offered more than enough aid on that front. Besides, I sincerely doubt you are unfamiliar with setting sentiment aside in favour of preparing for what you believe may prove necessary."

"Perhaps. I'm not saying that you are wrong, but I do wonder what specifically you might mean by that." Scarlett stopped again, turning to look directly at him.

"You are here today as a friend, am I correct?" The man studied her for a moment, then nodded.

"Naturally."

"Then when you helped us in Beld Thylelion, was that as a friend?"

"As an ally. And a friend."

"That is incorrect," Scarlett said.

"I gave you no choice at the time. Whether you considered yourself a friend or an ally was irrelevant." Raimond's expression stayed calm, but a quiet gravity settled into its lines.

"Can you look me in the eye and claim you truly approach me only as a friend?" Scarlett motioned back the way they had come.

"That, unless I force your hand with the Tribute of Dominion and dangerous information, you would remain this accommodating? That you have made no preparations in case I prove too great a risk? No measures, were I to cross whatever line you have drawn?" Raimond said nothing for several seconds.

"What brings about this line of questioning, Baroness?" he eventually asked.

"You inquired about the gala," Scarlett replied.

"Do you expect an answer?"

"I would prefer one, yes."

"Then I expect an honest answer." Raimond seemed to consider her words for some time, then let out a soft breath.

"Very well." His gaze drifted briefly to a painting on the wall, depicting a field in full bloom.

"No. I cannot claim that there are no such measures." Scarlett watched as he stepped closer to the painting, raising a hand to it and studying the brushwork.

"I do genuinely try to approach you and your group as a friend," he continued.

"I would like that much to be true, at least, regardless of circumstance or affiliation. I think it's already been demonstrated several times over that we can accomplish much together. But I am also a deacon of Ittar, a member of the Quorum, and a man with far too many people expecting him to notice when the world begins creaking at the seams, as it appears wont to do lately. It would be irresponsible of me not to prepare for unpleasant possibilities." Scarlett crossed her arms.

"I am an unpleasant possibility?"

"Yes." The answer came without flourish this time. Without even an attempt at a smile. Raimond looked back at her.

"I hope you'll forgive the phrasing, but Baroness, you are the very definition of a volatile unknown. And while it is unfortunate, you have also demonstrated a troubling willingness to work with dangerous and unpredictable forces." He lowered his hand from the painting.

"It's also true that you forced my hand in Beld Thylelion. I do not personally hold that against you. I actually happen to believe you have sound reasons for acting as you do, even if you never share them. I suspect even you would be surprised to learn how much faith I have in that aspect of you. It also should not be understated how significant a part you played in ensuring that several other unpleasant possibilities have not yet come to pass. But that does only serve to rather complicate matters."

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"I imagine it does." The man's eyes lingered on her, and a light chuckle left him.

"You're aware that you are an exceedingly inconvenient person to be fond of, are you not?"

"It has been implied by certain individuals," Scarlett said.

"I'm sure."

"With that said, what do you believe I want in exchange for telling you about this gala you are so interested in?"

"Is that a sincere question?"

"Yes." A thoughtful crease formed between Raimond's brows. He clasped his hands behind his back again, the bright fall of his robes shifting as he turned to face her fully. For a moment, the levity drained from him completely. In its absence, Scarlett was reminded that the man could, when he actually chose to, carry himself with all the weight and dignity his position suggested.

"Judging by what you have touched on in this conversation so far," he said, "I can imagine two possible demands." Scarlett raised both eyebrows.

"And they are?"

"The first would be my allegiance. Full candour, full cooperation, and a heartfelt promise to aid you in your efforts without reservation. Am I correct in thinking that would satisfy you?" She regarded him for a few seconds, then inclined her head.

"I would be willing to accept that, assuming there were some means of ensuring your word."

"Regrettably, that is not a thing I can ever truly offer." Raimond met her eyes.

"My loyalty will always belong to Ittar first and foremost, and to the tenets of his teachings and guidance. That was true in Beld Thylelion, and it remains true now. I do not believe you would set yourself against those teachings unless you wholly surrendered whatever principles still guide you, but I cannot promise anything of that sort."

"Is that so?" Scarlett wasn't too surprised by the answer, though the conviction in his voice caught her slightly off guard. There were times when she had wondered whether Raimond really was devoted enough to his god to even be a priest, but clearly he was.

"The second demand, I assume, would be reassurance," Raimond said.

"You want me to reveal what measures we have prepared for you."

"I do." Raimond's gaze seemed to scrutinise her entire appearance, then a trace of his usual ease returned in the curve of his smile.

"Could you not show me a sliver of mercy? I'm not lying when I say Ava will be incredibly wroth with me for revealing as much as I already have."

"That sounds like a difficulty for you to resolve. I do not consider it unreasonable to expect my allies not to keep plans for subduing me, however understandable such plans may be." The smile turned slightly awkward, but then it faded as his solemnity returned.

"Meet Ava with me. We can discuss the matter properly. In all honesty, I am not as familiar with the particulars as she is."

"When will she be available?"

"She is outside Elystead at present, so it will have to be on the day of the celebration." Scarlett considered that briefly, then nodded.

"Very well. That should not pose an issue. The gala is not to be held until after the celebration anyway." Interest appeared in Raimond's eyes.

"When, specifically, is the gala to be held, if I might ask?"

"You may find out after we have had our discussion with Deacon Solnate." Scarlett turned and started down the hall again, but stopped after only a couple of steps. She looked back at Raimond.

"Ah. I forgot to mention. You were admirably subtle about your desire for me to seek out the Augur earlier, but I have no particular patience for continued theatrics. Can you simply confirm whether she is in Grace's Solarium?" Raimond scratched his chin, and every trace of gravity that he'd managed to cultivate vanished from his demeanour.

"Oh, I wouldn't know. Grace's Solarium? Never heard of it." Scarlett's gaze dropped to his other hand, with which he was straightening a fold at the side of his robes and giving her a very deliberate thumbs-up. She held back an exasperated chuckle, then turned to continue down the hall.

"Alright, try this one. A velvet thimble or a finger-bone bodkin?"

"You're not even trying anymore, Rosa. Bodkin, obviously."

"What? Why?"

"What would you even use the thimble for? Keep your thumb warm? At least you can use the bodkin as a toothpick." Rosa pulled a thoroughly disgusted face at Kat.

"I'd clean it first, obviously," the woman said. Rosa shook her head, turning forward again, and slipped aside just in time to avoid a broad-shouldered man with a nose that looked like it had lost an argument with a door not a moment earlier. He came barrelling through the muck-slick alley, boots splashing through a gutter's worth of grime, but found himself in for a rude awakening as his shoulder slammed into Kat's.

Rather than the flaxen-haired Shielder being knocked to the side, there came a dull, ugly clang as he was bounced into the damp stone wall of the building to his left, with an unimpressed Kat glaring at him. The man staggered for a moment, staring at her with a reddening face, but then his eyes flicked back down the alleyway behind him with a furtive twitch.

Rosa would wager a song and a half that he performed what probably amounted to a heroic feat of arithmetic in his mind and quickly decided that this woman with the burn scar cutting across one side of her cheek wasn't worth the trouble. So he cursed under his breath and kept stumbling down the alley, disappearing around the corner. Rosa followed him with her gaze, then tilted her head curiously at the pair of burly men who came pounding down the alley next.

They completely ignored the two of them as they charged towards where the first man had disappeared. She glanced at Kat, who was now frowning at her.

"Do we really need to be skulking down these back alleys?" the woman asked."'Course we do. Where else does one skulk? Front promenades? I think not." Rosa smiled, pointing at Kat's right sleeve.

"By the by, have you got an iron brace under that, or was that man secretly one of those metal construct thingies that's all the rage in abandoned ruins these days?" Kat's eyes stayed on her, a clear weight of judgement settling into them, but finally, the Shielder saw what was undoubtedly reason and accepted Rosa's logic with a sigh. She moved up beside Rosa as they continued down the alley.

"I cast Cinderplate as soon as I saw him coming at us. Unlike some people, I'm actually paying attention to where we are." Rosa huffed, waving a hand.

"Now, now. Let's keep the snide remarks aimed away from Scarlett. She can't help it if she doesn't know our every cobble and footstep. Even she, in all her terrible omniscience, can only stalk so many people at once."

"I wasn't talking about Scarlett."

"No? Hmm. Well, I can't for the life of me imagine who else you could mean. I'm hopeless with riddles."

"Sure you are."

"Completely unrelated, do you know why the rope refused to work at the gallows?"

"Rosa, sometimes I genuinely wonder how you managed to hang around Scarlett long enough for her to actually start liking you. How did you manage not to get burned to ashes?"

"Oh, I got burned plenty."

"Clearly not enough."

"Now that's just mean."

"I'm saying it for your own good."

"Awww. Now it's wholesome. Still, I can't help but notice that you've swerved my very serious question." There was a moment of silence beside Rosa before Kat's voice came.

"Because it was already tied up."

"Oh, clever one, that."

"I've heard it before."

"That can't be. I made this one up just now. I was thinking the answer was it being tired of hanging around." Rosa grinned as she stepped out of the alley into a crooked side street, almost as narrow and not a whit cleaner. Warped shutters sagged over dingy windows, crooked doors leaned in their frames, and the walls bowed close enough overhead to make the whole street feel as if it were conspiring to collapse.

There was also barely a soul in sight, unless you counted the litter of scruffy kittens squabbling in an overturned rain barrel at the mouth of another alley farther down. All in all, it looked exactly like the sort of street where footpads would creep from doorways in a cheap cautionary tale, only to be set upon by larger footpads with fancier knives.

Not the kind of place where you would find two moderately charming ladies—Rosa had been practising modesty after the 'incident'—strolling down on a grey afternoon with scarcely a witness. But here they were, courtesy of one of Scarlett's 'jobs'. Truly, Rosa's employer was a monument to heartlessness and unreasonable expectations.

Mind her, Scarlett hadn't asked them to come to this district in particular—if she had, she'd likely have insisted that either Fynn or Shin accompany them—but if anything, that simply showed how the once-formidable noblewoman who had outwitted Viles had begun to succumb to the ravages of age, stress, and administrative excess.

She had asked Rosa to meet up with some Mirage-aligned contacts in Elystead to arrange the discreet delivery of certain materials, but she really ought to have predicted that Rosa would ply those contacts for a more direct route so she could go straight to the source herself. Was that so unreasonable? Probably, yep.

But Scarlett had shared with Rosa that there were several very rare and highly questionable reagents included in this delivery that she needed prepared before she was willing to involve herself further with the likes of Malachi and Mistress, and Rosa knew the woman only had so much time to gather them all. The least Rosa could do was ease some of her burden and reduce the risk of something going wrong along the chain of supply. Besides, she was no stranger to the less savoury corners of cities like Elystead.

She'd spent more than a few fortnights drifting through streets exactly like this in her pup years. They really weren't so bad, all things considered. Especially not if you spent half your time more scared of your own shadow than the people around you. She and Kat continued down the street. The cluster of kittens stirred as they passed, a faint chorus of hungry mewls rising from the barrel, and Rosa watched as Kat stopped to take them in, eyeing the tiny creatures with a conflicted expression.

Rosa reached into the folds of her travelling cloak, magically drawing out a couple of beef rolls wrapped in waxed paper, and handed one to the Shielder. Kat looked at her, then the roll, before kneeling down and feeding the kittens.

"Ever been accused of having too much of a bleeding heart?" Rosa asked, tearing a piece from her own roll with her fingers and casually popping it into her mouth. Kat glanced up at her, then back down at the cats.

"I don't want to hear that from you."

"Why not? I don't even have a heart that can bleed anymore. I'm a pretty terrible person, you know."

"I know."

"You know?"

"I know that you think so. Scarlett's told me."

"…You talk about me behind my back?"

"She likes to complain about you sometimes." Kat divided the roll into one larger portion and a smaller one as the mother of the litter—a scrawny tabby with ragged fur and one torn ear—crept out of the alley, giving a low meow. Kat handed the smaller piece to the mother, left the rest to the kittens, then brushed her hands off on her trousers and stood. Her eyes settled on Rosa.

"She thinks you're too kind for your own good." Rosa watched the woman, then offered a crooked smile.

"Yeah, well, she's biased." She turned, running a hand through her hair as she swept it over her shoulder.

"Who can fault her? Anyone'd be beguiled by my wily charms. But since she's so taken with me, I suppose I can overlook the odd lapse in judgement. A beloved bard has little choice but to forgive the occasional inhumane silence curse from her patron."

"Don't think she needs your forgiveness," Kat said. Rosa glanced back and touched a finger to the side of her nose.

"That is where you don't know her nearly as well as moi." Kat raised both eyebrows.

"Moi?"

"It's French."

"It's what?"

"Whoops. Sorry. Misspoke. I meant Voneian." Kat studied her for several seconds.

"Is it really?"

"Of course it is." Rosa faced forward again.

"Learned it from the horse's mouth. A Voneian horse, naturally. Very refined creature."

"You never know what you can trust when it comes to you."

"A good rule of thumb is 'everything.'""Mm-hmm."

"Speaking of rules—and thumbs—how'd your trip to the Guild go this morning?" Rosa and Kat had both been instructed by Scarlett to meet with her shady contacts today, but that had only been at noon.

Before that, they'd been left to their own devices, and from the sound of it, the daring trio of Shielders sometimes known as the Intrepid Three—Rosa was still workshopping something with better alliteration for her epic—had taken the opportunity to pay a visit and holler some quick hellos to their friends at the local Guild branch in Elystead.

Rosa had heard that Allyssa and Shin hadn't done much more than exchange a few words, but Kat had supposedly been pulled into some private room and given a more thorough grilling.

"That doesn't have anything to do with either rules or thumbs," the woman in question said.

"But—""Ah, sorry, hate to shear your thread, but I think this is the place." Rosa stopped to consider a narrow, half-sunken doorway that seemed less built into the building than wedged there by accident. The surrounding stone had blackened with age and damp, and even its boards were ambitious enough to be warped, rain-swollen, and peeling in strips all at once, with old scratches gouged around the keyhole like something had consistently tried very hard to get either in or out.

"Yes. This has the look of a door that knows exactly where the bodies are buried," Rosa muttered to herself.

"Please don't joke about that," Kat said. Rosa glanced at the bent signboard above the door, where the flaking remains of old paint might once have read something along the lines of Grint's Remedies. Or Goat's Regrets. She put the odds at about fifty-fifty. There was definitely a G in the blend, and something that had once aspired to be an R. Kat stopped next to her, eyeing the sign and the door for a moment before looking at Rosa with a flat sort of concern.

"…You sure you want to go in there?" Rosa smiled brightly.

"Yep. Doesn't it look cosy?"

"No."

"You've got to squint real hard first. That's where you're going wrong." She took one step towards the warped door, but then stopped again with her hand a finger's breadth from the handle.

"Right. I nearly forgot."

"What is it this time?" Kat asked.

"Well, we've got company. Since we're about done with the skulking, it'd be rude to leave her still doing it in the gutters, wouldn't it?" Rosa's eyes flicked to a pocket of shadow beneath a jutting wooden awning.

"What do you say? Coming in with us properly, or are you set on haunting the pavement?" A beat passed, then the shadow gathered itself as a masked figure took form. Kat's hand twitched towards Rosa, but stopped short when she recognised who it was. Nol'viz's curious little trio of eyes blinked as they all settled on Rosa together, and her head tilted to the side.

"You saw us."

"That I did," Rosa said, nodding gravely.

"Now, how about it? Fancy a proper poke around, or should we keep pretending you're not part of the outing?"