Page 128 of A Weave of Lies
From far away, her mind lost in another world she never knew she longed for, Semras returned to reality. “This will not fix our problem,” she muttered.
“Do not let guilt hold your tongue. I am prepared to die. All my affairs are in order, and—”
The witch snapped. “Estevan, just be silent! I will not entertain your ideas of martyrdom. Even if I wanted you dead, it wouldn’t stop a war from happening.”
Face paling, the inquisitor turned toward her. “What do you—”
“You don’t have to take the blame for a witch. My kin didn’t poison Torqedan. Cael Callum did.”
Estevan blinked. “…Cael? No, that is not possible, he—”
“He had the opportunity to do it. You know it as well as I do.”
“You think he visited Master Torqedan to kill him and frame the Yore witch who made his medicine …” Mulling it over, the inquisitor slowly frowned. “But why would he do such a thing? He has no motive, and he is—”
“Half aSeelie. You know what they are like; you dealt with them in the past.”
He blanched. “You are truly convinced he is a fey, then …”
“You told me yourself how he kept harping on about you having ‘no place in the Inquisition,’” she replied. “And he told me witches barely belonged in the current century. Does that not sound like a Seelie’s speech to you? His worldview was clearly clashing with yours and Torqedan’s. For a Seelie, that’s motive enough to kill.”
He stayed silent.
She pressed on. “One or two fey traits can be excused as simple oddities, Estevan, but you have to admit, your brother is accumulating far too many. He is a son of the Night, and you can’t keep denying it.”
Wincing, Estevan closed his eyes. “I … I know,” he replied quietly. “Keep speaking.”
“His being behind it all is the only thing that makes sense. He asked for my cooperation because he wanted to know if you had found out about his involvement in your mentor’s death.”
The inquisitor stayed silent. His eyes looked right through her as he pondered her revelation.
Semras breathed deeply. Now came the moment she had dreaded ever since knocking on the door. “And … Callum knows something about your plan. When we spoke, he told me to hide messages for him in my laundry and that a spy would retrieve them for him. And I … when I organized my thoughts, I wrote everything down on pieces of paper. Some … some fell among my dirty clothes. I think. I tried to retrieve them in time, but I was too late.”
Estevan drew closer. “This is why you came here so agitated.”
“Yes.”
“And it never crossed your mind to come to me right away so I could handle it?” he asked, scowling.
Semras waved her maimed hands at him, and his rising temper mellowed at once.
“I searched the papers I still had with me,” she said. “I didn’t find the one saying you planned to frame a witch.”
The inquisitor blanched. “… Void take me. That means you are in danger, Semras. If what you said is true, then Cael must have been looking for a witch to frame, and I—” Estevan gripped his head. “I brought you to him. He knows of you because ofme. And now he knows what you can be used for.”
It was her turn to lose all colour. Dread unfurled its icy hands around her spine. “H-How could he? I have nothing to do with—”
“Because there is nothing at the crime scene linking the remedy to whoever made it. There were no dosage instructions left by the witch of Yore, no correspondence between her and the victim—nothing. So he will need to fabricate that proof and attribute it to a witch: you.”
“How do we stop him? We can … we can stop him, right?”
Limbs as numb and cold as her fingers, Semras watched him mull it over.
Then he spoke slowly. “Perhaps, if we can ruin Cael’s scheme. We need to find the cracks in his plan and exploit them to refute his fabricated truth beyond the shadow of a doubt. If we can get irrefutable proof that the medicine was not meant to be lethal, then we could rule out the tribunal’s death as an accidental overdose, and that will buy us time to build a case against my—” His throat bobbed. “… my brother. My own damnbrother.”
Semras creased her brow. “Callum must have forced Torqedan into ingesting a deadly amount of the salve. You said you found none of it remaining when you searched his house. If it’s all gone, we can’t make a comparative analysis with what the victim ate …”
“I doubt he used physical force. Master Torqedan’s body showed no traces of a struggle, so I suspect Cael either convinced our master to swallow the medicine as a single dose or tamperedwith it and let him consume just enough to fatally poison him.” Passing his hand over his face, Estevan grimaced. “My brother is many things, but not an opportunist. He is a meticulous planner, so proving his guilt will be difficult. If there were leftovers of the ointment, he must have destroyed them by now. That means we need proof of its original recipe instead. The dosage instructions would have helped too, but I never found any letter containing them. Maybe it never existed. That means we need …” He glanced at her.
