Chapter 15

Maren slumped down in the chair opposite Icarus with a groan. He lifted his head off his folded arms atop his desk and blinked at her. Everything hurt and he would love to vomit out the window if his legs could carry him to it. He settled instead for a deep breath and a stomach-turning gulp of water from the glass one of them had remembered to pour—Maren, most likely. Icarus was hardly so responsible. 

He sighed and met her eyes—the left more ugly and greenish than it had been in his last hazy memory of her face. He rolled his shoulders and winced at the bruising in his ribs, the back of his head, and effectively everywhere. Between them, they made up one whole and unharmed person. Together, they were each half-dead from drink and a thorough clerical ass-kicking. 

“Right,” he clapped his hands together and Maren winced. “How are we feeling on our first excommunicated morning?”

“Your first excommunicated morning,” Maren croaked. “I renounced.”

“Tomato, tomato.”

“That’s not- you just said tomato twice.”

He rolled his eyes but the door opened before he could retort and Edith poked her head in, “A good morrow to you, Fathers. Coffee’s on and I’m about to- Pale Sons and Daughters, what happened to you?!” She was in the office inspecting Maren’s face without waiting for an invitation, tutting her concern, “I’ll get the medical kit. Neither of you move. Was it a fight? Did Icarus rile those Austrians again?”

It wasn’t a real question, she was working through her own theories as she opened cabinets in the kitchenette. Icarus grumbled to himself, “It was one time and I regretted it immediately, the Black Dog never let me back in. Terribly inconvenient.”

Edith tended to Maren’s eye first with a smear of sweet-smelling ointment and a stinging antiseptic blotted on a cloth pad. She inspected and cleaned the cut at the back of Icarus’s head and he begrudgingly allowed it, too hungover to fight and confident he would lose to the elderly woman if he tried. She confirmed his ribs were merely bruised with an agonizing pres of her fingers and took a long look at his bleary eyes.

“You,” she swatted his arm and he cried out, “should not have been drinking with a head wound! And you,” she thrust an accusing finger to Maren, who shrank under the sharpness of her stare, “should not have let him.”

“Yes, ma’am,” they uttered in unison. 

Hands on her hips, she pursed her lips, “I’ll get you coffees and pop to the shops for a bite. No active work today, paperwork only. I’ll handle dispatching notes to clients. I mean it, Icarus. Rest your head and drink water.”

An hour later, Icarus felt his humanity slowly returning thanks to the balm of bitter black coffee and a well-stuffed pastry full of piping hot eggs and good pork sausage. He patted his stomach, forgetting for a moment he regretted about his bruising, and leaned back. Maren blotted crumbs from her mouth and folded her hands on his desk.

“We should talk about it.”

His sated expression spoiled into a frown. She was right, but he had hoped to avoid it for a little longer, “Aye. I believe we should.”

“What the fuck-”

“What the fuck.”

“Right. That’s out of the way,” Maren eased to her feet with a grimace. “I don’t even know where to start. I suppose… do you want to start?”

He blinked up at her and cocked his head, “Explain.”

She gripped the back of the chair and held him with a hard stare, “We don’t have to look into this anymore. We can let it go. Let the Church handle the Church, we’re not obligated to them now. We can do what we like. If you’d like to drop this and let it go, we can.”

He hadn’t considered that. It was all such a disaster—the Inquisitor held prisoner, his father still alive trapped in some mystical gaol, all the Azure Prince nonsense, a Church keeping its people afraid instead of doing its job. There were so many threads he hardly knew where to start untangling them. 

Maren was right, though. He could just… not. He could put all of it down and let whatever was happening with the Church be the Church’s problem. With a heavy sigh, however, he knew that was never going to happen. For a time, they might pretend not to think about it, but it would never last. Neither of them were wired for it. 

Besides, after fifteen years of lying to him about his father, Icarus would enjoy being the excommunicated priest who tossed a wrench in the Church’s spokes. He shook his head, “No, Mare. I don’t think we can.”

Her shoulders fell in a picture of relief and she nodded, “Agreed. So. Where do we want to tug first?”

“We can tick the Inquisitor off the list. He’s dead, we’ve done what we can, if they replace him with another then so be it. What we can do,” he got to his feet and stared at the pair of file boxes on his sideboard, “is go back through it all and see if we can parse out anything about a gaol.”

They uncapped the boxes and began pouring over the same files they had poured over for days. Icarus sifted through others in their hall closet, Maren pulled in a few from her office, and they sent Edith to the bookseller for anything she could find about the history of faerie gaols. Banned as he was from every Church establishment, Icarus wasn’t keen to try his luck with the college quite yet. 

***

The clouds took on the dull steel of late afternoon by the time Icarus slumped back against the wall and threw a handful of papers across the carpet, “This is useless and stupid.”

“Agreed,” Maren set down a file and leaned back on her hands, “but what else is there? Where else is there to look?”

He thought for a long moment and stared intently at the various case details. It was connected, he could feel it singing in his bones—Eilonwy, the abhartach, the Inquisitor, Daedalus—but he couldn’t see how. Too many pieces were still missing and the only way he would find them was to figure out where this gaol housing his not-dead father was. His father who had adopted an obsession with pulling apart every thread that made up the fae realm, the Veil, all of it in the valiant quest to save humanity from the Rot-inducing netherism and ensure the Pale God became the only god. 

He hated what he was about to suggest. It had been a decade and a half since he’d set foot there, but it was paid in full and he had his own flat long before Daedalus had disappeared. There was never a need to go back unless he wanted to. 

He had never wanted to.

He draped his arm over a bent knee and flexed his hand, tensing into a fist once and again. The bones still carried the residual cold of the Inquisitor’s grip, “There’s his house.”

Maren paused and lifted her head. He never told her he’d kept the place, taken the deed in his name when the estate lawyer dispensed the last will and testament of his father. He wouldn’t meet her face and stared at the blank cover of a haphazard folder. 

“I can go alone,” she offered too gently for his liking. “You don’t need to go back there.”

He shook his head and ran a hand through his unkempt hair with a note to get it trimmed before it tangled beyond repair, “No, I think I do. We’ll go in the morning and see what we find. It’s the only place left.”

He saw her nod in the corner of his eye and bring herself to her feet. She bent backwards in a brutal stretch, “Meet here in the morning after breakfast, then we’ll get on with it.”

She didn’t wait for his answer and turned to leave, he caught the sound of her office door clicking shut and made himself rise. Joints protesting, he ran through a series of stretches to pop everything back to life before dimming the desklamp and heading through reception.

Edith raised her head and smiled, “Off for the evening then?”

“Going for a walk to clear my head. Head home anytime you like,” he nodded his farewell, too distracted to catch whatever she murmured when he descended the steps. 

He shrugged on his heavy coat and headed out into the bitter cold of an evening coming on too soon. Icarus walked without purpose, meandering the city and taking none of it in. He’d hoped he would think and reason and logic through some of it, but pain and hangover still stuffed his head like cotton. A persistent buzzing at the back of his mind droned over any half-formed thoughts and

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