Crimson Veil

Chapter Ten — The Marked Soldier

✦ Eve's POV ✦

I found out about Perrin on a Wednesday morning, which was how I would always remember it afterward — a Wednesday, ordinary, the ward busy with the usual intake, the smell of the herbs I had started keeping in a small pot on the supply cabinet filling the air with something that made the space feel fractionally more human.

Theron told me, with the careful flatness of someone delivering news they had already processed so the person receiving it didn't have to watch them process it. "The soldier from Third Division," he said. "The one with the forearm laceration your first week. Perrin. They found him this morning."

I went still. "Found him."

"Dead." A pause. "Not in the field. Not in training. In his quarters."

The ward noise continued around us — the low voices, the sounds of work, ordinary morning things. I stood in the middle of it and felt the specific cold quality of something slotting into place that you hadn't wanted to slot into place.

"How?" I asked.

"Under investigation." Theron looked at me steadily. "You treated him. I thought you should know before you heard it from someone else."

"Yes," I said. "Thank you."

I finished the morning rotation on automatic — hands doing the work while my mind was somewhere else entirely. Perrin. The forearm laceration, the careful stitching, the way he had stayed completely still throughout. The mark on his inner arm that he had called an old injury and that I had known was not an old injury.

A circular form with four lines radiating inward.

I had seen that mark somewhere before. Not in person — in a text. One of the old reference volumes that Mira had in her office, the ones with the scripts that were barely readable. I had noticed it in passing without registering its significance, and now I was trying to reconstruct where and in what context.

After the rotation ended I went to Mira's office.

She wasn't there. I stood in the doorway and looked at her shelves, and after a moment's hesitation I went in and began looking through the older texts on the lower shelf — the ones with the worn spines and the faded lettering.

I found it in the fourth volume I opened.

The mark was there — reproduced in careful ink on a page that was brown at the edges with age. The text around it was in the old script, which I could read slowly if I concentrated. I sat down on the floor with the book in my lap and read.

The Brand of the Interior Veil, the text called it. A faction mark from the early days of the Iron Veil's founding, belonging to a splinter group that had operated within the order for the first century of its existence. Members of this group had believed that the Veil's power should be consolidated rather than distributed — that one authority, strong enough, was more efficient than a council. They had burned the mark into their own skin as a pledge.

The text said the faction had been disbanded two hundred years ago.

The text, I was now fairly certain, was wrong.

I heard Mira's footsteps in the corridor and looked up as she came through the door and stopped at the sight of me on her floor with one of her books.

For a moment she was very still.

Then she came in, closed the door behind her, and sat down in her chair. She looked at the book in my lap. She looked at me. Something in her face had the quality of a decision being made.

"Perrin is dead," I said.

"I know," she said quietly.

"This is what the mark means." I held up the book. "The Brand of the Interior Veil. A faction that was supposed to have been disbanded two centuries ago." I looked at her steadily. "You recognized it when I first described it to you. You said you'd seen it before in circumstances you weren't proud of."

She was quiet for a moment that had weight to it.

"Yes," she said.

"Tell me."

She folded her hands in her lap with the precise care of someone arranging something that needed to be arranged before it could be spoken about. "When I was young," she said. "Before I understood what it was. I was recruited — that's the word they use, though recruited is a gentle version of what it actually is — into a group within the Veil that I believed, at the time, was working toward something good. Reform. Better resource distribution. An end to some of the corruption in the upper ranks that everyone knew existed and no one addressed."

She paused.

"And then I began to understand what the real goal was," she said. "Not reform. Consolidation. One authority. And I understood who that authority was meant to be." Her grey eyes were steady on mine. "Lord Aldric. High Commander. The man in that tower that you sensed something cold and deliberate coming from." She paused again. "I left. It cost me things I won't go into now. But I left, and I came here, and I have spent twenty years keeping my head down and hoping it had died."

"It hasn't died," I said.

"No." She looked at the book in my hands. "It hasn't."

I sat with that for a moment. The morning light lay across the floor between us. Somewhere in the ward beyond the door a patient asked a question and a junior healer answered it, and the ordinary sounds of the place continued without any awareness that something significant was happening in this small room.

"He wants my gift," I said. Not a question. I had worked it out already, in the slow careful way that I worked things out — building toward a conclusion before I was willing to name it. "The artifact. The mirror. The ability to amplify. He's been looking for someone with resonance, and now he knows I'm here."

Mira's expression told me I was right without her having to say it.

"Then we need to move," I said, "before he does."

She looked at me for a long moment. "Yes," she said. "We do."

I stood, and put the book back on the shelf where I had found it, and went to find Caine.