Ring. Sister. Piano (Book 4 of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Twenty Seven: Explanations

Two hours later, Jack was lying on his back, grinning up at the ceiling, with Ellini on his chest like a ship-wrecked woman who had just managed to pull herself onto the beach before collapsing. 

Her hair was warm under his fingers. It had been burning hot, but now it had cooled to a pleasant toastiness, flaring and dying by turns, which made him wonder if her hair got hot in rhythm with her heartbeat. He wished there was more time to investigate – and yet wishing for anything now, in this state of glowing contentment, was unbelievably funny.

"I'm so happy," he said, to the ceiling.

"I'm sorry," said Ellini, which made his smile even broader.

"I'm so happy that that wasn't even the tiniest bit annoying."

She raised her head to scowl at him. "I meant that I still have to go."

Jack chuckled. "I know, I know. Can't I just be happy right now?"

He stroked her hair as a pacifying gesture, and let the contented silence settle back over them. He would have liked to switch off his brain and just drift on the currents of fulfilment, but there was something niggling at him, something just out of sight. Joy and bliss had overwhelmed it before – no, it was older than that. The fever of hopeless longing had overwhelmed it first, and then the joy and bliss. But it was still there, if slightly flattened by the procession of emotions. What was it, what was it? Terror? No, no – sounded like terror, and meant the same thing... 

Ah yes. Myrrha.

"Tell me about this disciple of Myrrha's who scratched your face the night I met you in Northaven," he said. "Why should you be brawling with Myrrha's disciples?"

She sat up in the bed beside him, tilting her head dubiously. "Didn't Robin tell you?"

It was jarring to hear Robin's name spoken in a context like this. Jack found himself unconsciously clenching his teeth. "Tell me what?" 

But then he thought: perhaps Robin had told him – or, anyway, told him enough for him to work it out. Perhaps that was the source of the niggle.

He sat up too – because you didn't want to be in a prone position around Robin, even if you were only talking about him.

"He told me you wanted to learn how to fight," said Jack slowly. "He said you attended training sessions in your underwear, and you'd proven so adept that last week he saw you jump out of a lake completely naked, and beat three other naked women into insensibility."

She laughed – a little nervously, it seemed to him. "Well, those were some strategically-chosen details!"

"Not the whole picture, I take it?"

"Of course not!"

"But true, so far as they went?"

"Yes," she said, with a shade of defiance, as if she was daring him to object. "So far as they went."

He leaned forwards. "All right then, why did you want to learn to fight? Why were you naked in that lake, beating those women?"

She hesitated. "I suppose, while you've been getting my revenge, I've been getting yours. I wanted to find Myrrha's society of embittered women. I wanted to make them stop tricking young men into forgetting their loved ones – just make them stop, you understand, not kill them. Although..." She looked down at her gloved fingers, spread against the sheet. "Well, most of them ended up dead, one way or the other..."

Jack stared at her hands too. They were a useful thing to fix his eyes on while his stomach plummeted.

"I've only got Myrrha and her closest confidante left," she went on. "They're in Edinburgh – at Pandemonium, if you can credit it. And the other strange thing – or perhaps not so strange if you think about all the harm that book did – is that this confidante is the woman who wrote Helen of Camden. My biographer. It makes me wonder if Myrrha was behind the whole enterprise."