Angelfire | The Whispering Wall #3

Forty Eight: Guilt

Jordan was the only one in the house when the knock came at the door.

He cursed, looking frantically around at the mess of paint and spirits littered around his floor; his hands were spattered with oil paint and he wasn't wearing a cloak.

"Shit." He dashed into the hallway as another knock came. "One minute!"

After furiously scrubbing his hands in the water basin outside and tipping the contents down the drain, he rushed back inside and threw his cloak on, capping all the jars of spirits between doing up the clasps.

When he opened the door, he startled, still frazzled enough not to realise who he was looking at. Another Unspoken apprentice stood on the other side, hands clasped in front of them, but it wasn't Astra. Oloe? No, Oloe had been well up north for months, Nika had told him. So that meant...

"Dela?"

"Medina," she corrected gently. "Dina for short. I didn't...didn't want to make it too different."

Jordan grinned despite himself. He and Dela had only known each other briefly before she manifested and left for the Guildtown with her new teacher, and that short experience had been largely unpleasant for both of them. She had grown a couple of inches since he'd last seen her, so that they were almost eye to eye. He would have been alarmed that a fourteen-year-old girl was nearly as tall as him if he hadn't known she was Varthian. Despite their history together, he found himself glad to see her.

"Well met," he said. "Come in. Is Torian not with you?"

"He met a friend. I told him I could find my own way here, so he'll join us in an hour or so probably. Are you on your own?"

"I am at the moment. Nika and Yddris are both at the castle today." And he was more than glad not to be with them. The more he saw Harkenn, the thinner wore his self-control. He wouldn't be much use to Grace or Arlen clapped in irons for burning half the study down.

He led Dela ­– Dina, he mentally corrected himself – through to the front room, after glancing up and down the street. If she didn't identify herself to anyone, she wouldn't be picked up by Arlen again; she could blend in far better than Jordan had ever been able to. But the memory of her terrified face on the jobs Arlen had forced her onto, that Jordan hadn't been able to get her out of, was still fresh in his mind.

Not that he'd seen Arlen recently. He was trying not to be nervous about it; he was sure one of the others in the group would have said so if anything serious was going on, but he hadn't seen Arlen or any of his group since the dinner at the temple the previous week. Last time it had gone silent from the dead quarter there'd been a very good reason for it, but he wouldn't put it past the assassin to freeze him out over something Jordan had done. And he'd done several things recently, he thought with a stab of nerves, that he knew Arlen wouldn't be happy about if he'd found out.

"How's the Guildtown been?" he asked, mostly to distract himself.

Ren scampered out of Jordan's bedroom then and Dina gasped, dropping to her knees and opening her arms. Ren immediately clambered into her lap and accepted all the attention as her due, and he couldn't help chuckling.

"It's been wonderful," Dina said softly. "It really has. Nadiya has been a great teacher." A short pause. "I do miss the temple sometimes. And I wonder if I will see my family again as me. We had...different views on life, but that doesn't mean I don't want to see them."

Jordan crossed to the fireplace and set a kettle to boil, filling two pouches with Nika's tea blend from the jar on the mantel. "I know how that feels. I still talk to my sister, if that's any consolation." He paused. "It's not the way it used to be, but that's not all because of my magic."