Chapter 213: Fourteen Elm Terrace

Elm Terrace curved along the outer shadow of the old cathedral wall, three levels above the noise of the canal.

Number Fourteen sat near the middle of the limestone row, a three-story townhouse with a weathered stone merchant ship carved above the door.

Arthur stopped at the bottom of the front steps and pulled Denton’s folded note from his coat.

Emily stepped in front of him before he could climb the stairs. She tugged his left sleeve down to cover the top buckle of his leather bracer and flattened his collar against his neck.

"Do I look respectable?" Arthur asked.

"You look like someone who gets into tavern fights and borrowed a clean shirt," Emily said, letting her hand linger against his chest before stepping back. "Let me do the talking."

She rapped the brass knocker twice.

An older woman in a gray apron opened the door a few inches, looking from Emily’s burgundy riding coat to Arthur’s shoulders.

"Good afternoon," Emily said. "My name is Emily Thorne, and this is Arthur Vance. Mr. Denton on Tanner’s Lane gave us a letter of introduction to Mrs. Ward regarding an estate lot she acquired a few years ago."

The housekeeper checked Denton’s printed letterhead and opened the door wider. "Wait in the hall, please. Wipe your boots."

She left them in the tiled entryway while she carried the note upstairs. Along the wall, framed parish charters hung in neat rows, each fitted with a small brass plaque engraved with a date and the name of a chapel.

"She labels her hallway," Arthur muttered.

"Behave," Emily murmured, nudging him with her elbow as footsteps sounded on the stairs.

The housekeeper led them down the corridor into a bright sitting room overlooking a walled garden. Mrs. Ellin Ward sat by the window with a wool shawl over her shoulders and a silver-topped cane resting against her chair. She was around seventy, with sharp hazel eyes and white hair pinned beneath a lace cap. Denton’s open note lay on the tea table beside her elbow.

"Miss Thorne. Mr. Vance," Mrs. Ward said. "Sit down, please. Standing in doorways makes my neck ache."

Emily took the chair opposite her while Arthur sat on the bench by the window.

"Young Denton tells me you’re asking after the Oakhaven clearance," Mrs. Ward said, tapping the stationery. "I hope you haven’t come to tell me the woodworm in that folding screen has woken up. Having the hinges rebuilt cost me nearly as much as I paid Blackwood & Sterling for the whole box."

"We aren’t here about the screen, ma’am," Emily said. "When Lot four-twelve was photographed for the auction, there was a tray of small loose items included with the censer and the panels."

"The parish tray," Mrs. Ward said immediately. "Denton’s carter dumped the whole box on my table four years ago. Half of it was decent river-abbey pewter, and the rest was whatever the bailiffs swept off the chapel floor before they padlocked the doors."

"You still have the smaller pieces?" Arthur asked.

"Of course I still have them," Mrs. Ward said, looking at him sharply. "If I bought chapel clearances just to break them up, I’d be no better than the junkmen down by the canal melting abbey brass into candlesticks." She shifted her gaze between them. "Though I doubt a girl in a riding coat and a young man with bow-string calluses on his fingers came up the hill to admire abbey rosaries. Why are you asking about that tray?"

"There was a small black stone bead in the corner of the auction photograph," Arthur said. "Flat-sided, with a notch near the hole. I have two other pieces made of dark metal with similar markings, and I’m trying to confirm if that bead belongs to the same set."

Mrs. Ward’s eyes narrowed slightly. "You have the other two pieces with you?"

"Locked in my room at the academy."

She looked at him over the rim of her spectacles. "Convenient."

"I wasn’t planning to carry them around the canal district in my pocket," Arthur said evenly. "I’m not asking you to give it to me. I just want to look at the stone."

"I heard what you asked, young man." Mrs. Ward reached for her cane and pushed herself up from the chair. "Well, you paid Denton for a letter, and at least you didn’t invent a story about it belonging to your dead grandmother. Come upstairs."

The second-floor study smelled of cedarwood and old paper.

Glass-fronted cabinets lined the walls, filled with wooden saint figures and pewter badges. The painted lindenwood screen from the auction photograph stood on a low table near the window, a slip of paper tucked into its frame with three lines of Mrs. Ward’s cramped handwriting correcting the restorer’s invoice.

Mrs. Ward unlocked a drawer in her map chest and brought a shallow walnut tray over to the reading table.

"The Oakhaven smalls," she said, setting it in the light.

Arthur stepped up to the table beside Emily.

The velvet compartments held tarnished medals, brown wooden beads, and four smooth river stones, each pinned above a neat cream label written in Mrs. Ward’s hand.

Wedged into the back corner compartment behind a broken bronze clasp sat a piece of matte black stone no larger than the end of his thumb.

"May I?" Arthur asked.

"Go ahead," Mrs. Ward said. "Just don’t drop it on the floorboards."

Arthur picked the bead up between his right thumb and forefinger.

It was cold and unusually dense against his skin. Seven uneven sides, a shallow geometric channel across the widest facet, and a sharp, chipped notch beside the string-hole. When he angled it toward the window, he caught the three tiny, angular incisions tucked just inside the rim—the exact same archaic script etched into the shrine key and the piece from Kaelen’s belt.

Holy shit.

He actually had it. Weeks of chasing leads, dodging Kaelen’s mace in a muddy quarry, and paying half the merchants in Lornfell to read four-year-old receipts—and the last key to the Tomb of the Veiled Knife was sitting right in his hand.

His thumb tightened hard against the notched facet before he forced himself to set the stone back onto the velvet.

Mrs. Ward leaned on her cane, watching his hand. "You look like a stray terrier that just found a butcher’s bone under the porch, Mr. Vance. I take it the scratches match?"

"They match," Arthur said.

"Can you read them?"

"No," Arthur said. "I just know what they go to."

"Hmph." She poked the edge of the stone with her fingernail. "When that crate came up from the vault, I spent two evenings going through the diocesan directories trying to place that ugly little thing. The auction clerk called it a penance stone. Idiot boy couldn’t tell basalt from bog oak. It has no saint’s mark, no abbey seal, and no prayer notches. It’s been ruining the symmetry of my river-abbey drawer for four years."

"Then let me buy it off you," Arthur said. "Five silver, right now."

Mrs. Ward looked up at him, her mouth pressing into a thin line. "I don’t run a shop, Mr. Vance. It arrived on the Oakhaven manifest. If I start pulling items out of my trays every time a student comes knocking with a handful of silver, my ledgers are worthless."

"You shoved it in the back corner behind a broken cloak pin because you didn’t even want to write a label for it," Arthur pointed out.

Mrs. Ward glared at him over her spectacles. Emily shifted slightly beside him, her boot nudging Arthur’s ankle under the table in warning, though Arthur just held the old woman’s gaze.

For a few seconds, the only sound in the study was the tall clock ticking by the door.

Then Mrs. Ward looked back down at the black stone, her mouth twitching slightly. "You have terrible manners for someone asking a favor."

"That’s why I brought her," Arthur said, nodding toward Emily. "So you’d let me through the front door."

Emily closed her eyes briefly. "Arthur."

"No, at least he doesn’t waste my afternoon," Mrs. Ward said. She tapped her cane once against the floorboards. "That stone has been sitting in my drawer for four years without a proper entry, and I have no intention of dying before I know what it is. Put the five silver on the blotter, Mr. Vance. If I have to cross an item off my intake sheet, I’m not doing it for copper."

Arthur pulled five silver coins from his pouch and set them on the wood before she could change her mind.

Mrs. Ward dipped her pen and drew a neat line through the bottom entry on the Oakhaven page. "Where did you find the other two pieces?"

"One in an old shrine north of the city," Arthur said. "The other near the eastern quarries."

"An old shrine and the eastern quarries?" she muttered, blotting the ink. "And you handed over five silver like it was pocket change after making such a fuss about how much this search was costing you."

She wrapped the bead in a piece of soft leather and held it out. When Arthur reached for it, she kept her grip on the other end. "When you put those three pieces together and figure out who carved that script, you will send a letter to this house so I can write a proper provenance note in my margin. If you leave a blank line in my book, I will complain to Mr. Denton."

"I’ll write when we find out what it is," Arthur said.

She released the leather packet. "Good. Now get out of my study before you talk me out of my bronze censer."

The late-afternoon bells were ringing from the cathedral tower when they walked down the steps of Number Fourteen and turned onto the quiet stone stairwell leading down toward the canal.

They made it halfway down the first landing, out of sight of the townhouse windows, before Arthur reached into his coat, pulled out the chamois packet, and flipped the leather open to look at the black stone one more time.

He grinned, tucked the bead safely into his inner breast pocket, and caught Emily by the waist with his good arm, backing her up against the cool limestone wall of the stairwell.

Emily let out a surprised laugh as he leaned in and kissed her hard. She didn’t push him off; she grabbed the front of his jacket with both hands, kissing him back until Arthur finally raised his head a few inches.

"Definitely the right rock, then," Emily said, her eyes bright as she tugged on his lapel.

"All three pieces," Arthur said, resting his right hand on her hip. "Do you have any idea how much time you just saved me?"

"Considering you nearly ruined the whole thing by arguing with her about her drawer labels, quite a lot," Emily said smugly. "And you handed over five silver like it was pocket change after complaining all morning about a two-silver archive fee."

"I’d have given her twenty and carried her broken folding screen downstairs if she asked," Arthur said, pulling her away from the wall and keeping his arm slung firmly around her shoulders as they headed down the stairs toward the cab stand. "Come on. I want to see all three of them together."

They caught an open-top carriage near the bridge and rode back to the academy as the streetlamps were starting to flicker on along the avenue.

The third-floor dormitory hallway was empty. Inside the room, Felix’s bed was neatly made and his corner was quiet—he was still out for the afternoon.

Arthur unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk, lifted out the cloth bundle at the back, and spread it open under the lamp.

He set the Black Prayer Bead down beside the notched bar from Saint Orlan’s and the jagged plate from Kaelen’s belt.

Emily tossed her riding jacket onto the bed and came over, leaning her hip against the desk beside him.

The three pieces sat together on the linen: dull black metal and matte stone scored with the same tiny, sharp-angled cuts. Complete.

"All that trouble for three ugly little pieces that fit in one hand," Emily said, picking up the shrine bar and testing its edge against her thumb.

"Worth every copper," Arthur said, leaning back in his chair and flexing his left hand inside Brunhilda’s bracer. The tendon still pulled with a dull tightness, not quite ready for thirty full-weight draws in a dark corridor. "A couple more days for the wrist to settle, and we can take Felix and Chloe up north to open the door."

Emily put the metal bar down, stepped between Arthur’s knees, and caught his face in her hands.

He barely had time to look up before she kissed him.

Arthur’s right hand went immediately to her waist, pulling her closer between his knees as she broke the kiss just enough to look down at him.

"Stop staring at the rocks," Emily murmured, her fingers sliding into the hair at the back of his neck.

Arthur slid his hand up the back of her thigh, his grin matching hers. "Lock the door."