Zolani had her suspicions, but she never knew it was to this extent.
She stood in front of her mother and looked at her.
Oh my God. What have they done to you?
Veyra's face in the low candlelight was haunting. Her warm brown eyes were half-open, the pupils showing that specific unfocused quality of someone whose mind had been chemically adjusted. The face of a woman caught between her own thoughts and wherever the drug had dragged her. Fine lines etched at the corners of her eyes. The exhaustion that had marked her at the funeral was still present, but altered — no longer the raw weariness of fresh grief, but the deeper, grinding fatigue of something being applied to her regularly, her body fighting a silent, losing battle against it.
She had been beautiful.
She was still beautiful, even now. Beneath the drug haze, the restraints, the oppressive darkness of the room, and whatever else this was — she remained the face Elowen had drawn obsessively in charcoal on rough paper, over and over, until the creases in the sheets went soft from handling. The face of the woman who had stood at the left wall of the burial hall, shaking with suppressed emotion, refusing to retreat.
Zolani crouched down in front of her.
"Veyra," she said, low. Just her name.
Nothing.
"Veyra." She placed her hand carefully over the bound ones resting in Veyra's lap.
The eyes moved.
Not immediately. The motion carried the heavy quality of someone fighting through multiple layers of resistance to reach a surface where response was possible. Slow. The specific slowness of a mind working far harder than it should for such a simple task.
The eyes found her face.
Stayed there.
Zolani watched Veyra struggle to process what she was seeing. The confusion of the drug clashed with recognition of the face — Elowen's face, the one she knew intimately — and something deeper working separately. Something that had been working separately for five days.
"You came," Veyra said.
Her voice was wrong. The drug thickened it, giving the words a specific texture produced by a mind fighting for clarity. But it was present.
"I came," Zolani replied softly.
Veyra looked at her for a long time. Zolani swallowed under the weight of that gaze.
She didn't rush it. She let it happen at whatever speed the woman needed.
"You're not her," Veyra said.
Flat. Not accusing. Simply the statement of someone who had sat with this knowledge for five days, processing it in whatever fragments of clarity the drug allowed between doses, and had reached the end of that processing.
"No," Zolani said.
Veyra's bound hands turned under hers. The fingers found Zolani's hand and gripped it with the same desperate strength she remembered from the casket — checking, confirming that something real existed in front of her.
"My daughter is dead," Veyra said.
Fuck. Should she lie? The raw desperation in those eyes made Zolani heave a quiet sigh.
"Yes."
"I know she's dead." Veyra's eyes unfocused briefly, then fought back. "I felt it. When they — I felt it. Three days before the funeral I woke up and I knew." Her jaw worked with effort.
Probably when they killed Elowen in the dungeon. Dorian.
"They told me she was ill. They told me she was resting. But I knew." She stopped. The drug pulled at her again, the effort of this much clarity visible in the strain on her face. "I went to her room and they had locked it. Cedric had locked it."
She went very still. For a second, Zolani feared she had slipped away entirely.
"Who told them to lock it?" she asked, hoping her fears were unnecessary.
"The Count," Veyra replied after a minute, much to Zolani's relief. Then, smaller, the word costing her visible effort — "Dorian."
Zolani filed this away. Confirmation of what the letter fragment had already hinted at. The name spoken in Veyra's voice carried the heavy weight of a woman who had known the truth and been contained before she could act on it.
"They gave me something," Veyra continued. "For the grief, they said." Her free hand — the one not gripping Zolani's — moved toward her own face and stopped short at the restraint. The automatic gesture of someone trying to touch their face and finding they couldn't. "It wasn't for the grief."
She muttered to herself, an abrupt realization breaking through.
"No," tears welled in her eyes. "It wasn't."
Veyra looked at her directly.
At the crimson eyes set in Elowen's face.
"But you're here," she said. The logic of someone working with whatever tools the drug had left her. "You're in her face. You're in her hands." The grip tightened. "I don't know what you are. I don't know how this works. I have theories." A pause. The grip on Zolani's hand became painful. "I have one theory."
Zolani waited, bearing the pain.
"Her father," Veyra said. "Her real father."
The words came carefully, the way words emerge when someone has kept them locked away for a long time and is finally releasing them.
Her real father? Had Elowen's mother cheated on the Count? Was that why the Count showed so little affection? Did he know?
Zolani pondered. If true, it complicated her hatred for the man. His actions remained unforgivable, but the context shifted.
"He was… he wasn't from here, I think. He wasn't like other people. He was…" Veyra stopped. The drug made forming the sentence harder.
Speak, please. You can't stop now.
"Old. He was so old. And he was something the church would call a heresy and the guild would call an anomaly and I called—" she stopped again, lost in reminiscence.
"What did you call him?" Zolani asked gently.
Veyra looked at her with those warm, drugged brown eyes.
"Mine," she said simply. "For a little while."
For a moment, Zolani felt as if her eyes were deceiving her. The dim candlelight on Veyra's cheekbones created the illusion of a blush.
What the actual fuck. Was she remembering something she wasn't supposed to? This was batshit crazy.
She almost dropped the woman's hand in disbelief.