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The thing about solving a murder when you’re 8 is that it’s very easy to slip into the self righteous assumption that you are always right. Emeric Conrad knows he can be self righteous and have a stick up his ass and look at people down the bridge of his nose. He knows that. But he also knows his instincts are rarely ever wrong.
Which makes it all the more difficult when his instincts are wrong.
There’s a certain feeling that comes when you become aware that you’ve fucked up monumentally. An adjacent feeling when one of his sisters eyes started to well and he realized he’d snapped a little too harshly. Except worse. This is so much worse. This is crushing, this is his chest caving in on itself, this is a mistake he can never take back and the realization is just sinking in.
It’s a silly realization; that he’s never seen Vanja hide her face before. That he’s never seen her shrink away. Even when the margrave held her by the chin, even when he was putting her in shackles, she never, never made herself smaller. Vanja Schmidt is proud, if anything, and strong, and doesn’t give up. There’s an air of giving up when she slides down the wall and looks awfully like a girl her age, a girl of just sixteen.
He only gets a glimpse of her face (flushed, speckled with blood, terrified ) before she presses her face into her knees. He’s not sure what to call the noises at first, it’s more gasping than anything else. It seems wrong that Vanja should cry. It seems illogical.
But Vanja sits there. And she cries.
And he feels as if the witch-ash is hitting him all over again.