Category: The Nowhere Bird

Chapter 26: Penumbral Whispers

September 14th, 2022

CWs: unreality, suicide attempt trauma, mental illness/PTSD (SO MUCH), paranoia, drug discussion, closet anxiety/internalized homophobia

The beliefs of the Southlanders are as varied as their tongues, but one sticks out to me in particular; that of ‘prophets’ or ‘seers’, who would speak of things that had passed, things unknown, or things yet to be; the words of gods, the decrees of spirits, and suchlike. Elessans have long since moved past such notions, but it has always struck me as terribly tragic that the suffering of these ‘prophets’ never seemed to matter to those who benefited from their words. Indeed, in a recent intervention, I had the opportunity to study one of those afflicted, and instead of anything divine or supernatural, it seemed to me to be a case instead of dementia praecox; premature dementia. These beliefs, then, rely on the mad ramblings and fading minds of the insane and nothing else, and divine inspiration consigned to the same bin as holy shrines and displeased watchers.

Still, though. One thing troubles me still, one that shall not leave the pages of this journal.

It occurs to me — how could it not? — that an oracle may very well be demented, half-rotted and speaking of nothing but his own delusions… he may very well be all this, and also be what he claims to be. One must admit, if a god wished to remain hidden, one could think of no better disguise. But that would mean accepting the existence of gods at all.
Dr. Alois Gulliversohn Gammon, personal journal, 1845 entry (Journal #4, 1844-1847)

Wolfie was the one driving him home, not Jacob; and Rook had never felt so guilty in his life. He stared out of the window, resolutely not looking at Csindra or Wolfie. Achielsohn, he reminded himself. He was… trying to get better at that. He hated calling anybody by their middle or last names. It just rubbed in what a nothing his was.

At least Csindra was in the back. She was pre-occupied with something; Rook could tell that even without turning back to check. She’d barely spoken to him, and usually he would have been chewing himself up about it, not the pseudocalm self-assurance that she was mad at him, but it would come up eventually, one way or another. Probably because he was too hyper-aware of who else he was disappointing.

It wasn’t until he’d gotten into the front seat that it had occurred to him to even wonder — but Jacob had definitely talked to Wolfie. Rook could tell, not in the same way that he knew what was on Csindra’s mind, but in the way Wolfie was resolutely glaring straight ahead as he kicked the car into gear and not looking at him.

Rook stared out of the window, head still bubbling. The laudanum was taking its time wearing off properly; there was a reason he ate light when he ate at all, because the nausea would’ve been even more overwhelming if he’d had a full stomach. “I’d rather you just got it over with.”

Wolfie sighed, pulling to a stop at the end of a road. Luckily the door between the sections was closed; still, it didn’t mean Rook didn’t flinch at bit when Wolfie replied, “Opium, Rook? Really?”

“Laudanum. We’re not exactly talking about heroin.”

“It’s the same fucking thing.”

“If it was the same thing, it’d be the same thing,” was Rook’s exhausted response. He gently bumped his head against the seat. “Jacob’s already told me off plenty.”

“Sure. Like he’s ever that hard on you.”

Great. More of this. More of Wolfie seeming fine, and then bursts of… something. Oddness, uncertainty, meanness out of nowhere, or what felt like out of nowhere. He chewed over a few possible responses, then threw them all away, retreating back into sulky silence. He didn’t want to fight with Wolfie. Not right now, not when he’d been dreading this for a long time. He expected Wolfie to put the car back into gear; instead, the silence between them grew, underscored by the gentle purr of the engine. It was late. Nobody else was out, not in this part of town. Prole territory, but upper-class proles, who went to bed at nine o’clock and walked their dogs in the mornings.

Rook glanced at Wolfie, at the words that kept half-taking shape on his lips, half-begun sentences that didn’t quite come out. Whether it was just guessing or intuition, he could almost hear some of them. If you’re in trouble, you’re supposed to come to me. Or I taught you better than that. Scripts. You picked them up after a while, even the unusual ones, when it came to the people who’d asserted certain roles in your life. Like Jacob, dutifully trying — and failing — to play at fatherhood. Scheffen, switching carelessly between a mishmash of mother and commander and owner that she probably didn’t even understand. Most people went for parental. Wolfie ended up more at attempted-sibling. It was all very sweet, Rook supposed, and it also just didn’t fucking work. When you could hear the woodenness in some of the lines, you stopped being able to take them seriously.

But instead, Wolfie tossed the scripts out entirely, sitting back with a scoff. “Figures. Whatever.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You think you’re fucking immortal.”

Rook nearly bit through his tongue to force himself not to reply. For fuck’s sake. He never should have come back at all. He could have managed it. Send the Den Arden conspirators back with Hank, and just… stay in the Zweispars. Had everything felt so bad before? It must have. Just… If I thought I was immortal, he thought viciously, so loudly he almost imagined Wolfie could hear him, I wouldn’t need it in the first place. And he tripped over the word need. He didn’t need anything. He could function through pain, when he had to, if he had to.

Wolfie put the car back into gear, and Rook found himself watching him through a thin curtain of grey hair, trying to take a guess at how Wolfie was really feeling. I’d hoped you’d gotten it out of your system. He didn’t mean to be an asshole. He couldn’t even remember what he’d said to Wolfie, before he’d left, some time in the miasma that got all wrapped up into a single chunk of time, a chunk of time that started vaguely with an engagement announcement or a night out drinking, one of the two, somewhere in there — and only really ended once he’d woken up from his first night in North Zweispar, head finally clearing enough to think in a straight line.

He hadn’t expected it to be waiting for him.

“How’s Phania?” Rook mumbled.

“Oh, so you care now.” Wolfie stopped himself, then sighed, leaning back as he drove. “She’s… fine. I’m not gonna tell her about you terrorizing her fiance again, and I’m sure he’s too much of a coward.”

“He told you.”

“More or less,” Wolfie admitted with a small smile. “Practically pissed his pants while whining about you being a demon.”

Rook nearly did bite through his tongue that time. But Wolfie just seemed to find it funny. That was the good part, he supposed; Wolfie wasn’t any more fond of Bryan than he was. “…He started it.”

“I know. You don’t start fights. You just end them. Dramatically.” Then another glance sideways at Rook. “One way or another.”

…Yeah, he wanted to be out of this conversation now. It probably wouldn’t matter, if he did try to fumble through some kind of explanation for why he’d shoved Phania away. He was starting to think he preferred the scripted responses and easy roles.

Wolfie finally brought the car to a stop in front of Rook’s apartment building. “If Lambert had it his way, I’d be taking you to the hospital.”

“Yeah, well. I’ve had worse.”

“Unfortunately, I believe you.” Wolfie grabbed Rook’s arm before he got out of the car. “Nope, nope, you’re not getting off that easy.”

“What are you doing?”

Wolfie clicked his tongue at Rook, then pushed two fingers to his neck for a moment, before checking his forehead as well. “No fever, and your heartbeat’s normal — What?” he said peevishly, and Rook realized he hadn’t managed to hide the embarrassed smile.

“…I thought you were mad at me.”

“Of course I am. I’ll be even more pissed off if you up and die during the night just to prove a point.”

“I’d never do that,” Rook said, with a little bit more sadness than he meant; Wolfie met his eyes, held the gaze for a little longer than he felt comfortable with — then leant back.

“You seem alright to me. Surprisingly so, actually, but I guess your animal buddies come in handy. Get some sleep, okay? And I better not see your ass back at the office tomorrow.”

“Yeah, yeah. I think Csindra might tie me to the bed or something.”

“Ah, what I wouldn’t give. Now shoo.”

Rook suppressed his snort of laughter as he climbed out of the car, and his snake stuck his tongue out at Wolfie as he closed the door. Rook gave him a stroke, wishing for all the world that he could talk. Maybe he could explain what was wrong. Why Rook couldn’t just… relax.

“So,” Csindra said after a moment, and Rook started; he’d been so lost in his own thoughts, he hadn’t even heard her get out of the car. Wolfie was long gone. He really wasn’t at his best tonight. “Who’s Phania?”

Motherf— “I thought the partition was closed,” he grumbled sulkily.

“It was. I have good hearing.”

“And you’re using it to eavesdrop.” He stepped inside, already trying to figure out how to get out of this conversation. People were exhausting. He’d nearly frozen to death, wasn’t that worth a reprieve?

“Not deliberately. I’m just curious.”

“She’s…” Rook hesitated in front of the elevator. “A friend. She was a friend.”

“Was?”

“We don’t talk anymore.”

Csindra raised an eyebrow. Rook refused to answer the question she was silently posing, because Csindra knew entirely too much about him already, and besides, she would just tell him about how he was being stupid for not fixing it, and he already knew that. “Wolfie has a thing for you, by the way,” he interjected, before she could ask anything out loud.

“Great. Another straight boy who thinks his cock is magic.”

The lift chose that moment to open. Rook tried to keep a straight face at Marcus’s shocked expression. “And now you’re corrupting the youth.”

“Me?”

“It’s alright, miss,” Marcus mumbled, face turning bright red. “I’ve heard worse.”

Csindra rolled her eyes, clasping one hand to her face. “Perfect. I’m never being vulgar in Elessan again.”

“I like that you specify.”

“Of course I did. Anyway, I figured — I caught him checking me out a few times. I suppose there’s no accounting for taste, but his hand goes anywhere it’s not meant to, I’m chopping it off.”

Rook snickered despite himself. “He’s fine, I promise. He’s flirty, but he can recognize a barbed wire fence with NO ENTRY on it when he sees one.”

“Gotta wonder if that’s a metaphor for something.”

“You tell me.”

Csindra chuckled at that, but even in her face, Rook could see the uncertainty, the upset way she wasn’t quite looking at him. He could feel it, too, and now it was bothering him. “Come on. You need sleep.”

“Like you don’t.”

She just shrugged, and walked down the hallway, leaving him lingering in the elevator a moment longer.

She knows—

About what? He mentally snapped back. A little specificity would be nice.

A second voice — Maybe that’s a sign you’re building a house of cards.

Yeah, well. What else was new. He followed her back to his flat, trying to shake the ghastly afterimage in his thoughts, a whispered taunt that nobody was particularly happy to see him after all. It wasn’t that simple.

Jacob had always had trouble sleeping. For nearly twenty-six years, he’d found himself seeing the sun rise, or missing entire nights while trying to at least get some rest. Some of it was pure stubbornness on his brain’s part; some of it was learned restlessness and vigilance. First, it’d been waiting for the creak of the floorboard that told him when his father was home; then, it’d been the jostling and movement of the mikdova, and in Alkmer, being on edge waiting for the possibility of danger. Really, these days, he was the safest he’d ever been and he couldn’t quite adapt to it.

So when he ended up on Thomas Karella’s doorstep, it wasn’t really anything new. Embarrassing, yes, but nothing new.

Tom looked him up and down, then sighed, stepping aside and jerking his head to beckon Jacob inside. “Insomnia’s bad again?”

“Yeah,” Jacob mumbled. “I take it you were spying again.”

“It’s not spying. It’s staying informed. There’s nothing saying I can’t listen to the NatSec radio channels while on paternity leave.”

“Yeah, well…” Jacob couldn’t quite muster up the professionalism he was supposed to have, shoulders falling. “At least I only have to catch you up so much. Olive home?”

“No, she’s staying late again.” Tom took the opportunity to unbutton Jacob’s jacket for him, pulling it off his shoulders. “You look ready to fall over.”

From anybody else, Jacob would have taken practically undressing him as a cue for a different kind of intimacy. Instead, he just half-sunk, head resting on the smaller man’s shoulder. Smaller, albeit not by much; most of the size difference between them was bulk, not height, which was a nice change. “Martinadocht was telling me to sleep.”

“Without offering to stay over? How cruel.”

“Har har. Very funny,” he mumbled.

Tom practically pushed him onto the couch, where he let himself sprawl in an ungainly heap while Tom vanished into the kitchen. He liked Olive; at least as much as you could like someone who seemed to always be shaking off a vague discomfort with you. He couldn’t entirely blame her. If he’d been in her position, watching the casual intimacy between him and Tom, he’d probably come to the same conclusion. But for all that Jacob had plenty of lovers of both genders, Tom had never been one of them. Not for lack of trying, either; but that was long dead and buried. Some of it was cultural, too. Tom was Sigaro, through and through, for all that he passed for Elessan — and Sigaro men weren’t nearly as cold with each other as Elessans.

Tom reappeared, holding two glass bottles.

“…What are we drinking?”

“This mysterious substance called sarsaparilla.”

“You don’t have any beer?”

“I have a three year old, Jacob. I don’t keep beer in the house. Can you imagine if Lissa got into it?”

Jacob took the sarsaparilla with a smirk. “I’d be too busy being impressed she figured out a bottle opener — ow!” He rubbed his head in complaint from the gentle tap. “Yeah, yeah, got it, I won’t give your toddler any booze, did you need to hear it out loud?”

“No, but it’s nice to. Gwyn knows neither of us have a good base to work from.” Tom sat down next to him, and before he could get another word out, Tom’s fingers were rubbing the back of his head, twisted into his hair, and he’d forgotten how to talk. “Yeah, figured that’d shut you up. You’re like an overgrown puppy.”

“Mm. I’m ok with that.”

“I know that. I’ve seen what you wear to the club.”

Jacob felt himself turn a little pink, and he hid whatever response he was going to make by taking a drink. It wasn’t booze, but it was cold. And Tom didn’t stop, either. The stress was still there, but it was vanishing, or at least lessening. “…Still haven’t found Coben. I fucked up pretty bad.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“You’re my best friend. You’re supposed to say that.”

“Yeah, well, it’s still not your fault. Both Palace and Centrum are supposed to check people out better than that. You aren’t the one looking bad.”

That was a good point, but it didn’t mean he felt any less stupid about it. And then there was… well…

“What do you know about Tenton?”

“Tenton, Etamara?”

“Yeah. It’s a real place, right?”

“More or less,” Tom grimaced. “One of those shantytowns that sprung up after the purges. No room in Avolara or the proper towns, so they built their own. Tenton’s one of the bigger ones.”

That fit with the little bit that Csindra had said. Avolara was one thing; the place was at least a city. The Etamara shantytowns were something else entirely. “Djaneki’s from there.”

“Djaneki? The contractor?”

“Yeah.” He chewed on his lip. “And so is the girl we’re after.”

Tom paused. Jacob watched his face, seeing the same mix of conflicted emotions cross his face that had been plaguing Jacob for hours now, dark eyes processing the information. “It’s not a big town,” he said after a few moments. “That’s a hell of a coincidence.”

“I know.” He dragged a hand over his face. “I don’t think she’s Advolk, but…”

“But nobody caught the first one, either.”

“Can you look into it for me?”

Tom frowned. “I’m on leave. And I work for Internal Affairs, not Investigations.”

“Technically the same division.”

“Technically won’t get me out of trouble if I’m caught.”

“Just some follow-up. If it’s nothing, it’s nothing.”

Tom frowned at him… then sighed. “She is a contractor. It’s within my rights and all. Other than the leave part.”

“Which is why you’re listening to military radios, obviously.”

“And you’re asking me about work stuff when I’m trying to put you to sleep.”

That was a fair point. Jacob closed his eyes. There were a lot of things bothering him, and part of the problem was that they kept getting clearer the more relaxed he got. Garrow, for one. Tiffany had said something, on the way back from the Palace — it hadn’t pinged as anything at the time, but it was nagging the hell out of him now. She’d said that she’d expected Garrow to be more upset. A reasonable enough question, when you were young and didn’t know much about Garrow.

He’s never that nice to me. Jacob hadn’t seen him in years — his business had always led him elsewhere. And he’d nearly fallen for it, too, the idea that Garrow might like him. Maybe he did.

But Garrow was also a man who had to keep his anger stifled. Jacob didn’t know the details. The revolution, well — that had happened right in the middle of his academy training. He’d only heard vague whispers of it, and a few dark jokes from Dasta, who had otherwise been respectfully silent about it. But there was a reason Garrow was so dangerous. All it was going to take, if he was masking this hard, was one stray comment from the wrong corners.

Note to self, keep Rook far, far away from him.

Rook, who had lost to a demon. Or, if you really wanted to make him look bad, had let it go.

Tom gave him a gentle thwap on the back of the head. “Stop it.”

“What?”

“You’re still worrying. I will drug you.”

Jacob snorted. “Like you would. Besides—” No, he wasn’t going to bring that up. Whatever the hell was going on with Rook, he deserved some privacy. “I’ll be alright. Just…give me a minute.”

Tom obliged, continuing to scratch Jacob’s head for a few moments before pulling him down onto his lap. It felt ridiculous. It was ridiculous. It made him feel like a child sometimes; he got around it a lot of the time with the promiscuity, although any lover he had kicking around for a while realized pretty quickly that not every night he spent with them was about sex. But sometimes he wanted Tom, specifically.

He closed his eyes again, cheek pressed to Tom’s thigh. He’d been fine for a while. Dozing off on the tram — that’d set him off all over again. But this way — here — he was fine. At least for a little while.

—

Rook had wanted a switch-up from the guilt — an emotion he wasn’t particularly used to, all things considered — but now he was regretting that wish, because the gut-wrenching, nauseating terror he felt, and accompanying humiliation, just looking at the closed door of his room was not a step up.

He was sort of over this emotions thing. What good had they done anybody, anyway? Particularly him. Every time his emotions got involved, he made stupid, stupid choices. Like the one that had turned his room into a haunted house that only Cutters could see. He’d fought demons and terrorists and wraiths; rogue Cutters and serial killers (well, killer, singular; that’d been a one off) and here he was, too scared even to touch the doorknob again.

His familiar nuzzled one of his bare feet, and he gave the snake a little nudge back. It… helped, that his familiar wasn’t mad at him. Not as much as it could, though. The drugs were all the way out of his system, now, which meant he was replaying how much he’d fucked up and suppressing the urge to throw himself out of a window.

She looked like me.

You’re imagining it.

She was the same as me.

And what is that exactly?

None of the Other voices. Just his own. Like an empty, rattling cavern. He’d gotten so used to them that he was almost lonely when they weren’t there.

Maybe he could talk to Csindra —

Don’t don’t don’t don’t she is lying like the rest of them DON’T DON’T DON’T

Right on cue. “I’m starting to think you don’t have my best interests at heart,” he mumbled.

He wanted to apologize to Jacob. Apologies didn’t come easily to him, even if he suspected it was the appropriate thing to do in this situation. If he apologized the normal way, he’d be asked to explain it, though. So — oh, who knew? He’d just go show up at Jacob’s door like he usually did and figure it out from there. Make it up to him without actually apologizing, because that would involve going into the whys and wherefores of his nasty little habits and Jacob was too good a guy to leave those alone.

Rook sighed, leaning against the opposite wall and staring down the bedroom door a little longer. At least he’d changed out of his wet and blood-stained clothes. It was a shame about the skirt, although he could probably get it fixed easily enough; his skirts looked nice, but he didn’t waste money on anything expensive. He just had normal slacks on, which felt… weird, honestly. At least his long sleeves felt familiar. He did keep men’s clothes around, despite what people thought. He wasn’t that stupid. He didn’t even really crossdress; most of what he wore were still men’s clothes, with the skirt and leggings as the main exception. He just… made some alterations here and there.

He took another glance at Csindra’s room, then closed his eyes and tested the spell. Still flexible, so that was good. He hadn’t planned on that — which was a little worrying – but there seemed to be some give in the distance they could be from each other. Being in the same building seemed good enough some of the time. At Den Riviere, he’d started feeling the tension when Csindra had tried to walk out of the gates, but not before that — here, he was pretty sure he could get all the way down to Jacob’s flat without any problems. If that changed, he’d just…. Oh, he didn’t know. Figure something out. Get around to lifting it, maybe, if he had any energy left to draw on. He hadn’t meant to tie himself down like that. Like most things, it’d seemed like a very clever idea at the time.

He headed out of the flat and locked it behind him, to keep Csindra safe. His familiar had refused to stay put — which he supposed wasn’t the worst idea, but he would have preferred him to stay inside. Between the wraith and the odjaken, it was better safe than sorry.

(and who’s going to keep them safe from you)

Had that been his own internal voice or one of the Other voices? He wasn’t sure he could easily tell the difference anymore. For a long time, he’d thought he could; but the more of them there were, and the more tangled his own thoughts got inside of each other, the more he struggled to find the gap between the two.

Just tell Jacob—

Tell him what?

Rook curled his bare feet against the carpeted floor, trying to pretend he didn’t have a knife in his pocket just in case. Not against Jacob. No, Jacob didn’t scare him. He passed each of the other doors down to the lift, trying not to let his mind whisper to him how well do you know your neighbours and when was the last time you saw them because he had enough to worry about. The Zweispars had been fine. When everything was strange, the paranoia was reasonable. He was home. Home was supposed to be a comfort.

His own room was supposed to be a comfort.

What’d you expect, Rook? If you spent long enough away then it’d never have happened? You’ve been hurt worse than that on missions—

No. No, he hadn’t. The closest he’d ever come to death, not counting the first memories he had of waking on a sea-shore freezing and half-drowned, was because he’d lost his fucking mind and tried to slash open his wrists all the way instead of just a little cut. Over the stupidest thing in the world. How pathetic was that? He couldn’t decide whether it was more pathetic that he’d tried or that he hadn’t even done a decent job of it.

He shivered a little, then looked down at his feet with a sigh. Maybe he should have put on shoes, especially since the usual night liftboy was off sick. He’d forgotten. He was forgetting a lot, lately. Maybe he’d given himself brain damage with the cold. Or the blood loss a month ago. Or the drugs. Whatever. He had plenty to spare. Maybe being a little less smart would be a blessing in disguise.

Stop it.

Ah. That one was one of the Others. One of the nice ones; he’d forgotten he had nice ones, sometimes. “Are you going to tell me to be nicer to myself?” he murmured under his breath.

You’re punishing yourself.

“What else is new?” He took the stairs — slowly, but his knees seemed to be behaving for now. “You heard Jacob. I let her get away.” He wasn’t even sure if he was talking to the voices or to his familiar, who was following him dutifully but with his usual air of concern.

You know perfectly well he was more worried about you.

“About what, my reputation?”

About you dying.

For some reason, that hadn’t really occurred to him. Probably because he hadn’t really felt like he was that close to death. Although…

His hand paused on the stair banister, and he felt so stupid he considered — only for a brief second — throwing himself over the banister. It wasn’t a real consideration. Just one of those passing thoughts.

Jacob had found him in the water. Freezing water.

No wonder he’d been so concerned.

“Yeah, okay, I owe him an apology,” he muttered. He hated hurting Jacob. Scheffen was… whatever. He tried not to think about it.

(I do so much to protect you and you won’t even let me do that)

(what do you know)

It seemed like him just existing hurt Scheffen. Jacob was different. Jacob was…

Rook paused for a moment before leaving the stairwell, sucking in his lips and forcing himself to stop blushing. That’s enough of that, he tried to tell himself, but at least it had improved his mood, just a little. Yeah, he could pretend all he want that there were only platonic reasons he thought of them differently. Not that it mattered either way; he’d find a girl he was into, eventually, once he spent time with people who weren’t military, and she’d be nothing like Scheffen. Phania had been — a mistake. Phania didn’t count. And he’d get over the Jacob thing, eventually, maybe. It was hero worship, that was all. Hero worship that had nearly convinced him a few times that actually kissing Jacob wouldn’t be so bad, and Rook already looked like a girl, so really, it was close enough.

Yeah, and if you’re thinking about any of this when he opens the door, it will be all over your face, so shut it, he lectured himself, but it was a much nicer topic than what he’d been dwelling on. He made his way down the rest of the hallway, rolling his shoulders to try get the eerie prickle of the nighttime quiet off of his back.

He knocked lightly on the door. That was usually enough. Then he found himself rehearsing what he was going to say. I promise I’m not trying to die this time. Nope, that involved actually admitting that he’d done it before. He might as well put on a broad grin and say, “Well, THIS one wasn’t a suicide attempt!” with two big thumbs up.

Actually, that had potential. For another time, though.

Can I talk to you?

Too open. Jacob might try to steer the conversation. Although that begged the question of what Rook actually wanted the conversation to be about. If he talked about how much pain he was in, he already knew how that would go. Why didn’t you tell me sooner? One, because he wanted to keep his job, and two, because he honestly hadn’t realized it was that weird. Nobody had really given him the down low on how human bodies were supposed to work. They’d just sort of dressed him up and given him an encouraging shove. You can’t be in that much pain all the time— No, Jacob wouldn’t ask that. Scheffen might. Olive… maybe. Jacob tended to take him at his word for things like that.

God. He sounded so confident about this, but now he was realizing Jacob wasn’t answering the door.

Come on, you didn’t piss him off that much.

You sure?

Rook swallowed, forcing himself to steady his breaths. Jacob had never deliberately ignored a knock, so what was more likely, Jacob suddenly turning into a whole different person or Jacob just not hearing him?

Tough question. Jacob had really good hearing.

No, stop, think. Jacob wasn’t always home. He just wasn’t thinking clearly. Jacob was —

With one of his girlfriends? snarled one of his voices. One of his own, at that, so he didn’t have any excuse but jealousy. The Others didn’t get this thorny about petty bullshit. What if Jacob was with a girlfriend? He didn’t care. Besides, it was just as likely he was at the Karella place.

Rook sighed, leaning his forehead against the door and trying to pretend he didn’t care if Jacob was with Tom Karella, either. As far as he knew, that was a platonic relationship, but he wondered sometimes. Frankly he was starting to suspect that it was safer to assume Jacob was sleeping with someone unless explicitly told otherwise. He should have fallen for someone shorter, or uglier.

He guiltily glanced upstairs. It was one thing pulling this when he only had himself to worry about — but he doubted Csindra was too pleased with him right now, anyway. Besides, they were well within range of each other. He couldn’t feel so much as a tug on the spell.

Rook whistled a few notes and heard Jacob’s lock click open on the other side. It was a trick that only worked if you actually knew what the lock looked like — otherwise Jacob’s apartment would have been vulnerable to just any thaum — but he was still proud of it. Jacob had actually made him break in a few times over to make sure his door was otherwise secure against magic, and now he could let himself in if he needed to. He still thought giving him a key would have been easier, but there was no accounting for paranoia.

He opened the door, and even though he’d known perfectly well, he still found his heart dropping a little at the sight of the empty flat.

You really wanted to talk to him.

“You sound surprised,” he mumbled back. He didn’t really need to mumble, now that he was inside and away from anyone who might overhear, but it still felt weird.

Not surprised. Just… interested. You care for him a great deal.

Maybe it was just the conversation from earlier getting to him, but Rook found himself blinking rapidly, furiously trying to stop tears from forming. Like a stupid girl after all. He sat down on the couch, curling up on his side and trying to ignore the voice. The problem was, especially now that he was alone in an apartment that wasn’t his but was almost as familiar, the voice was nearly as audible as a real person. That was the trouble with the Others. His own internal voices, well, those were easy enough. He wasn’t entirely sure they weren’t — something, not with the way he went at himself sometimes or couldn’t make up his mind about the most infuriating things, but it wasn’t like this. Like someone standing in the room next to him and talking straight into his ear.

<This embarrasses you. Why?>

“What are you, a fuckin’ interrogator?”

<Curious.>

Rook grabbed one of the sofa cushions, clutching it over his face. That wouldn’t keep it away, though — and this was still one of the better ones. He wondered, idly, if this was the same one from his dream about the ocean, then dismissed that thought with rapid horror. That was falling into the trap of treating them like they were real. “Because I’m supposed to like girls, dipshit, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

<And you don’t.>

Rook groaned into the pillow. This was just another version of a painstaking conversation he’d already had with himself plenty of times. Most of the time he barely even acknowledged that there was such thing as a closet that he may or may not be in. It was spending time with Csindra that was making that hard. Csindra was so — casually confident in being a lesbian, even without talking about it, and Rook was jealous. Of what, he couldn’t even explain. It wasn’t like Csindra was flirting with people in front of him or showed any particular success with women. She just… didn’t bother hiding it. Like Jacob.

<Some would say that the skirt counts as not hiding it.>

Rook found himself smiling into the pillow. “You’d think,” he said, voice muffled. “People are very stupid sometimes.”

<And your own denial?>

“I’m a people, aren’t I?”

<Surprisingly accurate.>

Surprisingly. Very funny. He pulled the pillow off of his face — then stopped. He knew when he wasn’t alone. He would have felt it in the air, heard something moving on the floorboards. Something. People left imprints.

So the person hovering above him wasn’t actually there.

Besides, there was another obvious tell. The face looking down at him was his. Not just a vague resemblance, like the odjaken; no, this face had the same pallid skin, the high cheekbones, the aquiline nose and slightly crooked jaw framed by stormcloud-grey hair. And he got the same lurch of unease that he always did when looking in the mirror, the sense of something out of phase, that he was looking through a tunnel and that the other side was another universe’s stranger.

He swallowed, mouth dry. “I haven’t uh… had these in a while.”

“No, you haven’t.”

The last time he’d had full hallucinations was… god. He wasn’t sure, actually. It’d been a mission, though. One he’d gone to alone, so not that long ago; but long enough that he’d almost forgotten.

He averted his eyes, frustrated tears coming back. Not real. That’s not real. Remember. You established that last time. If you lose your handle on that, you lose everything.

Not real. There were things that happened, and things that didn’t —

And suddenly the scream leapt to his throat, the slightest push from coming out.

Like demonbounds?

He was going to throw up.

Don’t look. Just don’t look and —

And what?

It’ll kill you. It’ll kill you because you can’t be sure anymore, you can’t trust it’s not real, you can’t, and you can’t trust your senses either which means you had the right idea before —

When he finally tore his eyes back to where the hallucination (he had to hold onto something) had been standing, there was nothing. He reached for his pocket, flipping out one of his knives – a switchblade, this time. Smaller, easier to hide. “Who are you?” he insisted. No way had it disappeared that quickly.

<Part of you. That’s all.>

“You’re still useless.”

<We mean you no harm.>

That was…

Actually, it was more comforting than it should have been. It told him a surprising amount. His heart was still hammering against his ribs, but especially in the dazed state he was in, he couldn’t quite summon up more of a response than the quiet settling that the Others were something. Maybe he was crazy. Scratch that, he was definitely crazy. Normal people didn’t have to hide this much from potential onlookers. But…

But there was some order to this. If he just figured out where to look.

“You promise?” he asked. It was the first thing that came to mind. It sounded so helplessly childish out loud.

<Promise. Would you like to sleep?>

No, part of him insisted. Yes, said another. And clearly the Others were listening to the second, because the exhaustion started to win. He put his head back down on the couch cushion. Jacob would be back in the morning.

And then what?

Your dreams are where we can speak the most freely; but that comes with a cost

              (blind deaf and dumb you are if you cannot understand the language of the clouds simple simple boy)

     but at least you can recognize our presence now. There are so many of us, bursting at the seams, trapped in too close proximity, and you wonder why you are so mercurial, so quick to temper, so full of extremes—

              (storms are made in the battles between us not in our peace treaties)

                        (izhya ethya ongye achye we call out for each other but in anger not in love)

                                  (drowning still and screaming with a mouth full of water that this is not what you wanted)

                                           (where is ongazhye — dimitri —)

I have tempered it where I can, but without help, even I am losing my grip.

I lied to you, but not out of malice.

My name is Ayakhoh.

But that means nothing to you. And so I hope it remains.

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Comments:

Whew, I’ve been looking forward to this chapter! Re: the epigraph, dementia praecox is an old term for schizophrenia (and other psychoses). And yes, if you’re plural and seeing yourself in this chapter – good. I’m plural myself and despite my best efforts, it creeps into everything!

Jacob and Tom’s relationship is one of my favourite side bits in TNB – Tom is a cis-heteromantic ace, but he and Jacob are… QPPs is probably a pretty close term. We so rarely see this kind of casual affection between men that it was sweet to write it.

Song: Sekai Wa Sude Ni Azamuki No Ue Ni (Instrumental)

Type your email…
Chapter 25: Poppy and Peridot

September 9th, 2022

CWs: drug use + related confrontation, self-harm (Bloodwork), casual racism, captivity(?), suicide attempt referenced, fantasy discrimination

BLACK GUARD: FACT OR FICTION?

The mystery prevails! Did Forrath’s special paramilitary force ever really exist? Tune in after these messages for an inside scoop with our very own Mick Abrams — where we’ll dig into the urban legend, the truth, the lies, and the juicy details. But first, a word from our sponsors over at Coca-Cola Pearl, the drink that keeps our soldiers awake, alert and ready to defend our country. Coca-Cola Pearl— for the nights you need a little something more.
Toltberg Citizen, March 1914 Broadcast

Rook had gotten, unfortunately, used to passing out. Technically, he didn’t usually faint. Fainting was a pretty specific thing; there were three kinds of syncope, more or less, including the type you read about in books where fragile maidens passed out at the sight of blood or at bad news. That he’d never gotten. There was cardiac syncope that old or sick people got, where their heart just had it out for them — then there was the one he did get here and there, where you’d just overexerted yourself. He supposed he could pass this one off as that, in a pinch.

As his blurred vision started to clear, though, he began to put the pieces together. Someone sitting on the armchair across from the couch, face still kind of obscured in the shadow and distorting, shifting light of the fireplace, and —

And his flask on the table.

Ah.

It was Jacob sitting across from him. And they were still at Den Riviere.

Well, he thought with a groan, at least I’m not dead.

Rook had gotten used to passing out, but it was another thing entirely that he hadn’t fainted. He’d fallen asleep. Adrenaline and coke only worked for so long, especially when there was opium in the mix, and the opium had won — sooner than he’d hoped, too. And now he had to figure out what the hell he was going to say.

Jacob sat back in the armchair, arms crossed. “I know you’re awake, Rook. Your breathing is different.”

I hate him so much sometimes, Rook thought with so much vehemence he thought Jacob might hear him. He opened his eyes the rest of the way, glancing around to see who else was there. Nobody in here — but he could hear voices in the other room. The tea room, he supposed. Just him and Jacob in the parlour.

“Can I pretend I’m still asleep?” he grumbled. “Everything hurts.”

“I expect it does.”

Rook tried not to wince. That wasn’t a voice that preluded praise. “I know who our killer is—”

“Do you?”

Rook fell silent. He didn’t like it when Jacob got that expression. Scheffen, he was used to pissing off. Jacob wasn’t his superior. Jacob rarely bothered telling him off seriously. A nudge here and there, sure. Friendly advice. But Jacob had only told him off seriously once or twice in his short memory, and none of them had been good. Whether or not he’d deserved them was besides the point, and he didn’t dwell on that part much. The sting of the reprimand was what stuck around.

“Well?” Jacob continued. “What’s his name? His motive? His shoe size?”

“I don’t see how the last one matters,” Rook mumbled. “But she’s a girl.”

“Oh, helpful.” Then Jacob sighed, rubbing his eyes. “No, okay, I’ll give you that. She’s a girl. What does she look like?”

And Rook hesitated. He didn’t want to. He didn’t mean to. But…

“Great.”

“Why are you so pissed at me?” Rook snapped. “Far as I can tell, I’m the only person so far to go toe to toe with her and survive.” God. He hadn’t expected to have to wake up and immediately defend himself.

“You’re lucky you did.”

“Lucky? I—”

Jacob picked up the flask.

Oh.

Shit.

Of the ‘top ten things he didn’t want to talk about’, Rook thought with a growl as he let his head fall back down onto the couch, his flask fell into about… four of them, easily. Which was bullshit, really. Csindra had already given him some trouble about the drugs he used to sleep, and Jacob wasn’t going to give him flak about weed or tobacco, not when half of the military stank of one or the other at the best of times. The fact that he used more than that, and for more things, didn’t seem like that big a deal.

Which perfectly explained why he didn’t tell anybody or felt so guilty about being caught. Obviously.

“What’s in this, Rook?” Jacob asked, in a voice that somewhat sounded like he already knew. Rook could try lying — but even if he’d thought it would work, he didn’t like lying to Jacob. He did it all the time, but actually doing it face to face over something like this — it felt different. It was a level of subterfuge that he couldn’t quite pull off.

“It’s — it’s just a bit of liquid courage.” That seemed like a safe enough half-truth.

“Liquid courage? Whiskey? So I’ll just have some, right—?”

The noise of alarm came out of Rook’s mouth before Jacob had even touched the cap. Jacob lowered his hand with a sigh, jaw set. “It was bad enough when I did think this was booze. Then Odette asked me about it. She figured you had permission. And of course she knows what laudanum smells like.”

“Great, so she ratted on me.” It was supposed to come out like a joke — and didn’t quite.

“She also doesn’t realize that it doesn’t matter if you outrank me on paper.”

“It should,” he mumbled, even more quietly.

“I don’t care. Why the hell are you carrying around a flask of laudanum? While you’re fighting demons?”

She’s not a demon, came the unbidden response, but how was he going to explain that? Instead, Rook eased himself upwards, wincing as he propped his back against the couch armrest. At least this was pain with a source, which was a nice change. “Red wine, laudanum, and Coca-Cola.”

“Coke?”

“The, uh… The Pearl stuff.” He cringed a little at the look on Jacob’s face — a steely kind of fury he’d rarely had occasion to see. Certainly this was his first taste of it being directed at him. “Give me some credit,” he added, although it rang a bit hollow. “I’m not carrying around enough laudanum to kill an elephant. There’s six drops of actual laudanum in that, max.”

“With Coke Pearl?”

The logic held up, theoretically. Coca-Cola had cocaine in it normally, but not a lot; it added a bit of zing to the caffeine, not much more than that. Coca-Cola Pearl was a military-issue variant with about three times as much coca leaf extract in it; enough to get you properly high. There was an argument somewhere in there that it was military-issue, but it was also meant for people on stakeouts and on the front-lines… and certainly not intended to be mixed.

Jacob shook his head, and Rook stifled the urge to scream. Anger he could handle. Disappointment was so much worse. “Christ, Rook. If you wanted to kill yourself, couldn’t you pick something faster?”

Rook’s heart tried to tear itself out through his throat, and he bit it back only with a lot of effort. Don’t react, don’t react, don’t react. He’d wondered if Jacob knew — if Scheffen had said anything. Apparently not. Jacob wouldn’t have said that if — Don’t react. Don’t. “I’m not trying to kill myself,” he managed to say after a moment, and it sounded convincing enough, and it wasn’t really a lie, even if he was on the brink of hysterical laughter while saying it. “I just — I was flagging. I —”

“Flagging? Rook, I could understand these on their own, or even any other time. While on a mission? During a fight?”

“That’s exactly why I needed it.”

“Needed it? Rook —” Then Jacob rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Rook,” he said after a moment, more quietly, “how long have you been taking this kind of crap?”

In for a goose, in for a gander, Rook supposed. “Kind of depends what you mean. I don’t normally drink it before fights, no.”

“Rook —”

“Do you want me to answer or not?”

“A lot of me doesn’t want to know.”

“Says the guy who comes to work with a hangover,” Rook shot back — and Jacob’s hand hit the table with a surprisingly loud noise.

“I drink when I’m off work, Rook! I go out after I’m done, and I go to a bar, and I drink, and the next morning I sometimes have a headache, but I’m not drinking when I’m working! If I was drunk when I needed to protect someone — pissen ridder, if I was drunk when I got that radio call from Djaneki — where on earth did you get the idea this was fine?”

I don’t think it’s fine, Rook thought to himself. He just didn’t know what else to say. If he admitted that he knew it was messed up then Jacob would tell him to stop, and then he’d be in pain when he needed to not be in pain, and that seemed a whole lot worse than being high.

“Even if it was booze, I think I’d understand more,” Jacob admitted. “I mean, you’re eighteen. I’ve caught privates gettin’ up to stupid shit. But laudanum? You take too much of that and you’re dead.”

“I know,” Rook mumbled.

“If you know, then what the hell is this?”

Rook closed his eyes. Jacob didn’t say anything else for a moment, then there was the sound of his boots on the floor. Rook thought he was walking away — but then there was a hand on his head, and when he opened his eyes again, Jacob was kneeling in front of him, arm resting on the sofa next to him, whatever anger there had been giving way to what Rook didn’t want to admit looked an awful lot like fear.

“What aren’t you telling me?”

Rook laughed and looked away from Jacob, because otherwise he’d be distracted reminding himself that kissing Jacob was both a terrible idea and not likely to get him out of trouble. “You’re not my dad, Jacob. I thought we’ve been over this.”

“You say that like I don’t do this for my friends.”

It was a good thing the firelight wasn’t illuminating the room that well, because Rook could feel the flush crawling across his cheeks. Give it up, he urged himself. There’s no good reason for anybody to take laudanum before a fight unless they’re an addict. Or you. “…I, um.” Shit. Where the hell did he start? “A lot, actually.”

“I figured. You keep the actual secrets well, but I know damn well you’re keeping them.”

Not for the first time, Rook wondered if he could just tell Jacob all of it. Jacob knew perfectly well that his familiar was just the one being; he could no more have kept that a secret from someone who practically lived with him than his packrat tendencies or his insomnia. But the outbursts of magic — the event that had made him leave for the Zweispars for so long — the other night with Csindra —

And then what? You see whether or not he buys into the same crap as everybody else in the military? You leave it up to chance?

Even admitting he was in pain was going to be hard to convince himself to do.

“It’s for pain relief,” he sighed… and chickened out. “I dislocated my shoulder back in Den Arden and it’s been bugging me. So the laudanum lets me fight through it and the Coke keeps me going. The wine’s mostly for taste.”

Jacob didn’t really buy it — Rook could tell that much. It wasn’t a very good lie, either. There hadn’t been anything about a dislocated shoulder in the Den Arden report, and anybody could tell from looking at his bare shoulder that there wasn’t enough bruising. Jacob had taken his jacket off, and his sleeves were full-length, but if he was getting checked out later, he’d get caught pretty quickly. Still, he seemed to accept it for now. “If you’re in that much pain, you shouldn’t be doing missions at all.”

Why do you think I don’t talk about it? Rook thought with no shortage of sarcasm. The military was the only place he was safe. Nobody looked for witches in the witch-hunter ranks. He’d suspected as much before; now he had the proof. “I know, I know. It’s not why I lost, though.”

“Can you tell that for sure?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“You can’t. I thought I taught you better than that. You cannot have an accurate judge of whether or not a situation would have gone the same way if you hadn’t been impaired. And because you were impaired, you can’t trust your judgment on your opponent either.”

“Now hold on a damn moment.” Rook sat up, swinging his legs around. “I might have been a bit high, but I know what I fucking saw, and I know this crap doesn’t fuck me up that badly—”

Shit.

Jacob raised an eyebrow. “Dislocated shoulder, huh?”

Rook hung his head, mostly just wanting to go back to sleep. “Can we focus on the part where this woman is terrifying and something to worry about? Save the lectures about my bad habits for another time?”

At first, he thought Jacob was going to say something else, keep the argument going — but then Jacob sighed, shoulders falling a little before easing himself backwards and pulling his feet out from underneath him, wrists leaning on his knees. “Okay. What is she?”

Rook chewed on the inside of his cheek. Jacob had asked what she’d looked like, and reasonably, there was no reason he couldn’t answer without implicating himself. Just… “If I don’t answer you,” he asked quietly, “you’ll understand it’s for a good reason. Right?”

Jacob had been tapping his thumb against his opposite wrist while listening— but then he stopped, listening intently. “You sound awfully confident for someone…”

He tried not to snort in derision. Jacob didn’t even want to finish the sentence. “Someone who drugged himself unconscious? I didn’t take nearly as much as you think.” That probably wasn’t entirely true, but it was close enough; he’d been getting more and more resistant to it, which was a whole other problem that he didn’t really want to get into. “I just — there’s some other stuff going on.”

“More secrets. You know you can trust me.”

“I do. Just… not enough.”

Rook hadn’t really thought about how that sounded, and to Jacob’s credit, he didn’t seem to be taking it too personally. There was a flicker of hurt on his face, but it didn’t stick around for long; his friend warring with the soldier. The two had never managed to stay particularly separate. “Sylvia wants to take you off the case.”

“Good luck with that. She’s the one who wanted me on it in the first place, and she doesn’t have any direct command over me.”

“She does, actually. Rank is rank, but she’s still your CO.”

“And this is joint with Investigations.”

“Do you really think Olive is going to go against Sylvia?”

“She might. I don’t think anybody else can handle this — What?”

Jacob was shaking his head. “Rook, I… Do you not understand what happened?”

A sudden chill ran down his spine. “I passed out. I’m injured, I can feel that much, but nothing terrible. Nothing I didn’t know about.”

“The whole estate was frozen over when Wolfie and I showed up. I don’t think you can handle this.”

Frozen over.

“Not — not just the portico?” Rook replied after a moment, voice a hoarse whisper.

Jacob shook his head. “That was clearly the epicenter, but no, there’s dead birds as far out as the orchard. Not too many, thankfully, but enough to show how far it went.”

Something rose, angry, in his chest. Something that wasn’t him —

Rook bit down on the inside of his cheek, squeezing his eyes shut at the jolt of pain. The sensation stopped, and when he opened his eyes, he did a quick once-over, tongue over his teeth, fingertips brushing over each other… No changes. The air temperature hadn’t changed. Alright.

“Talk to Sylvia. See what she says. But… I don’t know. I think —”

“Think what?”

“I think you need a break, Rook. You were supposed to be taking one in the Zweispars, and then you just kept doing missions.”

And you were supposed to be grateful! I did those missions and everybody was so thankful I did, and now what, you’re mad at me? He kept having to bite it back, because he knew Jacob was looking out for him, he knew none of it was actually condescension, but he couldn’t help but prickle at it all anyway.

“I’m going to go talk to Djaneki,” Jacob sighed. “You just… get some more rest. Wolfie should be back in here in a moment, and then we’ll bring the car closer in and get you to the hospital—”

“I don’t need the hospital, Jacob. I have a bruised nose, a couple scrapes and a puncture wound.”

“I don’t care. You’re still getting checked out.”

Rook grumbled something unpleasant under his breath, then watched Jacob walk away — with the flask in his hand, he noted with a sigh. Not that he was interested in taking any more. The headache was kicking in now, and it was — god, what time was it? Past midnight, according to the clock on the mantelpiece, but he had to squint to see it.

The odjaken.

He didn’t want to tell anyone about her. Which was ridiculous. She was a killer; that much was obvious. But…

Rook closed his eyes, throwing his arm over his face and making himself more comfortable on the couch. It wasn’t the hair, it wasn’t the eyes — although he hadn’t so much as seen her eyes, so who knew? It was the skin, and the face. Maybe Jacob was right and he was recalling things through too much of a haze to be accurate, but asking Csindra would clear that up pretty quickly. Plus… well, he had taken this enough to know. He might remember some things differently, or blank out some details, but he wouldn’t forget something like that, or make it up out of whole cloth. Besides, if he was going to conjure up someone like him, he’d go for something more obvious. White hair, white eyes. Not someone who just… had that tiniest amount of resemblance. Enough to frighten him. Enough to make the paranoia that already dogged his steps a little bit more unpleasant.

Where was his familiar? He raised his arm and glanced around — There he was, curled up next to the fire. God. For a moment, Rook had panicked, wondered if he’d died during the cold snap.

And the cold wasn’t from the odjaken, Rook. You know that.

No, he didn’t. There was no reason to think otherwise. None, except that the odjaken’s magic was hot and humid and salty when it wasn’t foetid and full of the smell of algae. But the cold and killing dark, the frost that had closed over him? The same frost that had came so close to his heart when he’d almost let the wraith kiss him?

Nobody looks for witches in the ranks of the witch-hunters.

How long was that going to protect him for?

Rook swallowed, his mouth dry as he forced himself to look the possibility in the eye. If — if — he was the same thing as the girl he’d fought, an odjaken, a demonbound, whatever word you wanted to use… wouldn’t he know? Demonbounds — well, they weren’t supposed to be real anyway, but he’d always had his doubts, especially with how the Advolk seemed to work. But in everything about them, they were products of deals with the devil. You had to become a demonbound. Csindra hadn’t said anything particularly different about odjakens, except that she seemed annoyed by the ‘devil’ side of it. Of course she was. She was clan. They worshipped the damn things.

You’re just lashing out at this point, the small, rational part of him said. Rational. That seemed like a stretch.

Rook glanced at the other room. Csindra wasn’t in there, but the Pawn spell meant he knew exactly where she was; outside, around the fountain. God. Had he really cast that many Grand Arcanum spells in short succession? He hadn’t been wrong when he’d told Jacob that the drugs weren’t the problem. He just… lost track, sometimes. No, the other room was just — Wolfie, Miss Odette and some of the staff. He was, for the most part, being left alone.

Carefully, he reached into his bag and pulled out the small, soft-leather pouch of his stones. Not everybody used them; some thaumatists got more out of them than others, and usually Sparks only used the ones that made crystal or glass, potential types of reflection and diffraction. Their other purpose was half-superstition; focus and concentration. For him, that seemed to be true, in part just because of how they felt. It didn’t work if he had gloves on or had tumbled all the texture out of whatever stone he had. The edges, the roughness, the little pieces of smooth in a shard — that was what helped, especially when he closed his eyes. This one was peridot.

Once more, just to be sure, he tried to check who was around, counting bodies without entirely turning his head. He was being silly. He was deliberately avoiding all of his structured magic, so when he tried to do something that required magic, nothing would happen. He knew how not to do Bloodwork — he wasn’t that far gone — and besides, he didn’t hurt too badly right now, not with the last remnants of opium still lingering in his system.

The question that came to his lips, very suddenly, was why he’d never done this before.

Don’t do it, came the sudden, warning voice that wasn’t his.

Why not? And he wasn’t going to listen to his own damn hallucinations about something like this.

I warned you.

He clasped the stone to his chest, heart pounding through his fingers and into the piece of peridot. And forming the thought in his head, like a single word, like a feeling, like four things at once, he thought — Freeze.

It happened so much faster than he thought it would. The stone turned into a chunk of ice in hand, and he opened his hand in alarm as the ice burned at his palms. Something blew at the fire in the hearth; the flames flickered, danced, began to die down as the temperature plummeted —

Stop it stop it stop it —

“Stop!” he shouted before he thought it through.

The wind vanished. The peridot, still cold, began to rise back to the temperature of his skin. He exhaled, trying to only allow himself to feel the relief that it had at least stopped, before feeling anything else. Then there was the sound of footsteps on the hardwood.

“What was that?” Wolfie’s voice came next. Better than Csindra’s or Jacob’s — but not by much.

Rook turned just enough to see Wolfie’s face. A year or two ago, Wolfie would have been able to see Rook’s lie a mile away. Now, it seemed, the tense smile that Rook managed was enough. “Oh, Bitey was getting nippy again.”

The Lieutenant didn’t seem entirely convinced, to be fair — but he seemed more annoyed than anything. “Keep it down, will you? The whole house is rattled as it is.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want to trouble the princess after saving her life.”

Wolfie didn’t manage to suppress the roll of his eyes. “And you’re back to being a twat. I hoped you’d gotten it out of your system.”

“It’s called a sense of humour.”

“It’s called you having a fit of adolescence. It was tiring when Phania did it, and it’s tiring from you too.”

Rook actually snickered at that despite himself. “…Okay, by the time you’re comparing me to a teenage girl, you might have a point. I think I need sleep.”

Wolfie glared at him for a moment, but then the stare cracked into a helpless grin, and he gave Rook a (very light, Rook noted with appreciation) smack on the back of the shoulder. “Next one to bite you will be me when you get snarly,” he added before leaving Rook alone.

Oh, why did he have to say that? Well, Rook contemplated while managing to keep his face straight, now he could worry about his other secret instead. He tucked the slowly-warming peridot into his pocket, and tried to ignore the scratching at his temple, like someone — or something — trying to get his attention.

The fountain on the front lawn of the Riviere estate was of the Drowned Bard. Csindra knew this story, at least; not that it was particularly easy to avoid at least the vague outlines of the Nine Heroes anywhere in Elessa. Considering how much work the Elessan government put into swearing it was secular and hated gods, it sure treated its folkloric heroes like deities. She could count on one hand the number of paintings of Kesh’lashe she’d seen in her lifetime, and this was the fourth sculpture of Proteus she’d seen just in Den Elessa.

She was tempted to break the damn thing.

Not because of Proteus, no. The legend itself was — well, she didn’t like it, but it depended who you asked. In most versions, Proteus was the rightful king of Elessa — or Torya, or Bjornelend, or sometimes even Avalon, but the actual names didn’t matter, it was all Elessa in the end — and in all of them, he was thrown into the ocean by usurpers. Usually, the Fisher King, who was either his uncle or his brother — and just as often, the Fisher King was talked into it by some strong-minded witch. The Thistle Queen, and the demons through her; or Grendel herself, or — Csindra’s mouth really turned sour at this one — Yasaralan, another of Grendel’s names. So either uppity women, clansfolk or both were responsible.

It said a lot about the Rivieres, she thought with a bitter kick at the fountain’s edge, that their statue of Proteus had a woman’s hands pulling him down into the water.

That wasn’t even what she was angry about. It just made for a convenient distraction so that she could stay in the realm of Irritable, Cranky and Tired instead of the deeper, much scarier rage tempting her underneath.

Rook had cast something on her.

She hadn’t noticed it before — Navónez knew why, but the scariest possible answer was that he was just that good. He hadn’t seemed like such hot shit back in Den Arden. Talented, sure. Caught her off guard with the Bloodwork. There was a difference between that and casting a Smoke enchantment on her, a lasting one, without her even knowing. She knew Smokes were capable of that, theoretically. She also knew her wards were usually good enough to stop it.

She sat down on the edge of the fountain, pressing a finger into one of her new wounds and making it bleed again. Everybody experienced magic differently; for her, it was a mix between different types of senses, none quite clear enough to put a finger on, blending in a way that was impossible to describe to others. It made it nearly impossible for her to collaborate with other magic-users, but that was fine by her — she didn’t really need to, or want to. Her wards were like… rough stone brick. She’d found the texture worked with her the best. Too smooth and her fingers slipped right off the textures in the air again, too irregular or thin and she could never quite make them fit together.

The wards, though, looked fine. Of course they were. If they’d actually broken, she would have felt it — mostly because, she admitted with a rueful note, one of her veins would have blown out. There were worse ways to reinforce a Cutter ward. Not… many, but there were. No, everything looked intact, so he’d just… gotten past them somehow. And she could find the crack, sure, but first she had to stop being so fucking angry.

She closed her eyes, trying to control her temper. Trying to feel less like an animal on a chain. That was what it looked like, tied to her shoulder like a golden thread, the nature of the spell or its ingredients hidden to her but woven somewhere into the thread itself for those who had the knowledge to understand it.

She’d known they weren’t friends. Not really. Not when she’d practically threatened him into helping her with the odjaken on the down-low. And he wasn’t the friends type; that much was obvious from the state of his apartment. But the part of her that always struggled with the concept had still — kind of hoped for some trust, or at least that the chains she could see were the only ones she had to worry about. And after the word bondsman had come up —

She waved the wards away with a lump in her throat. She’d probably be able to find a way to break it, given enough time. It was already an odd enough spell; she knew binding spells well enough, but this one had stopped her just before reaching the gate like hitting an invisible wall, and for the life of her, she couldn’t remember hitting that wall before. She’d definitely been farther away from him even upstairs. That wasn’t how these spells usually worked, but then again, Rook wasn’t your everyday thaumatist. And what wasn’t strange about casting what was essentially a magic fucking ball and chain on somebody who’d already promised to work with you?

“Want a smoke?”

Csindra started, then scowled at the figure coming out of the darkness, the lights on the fountain throwing Lambert’s face into relief as he got closer. “Not the person I want to see.”

Jacob blinked, cigarette halfway to his mouth. “What’d I do?”

“Convinced me to fucking stay is what.”

Jacob didn’t have the speedy or witty answer that she’d hoped — and it was embarrassing realizing she’d wanted him to convince her back into staying, too. At least into feeling good about it. “Teach me to assume he’ll do the smart thing, I guess. Sorry,” he added, leaning on the fountain-edge next to her.

“Fucking — He told you?”

He hesitated a little too long before saying yes, and the dark temper that had been so hard to suppress already finally burst out. She slammed her fist down on the fountain brick — and involuntarily, a pulse of flame shot out towards Jacob. He dodged just in time, which was good. She had enough to worry about without someone else’s injuries on her conscience. Still… “You knew, didn’t you?” she seethed. “You pulled that whole routine—”

“What? Ridder, no, I —” He sighed, looking guilty again. “I’m a dick, I’m not that much of a dick. I never would’ve signed off on that. Officially or otherwise.”

“Makes me wonder what you do sign off on,” she grumbled, in part to hide her embarrassment as she tried to coax her nerves back down from flaring. She hadn’t missed how buddy-buddy he was with the Rivieres that he was supposed to be so scared of. Then as she flexed her hand, rubbing her thumb over the lines, it occurred to her — had he started moving before the flames burst out? Before or after? “…You were looking,” she said after a moment, voice quieting. She glanced up through her hair to see if she was right.

Jacob shrugged, giving her a small and sheepish smile as he sat back down and handed her a cigarette. “I’m sure you’ll claim you don’t smoke, but your coat smells of bac and unless you sell it on the side…” He let it hang there with a knowing raise of his eyebrows, and she just chuckled and accepted it. She’d been trying to stop. Probably hadn’t helped with the nerves, and maybe if she’d been dealing with less, she would actually have said no.

“Bac,” she repeated, trying not to sound too entertained. “First I find out you’re a thaumatist, and now that you’re from Alkmer.”

“Born Red River, but that’s practically the same thing.”

“Does Rook know you’re a thaumatist? I thought it’d have come up.”

Jacob wiggled his hand. “I’m not, actually. I just, uh —” He pulled a face. “Uh, I don’t go spreadin’ it around.”

“Why not? Seems like they get plenty of respect.”

“Yeah, I would, if I could use it. I can’t. I can just see it fine.”

Csindra blinked. “What, just… on your own?”

“Most of the time, yeah.” He gave a nonchalant gesture. “S’just how it worked out.”

She sincerely doubted it was just how it happened to work — but there was probably a story behind it, and frankly, she was intrigued enough by the details alone. “So you didn’t know about Rook casting something on me until just now.”

“Pretty much. I thought I saw something earlier but you know how it is with magic. There’s always a lot floating around people who use it a lot.”

“Is there?” She couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice — or the little note of wonder. It was a little embarrassing, especially when Jacob couldn’t hide the small, equally embarrassed grin. He clearly didn’t get to talk about it much.

“Yeah. Strongest with Bloodwork, obviously. You guys carry it around with you like — well, like the smell of bac, honestly.”

“So you know who the secret Cutters are,” she drawled.

He flinched a little at that. “Unfortunately. Kinda have to keep my mouth shut, though.”

“You don’t arrest them, get your quotas up?” She was mostly joking, but she was still a little surprised at the grimace on his face.

“Be a little hard, given how many of them outrank me. The only one I could say anything to safely would be Rook, and let’s — you know, qualify safely there a little,” he added with a snort.

Csindra was pretty sure he was joking about Rook’s temper, but it still switched something over in her brain.

Jacob could see magic.

The thing that she’d had to actively look for, the thing that had taken her Bloodwork to see —

She was still stinging, so all she had to do was flick up one of her fingers and let a small flame dance on it, a tiny amount of fury concentrated into a spark. She held it to the end of the borrowed cigarette, taking a long drag – but then she flicked the spark outwards. “Zhìh’te vol.” She said it with such quiet confidence that it took Lambert longer than it might have to realize she’d cast a silence ward; both very quickly, and very smoothly.

“Bloody hell, you’re scary,” he muttered, tensing up noticeably. She was starting to think he didn’t like Cutters — although plenty of people didn’t, so that didn’t make him special.

“Never met a quiet Cutter before?”

“No, never met a Cutter who can do wards that fucking fast. Rook downplayed how good you are.”

“Rook doesn’t know how good I am. Neither do you.”

Lambert took that for the warning it was intended as, it seemed, although there was still a bit of a playful sparkle in his eye when he finally answered. “So you’re interrogating me, is that what’s happening?”

“Sort of.” She blew out a puff of smoke. “Were you ever planning on fucking telling Rook?”

“Telling him wh—” This time, he did stop himself upon seeing her face. “Ah. Let me rephrase. What is it you think I should be telling him?”

“If I knew the details, Lambert, I wouldn’t be here. But he’s a — what do you call it — a demonbound, or something close to it, isn’t he?”

He paused, watching her for a moment. “Ah.” Then Jacob took off his sunglasses, toying with them in his hand and exhaling. “I… I have no fucking clue.”

That —

That wasn’t what she’d expected.

“But you can see it.”

“I can now.” He gave her a wry look. “I couldn’t before he left. Not consistently, anyway.”

“Before he left?”

“Before he went down south.”

Before he’d come to the Zweispars.

Csindra lowered the cigarette, frowning. This wasn’t the first, or even the second time she’d run into the shadow of something — something she was missing, or had missed. The idea that the Rook she’d met wasn’t entirely the same person who everyone else had grown up with. “Nothing before that?”

“Wouldn’t say nothing. Not consistently. But you fish a kid from the ocean, you expect a bit of oddity. Sylvia kept her mouth shut, but I ain’t stupid. One of the reasons she was so quick to teach him magic was so he’d have an excuse — he’d be good at that instead of whatever else it is that comes naturally to him.”

“This is all, what, conjuncture?”

“Con —” He hid his smile. “Conjecture. Pretty much. He never did anything obvious.” The smile vanished. “Except you’re bringing it up.”

“Don’t ask if you don’t want to know.”

“Was this him?”

“Depends what part you’re askin’ about. What happened a month ago?”

Jacob looked more than a little irritated about the fact that she hadn’t answered him, but he was smart enough not to push, and she wasn’t in the mood to rat out just how out of control Rook’s magic was. “Before he left?”

“Yeah. His birthday, right?”

“Nothing as far as I know, but his actual birthday was while he was down south. Pissed me and Tom off something grand, mind you.”

“What? Why?”

“Why do you think? It’s his eighteenth birthday. And we’ve been too damn busy ever since he got back—” He stopped himself. “What are you smiling at?”

She raised an eyebrow at him, not even bothering to hide her expression. Jacob had gotten almost entirely distracted from any actual anger at the kid into being disappointed that he couldn’t spoil him. No wonder Rook had it bad. And this idiot’s clueless, huh? “Just… Don’t worry about it.” But then it occurred to her exactly why Rook might have fled the city. His room.

Did Jacob know? No, he didn’t seem to. It was possible he just wasn’t saying anything, but her bet was that if Jacob had any idea that Rook had tried to kill himself, he wouldn’t have let him out of arm’s reach.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Me? I don’t fuck with this stuff. I have no clue what to do. Never have.”

“You can see it—”

“Yeah, a bunch of pretty colours. Don’t ask me for answers. That’s —” He exhaled. “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?”

“Hmph. So you put that together.”

“Rook doesn’t work with partners.”

“Right. About that — what does consistently mean? When you say you didn’t see it consistently.”

“You really are interrogating me.”

“It’s why he hired me, bizakh’, so work with me here.”

“I know what that one means,” Jacob grumbled back at her, but shifted his stance slightly, his discomfort showing. She wondered where it was coming from, although she had a few guesses. She gave the silence ward a quick test, just to check; but between how vague they were keeping most of it and the fact that anybody actually important was inside, the only person Jacob had to worry about was — well, her.

Csindra supposed that was fair, honestly. Especially since, thinking about it, from Jacob’s perspective, Rook had probably come back ten times more unstable with her in tow. Didn’t help the whole trust angle.

Yeah, and he’s fucking military. Don’t forget that. Just because he’s not consciously treating you like scum—

Csindra batted it away. She wasn’t going to get anywhere, with anybody, if she was falling back on that every two seconds.

“You know that if this gets out,” he said after a moment, “there’s not a damn thing I can do for him.”

“Yeah. You saw what I was reading on the bus.”

“Leshin shar, I was hoping that wasn’t why.” He ran a hand through his hair, and Csindra tried not to notice the twitch at the corner of his mouth, the stress building in the way he was sitting. Even little details that she wasn’t supposed to notice, even by the standards of a merc; leshin shar wasn’t standard even for Alkmeri dialect, as far as she knew, and he hadn’t said anything like leshin shar or bac before. She wasn’t sure when she’d started picking up so much about people. It wasn’t the kind of ridiculous hyperobservance that detective novels liked to play up. She couldn’t immediately intuit what it meant. But it was information, and information she would keep, whether she meant to or not. “Nah, before he left, it was all — glimmers. Nothing ever actually happened. I’d just see it in the background.”

“Rook said something about — someone getting hurt.”

“That wasn’t fe— that wasn’t whatever this is.”

Csindra noted, with a sigh of frustration, that apparently Rook’s aversion to calling whatever he was doing feral magic, let alone its real name, came from somewhere. “You’re sure?”

“Very sure.” Then Jacob gave her a serious, searching look. “You seem… less concerned about this than I thought you’d be.”

“Benefits of being Kanet’, I guess.”

“So it’s true, huh?”

He hadn’t said it unkindly — if anything, with a hint of amusement — but she felt her hackles rising anyway. “What, that we’re demon-worshippers?”

“Not what I meant,” he sighed. “I’ve met enough Dani’it to know what you actually think about demons. Generally speakin’, anyway.”

“They’re not demons.”

“No, but I can’t pronounce the other word for love nor fuckin’ money and I’d rather not give you another reason to laugh at me.”

“O—” She suppressed the urge to groan. Loudly. “Odjanin. Od-ya-nin. It’s not hard.”

“I’m Alkmeri. I specialize in butcherin’ language.” He was grinning at her. The bastard.

Especially because she was, despite everything, feeling better.

She hated him a little.

She crossed her arms, glaring at him and refusing to show the smile on her face like she wanted to. “I’m concerned plenty. I’m tied at the hip to someone with temper issues and the ability to use magic that could eat me for dinner. Unlike you, I know that the magic isn’t gonna go out of its way to do it.”

“If I thought that, I wouldn’t be protecting him, you know.”

That was… a very good point. “Not just because you like him?”

Jacob shrugged, lips lifting in a warm smile as his eyes wandered off a bit. “I mean, that too. But I dunno if they’re that different.” He moved on from that before she could react to what was a much, much bigger thing to say than he seemed to realize. “Satisfied now?”

“Not even remotely. I can’t quite wrap my head around you just sitting around and letting a demonbound — vol I hate that word — work for the military.”

“I don’t know why Sylvia does half of what she does, but I’m not out to rat on people. Certainly when he’s never done anything wrong.”

Csindra nearly asked about whoever had gotten hurt — then closed her mouth.

Jacob was very, very insistent that it hadn’t been feral magic. That was, she realized, a good thing. He couldn’t claim Rook wasn’t dangerous — because soldiers were dangerous, because the record showed differently, because that was a lie. But she could appreciate the difference between a dangerous thaumatist and a dangerous witch, and apparently, so could he.

Jacob was watching her again. Not just watching; examining. She could see it in his face — and even as she thought it, he stood up and slid his sunglasses back on. She wasn’t sure why he wore them, even at night, but it was particularly noticeable now. “I gotta ask,” he admitted. “I like selfless people as much as the next guy. But I really don’t understand what you’re getting out of this.”

“Don’t call me selfless,” she groaned, taking another drag on the cigarette and appreciating that the nicotine was taking the edges off her temper. She didn’t want to snap Rook’s neck anymore, at least. “I’m getting paid and you’re the one who talked me into staying. Didn’t think he’d put a chain on me.”

He winced in sympathy. “I’m not sure he meant well covers that, huh?”

“Not even slightly, but you get points for effort. I’ll kick his ass until he takes it off, it’s fine.” It wasn’t, but what else was new? It wasn’t like she and Rook’s working relationship had been founded on love and trust to begin with. “You seem surprised.”

“I keep thinking you’re gonna run for the hills or slit his throat.”

“What, ‘cause I’m a criminal?”

“It’s what I would’ve done. First one more than the second.” He scratched at his cheek. “But you’re right. And besides, you don’t seem in a huge rush to get back to… where was it? Tenton?”

“Yeah. Middle of fuckin’ nowhere.”

She couldn’t read his expression, and that was setting her back on edge all over again. She dispelled the ward, trying to brush off the uncertainty, the sense that she was missing something. She kept getting… relaxed. Thinking he was just another guy, another person she could hang out with.

“Oh, by the way, real quick.”

“What?” She stirred herself out of it. Jacob was grinning again.

“Can you do me a favour?”

“Uh. Maybe.”

“Don’t tell Rook I can see magic, yeah? I’ve been keeping that one under my hat for a while.”

She narrowed her eyes. “…Why?”

“Cause as far as he’s concerned I just have a sixth sense for whenever he’s doing shit he shouldn’t be.”

She groaned, shoulders falling. “That’s — You’re not serious.”

“I might not be his dad, but I am the… Okay, both responsible and adult are complete lies. If I was, I wouldn’t enjoy making him blush so much.”

One day, I’m going to have to kick you, and you’ll have to trust me that you deserve it, Csindra thought with a quiet, pitying snort.

Jacob’s radio flickered to life with a burst of static. “Center Lead, this is Red Team. We’ve got activity at the docks, over.”

He picked up the radio. “This is Center Lead Lambert. What kind of activity?”

“We’ve been approached directly by somebody offering information, sir.”

Jacob scowled. “Most obvious trap I’ve ever heard of,” he grumbled, then pressed the talk button. “Description?”

“Clansman, late teens-early twenties. Further information may put him at risk, sir.”

“That’s true,” he grumbled, mood visibly sinking. “Hold your position, Red Team, and keep him in custody. I’m on my way. Over.”

“Sir, have you slept?”

“…Of course I have,” Jacob mumbled into the radio. Unconvincingly. “That’s not the point, Ma— Marti—” He paused, collecting himself for a moment. “My sleep habits are not your problem.”

“Go to bed, Jacob. I’m perfectly capable of keeping things under control for a few hours.”

Even in the dim light, Csindra could see the flush on Jacob’s cheeks, and she couldn’t quite repress her chuckle. Jacob flipped the bird at her before sighing, and pressing the button one last time. “Fine. But I should write you up for breaking radio protocol.”

“You?”

“I said I should. Not that I will. Over and out.” Then he glared at her. “What?”

Csindra shrugged, arms loosely crossed. “So how long have you been sleeping with her?”

“…Month or two, on and off. Nothing serious.” Then Jacob swatted her lightly on the back of the head. “Not your business, Djaneki.”

“Not my — You have the subtlety of a brick!”

“Yeah, yeah,” he grumbled, still blushing a little. “Wolfie’ll take both of you home, okay? He doesn’t want to go to a hospital, I won’t make him, but keep an eye on him. And please don’t kill him.”

“No promises.”

She stayed outside while he walked back down the path to the house, watching him with a growing sense of unease. Not over Lambert — no, he seemed like a good guy, and even though he was still keeping some cards close to his chest, that was only to be expected. Plus, he didn’t have the skills to run the kind of experiment she’d suspected. She wouldn’t put it past the military — but it was above his pay-grade. Whether it was above Scheffen’s… she’d have to find out.

The part that was bothering her the most was the timeline. Bullying from another soldier, the start of his flare-ups, and then… something had happened. She was pretty sure she knew what.

Rook hadn’t killed or hurt anybody else in that room, the room he still wouldn’t go back into. He’d tried to kill himself. And Jacob didn’t know.

“My question,” she murmured to no one in particular, “is why didn’t it work? You’re a soldier, Rook. You kill people for a living.” If Rook wanted to die so badly, and she felt awful for thinking it, but it was true — he had no real shortage of options. He’d taken something, before fighting the odjaken; and now that she was thinking about it, it would be so easy for him to take too much, wouldn’t it? A gun, a knife, drugs, train tracks, even a short drop and a sudden stop.

Thinking about it was making her kind of queasy. Especially because he’d been down in the Zweispars for a month before running into her. There was every chance even he didn’t know why he hadn’t tried again. Kesh’lashe knew she wondered the same for herself, from time to time. The truth was that even trying to die took more energy than just…existing.

She pushed, experimentally, against the spell one last time. Not really to break it, this time. Just to feel the threads winding around her arm again, get a sense for its rules; it got looser and faded as two figures came out of the front door. She was still pissed. She was still going to deeply consider beating the shit out of him. Mostly, though, she wanted to know what scared him so badly about just asking someone not to leave.

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This is another portion that got rewritten a number of times – Csindra and Jacob’s chemistry is important to me, but so is the hesitation from both of them. Even more so, the reveal about Rook’s spell took some work! Cause I doubt most people would react well to that, let alone someone like Csindra.

Sorry about all the late updates recently! We’re shifting to a weekly schedule and that has obvious consequences for my organization – so hold tight as I get used to it.

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Chapter 24: Melting Point

August 15th, 2022

CWs: opioid and stimulant drug use (+discussion of), guns, implied human trafficking, subtle/microaggressive racism, racial profiling, self-harm scars

And bitter waes the breath and braying on Brunhilde’s soul
Whyn all she had waes lost or loathed or reveled as common cole
her crowne she’d kep for good or ill, no kept courtisane she’d be
so the fisher-childe’s blood she spilt into the midden greene
and from the bones she call’d the Torre, wicked and divine
she sold what vertue left she haed to be of Grendele’s kind

Demon-bound and demon-borne, paid for in children’s breath
And the Thistle Quene died in the Torre – with only hatrede left.
Brunhilde and the Bony Torre, by John Anselsohn Partridge

The radio chimed in one at a time, with coded responses from each of the teams that added up to much the same thing; none of them had seen Mary-Ann Daniels, and Jacob had long since stopped worrying about his career and moved onto a much more immediate fear that Coben Garrow was going to show up as a corpse and it’d be his fault. Before now, he’d still kind of wondered how much danger Coben was in. A manor family might have killed him, but he couldn’t see them going to all the trouble of an abduction if he was just going to die anyway.

But Advolk —

“Jacob, calm down,” Sylvia demanded, which at least got him to stop pacing. And he’d already punched the wall once. “At least you identified her.”

“Aye, late. I had her cornered, I knew something was up, and I let her go—”

“We’ll find her.”

Advolk. Fucking Advolk. He’d given her so much benefit of the doubt, because —

— sieben vervloekte, because he was trying not to repeat the same mistakes again. He didn’t need any more blood on his hands. But he’d overdone it. Ignored all of the things that were suspicious, that were an issue, because of his own stupid guilt, and besides, besides, what was he doing, trying to opt out of assumptions that worked?

Because they don’t, some small voice reminded him. And then — Fuck, why did she have to be Advolk? Because he’d liked her. She had the same kind of sharpness about her that Rook did, an apparent need to show off just a little paired with the confidence that she was just as good as she thought it was. He just forgot, sometimes, that his enemies could be just as likable as his friends. He’d been in the 214th for a decade. He knew Advolk. He knew the signs of their attacks, their influence. And he’d still fallen for it. Why?

“Police has a full perimeter set up around the city, and our teams are still in place to observe.”

That was true. He just… could have avoided this. He leaned his hands on one of the desks, hanging his head and trying to stop kicking himself.

Sylvia bent over the desk and lifted his chin with an air of command. “We have not lost him. We know she’s Advolk now. And we have her name.”

“I doubt ‘s her real name,” Jacob replied sourly. Then he glared over at Wolfie. “Ye kent—” He closed his eyes for a moment. “You knew about Coben seeing someone and you didn’t so much as run a background check?”

Wolfie pulled off his mask with a groan of frustration. “What do you take me for? I’ve been dodging assassination attempts since I was seven. Of course I ran a background check. Of course it’s a fake name. She’s Kanetan, they do that all the time when leaving Etamara.”

“So she is from Etamara.”

“Far as I could tell. Some town called Tenton.”

Sylvia wrinkled her nose. “Just likely as to be made up as the rest of her, really. You should have kept a closer eye on her.”

“Coben isn’t actually useless,” Wolfie protested. “It’s just safer to let people think so.”

“I’ve met the lid,” Jacob grumbled. “He ain’t exactly blessed wi’ ‘n overabundance of wit.”

“If she got past me, you, and the Richteran Guard,” Wolfie shot back, more than a hint of anger in his voice now, “she’s not exactly small potatoes, is she?”

“Enough!” Sylvia raised her voice. “We—”

The radio flickered to life again. Jacob expected to hear from one of the teams — instead, a low contralto came through the static, a voice he recognized but couldn’t quite place. “NatSec! NatSec, do you read? Major Scheffen?”

Sylvia picked up the radio with a frown. “This is Major Scheffen. Identify yourself. Ov—”

“It’s Djaneki!”

Sylvia’s eyes darted up to Jacob in sudden silent fear. The Rivieres, she mouthed.

The—

Oh, bloody fucking hell.

“We’re at—”

“I know perfectly well where you are, Djaneki, stay quiet.” Sylvia interrupted her before she could say anything. “Hold your position. Are you hurt?”

“Not really, but Rook…”

Sylvia’s face paled. Not because Rook was hurt; that alone wouldn’t have worried her beyond the normal. But Csindra hadn’t said that. She’d paused, scared. “Hold your position, Sergeant.” She flicked off the radio. “Jacob—”

She didn’t need to say anything else. He was already halfway out of the door, cursing everything about today. Mary-Ann would have to wait, because — because, shit, Jacob knew more than he was supposed to.

“Hold on, I’m coming with you!” Wolfie ran after him, panting slightly. “The Major says she’ll man the teams.”

Which also meant she could keep things quiet where she could. Jacob just nodded, too breathless to think too much about Wolfie being there. Djaneki didn’t rattle easy. He’d only met her a handful of times, but she was tough. What the hell had scared her so badly?

“Where are we going?”

“Den Riviere. They were staking out that killer.”

“Oh, damn. Okay. So—”

“Shut your gob and get in the damn car before I run you over.” Mean, maybe, but he was still sore about Mary-Ann. And…

You from Etamara, little one?

Yeah, Tenton.

He wasn’t going to think about that yet. One thing at a time.

To his credit, Wolfie actually complied, even pulling out his service pistol and loading it while Jacob slid behind the wheel, engine already vibrating. Wolfie had three guns, at least that Jacob knew about — the Browning 1910 that served as the military standard, an old modified R&G Model 1898, and the one in his hands – a Mauser C96, with a Smokework symbol already engraved into its wooden grip. “What do you know?”

“Not much. Not my case.”

“You make it your business to know everything.”

“You’re thinking of the Major,” Jacob mumbled distractedly. Den Riviere was farther than he would have liked — not that far, but it was still a bit of a world unto its own. He tried to focus just on driving, but he found himself swearing under his breath. Was Odette at Den Riviere? She probably was. She kept talking about actually moving in with her husband, but she’d been doing that for months. He couldn’t be worried about Rook and Odette. Do I say anything?

“She’s there. Sorry.”

“Who?” Jacob tried to brush off —

“You keep forgetting we all know each other,” Wolfie murmured with a small grin. He was doing more than inspecting his guns, Jacob realized; he was checking over his Smokework wicks. Some were pre-tied bundles of plant matter — others were clusters of incense sticks, all with small, handwritten labels and a heady, lingering medley of smells that didn’t quite make his eyes sting but was enough to be noticeable. “I haven’t talked to her in a while, but last I heard she keeps putting off Aloysius by askin’ him to make changes to Den Weiss. Which he’ll never do.”

Jacob couldn’t follow most of what Wolfie was saying, but that was fine. He could only drive so fast. Some of him wanted desperately to ask Wolfie if he knew that Rook was something else, something special — but the truth was, Jacob didn’t even know more than that. Just that Rook was something. And explaining to Wolfie how he knew meant explaining his relationship with magic, which was more thinking than he could handle right at this moment.

“Lambert, check in.” Sylvia. She was getting worried.

Wolfie picked up the radio for him as they pulled down the long driveway towards Den Riviere. “Approaching now. No s…”

The two of them fell equally silent at the same time. Jacob got as close as he dared, until the tires started to slide on the ground, then came to a stop.

The wrought-iron gates had been entirely blown off their hinges. That was bad enough. Jacob had never seen them so carelessly left before; he’d been to Den Riviere plenty of times, whether to see Mr. Riviere himself or to spend time with Odette.

The tires —

He felt the cold the moment he opened the car door If they hadn’t taken one of the covered ones, they would have noticed right away. The wheels hadn’t been sliding in water or mud; the gravel was covered with a thin, nearly-clear layer of ice. The tires had slid only half an inch before cracking through what of it there was, and when Jacob and Wolfie’s boots hit the surface, more cracks radiated out from underneath them.

“It wasn’t this cold when we left the Centrum, was it?” Wolfie asked uncertainly.

“Maybe,” Jacob said noncommittally. Then — “I don’t think so. It’s not cold enough now.”

Wolfie nodded, jaw set, then silently handed Jacob the gas mask he’d been wearing at the office and pulled his own mask over his head. When Wolfie got quiet, that said plenty. That was when you needed to worry.

Jacob checked his gun, then tucked it back into his holster. He held the mask — but didn’t put it on, as he walked through the gates with the ice cracking under his boots. There was something strange in the air, almost a static hum; he wasn’t sure, actually, if Wolfie could hear it. Usually his sensory oddities were visual. Usually.

The high gates were held up by two stone columns, the rest of the stone walls circling the estate out from them. As Jacob crossed between them, he felt the temperature drop a little more, but not enough to do more than make him shiver in his uniform jacket. Den Elessa got cold — but not this cold. Not in the summer. The front field was covered in frost that glittered in the low afternoon sun. The hedges, the grass, the orchard leaves…. Even the marble fountain was frozen, the water still determinedly piping from the top but breaking through the verglas on the basin’s surface with a quiet, steady crackle.

The good news, he supposed, was that it was melting. The icicles hanging from the stone Proteus’s nose on the fountain were scary to look at, but icicles were a symptom of meltwater, not killing frost. Whatever had come through here was gone. This was just the wake of its passing.

Jacob glanced back at Wolfie, who was silent behind his wolf’s-eyes. Wolfie hadn’t hesitated to put the mask on, because, like most people, like most thaumatists who weren’t looking for it, or casting anything — he couldn’t see or hear magic. You had to try, which meant you had to know what to look for, and even then magic liked to hide. That was how it was supposed to work.

“Lambert, just put the damn thing on,” Wolfie sighed through the mask —

“Hold on.” He didn’t know how he was going to explain it to Wolfie, or if he’d even have to bother coming up with an excuse. Something was gone; the big thing, at least. Something was still here, though. He pulled the radio out from Wolfie’s side holster. “Djaneki, this is Lambert. Where are you?”

“Third floor with Miss Odette. Is it safe?”

Safe? Did Djaneki not know? Or — he thought grimly — she was being circumspect on purpose. The truth was, the whole ‘feral magic killer’ thing had been bothering him from the beginning. He only knew the outlines of it anyway; it needed a thaumatist, and he was as far from one as it got. But he hadn’t voiced to Sylvia his concern that throwing Rook up against feral magic that seemed to have real, malicious intelligence was a bad idea, and now he was wishing he had. Don’t jump to conclusions. You’re not a thaumatist, and you and ferals are a bad combination at the best of times.

He chewed on his lip. “We’ll be up in a moment once we’ve cleared the outside. Stay put.”

“How’s Rook?”

“I’ll update you when I can.”

She hadn’t looked outside. And Rook wasn’t with her. Jacob tried to still the sudden thrumming in his chest, but was interrupted by Wolfie’s hand on his arm, squeezing in nearly as much panic as he was feeling.

“Where the hell is he?” Wolfie asked, voice muffled through the mask.

Jacob pushed Wolfie’s hand down, gesturing to him to relax. “Cool it, Achielsohn. Don’t freak out on me now.” Like he wasn’t freaking out just as much. Neither of them could help it — Rook might complain about how he was an adult now, but he was still the baby, the one who could take care of himself just fine, but shouldn’t have to.

The two of them advanced towards the house. Wolfie had already pulled out one of his wicks, although Jacob couldn’t identify it — for himself, Jacob had his hand on his gun. He had a Browning, too, but he preferred Vera for his everyday work. She was theoretically a Mauser like Wolfie’s — a gwēi-chúo, although Wolfie probably had never even heard the word — but his was a Schnellfeuer Red 9, which meant that if he wanted to turn someone to dust in a few seconds flat, he could. If he had to.

It wasn’t helping, he thought, that he’d been dwelling on the past. Everything was so quiet. Deathly still. Knowing that Djaneki and Odette were alive somewhere in the house helped; it didn’t quite shake the feeling that he was walking towards a house of corpses—

He paused. The colonnade of the front porch was in front of them. The half-circle of steps was running with rivulets of meltwater, the entire porch covered with thick, crumbling ice —

—and in the center of it all, a small body, almost floating in the steadily-melting frost.

“Rook!” The name tore itself from his lips before he could think it through, and his feet nearly slid out from under him as he crossed the ice — but most of it was slush, now. He was more worried about how long Rook might have been out here. How long had it taken for them to get here from the Centrum? Ten, twenty minutes? He wasn’t good at gaging time. One of his major flaws — no matter what he did, he couldn’t fix his internal clock.

He dropped down next to Rook, fingers fumbling to put away his gun and hands sliding into the cold water to try lift Rook out. His fingers brushed against something unexpected — he started back, then realized that there was a small serpentine head resting at Rook’s neck, the rest of the snake’s body underneath Rook’s head. In the freezing water.

“Leshin shar, you’re cold-blooded,” he muttered, and eased the snake carefully onto Rook’s chest before lifting them both out of the water. The fact that Rook’s familiar was alive was incredible — and hopefully a good sign. There was no real reason to assume the two were linked, but he’d always kind of assumed so.

He looked around, trying to figure out where to put Rook down that wasn’t ice or water, but Wolfie beat him to it; he pulled off his longcoat and lay it on one of the few places of the porch that was showing actual stone-and-tile. It was soaked almost immediately, but it was still better than putting him down straight on ice or cold stone.

“Thanks,” Jacob mumbled.

Wolfie pulled off the mask, dirty-blond hair falling free and eyes wide as he looked over Rook. “What happened? I’ve never seen him like this.”

“Hypothermia, I think,” Jacob said distractedly. More than that — he was bleeding, although the cold had kept it under control. Injury on his leg, another on his hand — Whatever he’d been fighting, it’d been nasty.

“The window’s broken.”

“What?” Then Jacob caught up. “The main window?”

“Yeah. There’s a fireplace in there.”

“Thanks.” Jacob pushed his arms under both Rook and the coat, still looking around and trying to calculate how far the frost had gone. Then he realized Wolfie was looking at him. “Spit it out, Achielsohn.”

“…Frost wraiths don’t do this.”

“Mountain wraiths? No. Not normally.”

Wolfie rolled his eyes. “You know what I mean. Besides, not all mountain wraiths are cold. Even the ones that are, though, they don’t… explode.”

That was exactly what it was, Jacob realized. Especially now that he’d stepped off the porch. It looked like an explosion. The ice was thinnest out by the gate, but it also had only just started to melt when they arrived. The fountain was getting there — the icicles. And the place with the most ice, that had already melted the most —

His eyes landed on the center of the colonnade where Rook had been lying.

“We don’t exactly understand feral magic yet,” he said instead, hoping Wolfie hadn’t followed his eyes too much and turning to the window. He didn’t want to brave the inside of the house right off the bat — and besides, this way, he could get a sense of what had happened. Who’d broken the window? All the glass was on the inside, not the outside.

“Maybe you don’t,” Wolfie replied, with a little more snark than Jacob would have liked, “but Phania’s one of the only non-state researchers there is. Mountain magic doesn’t work on this kind of scale outside of the mountains. It can’t sustain the energy. That’s why we have so many forest and freshwater wraiths here.”

Jacob ignored — or pretended to ignore — Wolfie, stepping through the window. Then he froze. There wasn’t any sign of struggle, no. Except Odette’s chair was in front of him. His heart leapt into his throat for a moment, before he realized what had probably happened. Djaneki didn’t know about the lift. He sighed, suppressing a small smile. “You’ll have to gab my ear off about feral magic later. Go check on Djaneki and Odette.”

“Me? Why?”

“She’s going to be embarrassed as it is.”

“She—?” Then Wolfie caught a glimpse of the chair. “Ah.” He narrowed his eyes at Jacob. “Are you sure you’re not—”

“I’m not having this discussion with you, Achielsohn.”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

Then Wolfie vanished up the stairs, and Jacob exhaled, setting Rook down on the small sofa and seeing what he could do about the fire. There was always a firestarter somewhere around here; before long, he had a small flame smoldering in the hearth, and could focus on Rook and his familiar. The snake, at least, seemed fine, if sluggish — it crawled off of Rook and onto the floor near the fire.

“Glad to see you’re happy,” Jacob mumbled. The familiar was another of Rook’s badly-kept secrets; in theory, he’d never actually been told that all of Rook’s odd pets were the same animal, but even if he hadn’t spent enough time around him to pick up on it, the tawny-gold aura the familiar usually had around it gave it away. Desert magic, he thought. The warm colours were usually desert or flatland, and the aura was the same no matter what form it took. There was more variation in the spells than the usual eight categorizations would suggest, but he usually couldn’t get close enough to learn much else.

The snake gave Jacob’s thigh a little pat with its tail, and Jacob smiled despite himself. That was the main reason he’d never said anything. Demons didn’t like him; feral magic lashed out at him twice as hard as it did anybody else. He was like a flashing neon light where others were muted, a beacon if he did so much as try to use thaumaturgy. But Rook’s familiar liked him just fine — which meant it wasn’t a demon, whatever it did turn out to be.

Rook’s breaths were coming a little easier already. Jacob sighed, kneeling down next to him and brushing his hair out of his face to get a better look. It was hard to say whether or not colour was coming back to his face, exactly — but he looked, well, better. Still, he needed a bit more warmth to get back to normal.

Jacob managed to slide the leather jacket off of Rook’s shoulders without too much trouble, and got a slurred, half-awake mumble for his trouble. He tried not to feel too pleased about that, but it meant Rook was a bit more conscious than he seemed. “Don’t worry,” he said with a small chuckle, rubbing his thumb over Rook’s cheek. “I’m not stealing it.”

“Mm.” Rook drifted back into stillness, and Jacob felt that twinge of concern again. Rook seemed small, sure. But he wasn’t sure he’d ever actually seen Rook down for the count. Especially because, he was noticing with a frown, he was injured, but—

Don’t trick yourself. It’s still some nasty stuff. That, plus the cold—

He tested the dampness of Rook’s shirt, and pulled a face. Cotton poplin dried faster than most, but it was still clammy to the touch. Jacob shrugged off his uniform jacket, then gently eased the shirt over Rook’s head. “Sorry, kid,” he murmured. “You’re not even shivering yet. Once you are, then we’re getting somewh—”

The word faded in his mouth. He dropped the shirt on the ground and managed to finish pulling his uniform jacket around Rook’s shoulders, but his eyes returned to Rook’s arms and stomach nonetheless; and the thin scars riddling his skin. If they were white, Jacob probably wouldn’t have minded so much. White scars were healed. These ones weren’t.

Jacob sighed, and avoided touching the healing reddish-pink scars on Rook’s abdomen, instead cupping Rook’s chin in his hand and checking his neck and face. At least none of the cuts were open. He hadn’t been using that kind of Bloodwork today. Which… He wished that made him feel better. He tried to pretend not to know about it, to look away from Rook’s cutting just as much as he did the familiar and the strange, haunting magic that danced around him — but that didn’t mean seeing the actual scars hit any better.

The fire was catching properly now. Jacob shook himself a little, snapped the jacket buttons closed around Rook’s chest, and checked his leggings before pulling one of the sofa blankets over his legs. “There we go.” Wolfie had taken the radio, but Rook was supposed to have one, so he could update Sylvia from here. He propped himself up on the floor with his back to the sofa, grabbing Rook’s jacket and fishing into the pockets —

Whatever he was touching wasn’t the radio, but it was a little too familiar for comfort. Jacob pulled it out. A hip flask. For water?

He cast an uneasy look back at Rook.

Jacob unscrewed the top of the flask — and the smell hit him so fast it was like being punched in the face. Wine, he thought, and something else sickly sweet.

He closed the flask, heart plunging into the pit of his stomach. There wasn’t any reason to think Rook had been drinking. Hell, he didn’t even know Rook drank at all. He’d never seen Rook so much as have a glass of wine.

And carrying around a hip flask of it?

Djaneki hadn’t said what was wrong with Rook over the radio. He’d just assumed. He’d just —

He resisted the temptation to throw the flask, and instead set it aside. He wasn’t going to be able to think straight, not until Rook woke up and the chill lingering in the room had finally cleared.

The radio had been quiet for a while, and Csindra had almost fallen asleep with her head on Odette’s shoulder when the Thaumatist-Lieutenant turned the corner of the desk. He looked down at the two of them through his lupine mask, then pulled it upwards, letting it rest on top of his head with the hood falling behind him. “…Well, this should be good.”

“Save it, Theolykos,” Odette snapped. She was fully awake, still shivering, although Csindra suspected it was out of more fear than cold.

Csindra lifted her head, pressing the heel of her palm into her eye with a wince. “Oh, lovely. You two know each other.” Then she watched with rising annoyance as Odette… steadied herself against the desk and slowly started to get to her feet. “You’re kidding me. You can walk?”

“Yes,” Odette snarled.

Wolfie just sighed — and stepped forward before Odette managed more than to get shakily upright, catching her against his chest. “No, she can’t. Don’t be stubborn.”

“I’ll be stubborn as much as I like, Theolykos, now take your hands off me—”

“That might work on a prole, Odette, but I’d like to think I have some familial privileges. How’d she get you up here?”

Odette just seethed quietly, and Csindra actually felt a little embarrassed. “I, uh — I picked her up. I was panicking.”

“For good reason, I suppose.”

“Of course it—” Then Csindra realized that hadn’t been a question. “Odjon’nez, what’s outside?”

Wolfie practically winced. “A lot of ice.”

“How much is a lot?”

He didn’t answer that directly, just letting Odette lean on him. “You were right to come up here.”

Odette paled. Csindra wasn’t expecting a thank you, but she did seem to relax a little. Besides, Csindra couldn’t blame her. It didn’t really matter how rich or powerful you were, or how much noble blood you had, when you were in a wheelchair in a house full of stairs. It didn’t mean Csindra liked her any better, but lashing out because of fear was a lot easier to handle than nasty, petty underhandedness. “I suppose under those circumstances, I can manage some grace. But put your hands on me again and I’ll have them chopped off.”

Csindra raised her eyebrows, but the Lieutenant just sighed. “Will you at least let me carry you down?”

Odette glanced up at him, then averted her eyes. “…Only if you let me walk the last bit.”

Wolfie hid his small smile, and Csindra only barely concealed her expression. Odette had heard Lambert on the radio, it seemed. It was oddly sweet; she had to wonder if it was mutual, but she was pretty sure Lambert’s interests lay elsewhere. Wolfie picked Odette up in his arms, with a lot more care that Csindra had managed, and Csindra strapped her axe onto her back, noticing the way her hands were trembling. Adrenaline leaving her body. It was okay. They had backup now, and nobody sounded panicked, nobody was firing guns, so everything was… fine.

A lot of ice. Yeah, no. Everything was not fine. She didn’t know if Rook was alive or dead—

He’s not dead. The thought came with such disturbing clarity that she stopped, hand on the desk. She scanned the room — the blown-open books, the scattered papers that had flown about in whatever wind had passed through, but there was nothing to give her that certainty. Desperate hope, maybe, but she wasn’t the type. Why was she so certain?

Then another thing occurred to her. A house this big had staff. Even the manors out in the Zweispars had staff, and this was in the middle of the capital. She walked carefully through the study, past the porcelain cup that had fallen and broken on the ground, and out onto the landing. Most of the other doors were open. The one to the left and across — That one was closed.

She tried the handle, and the door opened easily. The room was filled with people, all of them quiet as the grave, all of them turning their faces to her with a mix of relief and alarm.

“So that’s where you all vanished to,” came Odette’s voice from behind her. She closed her eyes for a moment, exhaling, before she turned back to look at Odette in the Lieutenant’s arms. Wolfie, to his credit, was rolling his eyes a bit — but not doing much else, while Odette was glaring at the room of people. “Really. I expected—”

“Miss Odette,” Csindra interrupted, managing to keep some respect in her voice. It took effort. A lot of effort, and reminding herself that Odette wasn’t being bridal-carried for shits and giggles, and that she had just had the living daylights scared out of her. “I’ll talk to you downstairs.”

“But—” Then Odette fell silent, glaring now at Csindra. Csindra just returned the glare with an even stare. “Fine.”

The Lieutenant adjusted his grip on Odette with a small snicker, and headed down the stairs. Csindra heard him say something to her about ‘Rook’s new partner’. She wasn’t sure if it was entirely complimentary or not — but it kept them both out of her way. And it didn’t matter what else she thought or wanted to think about Odette or the Lieutenant; the rich got a certain expression when it came to their staff. Like talking about misbehaving pets. There’s a reason I would rather starve then work for you, she grumbled internally. And she hadn’t exactly agreed lightly to…whatever it was she was doing.

She turned back to the room packed full with what she now realized was Den Riviere’s entire domestic staff. Close to it, anyway. They ranged from barely teenagers to in their fifties or sixties, all of them in working clothes of some sort of another, most of them obviously clan or foreigner of some sort. High cheekbones, thick hair, skin that ranged from just faintly dusky to deep shimmering Fuletcha black… She let them look at her for a moment, let them take in the deerskin jacket and dark skin and flag her as One Of Them, before she leant against the doorjamb.

“So,” she said with a drawl she couldn’t quite help, “I take it it’s not just my clan with that story.”

Everybody started looking at each other. Nobody wanted to be the one to talk, it seemed. Not that she blamed them. Just because she looked like them didn’t mean anything, not when it came to stuff like this. Csindra wasn’t sure if it’d ever actually been agreed on that they didn’t tell Elessans about these stories; probably some people tried and got brushed off, anyway. It was just an unspoken agreement.

“I’m not actually military,” she added, to see if it’d help. “I mean — not, not really. I’m a contractor. Technically. Which just means they pay me while I do something else entirely.”

“Doing what?” someone burst out. Csindra couldn’t see who it was, which was probably for the best given how tempted she was to throw something at them or tell them it was none of their fucking business.

“I heard that,” she said instead. God. What was it gonna take? She rubbed her forehead in between her eyebrows, then closed the door behind her. She wasn’t doing anything bad, but she wasn’t in the mood to deal with Elessan questions. And — just in case — the radio was still on her hip. “Nak’ma Csindra Djaneki Shelash-Kekash aŋat-Morną aŋat-Tenton sho-shą, nevéne keb-Navòne Kesh’lashe. Nadab, vol’ròz ŋet shé. Shur’la.”

Definitely some recognition there, which meant she was right, and plenty of the people in here were Zurkanet’. She’d figured. Including, as she’d suspected, the shortstack kid sitting on the ground near the back, whose shoulders sank in relief even as she chewed on her lip in clear annoyance. And a little bit of guilt. How old are you, ten?

“Come on,” she added. “Work with me a bit here.” It didn’t help that nobody else was talking.

The folks in the room slowly started to turn their eyes to one corner — Kanetaz, Fuletcha, Tosaka, even a few Shufennese and Nguan mixed in, all slowly giving away the real leader in the group. Csindra followed their eyes to where the kid was sitting, then to the two tall, dark-skinned coachmen behind her. Even if the man of the two hadn’t still had his flared black box coat on, the tight jodhpurs and riding boots would probably have given away their station. The woman was the one catching Csindra’s attention, though; she was the most obviously restless in the room, only the more now that everyone else was putting her on the spot. She had one hand protectively on the wall just above the girl’s head, white shirt-sleeves rolled up to her elbows and short-cropped curls showing off glinting blue studs in her ears. Not just any servant, then. Especially not with the way she was taking glances out the window.

Then the woman raised her eyes and met Csindra’s gaze with a steady, even glare and Csindra tried — hard — not to blush. Finding women more butch than her didn’t happen often, especially not ones with shaved heads and silver earrings. “Do you want something, Djaneki?” she said.

Csindra swallowed, trying to focus. “Ah — what happened?”

“I’m hoping you can tell me that, actually,” she replied, voice smooth as silk.

She couldn’t quite help the wry, frustrated look she cast the woman’s way — and the Tosaka woman laughed in response, throwing her head back. “So you’re not just a soldier, you’re a new soldier.”

“I’m not a soldier at all, thank you very much. I’m—”

“A contractor, yes, I hear you the first time.”

Csindra switched into Tosaka, in the hope she’d have fewer people making fun of her. “A mercenary, when I’m not getting blackmailed.”

The woman’s eyebrows flew up a little at that — probably both at the language switch and the statement. “Blackmail? I always wondered what the army did to the túzàzhúánsēpya. I’d thought they executed them.”

Csindra tried not to rankle at the assumption that she was Advolk. Great. She got it from Elessans and other clanfolk. Túzàzhúánsēp meant freedom fighter. But she didn’t really have the patience to get into an argument with someone about the Advolk right now, especially not when she had ‘the Advolk are devils’ to deal with on the other end. “Trust me, if I was túzàzhúánsēp I’d have gotten something much worse. And I’m not selling out anybody else. Just fuckin’ myself over, really. So can you help me out or not?”

The woman gave her a steady, appraising gaze… then nodded in what Csindra took to be agreement and switched briefly back to Elessan. “Back to work. And keep your mouths shut.”

“But—” the man next to her tried to argue, but she cut him off with a gesture of her hand.

“Kaune, mèmsáiṉahù.”

He subsided into slightly-embarrassed silence, and Csindra managed to keep a straight face as he headed out of the room with everyone else. She’d learned Tosaka as a kid, basically side-by-side with Kanet’valan and Elessan — later, Dani’i Feilim and Ze’an Feilim for Kestrel, which meant she knew more languages than even most other clanfolk. It was the one thing she had going for her when it came to book smarts, and it meant she knew when someone was being told to shut the hell up. More or less, anyway. Tosaka didn’t really have rudeness built into it beyond tone of voice, but it was amazing how well that worked when you knew how to use it.

Csindra stepped aside and leant against the wall, observing each of the servants as they moved past her — and logging how each of them looked at her. Mostly neutral, with a few more intrigued glances — and one or two dirty looks, but she expected that. Military was bad enough. A clanswoman working for the military in any capacity? Whoof. She’d thought about trying to explain that to Jacob, back when they’d been discussing it, but it felt silly to care that much — and she was half-blooded anyway, so doomed to be getting some variety of dirty looks one way or another.

Once the room was empty, she could see what it was more clearly; another study, smaller, this one probably for the steward or someone of similar rank. Certainly it wasn’t her study; if it was, the woman would have sat behind the desk or somewhere more comfortable than the windowsill. The girl had stayed behind, although why, Csindra couldn’t be sure.

“Zecka, it’s alright,” the woman tried to soothe her.

“I na leavin you with her,” the girl grumbled. “You say—”

“I know what I say. This is different.”

Zecka cast a dirty, distrusting look at Csindra, who was now struggling not to take it a little personally. At this rate, it seemed just as likely to be about being halfblooded as it was anything else. Zecka was clearly Zurkanet’ of some variety, although pinning down specific tribe on appearance alone was difficult, if not impossible; still, Csindra was pretty sure they didn’t share any actual tribal connection, not with Zecka’s hair like a thick cloud of dust twined into a ball at the base of her neck or the little tinge of Alkmeri accent lurking at the edges of her consonants. Shelash-Kekash had mostly gone along with the Etamara relocation, or managed to stay in Den Elessa before that; as far as Csindra knew, all of her kin out by Alkmer were distant cousins at best.

The woman, at least, seemed to be detecting some of the animosity. She folded one long leg over the other. “I am Angtaiki Kauti. Call me Zulang.”

Shit. She hadn’t mistaken the name Kaune earlier, then. She was going to kill Odette Riviere with her bare fucking hands. “Angtaiki. So Kaullo—”

“Kaullo my older brother, dòsāltúvòihò.” There wasn’t as much respect in her voice as I would have expected, rest in peace or not. “I suppose whatever vuh outside is the same thing that killed him.”

There were, Csindra thought with a suppressed shiver, a lot of ways to interpret that particular question. “Looks it.” It was a relief to feel herself falling back into the speech patterns of Nadjat slang instead of the ‘proper’ Elessan she had to use around Rook, she had to admit. “Not a lot of those around. You knew about her before I did.”

Zulang raised an eyebrow at she. Zecka, Csindra noted with a suppressed reaction of alarm, didn’t. “I notice the weather changing. At first I think, just a freak storm or something, but then…” She hesitated, then sighed. “Before Kaullo died, he tell me he feels like he’s being followed. He say he keep seeing mushrooms where they shouldn’t be. Brackets on alleyway walls. So when I start seeing them, I bring everybody up here.”

“And they listen to you.”

“Much to Jonathan’s displeasure, yes,” Zulang conceded with a small laugh.

“The steward?”

“Jonathan Becker. He likes me fine even if he get sourpuss about it. And he know what he don’t know.”

Csindra nodded, taking that in. So the steward was a Becker, too — and one who bowed to clan knowledge when he needed to. She wondered if Odette knew about any of this, but she doubted it. It was probably just as important to Mr. Becker as it was to Zulang that everybody believe that Mr. Becker was unquestionably in charge. “…Odette — Miss Odette,” she corrected with a steam of silent hatred, “say she don’t know Kaullo. Know why?”

The reaction was immediate. Zulang’s smile faded, and her hand drifted — clearly almost by instinct — to Zecka’s head, stroking her hair with the same protective instinct as before. “No,” she said, in Tosaka again. From the annoyed look on Zecka’s face, Zecka didn’t know Tosaka; that worked just fine. “Kaullo worked here, with me and Kaune. We’ve been Riviere bondsmen since we were young.”

Csindra tried to swallow away the taste of disgust in her mouth. Bondsmen. Slavery with extra steps. Of course that had been mysteriously missing from the file. “Lovely. I suppose she was lying about the mob, too.”

“No. No, that’s — that much is true.” Zulang’s thumb brushed some dirt off of Zecka’s temple; Zecka was watching her face, clearly trying to intuit some of the meaning without asking. “National Security should keep their distance,” she said after a moment.

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m asking you from one clanswoman from another. Nothing good can come from the military sticking their noses into what the Rivieres are doing.”

Csindra was ready to ask what exactly Zulang wanted her to do about it — then caught the steely look in Zulang’s eyes. “You’ve got your own plans, I see. Can you handle an odjaken on your own?”

“Ah, well, no. But there must be a way for you to lead it away from here.”

Csindra closed her eyes, trying to suppress the migraine she was starting to feel. “You’re taking the whole odjaken thing rather lightly, don’t you think?”

“I know how to avoid their fury. And besides, I wouldn’t call this lightly.” She was keeping her face very still — but it occurred to Csindra just how much of it was to keep Zecka from panicking. Zecka had clearly caught the word odjaken — but that was all. “I don’t want her hurt.”

Csindra paused for a moment… then glanced at Zecka with dawning fury. Zecka, who she’d initially taken for nine or ten before revising that, assuming that she must be a little older. Scheffen had been circumspect, sure, but with that information, she was starting to suspect that Zecka wasn’t supposed to be here at all.

“Don’t do anything,” Zulang said after a moment. “Just… don’t correct Odette.”

Don’t correct Odette. Let Kaullo seem like a random casualty or a hire from the depths of the swamp somewhere. All to cover up the Riviere family’s crimes.

“Alright,” Csindra said, and felt the scars on her arms start stinging again. Apparently these days, just the memory of pain was enough.

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I rewrote the Zulang/Csindra scene *so much*, christ. I’ll be posting some of the other versions if I still have them – this is one of the first chapters in a while that had a number of rewrites. The big thing, obviously, was how exactly to go about Zecka’s situation. The other one was navigating the – four? different languages at play in the scene!

Keep an eye out for the bonus Patreon post going more into the Tosaka used in this bit, but for everyone else: Tosaka is not related to the other clan languages (even distantly) even though there’s obviously loanwords and influence! The Sigaros language is closely related, but that’s all. As a result, it looks very different and functions as an agglutinative language; that is, all the grammar particles are stuck together, so you end up with almost whole sentences in words. “dòsāltúvòihò” is a great example of this – the tones show where the separate syllables/participles are for the most part (…yes, it’s tonal too.) and it breaks down into “dò-sāl-tú-vòi-h-ò”. Directly translated, this looks like “”he (previous statement)-sāl (rest)-tú (intransitive)-vòi (subjunctive – may/might)-h (present) -ò (third person)” or “May he rest). This is a set phrase in Tosaka, said after the name of a deceased relative or friend.

In terms of the dialect, I’m actually nervous about that. I’ve tried to strike a balance between understandability and non-caricature, and doing respect to the fact that pidgin languages and dialect are unfairly mocked and should be depicted as real, full languages. For that reason, the clan pidgin used here is explicitly inspired by several dialects worldwide, just like with a lot of my languages and dialects – it’s Elessan (transcribed, obviously, into English) but influenced by the grammar of the clan languages. For example, Kanet’valan (and Tosaka!) indicate tense after the verb itself, so clan pidgin often flattens tense and indicates it with separate words (“I know what I say” above – in context, it’s obvious that ‘say’ is past tense!) and Kanet’valan’s negative indicators (shev’ and kheb’/khib’/khibi) while having multiple forms, also function just fine thrown into a phrase at the appropriate place, so ‘na’ replaces it where necessary rather than struggling for the right version of ‘not/no/none/neither/etc.’

Song: Jakyl by True Widow
Chapter 23: The Quiet Oak

August 8th, 2022

CWs: bullying, exclusion trauma, loneliness

I’ll admit — the first time I saw the kid, I got a bit nervous. Not because of the albino thing. I’ve met albino kids before, you know? It’s a medical condition, not that you’d think that with how some people go on about it. It’s that, well, you expect amnesiacs to be lost, a little helpless. Even if it’s temporary. Rook, well. The first time I met him, his voice wasn’t working properly just yet, and he still looked me up and down and asked me if I was friends with ‘the other one’. And I didn’t think much of it. Amnesiac, right? He’d probably asked everyone that.

It wasn’t til I left that I realized I was wearing that necklace Jacob gave me. You know the one, Syl. When I was teaching him how to make jewellery and he turned that old set of buttons into charms. I know he wears one of them too, but — but, Sylvia, they don’t look like anything. Most people wouldn’t notice them, let alone associate them with each other. So, you know.

Tread carefully.
Captain Thomas Karella in a letter to Sylvia Christadocht Scheffen, 1915

PARC DER RUSSIGNOLS, DEN ELESSA, 1917

In some of the few books Rook had that were stories for children – or at least he suspected they were – characters talked about a point of realizing they were different, understanding being different from other kids or other people. He couldn’t relate. He’d never had any choice or illusion that he was anything but different – but that was alright. He wasn’t sure he was even made of the same stuff as the other people at the school. So, he kept to himself — all the more now that he had his brief but cherished moments with the Vandemeers — and he cherished the times that Jacob met him at school all the more.

Jacob found him that day in the park about a block away from the school, one leg hanging off the tree branch he was lying on, book on his face as he contemplated whether or not he wanted to actually finish it. “You skived off again.”

Rook sighed, pulling the book off his face. “I thought I’d have longer than five minutes after last bell.” He sat up, elbow on the tree branch as he looked down at Jacob. “How’d you find me?”

“You can’t actually forge my or Sylvia’s signature for shit. Nice try, though. They called me at lunchtime once someone actually looked at your ‘doctor’s note’.” The older man folded his arms and leaned against the tree, looking up at Rook with a mix of frustration and amusement. “For someone who’s technically two, you have the rebellious teenager thing down. I didn’t think Wolfie would be that bad of an influence on you.”

Rook chucked an acorn at him. Not hard. Just enough to make a point. “If I’m two, then you’re a civilian.” It was all the more annoying, he decided, that Jacob had caught the damn thing out of the air. “I wish you were,” he groaned, flopping back down on the tree branch.

“Why, so you’d actually get away with some of this?”

“…Yes. Civvies are dumb.”

“You are aware, la,” Jacob couldn’t quite suppress the laugh, “that you’re a civilian.” He tossed the acorn back at Rook, and Rook snatched it before it hit him with another suffering groan. “Although you’re a quick study.”

“You’re the one who drills me on this stuff.”

“It’ll do you good one day.” There was a quiet huff, and then Rook startled upwards as Jacob joined him on the branch. Like usual, Jacob wasn’t in uniform; he always changed into more normal clothes before picking up Rook, although Rook had no idea why he bothered. This time, he had a black t-shirt on below a leather vest that didn’t really look any more ‘civvie’ than his uniform did. Rook suspected, actually, that Jacob had no idea how to look normal — but that suited him just fine, because he was never going to, so he might as well keep equally strange company.

“If this branch breaks,” Rook threatened, “I’m blaming you.”

“I know you don’t weigh owt, but trust, la, it can handle me. You’re not the only one who comes here.”

Rook sat up properly, gazing at Jacob for a moment. “Did you skip school too?”

Jacob laughed at that, too, although there was a hint of something wistful in it too. “Ah, I didn’t really have school. And skippin’ the academy would have just f- screwed my chances, so I was a decent enough student once I got there. Nah, I come here sometimes to clear my head. Not so much now that I live over by Parkland — What?”

Rook stifled his smile. “You can swear in front of me, Jacob.”

“Now, you say that, and then you learn new words and get me in hot water with Syl.” At the mention of Scheffen, though, Rook’s smile soured. Jacob noticed, too. “You two still not getting along?”

Rook shrugged. “It’s usually fine. Just…” He didn’t want to bother explaining it, in part because he wasn’t sure if he could. Scheffen just transparently didn’t know what to do with him. The jokes Phania and Wolfie made just underlined how bizarre their relationship was; the Vandemeers kept assuming a motherly or at least parental relationship, and he found himself undecided on whether he wanted that instead, or if he just wanted… someone else. “Please don’t tell her I skipped again.”

“I’ll do my best.” Which, from Jacob, usually meant yes.

He couldn’t help the small smile of gratitude, and looked away, suddenly embarrassed. When he looked back, though, Jacob was leaning against the trunk, watching him with a curious expression. “What are you looking at?” Rook grumbled.

“Why do you keep skipping, anyway?”

“I dunno. I pick up the lessons fast enough with just the textbook anyway. And there’s all this stupid stuff I don’t know.”

“Like what?”

Oh, like Jacob didn’t know. Still, Rook decided to indulge him. “Apparently the ocean’s — well, cursed. I didn’t know it was that bad. I just said something about sharks and asked if they were real and got laughed at.”

“Hell, that ain’t your fault. Besides, they were real. Most of them died out centuries ago.”

That did make him feel better, although it didn’t take away the real stinger of that conversation; the idea that everything that came from the ocean was tainted, or poisonous. Including him. He couldn’t get away from it, either. The name Zeesohn hadn’t been intended to be cruel, but it followed him around anyway, a constant reminder that he was something that was alive when he wasn’t supposed to be. Then he caught on to what Jacob had said. “Wait, most of them?”

Jacob grinned at that, clearly enjoying the thrill in Rook’s voice. “I grew up down in Alkmer. There are river sharks in some of the deeper parts of the Az’ around there. Not as big as the ones in stories, but still sharks.”

“Bullshit.”

“Now who’s swearing? And bis Grendelszahn, I will take you there and show you one just to give you the joy of vindication.”

“Forget that, I just wanna see the sharks now!”

“You know they eat people?”

“Which makes them icons in my opinion. More sharks in government, fewer dumbasses with more money than sense.”

“I really need to hold my tongue around you more,” Jacob muttered, although he was clearly too amused to mean it. “You’re gonna get me in trouble.”

“Don’t worry, I’m smarter than that. I’ll only get you in trouble if I’m trying to.”

“Again, for someone who’s technically two—”

Rook kicked at Jacob’s leg with another scowl. “I’m thirteen. I just… have some more catching up to do.”

Jacob reached forward and ruffled Rook’s hair, which he still couldn’t decide if he liked or not. “Oi, don’t let my jokes bug you. You’re doing great.”

Rook bit his tongue, trying not to think about Pieter Janssen. “You think so?”

“I’ve been training you with a bloody BB gun, la, and you’re a better marksman than any of the snots in your class. You with live ammo is going to be scary. Let alone what Tommy’s been teaching you with those knives.”

“I like the knives better.”

“I was worried you’d say that. There goes my bet with Tom.”

“You bet on it?”

“Old habits die hard. And sue me, I want another gun nut to talk shop with.”

Rook couldn’t help his grin at that one. “Are you sure I’m a civvie? Cause you don’t train me like I’m one.”

Jacob went a little quiet at that, and Rook tried to figure out what he’d said wrong. Nothing too terrible, he decided, because Jacob looked more thoughtful than upset, but there was definitely conflict going on. Faces were hard for him, but Jacob was someone he spent enough time with to start picking up on how his body language worked. If he spent enough time studying faces, bodies, people, he’d probably manage being a real person eventually.

Jacob exhaled after a little bit. “You’re right, I don’t.”

“Why? Just — curious.”

Jacob chewed on the inside of his cheek, and Rook added, “You know I don’t care if you smoke around me—”

“Dammit I hate that you know when I want one.”

“You have a tell!”

Jacob snorted, and he did pull out a cigarette, but he didn’t light it – just rolled it between his fingers. “You are different,” he sighed. “Shouldn’t matter, I know. But you’re special. You’ve been trying to hide how fast you’re learning thaumaturgy, too. Which I’m guessin’ is the other reason you’ve been skipping school so much.”

Rook cast his eyes down, unwilling to admit to it out loud, but Jacob was right. It wasn’t just that he was bored in class. It was more troubling than that. Thaumaturgy wasn’t something that was supposed to come quite so easily to anybody; and when it did, it wasn’t supposed to be all of it. He didn’t find Mirrorwork any more difficult than Smokework or Songwork, and he read his textbook in the five minutes before class instead of at night when he was supposed to, because he just… read so quickly, and took in all the information fast enough that he didn’t need to do it any other way. He supposed if he’d been a Miller or a Pont or a Weiss or whatever it wouldn’t have mattered. Maybe he’d even be praised for it; but he wasn’t one of them. He was the stranger, the foundling, the one who didn’t quite look human — which meant he had to try harder to fit in. Excelling wasn’t an option, but that was the problem; he didn’t even have enough memory to know when he was doing something impressive. So he just… avoided school entirely, when he could, and let the anger curl up in his stomach over how much he wanted to show off. He wanted to enjoy being the best. “You’re teaching me to defend myself because you think I’ll need it,” he said after a moment, trying not to sound so miserable about it.

“Ey, ey, chin up. You’ve got me and Syl and Tom on your side. And, look, I know trying to get along with the other kids isn’t really working, but stick out the school for a little while longer.”

“Until what?” Rook grumbled.

“Until the end of the year. Which is soon. And if it’s still not working out, maybe we can figure something else out. But give it one more shot. For me.”

Rook rolled his eyes at that. “For you,” he taunted, then stuck out his tongue. Mostly to hide that he was genuinely happy to be heard. He’d wanted to tell Scheffen for a while now, that he couldn’t bear the thought of going back, but the words kept getting trapped in his throat, going turncoat at him at the thought of her disappointment, her judgment.

“Atta boy. Now come ahead. Tommy’s insisting on feeding you.”

“What? Why?”

“You’re too skinny. I happen to agree.”

“Ughhhh fine. It’s rude to say no to food.”

Jacob hopped down from the tree, and Rook readied himself to jump down — but first, he reached inside of the folds of his jacket, giving his familiar a stroke. He was in the shape of a squirrel this month, which meant he’d mostly burrowed into Rook’s inside pockets and stayed there quite happily — but he still nuzzled his head into Rook’s hand, tail poking up and out of the pocket. Then Rook jumped down from the tree, landing next to Jacob with hardly a stumble, and decided that if Jacob really wanted him to give school another try, he would. And maybe he’d just let himself be the best, for once. For a little while.

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Phew, schedule slip, sorry! This chapter coincides with Ghosts in Quicksilver Book 3 starting to post, which means I’m now technically on a WEEKLY schedule (biweekly, two serials — I did this to myself.)

This is a nice quiet chapter, and one where Jacob’s regionalisms are a lot more obvious than they usually are. I think I’ve mentioned it in comments before, but Jacob’s accent is based on primarily Scouse accents, mixed in with some New Orleans! Most of his terminology is pretty easy to guess from context (…for now, anyway) but full Alkmeri slang gets pretty wild.

Song: River Flows in You – HAUSER

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Bell, Clock and Candle is free to read online and I don’t plan on changing that; however, if you like it and want to support its author, please consider supporting me with a Patreon pledge or a Ko-fi donation! For bonus goodies, Patreon readers get every chapter a week early, and pledging to the Elementals tier ($5+) gets you access to deleted scenes and conlang progress posts.
Chapter 22: A Note of Concern

July 15th, 2022

CWs: hyperdevotion/cultlike thought patterns, kidnapping, threatened murder

ABRAMS: How does it feel, being an adult?
COBEN GARROW: Oh, um, I’m not sure. I haven’t been one for very long yet.
ABRAMS: [laughs] That’s fair! I’m sure the tabloids have been on you about betrothals and engagements already.
GARROW: Yes, although I’m afraid to say that’s still a ways in the future.
ABRAMS: But you’re not spoken for.
GARROW: You’re a political commentator. Why are you asking me about girlfriends?
ABRAMS: The truth is, everybody’s very curious about the next three years. You’re eighteen now, but it’s another three years before you can officially take your seat in Parliament. What does the future hold for you?
GARROW: I’m… not sure, actually. I’m not very good at politics, so I guess I have to work on that. Honestly I’m not even sure I’ll do much more than be there and do my best to keep up.
ABRAMS: You’d rather not?
GARROW: Of course I wouldn’t. But every other family gets a choice, right? I don’t know why it surprises anybody that I’m not particularly eager to jump into politics. I’m only the choice because everybody else is dead. I’m needed, so I’ll do it, and I’ll do the best that I can, because my family deserves better than what they got. But if you’re looking for a hotshot you’ll have to ask… I don’t know, are the Vandemeer children looking at politics? [beat] Actually, maybe I should ask for their help.
ABRAMS: [obviously disappointed] So you don’t have any causes you want to support.
GARROW: Oh, I do.
ABRAMS: Ah! Like what?
GARROW: Well, for starters, I think all female soldiers should wear tiny miniskirts —
ABRAMS: This interview is over.
Toltberg Citizen interview with Mick Abrams and Coben Heathsohn Garrow, 1918

It is a bizarre and somewhat troubling fact of history that some of the most well-planned and manipulative schemes are the ones that peter out with hardly a mark on the record of memory, and others — the ones that are seen by others as nefarious conspiracies with no bottom — are simply the results of all-too-human error. In other words, sometimes idiocy makes more impact than malice ever could.

The girl who had been calling herself Mary-Ann Daniels was considering this in a mood bordering on hysterics. It had all seemed like a perfectly good idea at the time. “Come on,” she whispered desperately to the sky, “get back to me.” Five days now, and no word. They were cutting it really close.

She’d ditched both of her uniforms at this point. She knew it wouldn’t be long before Lambert caught on; she’d managed to get out of the conversation with her cover nearly intact, but he wasn’t stupid. Plus, they would find her eventually, if she didn’t do something. So, here she was, hiding in an alleyway, waiting for Kestrel and hoping she’d come up with something good along the way. Exactly how anybody wanted to pull off heavily-politicized kidnappings, really.

A few moments later, a figure approached the alleyway, looking casual as he strolled down among the garbage cans. She exhaled in relief, especially once he lifted his head, face visible under the rim of his cap. Kestrel didn’t look happy with her, but that was fine. Kestrel was only involved with this because she’d begged for help.

“I—”

Kestrel shushed her. Then he lifted his hands. <You’re an idiot.>

<Tell me something I don’t know.>

<The guy at the Centrum just put out a call for a teenage clan girl.>

Oh, great. She thought she’d have a little more time. She tried to still the panicked rush of her heart, but Kestrel grabbed her wrist, yanking her after him and still signing with one hand. <Just let him go, for fuck’s sake. Maybe you’ll get some mercy.>

<I can’t do that now. Not after all of this—>

<You know Abner’s not sending any help.>

<You can’t be sure of that.>

Kestrel rolled his eyes, but Mari ignored him. Kestrel wasn’t Advolk; his opinion of Abner was low at best, which was pretty rich considering that the Advolks were fighting for him just as much as everyone else from the clans. But he seemed to let it lie; he scanned the rooftops, then handed Mari the radio he’d been holding. <You’re lucky I’m not completely deaf.>

<I appreciate it.>

<You’d better. Csindra is going to kill me.>

<Csindra isn’t going to find out.>

<Trust me, if you wind up dead, she’s gonna know why, and it’s gonna be my head on the block.>

Mari scoffed at that, only barely trying to hide her derision. Yeah, right. That would imply that Csindra actually cared enough. Csindra would probably spend the entire funeral complaining about how it was Mari’s own fault for actually wanting to accomplish something. Maybe that was mean, but it was hard to care about the judgment of someone who had all the ambition and drive of a teaspoon.

Mari’s apartment building was a beaten-up, grimy old thing, a building constantly at threat of falling apart in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Den Elessa. The tram didn’t even go through here — it stopped a good fifteen minutes away, which was fine by her, because it meant nobody really thought to check here. It helped that she had a contact in NatSec, although his usefulness was limited; he’d nudged his team closer to the tram and away from here. She had a plan; it just wasn’t quite working out the way she wanted it to. Mostly because she kept having to change it.

At the very least, she hadn’t been stupid enough to keep him in her apartment. With another glance around to make sure they weren’t being followed, she and Kestrel went around to one of the side doors, and she unlocked it, descending down into the darkness until the dim light of the basement greeted her.

Coben gave her an irritated, and very exhausted look from behind the bolt of cloth stuffed into his mouth, the bare lightbulb above him covered in cobwebs.

Mari glanced at Kestrel, who shrugged. <If you want to take the gag out, be my guest, but if he starts yelling I can’t help you.>

<He’s been good so far.>

<Let’s see if that lasts up to him figuring out you’re planning on killing him.>

Mari glared at Kestrel, who was looking just as displeased as ever. <I don’t — I’m sure there’s another way.>

<Whatever you say. You’re claiming you can’t let him go, and you’re the one who joined up with the terrorists.>

<Bootlicker.>

<Kidnapper.>

Maybe Kestrel had been a bad choice. Then again, she’d been short on options, and at least Kestrel was slightly less likely to panic. Bryd would have freaked out and let Coben go on the first day. And doing this on her own… Well, she probably could have managed something, but not well. She knew she probably did have to kill him, but…

Mari sighed and approached Coben where he was tied to the chair, taking the cloth out of his mouth. He blew out his cheeks, rotating his jaw, then glanced up at her, bright blue eyes throwing her off-balance as usual. “I’m starting to take this personally,” he said after a moment, voice raspy.

Don’t laugh, she lectured herself, as she felt her mouth twitch. “Are you thirsty?” she asked instead.

“A little. Mostly I’m hoping I could, ah, prevail upon you to think this through a little more.”

Oh, lovely. Now Coben was starting in on her. “Please don’t,” she mumbled, reaching down to the water flask she’d been carrying. There was a sink down here, but she hadn’t boiled any more of it, and the water filtration in this part of the city was awful. She lifted it to his lips and watched him drink, and despite herself, brushed a few stray hairs out of his face. “There. And I’ll get you some food as well, once I can.”

“That would be nice,” he said so nonchalantly she almost wanted to laugh again, but then his face turned a little more serious. “So who are you working for?”

“Coben—”

“Five days later, I’d like a little bit of a clue. You’re rather good at keeping mum, I’ll give you that. And a whole year without giving it away was… impressive.” He couldn’t quite hide the hurt in his voice, and she managed to steel herself against the way it lanced through her ribcage, the reminder that she’d betrayed him.

“I’m not going to tell you that.”

“So at least I know you’re working for someone. Lovely. And here I was still holding out for the insane lover theory,” he joked, or half-joked. It was hard to tell with him sometimes.

Kestrel rolled his eyes again. Mari silently prayed for Khamlita to intervene and give Kestrel something else to worry about. Frostbite, maybe. The flu. Leprosy, if he kept being this much of an unhelpful prick. “Coben, I… it’s not that simple.”

Coben still didn’t look convinced — but then, he shrugged, as much as the ropes tying him to the wooden chair would allow him to. “It never is, is it?” And he gave her a soft smile, which was the worst thing he could have done, because now she really did want to cry.

<Kestrel, can you watch him for a minute?>

<Sure.> No snark this time.

Mari walked carefully up the stairs — and once she’d gotten outside, she collapsed against the door, hands over her face. God. What was she going to do?

She took a deep breath. It was easier to think straight now that she wasn’t looking Coben in the eye. Being in love was fine. Being in love didn’t change anything. There were more important things. It was easier to remember that when she wasn’t looking at him and thinking about having to kill him.

Breathe, she told herself again. Máfáchá Shézhíwe. Loyalty. Not the one she wanted to think about. Máfáchá Chyeféngázhíwe. Respect. Máfáchá Náfâye. Honor. …Too many questions. What was honor and dishonor in Den Elessa, far from any place that cared for it? Fucking invaders didn’t give one whit for honor. Máfáchá Lékhufâye. Ethics. The mouse.

Mari exhaled. She hadn’t been raised with the Máfáchángâ, but they were more help than the Navónez. Related, sure. But she didn’t have much patience for gods — which, she reflected sourly, was probably the one thing she did have in common with Elessans. Oh, sure, she respected the Shuyengê gods, and she still respected the Navonez. She wasn’t stupid. Whether in the end it was Ozhî or Kesh’lashe she faced, she would do it with a bowed head and a prayer on her lips. But the Máfáchángâ — the precepts — there was nothing like that in Kanet’ culture. Kantanavat’ didn’t deal in heresies or shame, which she was only glad for until it came to the flip side; that there was no duty to each other encoded in stone. Stone was easier to follow. Stone didn’t lie. Stone didn’t flare in rage or make stupid mistakes. Stone was stone.

Stone is stone. That helped. And what else was there? There wasn’t any version of the future where she and Coben had one. Even if she’d been telling the truth about who she was, at best all she would have ever been able to hope for was a position as a concubine or mistress, watching some Elessan manor girl on his arm as he joined the ranks of every other noble. Nothing would change. He was a good one, but his father was supposed to be a good one, too, and where had that gotten them?

Nearly involuntarily, she found herself running through the rest of the precepts. Abner himself had — not taught them to her, but made them laws instead of vague ideas. Máfáchá Kuzhíwe. Generosity. Máfáchá Angzhéyiwe. Bravery. She liked that one. “Only the Lady knows the day of your death,” she whispered. Even in Elessan, it had weight to it. Máfáchá Ongázhíwe. Nobility. Máfáchá Hérézhíwe. Humility. “You are a single piece of the world.” Well, she’d never be one of the Shuyeda’s Pledged, not really, but she could at least try to be one. It was probably her only way out of here alive.

Only the Lady knows the day of your death.

She glanced at the sky again. Plenty of pigeons, plenty of ravens, and none of them with messages. Nothing by Smokework either, and she’d kept her marker. Nothing at all.

——

Coben knew that the appropriate thing to do would have been to cleverly plan or plot his way out of trouble, but to tell the truth, he was too busy being depressed. He’d been trained on how to deal with kidnappings, sure. He’d been working on the ropes for a while, not that either Mari or the other one had noticed, but it was a little hard to keep up the energy for it when his girlfriend had been the one to kidnap him.

He leant his head back on the chair, chewing on his cheek in rueful annoyance as he gazed at the spiderweb cracks on the stone ceiling. Dasta had warned him, a very long time ago, about trusting people too easily; but one would hope that after a year-odd of flirtation and – he’d thought – genuine friendship, one had passed that stage. Being tongue-in-cheek about it was helping it not hit too badly, but that had been part of his training, too. Not explicitly, but this was what worked for him.

Well, at least she wasn’t torturing him. Unless this part was the torture.

He lifted his head, looking at the other figure who’d been helping keep him captive. He hadn’t quite managed to puzzle out whether the man in front of him was deaf or not; he used sign language, and sometimes he seemed to react to sound, while other times he missed things that seemed obvious. At least Mari had decided against the gag.

“Can you hear me?” Coben decided on the direct approach. It made him his share of enemies, but it cut through a lot of ridiculous tiptoeing.

The man glanced at him, then sighed, making a gesture with his hands – one finger around the other. Oh, that one was clear. Repeat.

“Can you hear me?” Coben said again, then — “Well, I guess you sort of answered that.”

“Sometimes,” the man said, and Coben started a little at the sound of his voice. He hadn’t known the man could speak. The voice that came out was a little hoarse, blunted at the edges and muffled, but perfectly understandable. He didn’t seem to enjoy doing it though; he returned to his hands, although Coben couldn’t understand a word, so he imagined the man was mostly doing it for his own benefit.

“Could you explain what’s happening?” Coben asked — slowly, in case that helped.

The man paused, scratching his chin, then sighed again. He shook his head. Then he pressed his palm to his forehead with a look of such pain that it communicated a lot more than words possibly could.

That was interesting. Coben had always imagined that if something did happen to him, it’d be part of some political plot. Maybe it still was, but the man in front of him was — well, not very old, actually. Maybe his age, if not younger. The hooded coat made him look older. “Ah – if it helps —” Coben said hesitantly, “I don’t particularly like getting people executed.”

The man gave him a long-suffering look. “Good for you.”

Oh, lovely, so he spoke when he wanted to be sassy. “Just because I’m upset doesn’t mean I want her dead,” he bristled slightly, although once he’d said it he remembered that men didn’t, largely speaking, have a particularly excellent record on that front. He’d never understood the point of that, but then again, he didn’t understand most things. He was deeply glad that his mother had managed to spin him as aloof and a loner, rather than likely to trip over his own feet or offend someone because he didn’t see the point in some particular ritual of manners that someone had declared Essential. Some Judge’s son he made.

Assuming he didn’t die, though, how was he going to explain this one? If he did get free, he’d have to come up with something. Maybe he’d claim he hit his head and lost his memory for a week. Or an attempted elopement — oh, no, that would probably still end up with someone dead or in jail. He loved his father, but he didn’t entirely trust him to remember that Coben was an adult, not twelve.

Then again, which one of them had followed someone home with the best of intentions, and instead of pretending not to see the stash of knives, ropes and other very scary implements he’d walked in on, had asked, out loud, “Blimey, are you trying to kidnap someone?”

Don’t laugh, he sternly told himself. It’s not funny when you’re the one being kidnapped. Abducted. Whatever. Well, it is a bit. It will be if you don’t die.

“Does talking hurt you?” he asked, trying to distract himself.

The man looked annoyed at that question, too, albeit less so. Then after a moment, he wiggled his hand in a sort of gesture.

“Okay. Okay, that’s — well, not cool. Maybe it’d be better if I couldn’t talk,” Coben added in a low mumble.

There was the ghost of a smile on the other man’s mouth at that, and Coben had the distinct feeling that he was being laughed at, but despite the situation, there didn’t seem to be a lot of malice in it. Besides, talking was stopping Coben’s brain from going anywhere really bad. Surface level silliness was a lot better than anything that would actually make him panic.

Before he kept rambling, though, the man stopped him with a gesture. Mari was coming back down. She probably thought that Coben didn’t notice all the small things that gave her away; the hint of redness around her eyes that said she’d been crying, or the fact that the blue ribbon he’d given her was knotted around her wrist, only slightly hidden by the dark-brown jumper she was wearing.

She signed something to the hooded man, and Coben watched his reaction carefully. He was taken aback — then almost angry when he responded, gestures sharp and stiff. But Mari stood her ground. You could get a lot from a language you didn’t understand, if you paid attention. Then the hooded man disappeared up the stairs, leaving the two of them alone.

Mari reached for the gag, but Coben interrupted her. “So what happened?”

“What do you mean?” She kept her voice level.

“Come on. You’ve got me tied to a chair, and I don’t…” He cocked his head, trying to get a better view of her face. “I don’t get the sense you planned this out particularly well, although I have to say, I don’t have the best view from over here.”

A small smile. At least it was still her. “Aren’t you scared? Even a little bit?”

“Obviously. Just not of you.”

“And why on earth not?” she burst out, wheeling on him with a spark in her eyes that he hadn’t seen since he’d been trapped in this basement. Before he even had time to react, there was a knife in her hand, with the same deftness she’d surprised him with before, and she pointed it at him. “I’m worth being a little scared of, don’t you think?”

“I mean, sure. I just don’t think you’re going to hurt me.”

“I’ve had you as my prisoner for five days.”

“Everybody’s got their flaws—”

“Oh, you think you’re so fucking funny.”

Coben couldn’t help the grin. “Hearing you swear is bizarre, I’ve got to say.”

“That’s what you find bizarre?” She buried her hands in her hair, knife still in her hand. “Does nothing get to you? Maybe I’ll send you back to your father in pieces, how about that?”

He did flinch, when she touched the flat of the blade to his cheek — but it meant they were making eye contact. Never mind that his heart was vibrating in his chest, feeling like it was going to give out on him at any moment. He was doing a marvelous job of playing it off, but truth be told, he wasn’t entirely convinced that Mari wasn’t going to stab him through the chest; it was just… well… One could hope.

“You kept the ribbon,” he said quietly.

And there it was. The flush across her smoky-brown skin, the freckles that normally were too hard to see popping out against the slight red hue. And he wasn’t tied that tightly. He leaned forward and kissed her — not hard, but enough to feel her heartbeat echoing through her lips.

She broke the kiss after a few seconds. “You really can’t handle the word ‘no’, can you?”

“I would if you had once sounded like you weren’t twisting your arm into saying it,” he replied cheerfully.

“You’re the one who followed me home.”

“When you put it that way, I sound awfully creepy.”

“It was,” Mari complained. “Although you’re so dense you probably didn’t think past your next five steps.”

“I’d be insulted, but that’s about true,” he admitted. “I figured you were hiding something. I just thought it was, you know, something guileless and charming.”

“Proving you don’t know me at all.”

“Oh alright, maybe the secret spy skills aren’t that shocking. I just didn’t think you were out to get me.”

Mari was still very close to him. It was one of the joys of being taller than her; even tied up like this, their faces weren’t that far apart while she was standing. “How have you survived this long?” she asked, nearly wondrous.

“…You’ve asked me that before.”

“Yes, and I’m still shocked.”

“That question carries a little more weight when you’re the one with the knife, you know.” Although, to his great pleasure, she had lowered it and seemed to have mostly forgotten it was there. “Er, Dasta helped, when he was around. After that I think my father just stopped letting me have pointy things and hoped natural selection didn’t notice me.”

Mari bit her lip, clearly suppressing another laugh. That did help, actually. He’d been worried that everything had been a put-on, a disguise; but if he could still make her laugh then that clearly wasn’t completely true. It didn’t mean he was in the clear — but it gave him some options.

He just wished he knew what Mari and her friend had been saying to each other — and why the other man had looked so unhappy about it.

——

PALACE VAN DE SAULEN, 1920

If he’d been asked — that is, by anybody other than nosy reporters and other people he had no interest in giving any information to — Coben Garrow would probably have admitted that he didn’t particularly enjoy being the oldest son. He suspected, actually, that most older siblings didn’t take a lot of pleasure in the position. Sure, there was that saying about the grass being greener on the other side. Deirdre hated being the only girl, and Rue — oh, well, he wasn’t sure what Rue thought. Rue probably got annoyed about being too young for everything, but admittedly Coben’s conversations with Rue tended towards adventure novels and games of hopscotch. An eleven-year age difference didn’t leave much room for common interests.

He also suspected that most older siblings didn’t have to go to such extremes to avoid their jobs.

Also, this closet was cramped.

“Note to self,” he muttered to himself. “Next time, acquire an escape plan with a route to the library. And possibly, snacks.” How nightmarish was this? He was turning twenty years old in approximately… He marked out an estimate in his head. Half an hour? And he had managed to trap himself into a storage closet after a single glass of wine because nobody would leave him alone.

It wasn’t his fault. Mama had told him to make an appearance, and he had. He just hadn’t realized that ‘make an appearance’ didn’t mean show up at the top of the stairs and promptly vanish. No, apparently he was expected to dance with people. And that would have been bearable, too, if the girls in question hadn’t then started fluttering their eyelashes in very awkward ways that he… well, bloody hell, he was sure somewhere in the mental map he had of social niceties he had a reasonable response other than asking if there was something in their eyes, but he’d panicked, hadn’t he? And it was come off like a blockhead or make some patchwork, terrible effort to flirt back, which would have been fine if he’d had the remotest interest in getting married, and even if he’d been interested in that, he had to check every single family tree and political vote and allegiance for the last twenty or thirty years to be sure he wasn’t marrying either a second cousin (thankfully unlikely) or a sworn enemy (an unfortunately high risk). And…

And he wanted to go to bed.

The worst part, Coben thought morosely, was that he couldn’t exactly shove it off on somebody else. Deirdre was — well, a girl, which apparently mattered. Not that he understood why. Deirdre was out there having a grand old time doing the foxtrot with the boys from the Bard College and showing off her admittedly-very-pretty dress, and none of them had the faintest clue that she was scoping out the competition for when she finally got around to taking the test. And there was the small matter of any extended family he’d once had being bumped off long before he was born. He only knew his grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins from portraits and old letters. It was a lot to think about, even without the pressure of his father trying not to loom while Definitely, Intensely Looming over his shoulder.

Coben was startled out of his grumpy monologuing — he was self-aware to know when he was grumpily monologuing, at least — by… oh, drat. Someone was opening the door. He looked around, scrambled —

The lantern in the doorway brightened a little, flame turning up. “I can see you in there, you know.”

Coben glanced between the shelves he was hiding behind. It was one of the domestic servants — probably one of the laundry girls, since this was one of the linen closets off the main dining hall — but that didn’t mean he was safe. Technically, Miss Damask didn’t have any say over him anymore, but in practice, all of the maids still reported back to her when he was misbehaving, the wretched traitors. It probably didn’t help that Mama encouraged them. Well, maybe she couldn’t see his face. “Yes, just… uh…” He tried to look at what was on the shelf, squinting in the low light. “Counting… threads. Thread count.”

The maid was quiet for a moment. “I see. How’s that going?”

“Careful work. There’s hundreds of the things, you know. And then I have to sort them.”

“Sort them.”

“By thread count. After I’m done counting them.”

The girl stepped into the closet, half-closing the door behind her. Coben could see her a little more clearly now, although still not entirely. She was one of the younger ones, and one he didn’t recognize, although that didn’t mean much. There were hundreds of staff at the Palace, and he had a hard enough time keeping his teachers straight without trying to remember every servant he caught a passing glimpse of. “Hm,” she said thoughtfully. “And here I thought they came with the thread counts already labelled.”

Did they? Honestly, he wasn’t entirely sure what a thread count was. “Oh, the, uh… labels got misplaced.”

“That’s a shame. Well, try not to mix them up. For the high thread count ones, we have to kill twice as many sheep—”

“What?” he burst out, sticking his head out from behind the shelves despite himself. “That’s barbaric!”

A moment later, when she burst into helpless giggles, Coben felt his ears going red. Well, at least he could see her now, illuminated in the lamplight. She was covering her grin, but she was a bit younger than him, with flyaway black curls badly contained under her white bonnet and chestnut-brown skin that was only visible at her hands and face. She had an armful of sheets, and he realized with faint embarrassment that she wasn’t picking anything up — she was putting laundry away. In fact, he could see the cart just outside the cracked door.

“I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “That was mean. I can help you back to your room, if you want.”

Oh, Coben thought with another flush. She was really new. The reason he didn’t recognize her wasn’t stupidity on his part — it was because she was new enough that she’d never actually met him. She thought — very reasonably, actually — that he was some new arrival or visiting dignitary’s child, hiding because everything was so new. Or, simply, lost.

Because, obviously, who would be hiding from their own birthday party?

“I knew you didn’t actually kill sheep for yarn,” he offered lamely. He did. Usually. He just had a bad habit of taking people at face value. “Or, well, I certainly assume you don’t. You don’t strike me as a sheep murderer.”

“Oh? What makes you say that?”

“Well, for starters, if you were a sheep murderer, I imagine you’d be out looking for sheep. I’m given to believe that there’s not a great amount of sheep wandering the halls of the Palace. At least, I’ve never seen any.”

She was grinning again, shaking her head and stifling another chuckle. “I certainly doubt you’d find them in a linen closet, sir. Why would they be here?”

“By your logic, mourning their fallen brethren. Perhaps stealing them back home for appropriate burials. I don’t know how sheep think.”

That seemed to do it; she nearly collapsed giggling. He felt inordinately proud of himself. Usually he got annoyed looks when his mouth got ahead of him. “Do you spend a lot of time considering these things?”

“More than I should. It’s a good deal more interesting than keeping track of who wants me dead.” A second later he realized what he’d said. Oops.

The girl frowned, then got a little closer to him, lifting the lamp to his face — and more importantly, to the Garrow silver-and-blue waistcoat he had on, their crest design all over it, although he apparently did look an unfortunate amount like his father. Then she blinked, nearly quailing. “Oh, f— goodness.”

“You were going to swear.”

“I was not.”

“I don’t care, I just thought it was funny.”

“Master Coben?”

“Don’t call me that,” he said weakly. “I thought you were new. No, please. You can call Rue that. Master Coben makes me sound like I’m either hideously old or hideously pretentious.”

“What are you doing in a linen closet?”

“I’ll tell you what I’m not doing. I’m not murdering any sheep.”

She looked over her shoulder, then back at him. “Does your father know where you are?”

“Oh, it’s not particularly important. He probably thinks I’m either off stargazing or in the library. Which is where I intended to be, but then one of those Schmidt harridans blocked my exit. Are they gone, by the way?”

“Schmi—” Then she stared up at him with a look of consternation. “Are you hiding?”

“Look, if you’d like to go dance the foxtrot with women who keep making loaded suggestions about their child-bearing hips, be my guest. Actually, do you? I could use a diversion. No, you’d never pass for me, never mind.”

She closed her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose, and Coben tried — and failed — not to be charmed. Not only was she new, he suspected she was actually rather new to the whole domestic servant business. Most of the servants were very no-nonsense or, too far the other way, capitulated to whatever he said or did. He’d gotten better about not abusing that over the years, especially with influence from the former group, but it was refreshing to run into someone who seemed to know how to act like, well… A person.

And if she doesn’t get fired, he sighed, Miss Damask will train it out of her within the next month. Depressing.

There was a twitch of a smile at the corner of her mouth that she was clearly valiantly trying to suppress. “Coben. Sir. I…” Then she paused, smile fading a little more as she looked confused.

Coben tried not to smirk at her.

“Uh…” she hesitated.

“Let me guess,” he offered. “This wasn’t covered in orientation.”

“What, having to gently urge the Judge’s son back to his own birthday celebration? Of course it wasn’t!” Then she grimaced a little, cocking her head. “…You really don’t want to be there?”

Coben shrugged, feeling a little helpless. “I — well. It’s not really for me. It’s for everybody else and an excuse to get all the eligible bachelorettes into one room. Thankfully Father’s not jumping that hard to marry me off just yet. Probably because he doesn’t entirely trust me not to trip over my own feet yet.”

“I can see why,” she mumbled — then covered her mouth in horror when she realized she’d just insulted him. “I — I mean —” Then she scowled at him. “Stop smiling at me.”

“I can’t help it. You’re so bad at your job.”

“I am not. My job is putting away laundry, not — not herding socially awkward young men back where they’re supposed to be!”

“Exactly.” He took the sheets out of her hands. “Where do these go?”

She looked ready to crack the lantern over his head. It was probably the best thing he’d seen all night. “…Right at the top,” she mumbled.

“Oh, I see, so you were going to need the steps anyway.”

“Not everybody gets to be six feet tall.”

“I’m not six feet tall,” he shot back, carefully peering at the top of the shelf and trying to assess which pile they belonged on. “I’m five feet and ten inches. The shoes add an extra inch. Is this the right place?”

“Is it to the left near the wall?”

“Yyyy — yes.”

“Then it’s in the right place. Why are you helping me with laundry?”

“I’m hoping to trick you into telling me your name.”

She rolled her eyes. “You could just ask.”

“Okay. What’s your name?”

“Mary-Ann —.” She grimaced slightly. “Well, Mariana. Gilbertadocht Daniels.”

“Mariana,” he repeated, and felt — to his embarrassment — a bit of a blush coming to his face. Thank god for the low light. “Uh — nice to meet you.” He made a quick escape before she could ask why he’d changed his mind, slipping out of the closet door and putting his back against the wall a few doors down. He touched his face. Oh, lord. He actually was blushing. It wasn’t that he’d never blushed before. It was a perfectly normal experience. It was just that, well…

Oh, hell. He’d never actually been attracted to anybody before.

Option one, pretend it never happened. Reasonable enough. That would save him a lot of headaches, and it wasn’t like it’d never happen again. Although… Coben chewed on his lip, reminding himself that it still probably would, but what did it say when he’d never actually gotten a crush before? He was twenty years old once the clock started striking, and this was the first time. Ever. Sure, he’d made up a few when Wolfie had jostled him about it, and he’d thought maybe his friendship with ‘Phania was what other people were talking about, but it hadn’t felt any different than his other friendships. This was different.

Option two, take it as a data point. Like that was any help. What was he supposed to do with a single data point? All he knew now was that he was perfectly capable of getting idiotic and red-faced around a woman, and that he just had the bad luck to be choosy about it. Besides, it was the exact opposite of helpful that he’d discovered that he wasn’t, in fact, made of stone… about one of the help, instead of the manor family ladies he was supposed to be so enthralled with. Certainly it didn’t solve any of his problems.

Option three…

…was not an option, even though just thinking about it had his heart leaping into his throat. He wanted… something. Perhaps not even a relationship or a courtship or whatever it was that he was supposed to want here. He just…

Coben stared at his feet, feeling almost as miserable as he was elated to realize that he hadn’t had to double-check or smooth over anything he’d said. Normally he had to pick his statements over at least three or four times. It was what had gotten him the reputation for being quiet; it was that or, well, saying whatever stray thought popped into his head. But he hadn’t even thought to do it. Maybe it was just that little bit of wine he’d had. Maybe it was just one moment, a perfect intersection that wouldn’t happen again.

Option three, act like an adult for the first time in your life and take a chance.

It couldn’t hurt. Could it?

Mariana was exiting the linen closet; she glanced up, realized he was standing just a little bit down the hall, and stared for a moment before shaking her head with a small sigh. Coben straightened his waistcoat, and joined her on her way back down the hallway — away from the ballroom.

“Do you want something, sir?” she asked, but she was happy to see him; she couldn’t hide that, and Coben wasn’t sure she was trying to.

“One, stop calling me sir. Two…”

She raised an eyebrow at him.

“Do you like chess?”

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And thus the full truth comes out! Also, I’m intensely proud of the dialogue in the flashback part of this – I was cackling while writing it. Fully blame Mercedes Lackey and Tamora Pierce for that dynamic. Coben is, btw, absolutely autistic. I don’t have any interest in leaving that vague, the term just – again – literally doesn’t exist.

I couldn’t resist the reference in the chapter quote either. It was just… right there. How could I possibly say no?

Kestrel is me bein self-indulgent – which certainly isn’t a bad thing by any means! But one of the things I’ve been trying to let myself do more is write deaf characters. It’s probably struck people as strange before how I don’t have that many, considering I’m deaf, but it’s one of the places where the lack of representation has really had an effect. I have a WIP on the backburner with a deaf main character, but for now Kestrel is my first little foray into it. He’s partially deaf and can speak, but it really is not his preferred way of communicating. (I find it odd that when there are signing characters in fiction, they tend to be mute and not deaf.)

Song: Bigger Than Us – White Lies

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Bell, Clock and Candle is free to read online and I don’t plan on changing that; however, if you like it and want to support its author, please consider supporting me with a Patreon pledge or a Ko-fi donation! For bonus goodies, Patreon readers get every chapter a week early, and pledging to the Elementals tier ($5+) gets you access to deleted scenes and conlang progress posts.

Elliott Dunstan

Category: The Nowhere Bird

Chapter 26: Penumbral Whispers

CWs: unreality, suicide attempt trauma, mental illness/PTSD (SO MUCH), paranoia, drug discussion, closet anxiety/internalized homophobia

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Song: Sekai Wa Sude Ni Azamuki No Ue Ni (Instrumental)

Chapter 25: Poppy and Peridot

CWs: drug use + related confrontation, self-harm (Bloodwork), casual racism, captivity(?), suicide attempt referenced, fantasy discrimination

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Chapter 24: Melting Point

CWs: opioid and stimulant drug use (+discussion of), guns, implied human trafficking, subtle/microaggressive racism, racial profiling, self-harm scars

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Song: Jakyl by True Widow

Chapter 23: The Quiet Oak

CWs: bullying, exclusion trauma, loneliness

PARC DER RUSSIGNOLS, DEN ELESSA, 1917

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Song: River Flows in You – HAUSER

Chapter 22: A Note of Concern

CWs: hyperdevotion/cultlike thought patterns, kidnapping, threatened murder

PALACE VAN DE SAULEN, 1920

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Song: Bigger Than Us – White Lies