I: Breath

The adrenaline hangover was only going to keep him going for a little while longer.

This was as close as he'd been to sleeping in days: lethargic and nervous in front of a fire with a mild concussion and a loaded shotgun. Just him, the copper glow, the warm clutch of wood and metal in his hands, a howling winter silence behind the bolted storm shutters. This was rest, a tiny vacation, despite that the pain in his shoulder had its own feverish pulse behind the clever veil of painkillers and his cranium felt full of clouds. Maybe if he pretended that it was really just a storm keeping them here, he could relax enough to drop off for a few minutes. But he needed something to hold him over, keep his brain working, for however long it could.

As it was, with everyone else asleep, or maybe just trying to be asleep, the silence was at least welcome insomuch as it provided opportunity to close his eyes, stop thinking. Only occasionally, there would be a sound. A scratching, a thump of wind driven tree branches against the roof. Nothing loud, just enough that he'd snap out of the welcoming haze of the world between asleep and awake, that enticing purgatory filled with moonlight and fog.

Inside the house, there was a golden diameter of blissful heat from the blaze in the big flagstone hearth, the warm glow of the fire on the scarlet draperies and wooden shutters, the leather wing chairs and woven blankets. Things that could lull anyone into a false sense of normalcy. Of comfort.

But outside, it was dark, nearly moonless. Bitter cold, the Alenhaten canalways all iced over and crusted with the crawling frost and snow. And out there, he knew, those sounds weren't all just wind and leaves.

The need for a long term solution was just one of the troubles rattling around his head like a shaken jar of bees. There were too many. Too many things to worry about, to plan, to keep coming back to… no matter how much he wanted to avoid thinking about them.

How he always ended up in some kind of goddamn leadership role, shit, he'd never know. Even how he managed to get involved in the first place in these kinds of things was in itself baffling. How he'd ended up awake at four-twenty-two in the morning at Bev's house with a loaded shotgun and a mess of blood dried stiff into his clothes…well. He remembered. It just didn't seem real, was all. Didn't seem possible.

Really, it was probably better not to sleep. If not just to avoid the inevitable horror, the revulsion that would strike him while he was defenseless against it. As soon as he was asleep, he would wake up sick. Maybe he'd scream. There was no telling. It had happened before.

Not just because of everything he'd seen. Because, once more, he'd just let it happen. He'd arrived too late, and stood idly by while someone important had been taken away, her dark blood on the elaborate parlor rug in the big manor house. All of it now so far away, a hundred miles south, abandoned in their hasty flight. Staring into the flames behind the metal grate of the fireplace, tame and controlled, all he really saw was a ghost of Totokanta's fiery skyline, the corona of it lighting the night sky with blazing topaz, burning in the darkness behind them while they'd fled, like so many others. He could feel it burning in the depth of his empty stomach.

They'd left her behind. Hadn't even buried her.

Yes. He remembered very well how he'd gotten here. The bigger task ahead of him would be to forget. To try to forget. He'd never been any good at that. If only he didn't still have the responsibility to protect others when it was so obvious he couldn't be trusted with that charge.

With a weary exhalation, he glanced down the dark hallway that led toward the stairwell and the upstairs bedrooms. If only he could get blind, blackout drunk. The lingering buzz of shock and panic that had fueled their rushed escape would only carry him so far until he needed something else to hide under. Like the fire pushing back the cold and the darkness, anger had often been his warm solace before, something to push back the fear and the grief so he wouldn't need to wrestle them away himself. For a long time, a simmering, febrile rage had been his lifeline when there was nothing else to sustain him.

It could be again. In a lot of ways, it had never left.

…5:46 PM, thirty-six hours before…

There was a bright sunset reflected in the windows of the main manor house, which had made it difficult to see when he'd first arrived after squeezing through the typical cheerful, homicidal panic that flooded the streets of the busy port city of Totokanta. People in a crazed rush to be somewhere other than where they were. Mothers towing children through the crowds, people shouting. There seemed to be a rush on the apothecary on 8th Avenue, a crowd was struggling at the doorway, likely piling in for bitters and tisane before the influenza influx that came with the cold northern winds out of the Fenril Woodland. The frost had come early this year.

It was quiet here in the outskirts, in the hills. Standing outside the estate, looking in at the human clockwork of the household, all white gloved hands and sycophancy in place of cogs, it reminded him a summer past where he'd stood under the same twisted elm each afternoon. Looking in at the same elegant ant farm. Waiting.

Now, here he was again. This time in the slowly darkening rose garden. But still. Waiting.

The sun had since set, and the manor glowed golden from the inside from its gallery of arched mullioned windows. A mob dressed in satin gloves and coattails milled inside. Silver platters and crystal champagne flutes, feathers and diamonds, generations of old wealth with liquid gold in their veins wearing jewelry that cost more than most people could hope to earn in their whole damn life. All of it made his stomach swim with a kind of disgusted envy, which he would admit was inherently contradictory if it had mattered at all. Having only arrived back in town, he was almost glad to overlook the nauseating display of the over extravagance and boredom of the filthy rich if it meant he was on his way back to normalcy.

Or, what he considered normal, anyway. Whatever.

As it happened, the youngest daughter of the Everlasting house had an appointment with him. Sort of. If appointment could be taken to mean she would be sneaking out at a particular time to meet up with him and Majic Lin, as discussed when he'd left to work with Bev at the newly unearthed Nornir ruins three months before.

He hadn't been informed about any kind of gala the same night he'd told her to be ready if she was coming with them, but probably that would be overestimating the importance of the event. It was safe, in his mind, to assume this kind of thing happened regularly. In and among the clusters of patiently coiffed and polished finefolk, he'd been trying to spot her. He'd seemed to develop a talent for finding her in a crowd, particularly this sort of crowd in which she stood out quite plainly as the most miserable human in the building. Squinting though the sparkling windows, he couldn't discern her. Not until the white set of double doors blew open up on the balcony deck and a set of quick footsteps clacked out on the stone, and through the rose leaves above there was a figure in a pale gown that made an odd, soft clatter of its own, wheat colored hair pinned up in a heap of carefully shaped curls. He couldn't be sure it was her, however, until her voice rang sharply like the echo of a thrown stone in a cavern, which, as it always did, utterly gave her away, despite that it had an unfamiliar inflection to it today. She didn't normally change her tone just to speak to some high breed, like she likely was supposed to. It was one of the things he appreciated about her: she spoke to everyone with an equal amount of haughty, impatient superiority.

"I told you, I just… I don't feel well. At all. I'm not going down." Through the rose leaves, he could see her pulling off a long earring with a petulant jerk.

"The Viscountess expects that I at least escort you down after the announcements."

"No one is going to miss me if I'm not there this time, I'll tell her myself. She can't blame you."

"I shouldn't think… Cleopatra, it's just unwise to defy your mother this time. Can't you reserve your little rebellion for another evening?"

Up on the deck, she turned suddenly, with interest or aggravation, walking back toward the door where he could see her more clearly, see the young man in his dandies and frills. Christ. Just a scared boy, not even Majic' age yet by the look of him and his shiny cherub face with his oiled hair and cravat who clearly had no idea what he shouldn't say to this one. Cleo would eat this kid alive.

"Grays," she began, using her best persuasive voice. He could hear her heeled shoes, every pointed step. Here was an act that never worked on him, her intimidation factor wasn't much higher than a duck's, and he would be apt to laugh at either. "Do you know something I don't?"

Quack, quack. Below in the garden, there was a rising impulse to chuckle. It was easiest to almost like her when she was being insolent to somebody other than him.

"Know something? Are you trying to imply you don't…" The boy's voice drifted with a note of doubtful anxiety. "Your lady mother wishes to declare my brother's intention after supper."

Now she did nothing. Said nothing but a weak and disappointing, "Oh." In the garden below, he was just wondering exactly what the hell 'your-lady-mother' was supposed to mean. He'd met Tistiny Everlasting. It wasn't the first phrase that came to mind.

"On the subject. They…will be expecting your reply."

"It's not really me he's asking anyway, Grays."

"I shouldn't think this is the time to be so selective."

"Just what does that mean?"

"Just that. Cleopatra, the arrangements are made. You know this! Your reply is a formality but my brother will wish to have it."

"What for?" Now she finally sounded angry. In the arbor below, Cleopatra's visitor was starting to get a little irritated himself.

"If the arrangements are made, what does it matter if I stand up in front of a bunch of stuffed shirts and say yes or no, Grays?"

"…Because…" Finally the boy showed a little anxiety in a bumbling way that reminded him of Majic for a moment. "It's you."

"Because it's me and everybody knows I don't want to get married? Is that why he sent you instead of showing up himself?"

Orphen didn't hear the kid's reply but it was something about propriety, that much-prized imaginary concept the gentry liked to pretend meant anything. There was too much blood rushing to his head to hear properly. He rarely handled these kinds of surprises well. In an inadvertent and abrupt motion, he sat on a wrought iron bench that huddled below the rose-laden arbor, still blooming in the early winter chill. With the wind kicking up, he felt suddenly colder, even cocooned in his cloak. Maybe like he'd swallowed ice.

Cleo's voice caught his attention again, she was snapping at the boy, Grays. Whatever the hell kind of name that was. She was belittling his reply, ordering him out of her chamber, flexing that vocal muscle a little more effectively than before. This time, it didn't make him want to laugh. But then, somehow, his inexplicable good mood had soured considerably. Why he'd even come here first, he didn't know.

No…he knew why. Of course he did.

He was thinking of leaving, coming back later or letting her come to the Lin's Lodge and Tavern looking for him, when she bore down on him out of the dark like a manic ghost, luciform in her pale beaded evening gown, with gooseflesh raised on her pale arms and a familiar blue jewel pendant around her long neck. Her hasty, seemingly soundless descent of the stone steps could only be attributed to the fact that he'd been distracted, since she wasn't making any effort to be quiet now that she was down.

"How long have you been here?" she demanded, her voice strained with more than anger. It occurred to him a moment late that she was actually expecting an answer, and a moment longer to formulate something coherent.

"Well, I don't know. How long have you known I was here?"

"Jesus, Orphen! You couldn't have had worse timing!"

"Me? Sorry, have I gotten the day wrong or just overestimated your ability to keep time?"

"…day?" The way she looked around, silenced and almost disoriented, all with that unfamiliar sound to her voice, was almost unsettling. She didn't even bother acting insulted.

He squinted at her, standing slowly. "Yes, the day. Today. Like we agreed? You…been drinking?"

"What do you care? Shit. Was it really the twentieth?"

That raised an eyebrow. Cleo cursing. It was as good as a yes. He just wasn't sure if it bothered him that she seemed to have forgotten entirely, or if it was just the inconvenience of the whole thing that had him a little riled. Actually, he felt a bit sick. He'd come all the way here, and she clearly was in no way expecting him or ready to leave. To say nothing of the fact she was engaged, though that in of itself didn't upset him so much as just shocked him.

No. That wasn't true.

"It's the twentieth," he said. He sounded faultlessly annoyed. Bored, even.

Her little manicured hands went up to her face, wiped at a made up eye, dabbing at the dark kohl with the pad of her fingertip. Not seeing her for three months couldn't account entirely for how different she looked from last he'd seen her. But normally she wasn't dressed up like a duchess or marquise or whatever the hell they called her. It made that time seem a lot more like a year when she was all coiffed and manicured and stuffed into brocade, looking more like a painting than a person. The kind of ambiguous, big-eyed aristocrat you'd see printed on banknotes. But certainly, it had been awhile, maybe three years since they'd first met. It would be naïve to claim she hadn't changed a little in that time.

"I'm sorry," she blurted finally. If there were two things that rarely came out of Cleo Everlasting's mouth, it was curse words and apologies. Already they were two for two. "Can…can I just meet you? Later? I just…I don't think I should—"

"Ditch your own engagement party?" He hadn't even meant to say it; it had just flown out of his mouth, unwilling to remain unsaid. Once it had passed his teeth, he'd prepared to defend himself against a flying fist but instead, she was ostensibly calm, fighting tears, her eyes on the ground. When she looked up at him, she lost her battle, a word snagging in her throat, a makeup stained tear snaking out against her will and dropping down her white cheek.

"What am I going to do?" Her voice sounded like a rusty hinge, her shoulders rounding when she bent forward to catch her face in her hands. It made his palms itch, made him want to grab her shoulders and shake her so she would stop.

"What the hell do you mean what are you going to do? Tell them to shove it. It's your life, isn't it?" The whole thing was getting very uncomfortable. He really didn't want to talk about this. Could there ever just be an easy five minutes where she wasn't making him crazy?

To make it worse, she didn't seem at all as prepared for his angry reaction as she likely should have been. Instead, his sharp comment just made a shred of a sob shudder out from behind her clenched teeth.

"Of course it isn't," she hissed.

"Well, for fuck's sake, I don't have an answer for you. I don't know anything about…"

"About what? About marriage? I'll be twenty next year..."

"What about your sister? Shouldn't she focus on her first?" 'She' meaning her lady-mother. The term kind of made his skin want to crawl right off his bones. He'd just as soon compare her mother to a giant spider, except that a giant spider would probably be more maternal. Why was he even having this conversation?

"God! You are so thick! Mariabella has been making her wedding plans for more than a year already."

"Well, how the hell would I know?"

"Because I told you!"

He held his hands up, palms out, to hold back the diatribe she was likely preparing to unload at him. "Then what are you going to do? I'm bringing Majic back to Bazilkok for his rune study. There's no real reason for you to be there." Except for her to be there. Which was the only reason she ever went anywhere with them, really. But it wasn't something they talked about. There were a lot of things they didn't talk about.

In his mind, she was just a cornerstone of normalcy these days, and he had never responded well to change after he became accustomed to something. And he…was accustomed to her.

"Wuh…" she sputtered, "What, so if I don't come with you right now you're just going to leave? What about Majic's Dad?"

"It's not my fault you were too busy getting sauced in your room to remember what day it is. What about Majic's Dad?

She looked angry enough to hit him now, which always gave him a little flutter of pleasure for one reason or another. "He's sick. Just like half the bleeding continent. Have you been living under a rock?"

Actually, he sort of had. Four-hundred feet down in the newly uncovered Nornir Chapel just outside of the Bazilkok ruins, translating rune phrases on the tabernacle with Bev by lantern light, on contract from the University. He made a doubtful face at her. "Sick, Bagup? With what?"

Cleo glared, hugging her arms in the thickening dark. He could smell fading roses on cold breeze, maybe a spritz of some kind of perfume, or maybe it was brandy on her breath. Something sweet and cutting, which was appropriate.

"With what? What else would it be? You haven't...?" At his blank expression, she scowled. "Rhinehold, Orphen. Haven't you even seen a newspaper since you've been gone?"

"I've been occupied."

"I bet," she sniffed resentfully. "Majic's not going to want to leave him just yet. You can't just wait a couple days? Bev can't get along without you out there?"

"It's not that she can't, I'd just rather get back myself. It's kind of a big fucking deal. All those relics, the temple, there's still an entire rectory to open up…" He paused, forgetting for a moment he was arguing with her. "You should see it."

"I want to see it!" She said it almost breathlessly, dizzy. In a weird way, it made his clothes feel too tight. Like the words had reached out and choked him.

"Then ditch this thing, what the hell?"

"I can't! I have to at least…refuse in person."

"So you're refusing. Why are you asking me what you should do—?"

She wilted. "What else would I do? I don't know how it will go over, but…"

Silence and cold wind took over the dialogue. He watched her hug herself and try to carefully wipe her eyes. Two things that he, if he'd been so inclined, maybe should have done for her. But he never touched her if he didn't have to.

"So who is it you're supposed to be marrying?" He asked, as though he really wanted to know. He didn't. The gods knew why he even had brought it up again.

She answered woodenly, the name tumbling from her mouth like a brick while she looked through him. "Lord Ambrose Farrior."

Why did aristocrats name their children preposterous shit? Instead of giving in to the sudden thunderclap of nausea sweeping over him, he pushed out a sharp, chilly laugh. "Well, don't sound so excited."

"Fuck you, Orphen."

"Ohhh, language, princess."

"If you're just here to twist the knife—"

"No, I'm here because we had a conversation and agreed—"

"Then go back to stupid Bazilkok without me and see if I give a—"

"Well, shit, what do you want me to do? Kidnap you?"

"Just wait, okay?" Her voice cracked when she raised it. "Just a few hours. Listen, I'm sorry I forgot but I've had a lot...just…can you please just go see Majic, and I'll meet you there? Just past midnight, okay, so I know this'll be over? Please! And if Majic wants to go…if he's ready to go then I'll go with you."

He frowned. Cleo never said please, least of all to him. Please, sorry and shit: it was a trifecta of unusual and it set him utterly on edge. And what the hell would it matter if Majic wanted to go? Why wouldn't he? "You want me to go catch whatever Bagup's got?"

"How could you not have heard about this? With everything they've been saying, I'd wager even in the streets they..." She folded her arms, tight, her features arranged somewhere between disgusted and incredulous.

He just shrugged.

"Leave it to you to know nothing..." She cut off with an exaggerated sigh. "Besides, it's not like he's got a cold. And he's on good medicine. If you catch it early, it's treatable. It's just that the medication is…expensive so… Didn't you pass through town? I practically got mobbed last time I went through. And last week, they burned down the clinic for turning people away."

He thought about the apothecary downtown, the mothers and their pale children. The shouting. He'd chalked it up to the usual urban panic that always repulsed him. Maybe it had been bad enough, though, that he'd noticed any of it at all.

"If it's so expensive, how did Bagup get it? The Lodge does that well?"

She made a face, "How the hell should I know that?"

"Cleo!" A voice from above, past the stone balcony and the open double doors into her chamber. She turned toward it with a jerk, sending herself into a wobble. The right thing to do would be to step out and catch her elbow. Offer her support, especially with the pinch of anxiety on her tear streaked face.

He didn't. She grabbed up her cream-colored skirts in one fist and fired another pretty glare at him. "So? You'll wait?"

He took a breath. Held it. Held it. Let it out. Shook his head.

"Alright."

Cleo's glower turned into a smirk. She hauled around, rushed at him in her rustling dress, threw her frigid arms around his neck. Stiffly, he patted her bare shoulder, keeping his eyes off the tiny constellation of freckles there, looking up at the stone wall of the garden instead and riding out a wave of the familiar claustrophobia he often felt when she came too close.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm the best, I know."

"You're an absolute asshole. I honestly can't stand you," she said, looking up at him, too close, in the dark. And there was that sweet perfume again, the hint of brandy on her breath.

Yes. Definitely brandy.

He pulled a breath into his tight lungs. "Mutual as ever. That's not getting you anywhere with me if you think that makes me feel bad…"

"I don't even want to know what would get me anywhere with you, whatever the hell that's supposed to mean." Above, the voice was calling again, searching, getting closer. Heavy footfalls pounded on a wooden floor above, and she wheeled quickly toward the sound before jerking back. "Now go away! Hurry and de…compose or…"

She really wasn't quite herself. Cleo had probably read more books on sorcery than he ever had. Decompose. For fuck's sake. "Dematerialize."

"Whatever! Hurry up!"

"Then let me go."

With a hard blink, she did. He stiffly stepped back into the shadow of the rose arbor and murmured the incantation to translocate, a modified operative assembly incantive phrase. The last thing he saw of the manor garden was Cleo, hurrying back up the stone steps, wiping her face with the back of a porcelain hand and not looking back to make sure he was doing as asked. Usually, she wouldn't trust him to do as he was asked quite so quickly.

And normally, he wouldn't have.

He supposed that he was a bit rattled by the whole thing; the whole rushed few minutes' worth of tense conversation: marriage plans, Bagup Lin with some kind of fever, Lord Ambrose Fucking Farrior, meeting at midnight, that she couldn't stand him. Her voice and her face were both different since he'd last seen her; her with her sculpted hair and painted eyes. It was queer, maybe even disquieting, but despite it, they'd effortlessly fallen into a blood-pressure-elevating, palm-sweating exchange, a kind of status-quo that made up for the any uneasy unfamiliarity. After his absence, it was somehow comforting to know that at least a few things remained changeless: her maddening sense of absolute entitlement; the length of her fuse; the picturesque, angry curl of her pink rosebud lips; that they mixed like vinegar and milk. That and the fact that, for one idiotic moment with her sweet intoxicated breath in his face, he'd been gripped with a sick, twisted yearning to put his hands and his mouth where they didn't belong.

Some things were just a constant.

It hadn't been the first time. Not for any of it. And until she was gone, until she was married off and locked away in her gilded prison of brandy and crystal and noble children with absurd names, where he'd never see her again, it wouldn't be the last.

Certainly nothing he couldn't handle.

ooo…ooo…ooo

To be continued…