Summer Break – 13.2
Author: Wildbow

Summer Break – 13.2 | Pale

Next Chapter

Lucy kept her eyes mostly closed as Zed poured the water over her, peering through lashes with her gaze on the furs.  With her Sight on, she could track the movement and expansion of the lines through her eyelids.  They rose up around her, extended, and added perspectives that hadn’t been there before, folding and unfolding the furs themselves.

A citadel of coppery red material, bound together with red cordage, with dark trees on either side.  She opened her eyes wider.

The environment kissed her body, shadows extending to meet her as if they were her shadows, branches touching the side of her head and leaving crimson behind, blood?  Not blood.  Her skin turned blacker than moonless midnight, her eyes a neon red that cast its own light, an effect that touched and ran through her hair.  Her limbs grew longer, as did neck and back.  Her heart grew heavy in her chest, until she was left feeling like whatever was holding it in place wasn’t necessarily strong enough to secure it.

Touching the door broke the last bits of unaltered Lucy, letting them fall to the shadow beneath her feet.  Violent wind whipped around her and pulled her hair free of its ties, and it didn’t hold its prior shape.  It held the shape of hair that had been left unbound and touched largely by wind, not anything else.

“Actions and associates, particularly those pertaining to Kennet,” she murmured.  Zed had said to be firm, but with the feeling in her chest, this felt like the right tone for entering.

She pushed, and a door twenty feet tall broke and crashed open, as if a train had run into it.  At the same time, the doorway itself rushed in the opposite direction, as fast as that train might go.  The darkness beyond swept past her.  It lingered, and she realized her eyes were closed.  She’d been sleeping.

She stretched out on her throne, one leg hooked over the arm, her back and one arm draped over the other arm, one bare foot in the blood red soil.  She could feel it simmering, boiling, broiling with activity.

“Do you want any counsel, madam?”

She rolled her head to one side, and she looked at the small mouse with golden fur perched on a rock.  She considered eating it, but then she saw the very large, twisting shadow it cast.  It was too big to get her mouth around, in ways that had nothing to do with size.

“If I may make a suggestion, you could pick out lieutenants, or create them from nothing.  Soldiers to run your errands, keep your company…”

She met those small black eyes with her own neon red ones.

“No?  It remains an option, miss Carmine. As you no doubt see, the spirits will handle most things, but things too contentious to manage will-”

She moved her hand, fingers flicking out in the mouse’s direction.

It bounded off, disappearing into foliage.  Trees swayed with its passage.

Toes dug into dirt.  Her awareness dug into the world around her, up until it butted up into other territories.  She was aware of conflicts big and small, fighting, killing, predators hunting prey and brother killing brother, husband killing wife, child harming child.  She was aware of the fornication, of the intimidation, of posturing, positioning, of power itself.

The more she dwelt on the details, the more time slowed down, giving her the space to do so.  It would take a personality different from her own to face every individual issue.

The throne moved as she wished it to move, taking a form she wished it to take.  She formed it into something more comfortable, then found herself vaguely dissatisfied.  It was too easy, a comfort without the earning of that comfort.

She let it remain uncomfortable, fit for a figure slightly different from her own, the previous holder.

Sitting there, draped across an uncomfortable seat, toes in the dirt, she held her court as a Queen might, but instead of attendants guiding the common folk and nobles to her audience, the universe served up the things too difficult for the spirits to make firm decisions on.  She could have left it be, let them sort it out with their own judgment, but in the doing, it would be the loudest, the most established, and the strongest who would win in all things.

She still licked wounds from recent decades, watching Man establish.  Watching Man grow in strength.  Watching Man win by its own strength.  Even now, Man brought slaves here.  Invaders conquered, fought, and exchanged bitter plague and sickness with those people who had been here since before she had manifested, well before she had taken this throne.

Goblins of the European countries met and mingled with the little people of the wilderness here, as did a grouping of dwarves.  The ferocious mingled with goblins, and the canny mingled with dwarves.  Another sort of establishment.

A group of those newcomers who had made binding deals to be able to speak with spirits, ghosts, and other forces were meeting, to negotiate the ways forward, agreeing to put old enmities to rest.  Others fought in subtle ways, hoping to remove potential rivals and rivals from half a world away before those people could establish themselves.  With so many sick, in unfamiliar territory, or weary from trying to forge a way forward, the hopes were warranted more often than not.

She did not leave it be.  She would adjudicate.

Edward Lehman met with Henrietta Belton on the shores of one of the great lakes.  Edward had been searching for soapstone, guided by a spirit companion he had summoned, and Henrietta Belton lived in the region, a regular hedge witch who was trying to figure out what herbs were in the area.  Their initial meeting scared one another, and moments of fear can, if followed by security, help open the heart to infatuation.

Edward, seventeen, son of a great practitioner family, helps provide that security by being helpful.  Henrietta, twelve, accidentally found her way into practice alongside a group of ‘sisters’, fellow students at a house for wayward girls and orphans, before being adopted.  One of her last gifts before her departure to the New World was an induction into proper practicing.  She helps Edward with a chronic toothache, picking out the herbs his spirit companion helped her find, and in this, provides her own security.

They know each other for five years, meeting in private to talk, Edward to speak of his strict father and shrewish mother, Henrietta to let her mind wander out her mouth in endless streams of ideas, fantasy, hopes, fears, and wonderings.  He copies and shares pages from the collection of texts his family brought over, giving them to her as a gift, wrapped like a scroll around flowers he’s picked.

She and an older girl were brought into the family from the girls’ home to help a family of one man and three older boys cook, clean, and sort things out.  The older girl married the father a year ago, and Henrietta is expected to marry one of the boys, an expectation that shapes her nights and mornings in the household.  Her every day is so dull she likens it to bashing her head repeatedly into the log walls.  Her thoughts are further numbed by darkness, pain, scrubbing, and stove smoke, ‘livened up’ only by the pressures from the older boys, who act when their father isn’t looking, to try to bully her into their embrace and eventual betrothal.

The older girl who is effectively her stepmother condemns her for every rude word overheard from the boy’s lips, every vulgarity on their parts, every time she finds Henrietta standing in the corner, eyes on the ground, hands clutching at something- anything, even one another, white-knuckled, while the oldest of the boys stands too close.  The boys go no further than this and leering at her, out of fear of their father, but the fact they go this far is a mark against Henrietta in her stepmother’s eyes, to be punished with more scrubbing.

Winter is hell, Henrietta has told Edward.  Winter means they stay indoors, unless wood needs to be cut, the food dull and stretched thin, six people and a baby in a cabin that would feel small for four, the odors of smoke, cooking grease, and unwashed bodies filling up the room until her head pounds with every breath she takes for weeks on end.  Months on end spent in their company, her stepmother’s words biting, Henrietta the scapegoat for everything that goes wrong, even the baby deciding to shit and cry.  Her only relief is the drugs she’s able to concoct, that relax tempers and render men flaccid, counteracted by the medicine she takes herself so she can remain sharp.

For five years, she has endured these winters.  For five years, she has looked forward to meeting Edward in the spring.  For five years she picked the herbs and medicines she needs for the five months of winter, and traveling for a day and a night on this sixth year, knowing she’ll catch a beating for getting herself ‘lost’, she can’t find any more.  They’ve been picked clean by her own hands.  Even the spirit companion cannot find more.

She has not been bullied into any of the boy’s ’embraces’, but the notion of betrothal is not far off, but instead overdue, postponed by the squabbling between the boys and the father’s knowledge the one who marries her will take her away.  If someone gets impatient and the father grows tired of his sons squabbling, it might even come to pass partway through the winter.  Marriage to a brother, allowed because they aren’t blood.

She panics, contemplates dark things, like drugs of the worst sort, to turn her into a monster strong enough to kill her family, or ways to erase their will.  Edward catches her, holding her tight.  It is meant to be their goodbye to one another before next spring and she is out of her mind with fear over what the long stinking darkness across winter might bring, ruining that goodbye, which prompts further panic – what if she comes next spring and he isn’t there?

Edward makes his offer.  Escape.  His betrothal.  His cabin instead of her adopted father’s.

She accepts, leaving everything behind, and the following weeks are a whirlwind.  She meets his family and they are glad Edward has found another practitioner who isn’t a rival, their cabin is lit by spirit, bright compared to the dark room with six people and one window with a shutter that controls the outflow of smoke, lets the cold air in, but that provides some of the only light that isn’t from the fire.  The food is good, and she helps in the kitchen.

She feels like a character from a fairy tale, a wayward girl abandoned by one family and picked up by another she didn’t want.  The evil stepmother, the grim fate- and it did feel like fate clutching at her.  She worries at the same time, because the fairy tales often had the most unhappy of endings.  The mermaid turned to sea foam, the princesses dead.

The fear comes true, but not as she thought.  Years of being on guard against men has her unable to even kiss Edward without her body tensing, her breath seizing in her lungs.  The more these fears come to evidence, the worse the experience.  She worries at the sadness in Edward’s eyes, if this fairy tale might end in some bitter irony, her prince turning away because he can’t understand why her breath and body act the way they do.

She concocts her solution.  Edward reluctantly helps.  A drug to mirror herself, transform her mind and body from sweet and gentle young lady Henrietta to the licentious woman Arietta.  Only a little, only with Edward, and only to unlock the feelings caged deep inside, that she does feel for him.  With that, the fears slip away, it gets easier and easier.  Only a dose to transform, now and then, such as when the coming winter of year seven brings old fears with it, renewing that entrapment of her breath in her throat.

While shopping on the week of Christmas on year eight, visiting a nearby town, she finds her elder ‘brother’ and his new wife.  He tries to accost her, and Edward stops him.  Angry, he storms off.

A little bit later, while they are at Church, their home is raided and ransacked.  Among the things taken are papers.  While transformed, Henrietta’s alter ego was incautious with her words, and made promises- still ones Henrietta might have made, but because Henrietta’s memory isn’t always Arietta’s, Edward thought it wise to write down those promises, in case they were keeping.

This sets the stage where the Carmine is expected to judge.

Wondering at the disappearance of his once-putative fiancee, the eldest brother wrote overseas to the home for orphaned and wayward girls.  One of Henrietta’s peers who used to be the most wayward was now the most devout, and she thus thought it appropriate to tell him of the contracts Henrietta had made with ungodly forces, that she was bound to truth, among other things she had learned.

The brother finds her again, and he names her forsworn.  She made promises, sober and of her own mind, that contradict oaths she made as Arietta, not truly herself, inebriated on chemicals, less binding.  On the one hand, she is to repay family, she is to honor father and mother, she is to wed one of her brothers.  That last extracted in a moment of desperation.

On the other, Arietta has sworn heart and body to Edward.  She swore to repay him for being her savior, to wed him.

These contradict.

The Carmine Beast has not been invited to this scene of forswearing, but in the clashing of two promises, spirits aren’t readily equipped to act.  She judges.

Lucy sat back in the throne.

“I’m supposed to make this call?” Lucy asked the empty clearing, ground and wood around her stained in blood, the leaves red.

She raised a hand, and the shapes Edward and Henrietta emerged from the soil, drawn out in crimson.  The events and details were there for her to reach out to as much as the faces were.

“She was only ten when she was brought into the family,” Lucy said.

“Correct,” the Alabaster said.  She strode into the clearing from a point opposite Lucy.  “Pardon the intrusion.  I thought you should have guidance for your first major task.”

“As a child, the oaths she made… should they really count?”

“The notion of the ‘child’ was only trending out of favor in that era,” the Carcass in Sable said, voice soft, with a faint ragged edge to it that Lucy’s earring could pick up.  “She was old enough to awaken, if we grant her words the gravity required for her to practice, we must grant them the gravity to condemn her.”

“If you wish to rule so the young cannot make oaths, running against all set precedent,” the Gold-Furred Mouse said, running along a branch and landing atop the very edge of the throne, “you’d have to undo all workings she’s wrought.  That takes power, Carmine.  Power you would deprive yourself of for other, future decisions and actions.”

“It doesn’t necessarily save her,” the Alabaster Doe said.

Lucy moved so they formed more of a square, so the Alabaster was to her left, the Gold-Furred Mouse to her right, the Sable across from her.  The images of the pair sat in the center of the clearing.

“It might,” Lucy said.

“If you strip away her practice, and rule so that the young cannot bear oath or awakening in this region, you’ll face pressure from the outside,” the Gold-Furred Mouse told her.  “She would be stripped of tools that have thus far saved her from many bad fates.”

“But she wouldn’t be forsworn.”

“She might wish she was, Carmine Child,” the Alabaster Doe said.

“Teenager,” Lucy muttered.  “I don’t have the impression that the forsworn usually think they got off easy.”

“No.  But in this scenario that ends with her being forsworn, she loved and lost,” the Carcass in Sable told Lucy.  “Lost everything.  She got to meet Edward.  She had a good few weeks.”

“That’s not the selling point you think it is.  I’m giving this relationship a C+ at best,” Lucy said.  “Too old.”

“Different times, less options,” the Mouse told her, from its perch on the arm of the throne.

“Still.  This isn’t a love for the ages, worth the utter destruction of her self, practice, and everything else.”

“Perhaps not,” the Alabaster Doe told Lucy.  “But without this, perhaps she might not have had any good moments at all.  Forsworn in all intents and purposes.”

The scene in the center of the clearing changed.  Henrietta, married to the eldest brother.  As the light shone in her face, there was a flash of color- Lucy could look deeper to see the scene as it might’ve unfolded.  A long winter, every winter.

“Can I like… just say no?” Lucy asked, looking at the three.  “Forswearing not granted, fuck you, eldest brother guy, you eat the forswearing instead?”

“On what grounds?” the Gold-Furred Mouse asked.

Lucy searched her brain for an answer, then said, “Arietta wasn’t Henrietta.”

“You may say no,” the Carcass in Sable told her.  The scene changed again, animated.

Henrietta and Edward together.  The eldest brother dropping to his knees.  Hairs on Lucy’s arms stood on end as she saw the look on Henrietta’s face change, realizing what had happened.  From defeat to joy, to a victory she’d never thought she’d have.

Lucy could see deeper, could see swords that were crossed in Henrietta’s chest separating, no longer trapping breath in her throat.  She would still struggle, but the road to victory was open.  She had closure.

She walked over to her brother, and she slipped from being Henrietta to being Arietta, without needing the drug at all.  She bent down and kissed her brother on the cheek.  “You know so little of what you’re dealing with, and now you’ve paid the ultimate price.”

“Henrietta?” the bloody image of Edward asked.

She startled, and turned to face him.

“The brother falls, Henrietta bears a child in wedlock to a husband she freely loves,” the Carcass in Sable proclaimed.

The image changed to show Henrietta with Edward, holding twin children.

“Two children?” Lucy asked.

“The other is Arietta’s.  If you’ve decided Arietta’s words are not Henrietta’s, then they are her own.  Henrietta is freed from her need for her alter ago, but her alter ego still exists buried.  She emerges on her own now, fights for a presence in the world.  In the midst of the struggle of childbirth, one child produced, the other lodged in the canal, Henrietta changes and it is Arietta’s body that bears the other child into the world.  The division existed in the womb.  One child is an angel, figuratively speaking, the other… wayward.”

“A bitter struggle,” the Gold-Furred Mouse declared.  “Arietta existing for moments a day, sometimes longer.  Henrietta wouldn’t understand at first what was happening.  She’d wake in the middle of the house, or in the deep woods, shivering.  She didn’t realize Arietta was browsing the same potion-making texts she’d learned the formulas from.  She’d become Arietta in her sleep, mid-nightmare, Arietta would wake, gather what she needed, and then start imbibing potions.”

The scene changed.  All of them stood in a large cabin wrought by Other hands, gifted to the couple by the family.

One child and Edward dead.  The beautiful house with its magic lighting now painted crimson.  Arietta and her daughter looked on, streaked in blood.  Lucy looked away.

“This is but one possibility.  Perhaps Henrietta beats Arietta,” the Alabaster told her.

“Slim chances,” the Gold-Furred Mouse commented, “but a chance.”

Lucy shook her head.

“This says nothing of the consequences,” the Sable told her.  The beautiful corpse approached Edward’s body, lying in blood, trying to shield the good daughter, and brushed his hair into position with fingertips.  “In small ways, this decision reduces the power of one’s word.  Perhaps that’s fair, perhaps drunken words shouldn’t matter as they do… but it still weakens practice.”

“A thousand Others who exist or pass through this region suffer for that weakening of the fabrics they rely on,” the Alabaster said.  “This is the trouble with revolution and upheaval.  The most vulnerable suffer for it.”

“The most vulnerable need it,” Lucy replied.

“Yes.  Very true.”

“Forswearing shouldn’t be a thing,” Lucy said.  “Not used this casually, not… like this.”

“Then the loss is greater,” the Gold-Furred Mouse told her.  “Those who dwell here in this territory lose the benefits of the Seal, they benefit less from the protections, and those who come fresh from a place that does have those benefits and do set the contrast of the words that matter and the forsworn will come here…”

The scene changed.  In the changing, a man very much like Musser stood before Lucy, sword in hand.  The blade was at her throat.

“Conquer the local Others in your region as a whole, conquer us, and replace us four with their own.  Forswearing remains a practice.”

“These expectations create equilibrium,” the Alabaster Doe told Lucy.  “The things that stand out from one region to another will get hammered down to roughly fit what other areas are doing.  Precedent established elsewhere can carry here.”

“Spirits,” the Carcass in Sable said, “will travel between regions, pushing their own influence.”

“And your own efforts, if you wish to establish something different, will require actual attention and effort.  Time will not slow down and wait for you to change the universe,” the Gold-Furred Mouse said.

“And while you attend to one thing, others will carry on as precedent demands,” the Alabaster told Lucy.

Lucy was struck with a distinct memory that was not hers.

She stood on a cliff.  She watched the palisade cities rebuild from damage she had wrought as the Carmine Beast.  While she had wrought that damage, other cities had sprung up.

“So there’s no point?  I’m… a slave to this system?”

“It’s a system you can learn to game, for the smaller things.  Or you can act, but you’d act with the knowledge you’ll be removed and destroyed, and then others will revert what you’ve done.”

Lucy looked around the clearing.  Red leaves, red soil, white trunks and branches.  Bones littered the ground, some sitting there so long the soil had swallowed them up in part.  She had a throne here.  The image of Henrietta and Edward-

It had changed back to them.  Edward held Henrietta, the two of them facing the brother who had just challenged Henrietta on the count of forswearing.

“Forswear the brother,” Lucy decided.  “Henrietta isn’t Arietta.  Henrietta knew she was going to bed Edward, but she didn’t know about what Arietta would swear.  You can’t… you shouldn’t be able to make deals while drugged like that.  A contract wouldn’t count, I don’t think.”

“If you remove the oaths Arietta swore, technically, she still owes her father fealty by oath,” the Carcass in Sable told Lucy.  “Technically, she still must wed a brother.”

“Then that was for the brother to declare.  He chose this angle, earned with words taken by burglary, he gets what he deserves,” Lucy said.

“Even knowing Arietta may come to fight Henrietta, and she’ll likely win?” the Gold-Furred Mouse asked.

“I don’t know what else to do… but I don’t think he should win.  If the idea is that it’s okay to forswear her because she at least got to love Edward before losing everything, she at least gets a few more years and two children with him before it all goes wrong.”

“It destroys both of them and two childhoods, not just her,” the Gold-Furred Mouse told her.

“I don’t know!” Lucy exclaimed.  “I don’t have any freaking idea!   There’s no great answer, or if there is one, use that wisdom and experience, walk me through it!”

“It is not our place,” the Alabaster said.  “You might like our choice less than you do any of the options already presented.”

“I don’t know,” Lucy said, a little defeated.  “What did the real Carmine Beast do?”

“Forswear her,” the Carmine Beast said, using Lucy’s lips, throat, and lungs to produce a growling voice that wasn’t her own.  “Let Henrietta fall to ruin.”

Henrietta dropped to her knees.

“If you need shelter,” the older brother said.  “I’ll grant it, so long as you keep the house for my wife and I.”

“I can grant my own wife shelter, you short-sighted oaf,” Edward said.  “You’ll always have a place with me, my love, whatever the circumstance.”

Henrietta looked up at him with sad eyes.

The Carmine moved her hand, fingers flicking out, as if to brush something away.

Arietta the alter ego turned her head, looked at the older brother and smiled.

The Carmine’s hand closed, crushing the last of Henrietta.  Arietta stood, stretching, still smiling, and strode toward the older brother.  He was strong, but so was she.  Henrietta had been talkative when happy, prattling on, and Arietta was wordless in her victory.

She destroyed the older brother, each strike decisive, aimed at vulnerabilities.

She stood over him, and the man, bearded, large, dressed in functional clothing, held one hand at one tattered ear, blood streaming from one eye and his nose.  His breath came out as wheezes.  He looked up at her with hate.

“The herbs and drugs you and Henrietta gathered, Edward,” Arietta said.  “Bring everything.  I’ll need them for him.  The pages too, while you’re at it.  The ones you copied for her.”

“To mend him?  Are you so merciful?”

“To mend him, yes, but my intent is the furthest thing from mercy.  I’ll take this lout apart, mend him, take him apart again, mend him.  I’ll see how far apart I can get the individual pieces while ensuring he’ll live a long time.”

“I don’t think she would wish to condone something so monstrous.”

“Do this for me, get the things I need, and I’ll be gone.  I expect to live a good while longer.  I can be an ally for your family for generations to come.”

“I want Henrietta back.”

“Henrietta is almost entirely gone.  I can give you a glimpse.  A face, the traces of her.  She won’t be able to respond.”

“Can you give me more?  Is there room for negotiation?”

“I cannot give you more.  There is very little of her remaining, and less with every moment you tarry.  My word is binding in this, sir.”

“Then I will get the things.”

Lucy stood and watched as the rest of the scene unfolded.  Edward found Henrietta kneeling in light snow when he emerged, looking up at him with sad eyes, defeated.  He knelt before her, being careful as he set books and herbs down, and took her hands.  He poured his heart to her, saying his farewell, talking of brighter times, and elicited a smile from her.

As his eyes welled up with tears, so did Lucy’s.

When the time ran out, Henrietta’s face became the back of Arietta’s head, and the back of Henrietta’s head became Arietta’s face.  Her bones twisted in a painful, rolling transformation as she bent down, collecting the packet of herbs and books in one hand, grabbing her elder brother by the throat in the other.

All that transformation, so the alter ego couldn’t and wouldn’t look back at her husband as she walked off into he woods, to forge her own way, and to spend a few years tormenting the older brother before letting him expire and moving on to other pastures.

“You won’t have our counsel for the occasions that follow, because she didn’t seek it,” the Gold-Furred Mouse told Lucy.

The Leathermen are Animus en masse.  A grouping that grows over time.  With skin like cracked, creased leather, their eyes and mouths are little more than folds in the material, hidden under cloaks and hoods of hide.  There are four in her territory, a fifth emerging.  They are borne of Nature and Fate.

Youths are expected to learn from family, to find their courses in life, but some find themselves at a crossroads.  Such youths may be visited by a Leatherman, offered a choice of three gifts.  Always two bundles – such as two selections of herbs, and the third is a weapon.

It’s a test, a question of character.  Have they learned enough to know if one bundle of food is better than the other?  One may contain poisonous roots, or fish unsuited to eating.  One bundle may be medicinal herbs, the other herbs to inflict rashes.

The weapon is the greedy, selfish choice, a flashy spear a boy could boast about.  A knife that glitters like a jewel.  Those who take the weapon will become murderers.  As of late, the weapons are often steel, like those tools from over the ocean.

Knowing which of the bundles to take and giving to the community means prosperity.  Taking the other means ruin.  Children don’t always remember the visit from the Leathermen, but even the ability to remember the tellings of the prior visits is a strength of character, an ability to listen to wise words and pull out the lessons, to apply them going forward.  Those who listened, know, and remember are at least warned about the weapon, but must still draw on knowledge to pick the right bundle.

The fifth rises and it’s a different sort of Leatherman.  His face is still creased leather, as is all the exposed skin of his body, but he wears the European coats and hat.  He offers the coin, but only in one bundle.  The coinage, spent selfishly, will doom one to destitution.  If spent graciously or given to caretakers, it spells good things.  He carries a weapon, of a craftsmanship that any boy would be proud to have.

“And what about the girls?” Lucy asked.

The Animus rises from ambient sentiment, from ruts and paths carved out in the world, absorbing culture and ideas from the newcomers.  Because it is borne of natural ebbs and flows, she can influence it.  Because of its ties to murder, the propensity to produce conflict, it falls to her.

She can shape it, or quash it.  She can give it direction, setting the course for it.  She was an Animus too, her course defined by her nature.  For the Carmine Beast before it was Carmine, it took more effort to step away from the path than to walk it.  It is the same for them.

“Representing how we choose our futures?  Or… I guess if you’re the kind of kid who picks one thing, I guess you were raised a certain way,” Lucy mused aloud.  “Kid of someone desperate and scraping by might see it as more necessary to take the knife.  Is it really fair that they end up a murderer?”

There was no answer.

The clearing was empty and lonely.

She had to decide whether to set him loose on the population.  What guidelines to set…

Was she really okay having a hand in death and murder?  Even in this simulated reality?

Why did it even matter that she was being asked to make the choices?  Why couldn’t she just watch the Carmine make the choice?  She could understand Verona wanting to really dive in and try stuff out, given Verona’s mixed interests and experimental nature, but…

She looked at the Leatherman, who existed in a sort of stasis, in that broil of blood and conflict.  Was it right to deny him existence?  What if he could become a John Stiles?

“Not murder.  If they choose a selfish path, give them a selfish existence,” she told the Leatherman.  “And do something for the girls, too.  With an appropriate gift that appeals.”

The Carmine Beast unleashed the Leatherman on the Europeans.  It was a brutal sort of fairness.

“For our third round, one on one.  As the holder of the seat, I hold the rights to dictate the nature of the game.  Our gracious judges will determine if it’s fair,” the golden mouse declared.  “The game is the blind bind.  Three dice, each with seven symbols.  Twenty one different symbols in all.  Tossed in the cup, they may trade symbols between one another.”

“A test of memory?” the woman sitting across from the Gold-Furred Mouse asked.

“A blind bind,” the Gold-Furred mouse told her.  “Your third remains in the cup, unseen by you, my third remains in my cup, unseen by me.  Bind all three as appropriate.  I roll…”

The mouse placed three seven-sided dice into the cup and shook it with both paws, demonstrating a strength and steadiness of paw that let him effortlessly manage a cup three times his size.  He tipped it out.

Man, Fire.  He pushed the cup her way.  She looked inside.  The mouse watched her carefully.

“And?” she asked.

“For my binding, steel, stone, and…”  The mouse moved paws in the direction of the other sticks.  It peered up at the woman, then selected a blue stick with a wave to it.

“Are you allowed to look beneath the dice?” the woman asked.

“Mustn’t touch.”

“So my result in the cup could be one of nine?”

“Read the expression on my face.  The twitch of my whiskers.”

“Your face is small and I’ve never spent enough time with vermin to know how whiskers twitch.”

“If you can’t deal with a mere mouse, how could you take the throne of coin and gold?”

The woman looked down at the dice, frowning slightly.

“Fail here and everything you are is forfeit,” the mouse told her.

The woman picked up the dice, examining each side and character, tested the weight of the die, then examined the cup.

“Those are the rules?” the woman asked.  “Guessing what binding might work?”

“The contest is fair,” the Alabaster said.  “Biased in the incumbent throne-holder’s favor, but this is acceptable.”

“You were warned,” the Corpse in Sable told the woman.  “This won’t be easy.”

Lucy knew she wasn’t meant to speak, so she kept her observations to herself.  There were more than one kind of binding, which meant there were multiple combinations of sticks that worked.  A positive binding would mean it was possible to pick something that suited everything, like the mouse had presumably done, charcoal for the fire, steel for the man, and water for what the hidden die was, but…

But the flip side could be true.  Water for the fire, stone for the man, steel for whatever the cup held out of sight.

“Roll,” the Gold-Furred Mouse said.

The woman opened her hand and let two of the dice fall.

“The symbols only change around if the dice is in the cup?” the woman asked.

The mouse was silent.

The dice were the skull and the knife.  She tilted her head left, then right, then looked at the cup.  She pushed it to the mouse.

The mouse scaled the side of the cup, looked down, then dropped back down to the wooden table.

“Hammer, coin… blood.”

The Alabaster approached the table, picking up a cup.  Lucy did the same.  She exerted some power to keep the dice’s facing intact, and let it slide from the cup to the table.

The mouse’s selection was man, entrapped by stone, fire, entrapped by water, and wolf, caged in steel.

The woman’s selection was skull, coins for the eyes, to set it on its way, knife with hammer to forge it, and man, with blood to set him on his way.

“Mine have the advantage of all being beginnings, if we’re tied,” the woman said.

“Did you know or did you guess?” the Mouse asked.

“I guessed.  Fifty-fifty odds.”

“We’re meant to look after fortune.  I’ll let the judges decide.”

“I’ll side with our Mouse,” the Alabaster said.

“Beginnings serve well,” the Sable said.  “I’ll side with the newcomer.”

“Whatever I choose, one of them will die?” Lucy asked.  She thought of John.

“Yes,” the Alabaster said.  “We did say we wouldn’t provide counsel.  I cannot inform your decision.”

Lucy shook her head.

“Whatever you choose, you know the outcome is that the Gold-Furred Mouse doesn’t hold the throne of fortunes in your time,” the Carcass in Sable told Lucy.

“How many more years before the new Aurum comes in?”

“A century.”

“I’m cutting someone’s existence short by that many years, making a decision.”

The others were silent.

She touched the table on the woman’s side.

The Mouse slumped.  “I had things to do.  I had things I was building!”

“I’m sorry,” Lucy said.

The Carmine, standing here, hadn’t apologized.

“The future is bright, I wanted to see it,” the Mouse told them all.

The woman reached down, and the Mouse wasn’t able to avoid the outcome any more than an ant could push a mountain.  The forces now arrayed against him were too many.

The woman bit into his head, tiny bones crunching beneath teeth.  She ended him by pulling his body away without releasing his head from her teeth.

“The golden seat is one with high turnover,” the Carcass in Sable told Lucy.

It was 1940 and two practitioners feuded.  Both were cruel men, in very different ways.  One wreaked havoc in the world, calling violent Others from the Abyss, and the other wreaked havoc in society, an upstanding man in the eyes of community, who nonetheless put children to work and exploited black workers even though slavery had ended roughly a century ago.  Slavery in everything but name, putting men to work in workhouses and keeping them on company scrip.

Bedraggled, violent, glaring, the Scourge shouted, “You called me an ally!  You promised to elevate me!  You owed me more!”

“It doesn’t change the fact that you brought danger to my house despite pledging to keep it safe!  My daughter-!”

“Your daughter faced the risk she did because of your carelessness!  You can’t ask me to keep your safety if you’re going to leave doors unlocked when you know the work I do!”

Lucy couldn’t bring herself to care.  They had grim histories, blood shed, people abused, both arrogant in their own ways.  It reminded her of Musser.

They’d each charged the other with a violation of oaths.

Forswear them both, she thought.  The world would be better off.

But the promises to elevate were implied, not outright stated, and offers had been made.  They hadn’t been good offers, but they’d been offers, and they’d been turned down.

The world was in upheaval, a war on the horizon, but practitioners had largely agreed to keep out of those affairs.  It was the business of Man, not Other, and much of the fighting that happened over here was behind the scenes, old and established families picking sides.

Lucy felt saddened to see so many actually siding with Nazi Germany.  They pointed to heritage and old alliances, they pointed to the need for power.

She didn’t have the grounds to act against the Upstanding Man, so she let him forswear the Scourge, and she told herself she’d keep an eye on the Upstanding Man, who sided with Germany and exploited the people.

The Carmine Beast kept a close eye on him.

He never gave her an excuse, and thus he thrived.

“An animal must eat if it’s to persist in a long journey,” the Alabaster said.

The Carmine dozed on her throne, head on the arm, looking at the intruder into her space.

“You won’t last for long, Carmine, if you don’t eat.”

“We don’t need sustenance.”

“We need things,” the Alabaster told her.  “As a beast you mated.”

“I can’t give birth.”

“Yet you mated.  You sought partners for base instinct.  You found something in that.”

“I’m not what I was.”

“You become less than what you are every passing year.  This job is necessary, the universe will feed you, but it won’t help you hold your shape or focus.”

“The solution to that is to rut?”

“The options are limited.  You cannot destroy without a multitude of complications.  You used to upend settlements, terrify hundreds-”

“I didn’t enjoy that.  I did it because-”

“Because you needed to, Carmine,” the Alabaster Doe said.  “See to needs.  Somehow.  Or your tenure will resemble that of the Aurum line.  Twenty-one years of mouse, thirty of dame, now the practitioner fused with familiar as our Aurum Coil.”

Lucy sighed.

“A man will come to hunt me tomorrow.  He has until dawn to catch me.  If the sun rises and he can’t give up the hunt or see that glimmer-”

“I’ll seize him in my jaws.”

“Thank you, that simplifies matters,” the Alabaster Doe told her.  She looked around the great, empty clearing.  “I’m sorry to disturb.”

“I used to hunt prey animals too, Alabaster.  What if my needs are for me to seize your arm in my jaws and bite until the bone cracks?  Or your neck?”

“It wouldn’t kill me.  Not if you did it.  If that’s what you need, Carmine, partake,” the Alabaster told her.  “I don’t mind.”

Lucy shook her head.  She turned her head to look.

The Alabaster’s flock waited by the entrance to the Carmine’s clearing.  People as young as seventeen and old as seventy, dressed in simple shifts of white.

The Alabaster bowed slightly, then turned to go.  Her handmaidens and handservants followed.  The youngest girl skipped up to catch up to the Alabaster, and the Alabaster stroked her hair.  They exchanged murmurs, the Alabaster smiling.

“Them?” she asked the Alabaster’s back.  “Your protected flock?  Could I hunt them?”

“You could.  I warned them before they came that there was risk you might.  These are the ones who were willing to accept it.  They won’t evade you very well, if at all.  They’d be a morsel for you.”

“And the ones who weren’t willing?”

“You won’t find them, even if you try accessing my domain.  It’s universal law.”

She contemplated hunting them anyway.  She contemplated scaring them, making them regret agreeing to come.

It was like the throne.  Too easy, effortless.  Pointless.

She rose to her feet, stretching.

She was fully aware of her domain, and much as she could pull on that domain to raise up an Other, if she saw fit, with spirits being the easiest, she could conjure up her own image and let her old self go.  In this way, she could travel with ease within the bounds of the territory.

There were suitors of various sorts, but for most, it was too easy.  What did it matter if she took the Alabaster’s neck in her teeth and bit down and broke the vertebrae, watched her twitch and come to some approximation of death?  What did it matter if she found a man who would take an attractive human female for himself, no real questions, no challenges?  Or an Other who would bow to her will if she so much as looked at it?

She looked for Others instead, and she looked for ones with willpower.

She found an Other in the woods, wrapped in a patchwork of furs.  His body was lithe, face unshaven.

She stood before him, wearing the fur shawl around her otherwise unclothed form, held in place by one hand, the shawl draping and pooling on the ground, where it mingled with her long hair.

The Carmine licked her lips.

“Uhhhhh,” Lucy said, backing away so she was looking at the scene from the side of the path, wearing mask, witch hat, and cloak.  “Cut to black?  Move on?”

The hunter faced her, and he did not shed his own furs.  His eyes studied her.

“How shall we do this?” the Carmine asked, head tilted so she stared at him from just past her slightly-furrowed brow.

“We won’t,” the hunter Other growled.

“No?  There’s no manner in which something could unfold?  I have power-”

“I could set you on a path, give answers…”

He shook his head.

“Minutes of your time for conversation,” she offered.  A baring of the throat, a showing of weakness.  “What will it take?”

“I don’t know how this is typically done,” she told him.  “You won’t show me the way?”

He turned to trudge away, carrying weapons and catches behind him.

It was as if time slowed down.  Lucy was left to make a decision.

Loneliness welled inside her, as did a kind of need that had nothing to do with the body and everything to do with the mind.  She felt it swell, compounding with an accumulated weight of centuries.

She thought of what it was to open the application for Class-RankR, and to see herself dead last.

This was that, a thousandfold.

Let him go, she thought.

The beast didn’t let him go.  The beast felt the isolation of her position like a blade had been run through her, and she’d felt it for centuries now.  She moved, and in that moment, Lucy felt glad, on a level, because she didn’t want to experience that loneliness to the degree that the furs would need to demonstrate it.  Glad, for her own welfare, but cringing, otherwise, ready to force a break and quick exit from all of this, even though she hadn’t come close to finding what she needed.  She hadn’t caught up to the present day enough.

They crossed the distance, striding, changing to have longer legs, to be four-legged.  As a canine of roughly two hundred pounds, their shoulder as high up as his, she pounced, leaping.  If she couldn’t have his company, she’d fight him instead.  He reacted, catching them by the ruff of the neck.  He hurled them to the side of the path.

He walked away, ducking beneath tree branches.

She rose to her feet, and resumed human form.

“I would let you be a lieutenant.  There are benefits to be had,” she told him, letting her voice reach through the trees.  “I could make you a lieutenant.”

There was no reply.

She tried, reaching out, testing him.  He was already far, far away.

He let a single fur he was carrying fall, her effort seizing that fur and falling with it.

She could have tried again, but it wasn’t worth the effort.  Not knowing the result- either she exerted her full power and it was trivial, too easy, or this would happen again, and all she’d do was deny him a good share of his catch.

She could have won the fight by the same measure.  She could have exerted will to crush his.  She could have looked deeper to see who and what he was.

But what would come of it?  An interaction without meaning.

She returned to her clearing and her throne.  She could smell the Alabaster’s prey smell, and that of the handmaidens that had taken her offer of sanctuary.

She could smell traces of the hunter from all the way back there, what would be five days of walking away.

The clearing felt large and empty.  Ever a solitary creature, the lone wolf, among other labels, she found herself craving some interaction of even small meaning.

She would go looking on other occasions, Lucy could see.  She would rut, she would even consider lieutenants, but she was so powerful that the only way was to lie, to hide what she was and hold back power.  But to leave someone ignorant meant associating with the ignorant, and that left her dissatisfied.  Most were too easy or too weak to serve under her or rut with her.  The ones who weren’t, or who were less easy and weak didn’t care to talk to her or spend time in her company.

Others had their trajectories and fields of interest and because of where she dwelt, she didn’t fall into those fields or paths.  She existed a step aside and a hundred steps above.

The only sounds in the clearing were the whistling of a violent wind through trees.

She watched as Arietta was bound by practitioners.  Arietta had killed in the years since the Carmine had let her become what she was.  She’d lived multiple generations, found lovers and rivals, and she’d left trails of carnage behind her.

There were no decisions to be made, no distinctions, no influence to be exerted.

Perhaps, if she were inclined, she could have taken Arietta as a lieutenant.  An Other she knew who had dwelt in her territory for some time.

Lucy stood in the Carmine’s place, facing the same decision point.

She wasn’t inclined.  She could understand the sentiment, why the Carmine might want to save her, but a killer?  A dangerous Other?  It…

It was a very similar decision she was being forced to make, every time, with exceptions for the selfish things.

The Carmine didn’t act either.  In this, they were eerily on the same page.

Which was a lack of effort and a degree of concordance that matched up with the Carmine’s experience.  The Carmine was here because there was little to do.  The spirits followed guidance and in all things relating to conflict, they knew the shape of this area and the directions of her will enough that she could leave them be and their decisions resembled her own.

This was a moment of importance.  A realization.

Lucy and the Carmine could do nothing and the spirits would be in line with them.  The more time passed, and the longer the throne was held, the more pronounced that would become.

She was here to mark the end of a story that had begun very close to the start of her own.

Arietta was bound, sealed in a box, and wrapped in chain.

Then they drowned the box, with Arietta inside it.

A chapter of her story closed and the story continued without flinching.

Her actions had ceased to matter.  What purpose was there?  What was she doing here?

“What am I doing here?” Lucy murmured.  She groped for an answer, realized who might be out there, and uttered, “John.”

The furs reached for moments.  She pushed those away.

The Carmine Beast had watched John…

“When she falls,” the Sable Prince said, “you’re our first choice to follow her.  You would have our support.”

John looked at the Aurum Coil, the Alabaster Doe, and the Sable Prince.  “Yalda only just died.  I’m not in a good state to…” he trailed off.

“This is a conversation that may extend for years to come,” the Alabaster Doe told John.  “Begin considering now, so you might be prepared when the time comes.”

“Is she watching?”

“She is,” the Aurum Coil told John.

“She knows you’re arranging things for after her passing?”

“She’s seen us do it for the others.”

“We’re grateful for your willingness to do what needs to be done,” the Sable Prince told John.

“Is there anything you’d want?” the Aurum Coil asked.  “Enticements?”

John gave the man who was mounted on the centipede’s head a dark, wounded look.  Lucy looked away.

“You took the last thing I truly cared about.  Enticements?”

“You’re not a terribly strong Other, John Stiles,” the Alabaster Doe said.  “Not in terms of raw power, not in the sense you could hold your own.  The seat wouldn’t be yours if you sought it out-”

“I don’t think I’d seek it out,” John replied.

“-but if you can find your way from having nothing left to caring about something again, you may be stronger than the Carmine Beast is,” the Alabaster told him.  “We’ll need that strength.”

“A tall order,” John said.

He turned his head the other way, and he looked Lucy in the eyes.

“Someone very unlike Yalda, but who you respect, who respects you in turn?” the Sable asked, looking at her as well.

Lucy shivered.

“Would you do this for her?”

“I don’t even know John at this point in the timeline.”

“I’d need more,” John said, quiet.  “You want to deal?  I want-”

The Sable raised his hand.

The scene went dark, except for Lucy and the Sable.  The man studied Lucy for a long moment, then disappeared, leaving her and John standing in Kennet, no Alabaster or Aurum present.  The Sable leaned in close to whisper something in John’s ear.

She couldn’t hear with the earring.

“What was that?” Lucy asked.  “You’re keeping secrets?”

“Yes,” John said.

Tears came unbidden to her eyes.

Guilherme was turning to Winter and John was keeping secrets.  Paul had picked his mother over a family with her and her mom, and her dad had died.

That loneliness the Carmine Beast had felt sat heavy in her chest, now.  A tear rolled down her cheek, and she smudged it away.

John looked off to the side, pretending he hadn’t seen.

“Are you the real John, or-?”

“Real enough.”

“I didn’t look for that scene, but…”

“I’ve been told not to divulge.  He thinks if I did, you’d stop the real John Stiles.  Can you trust me, Lucy?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, trying to blink away tears.  “If I asked you to be my familiar, would you say yes?”

“That would be nice, wouldn’t it?” John asked.

It wasn’t an answer.  Maybe because this wasn’t the real John.

“I wanted to talk to you because I’m stuck.  These events are passing by and I’m not sure… um, how I’m supposed to be tackling them or steering them.  I feel like the fact that I can’t is supposed to matter.”

“And you picked me to talk to?”

“I thought… she knows of you, you’re in her… field?  Realm?  Area of interest?”

John nodded.

“And you get it, I think.  Because I think what’s tripping me up, and what’s happening with her, is… it happened with you, but you came out of it okay.”

“What is it?” John asked.

“You… stopped being what you are.  You were a soldier and maybe you patrol or stop the occasional Other but it’s not… I don’t feel like it’s the full you, or even most of you.”

“Did she?  Stop being what she was?”

Lucy nodded.  “She doesn’t even know how to find it again.”

“Did you?” John asked, his expression sad.

“I made promises to myself when I was a kid, before I practiced,” Lucy told him, her eyes still moist.  “That I wouldn’t take crap, or let stuff lie.  That… if I could hold to this personal code and if it was the sort of code that everyone could follow, maybe the world would be a bit better of a place.”

“And?  You’ve fought the likes of Alexander.  You face Musser now.”

“After Paul, I realized how awful it feels to be angry, to actually act on it.  I… my element is smoke, apparently.  It’s the one that works best for me.  But isn’t smoke mostly all that’s left after the fires go out?”

“Do you want to be angrier?  To hurt, like fire does, instead of warn?  Because I knew a Blast Dog once who was like that.  I thought Yalda’s singing was a better deterrent.”

“Wasn’t Yalda a victim?”

“I don’t know.”

“And she was dangerous too.  You… had to shoot her.  That’s a scary comparison, I’m not sure that’s better than being an extinguished flame.”

“I don’t think you’re a victim, Lucy, and I don’t think I’ll have to shoot you.  Even with this gulf between us.”

“Gulf?”

“From that night.  From Alexander.”

She visualized Alexander, head cracked open, and looked away.  “I let stuff slide when I was out on a date with Wallace.  Stuff I might’ve been angrier about before.  And the people who said that stuff don’t know better, and they don’t know better because I didn’t say anything more.  I went easy on them to keep things… nice.  And it doesn’t feel nice.  I made up with Paul and it doesn’t feel nice.”  Her words came out faster, “Avery was asking me about compromises and what we were willing to do with Charles and…”

“I thought the way forward you settled on was a good one, with Charles.”

“I think we picked the wrong people to do the wrong parts of this Carmine Furs thing.  Because the Carmine’s in the same place I am, she doesn’t know what to do with herself.  She’s cut off.”

“I think, whichever one of you came, there’d be things that were difficult.  For Verona, she would get distracted in the nuance of having a kind of godlike power.  For Avery, the loneliness would crush her.  For you…”

“Justice.  A lack of justice.  A lack of- I can’t change this world, John, and that’s terrifying.”

“You can, but it’s hard.  It takes small steps.”

“I can’t even steer this into the topic I need and want.  I need to know what the conspirators were doing.  I need to know what secret you’re keeping.  Because you’re going away and it seems like you’re dead set on becoming the Carmine and it’s such a dead end, John!” She raised her voice, tears in her eyes again.

“It is what you make it.  If you’re at a dead end when you take the seat, you’ll hardly move from that.”

“What other ways are there?”

“Purpose,” John said, touching his chest.  “Escape.  Justice.  To rescue.  Anger, for the Carmine.  The Choir might have taken the position through power and they might’ve done it out of a hunger for power.  That’s what they are.  What they were made to be.”

“Can you help me steer this, John?”

“I’m only a figment, a model of John Stiles stored in memories, yours and hers.  I can’t move far from this scene or the scenes I was in.  But with luck, I’ll be out there when you exit, if you want to stop in and talk to me.”

“Will you tell me what the deal you made is?”

Her heart sank.  Another tear rolled down her cheek.  Frustrated, she didn’t stop it.

“If I take the throne and hold it, I’ll be a day’s travel away.”

“If you take it and you don’t hold it, that’s it.  It’s a dead end and there’s nothing past that.  I don’t think there’s a way to be deposed without being destroyed.”

John nodded once.

Disgusted, frustrated, she turned away from John.

“The Choir was a contender, yeah?” she asked.  “I was supposed to check on something about the Choir.  I’d say thanks for the reminder, but I’m pretty mad at you right now.”

He didn’t respond.

She strode out into the darkness.  At least she had a bit of anger now, something to help her find her way to the moments she needed, before she ran out of time.

That’s seven minutes spent, out of eleven and a half.

A version of Charles with a bit more hair hugged papers and books to his chest, a lantern on a chain dangling from one hand.  The wind blew against him, and the wet grass slid underfoot, roots not holding, turning footing into ground that was more treacherous than mud alone might be.

He lost pages.  A younger Edith grabbed some out of the air.

As Charles looked back, Edith’s eyes glowed.

“I hope that lost page wasn’t important.”

“It was,” Charles muttered.  “I don’t know what page it was, but if it was taken from me it had to be important.  I thought I had protection, to make things easier.”

“I think your actions right now aren’t for Kennet, or in line with promises you made to get that protection.”

He hissed a curse word under his breath.  The field stretched out before him, and in the twilight, the grass was emerald, the sky a navy blue.  Light was dim, even, and ambient, to the point that he, Edith, and the papers seemed illuminated.  The wind whipped violently around them.

“You’ve saved me more times than I can count.  You helped make me who I am today.  I’ll help you, at least.”

“Help me arrange the setpieces,” he said, brusque.  “Weigh down the papers.”

The preparations took two hours.  They might have taken one and a half if Charles hadn’t been hampered like he was.

Power sources.  He had four.  The lantern from Edith was one.

The diagram was set out on the field.  Bags of crushed limestone were emptied.  The Girl by Candlelight came and returned, carrying more stacked on one shoulder, the other hand bearing the candle.

All arranged.  A celestial diagram, nuanced, annotated with script carefully laid out with stones arranged to spell words and lay out instructions.  Much of it was a shorthand, utilizing symbols and arrangement as much as the words themselves.

Edith and Charles donned their masks.

“I can’t do this part,” Charles said.  “You’re more capable of practice than I am.”

“How do I do this, then?” Edith asked.

“Utter the instructions.  This is transfer of power.  Powering parts of the diagram.  As a spirit and elemental, you can do that much.”

“Walk me through this.  I don’t speak Latin.”

“I’ll make notes.”

Charles began scribbling on the page.  Edith watched over his shoulder.

“Who else?” Lucy asked the night.

There was nobody else.  Nobody yet.  A conspiracy of two.  Edith was only part of this for loyalty, not ideology.

“Okay,” Lucy murmured.

An Other began to come into being.  A living ritual.  A trap meant for practitioners.

Time seemed to slow down.  The point she could make a decision.

Lucy looked at the outcomes, if she decided not to do anything.

The Abyssal forces in the lantern tainted the working.  Charles had expected it, but he hadn’t expected it to be so cruel.

Lucy watched as the trap unfolded.  A red tint that took over buildings, changing the letters.  Signs and addresses became scribbled, overlapping text like the handouts had been, just enticing enough that someone felt like there was more meaning to be divined out of them.  Others found their way into the living ritual’s system and transformed, becoming part of that system.  Some were released out as agents.

As Alexander had described happening on the first day of the summer semester, those agents became glyphs, infecting Sight and scrying.  A perpetual figure on the horizon, a swelling power.

Alexander, intrigued, sent his apprentices in to investigate it.

Seth and Nicolette did not return.  Alexander studied it, then ventured in himself, accompanied by Raymond, accompanied by Bristow, by Musser.

The way these things were designed, they always had an out.  A curse that didn’t have a loophole or a secret way of removing it was much harder to wield and apply, in the same way water poured so inconsistently out of a jug if all of the streaming water blocked the aperture.  An escape route let the power swell without straining, pushing other forces out through that route.

Alexander found the out, which would frustrate Charles to bitter ends.  Raymond, Bristow, and Musser didn’t.

Raymond would not find or help Zed.  Bristow would not find or help Clementine.

She’d seen enough.  One possible future, as the Carmine had divined it, but that was all.

“It’s too… too big a weapon,” Lucy murmured.  “The collateral damage is too much, whether it’s the Choir or the Red Heron thing.”

In her memories, the Carmine Beast flicked out a number of fingers, the smallest of gestures.

The violent wind stirred, and as Edith was uttering the words, Charles pacing the perimeter, watching, the diagram simultaneously came to life and changed.

With the Carmine Beast’s will, the letters C and H from ‘cheat’ were scattered.  The stones found other parts of the diagram, connecting circles meant to be isolated.

The wind blew the lantern over.

“No!” Charles shouted.

Abyssal, elemental power flowed from the lantern to a line it wasn’t meant to touch, and power swelled in a central part of the diagram.

Yalda’s power, marked out with links to Charles’ blood, mingled with Abyssal power.  It drew on the incarnate forces, and Charles could see a glimmer of the Sick Dog in the midst of it all.

Lines moved and expanded, as if they were breathing, lifting up off the ground and moving away, finding new configurations.  Yalda’s unconscious will.

“No, no, no!” Charles screamed into the wind, and the wind muted him.  He leaped over lines, stumbling, and slipped as the grass’s roots broke and he skidded on mud again.

The Hungry Choir was born, and the Carmine Beast had helped bring it to pass.

She’d done so out of anger.  A frustration at being left out.  A resentment over the fact that they were already picking her replacement.  They’d set her on this path, they’d used her for hundreds of years, and now they would move on.  She would be forgotten, those few Others and entities she’d interacted with gone.  Any other Others were too far below her.

What mark could she make, besides this?

If they were to remove or replace her, let them do it for a reason.

Edith lit up a cigarette.  At the edge of the woods, it was the only light except a sliver of moon.  Charles stood near her, swatting at the bugs that seemed intent on devouring him.

Maricica dropped out of the sky, wings fluttering without flapping, still breaking her fall.  The lighting changed with her arrival, the scant light shining past patterns in her feathers to sharpen the diffuse light into glints and sparkles rather than dimming them or diffusing them further.

She wrapped the wings around herself.

“Is she watching?” Charles asked.

“You only ask that now?” Maricica asked him.

“I thought myself beneath her notice.”

“You were proven wrong in that thinking when she spoiled your ritual to create a trap for Alexander.”

Charles sighed.  There was deep sadness in his eyes as he felt the weight of the casualties.

“This remains your show, Charles,” Maricica said.  “It’s you front and center at the end of this.”

“Why would you say that when you admit she’s watching?” Charles asked, angry.

“There’s a purpose,” Edith said.  She sounded tired.  “Isn’t there?”

“It doesn’t change anything, Charles,” Maricica said.

“It’s my show, but I’m supposed to do what you say, when you say it, no choice?  That’s what you told me, months ago,” Charles told her.

“Don’t sound so petulant, cullion worm.  At this stage enough of the pieces are arranged that there is little choice to be had.  Consider me the director.  You created this weapon, we’re aiming it at her now, and the Carmine Beast knows we’re doing it.  There is no way this unfolds or goes the way you wish it to without careful orchestration,” Maricica said.  “You’re forsworn, you’ve already seen that if you have any real ability to shape what follows, you’ll spoil it.  You held the reins at the start, and you’ll have them at the end.”

At the end? Lucy thought.  Charles?  Against John?

“You, Edith, will have Kennet and Matthew both.”

“And what do you get?” Edith asked.

Maricica smiled.

“You won’t say?  Of course,”  Edith sighed the words.  “What next?”

“The pieces are arranged.  I’ve talked to them.  Two Others in particular will help, another will be steered this way.  Miss will be unseated, by fostering a lack of confidence in her, or by other means.  You’ll have a position of leadership for long enough to bring those pieces into Kennet.  The pieces we don’t have can be manufactured.  Charles.”

“I have few tools left.”

“You won’t need any except your voice, to make a suggestion and an argument.”

“People don’t listen to my arguments.”

“That’s an advantage of sorts unto itself.  No, we shall set things up with the intention of knocking them down.  A strawman ploy of sorts.  But that matters little.  I asked you to meet-”

“I was wondering if you would get to it.”

“Mind your tone, Charles.  You’re not of a stature or position to challenge me.”

“Yet,” Edith said, quiet.

Maricica smiled wide, her eyes dark and inhuman in the shadows.  “Yet.  As I told you, you need to do and say what I ask of you, and the pieces will fall into place.”

“What must I do or say?”

“Others who are strong and little else are hard to come by, here.  Miss would turn them away, and people would wonder why you’re gathering an army.  I have a task for you, and it won’t be now or even soon.”

Charles gave her a wary look with tired eyes that had bruised bags beneath them.

“The goblins.  Gashwad and Bluntmunch.  Our pieces are in place, but this will go more smoothly if we have distractions and obstacles, so that whatever practitioner Miss chooses will be confounded and slowed down.  I’m reluctant to involve them, but they serve our needs, they’re already here, and there are weaknesses we can exploit.  They resent Toadswallow, even if they can’t articulate that resentment.”

“You want me to talk to them?”

“Later.  Toward the middle of summer, when I’m more distant from things.  Offer them a deal.  Bluntmunch wants power, Gashwad wants to matter.  The sooner I give you this instruction and the more removed from it, the less it will stink for them.  Buy their loyalty.  I’ll give you the currency.”

“What are they meant to do?” Edith asked.  “Distract?  Delay?  Is there a specific time or place?”

“There will be, but their true purpose is to give you two confidence in this plan.  I remain confident without their involvement, but you can’t see the outcome yet.  Having them to protect the pieces as we put them into action will mean you don’t hesitate when it counts.”

“Thin,” Charles said, looking displeased.  “Shallow manipulation to our faces?”

“Deeper manipulation beneath.  Yet it gives all of us what we want, and Kennet what it needs.  This will be our last meeting before the Carmine Beast dies at the hands of the Choir.  If we meet again, there’s a chance Miss will be on the alert and notice what we’re doing.  Or the practitioner she chooses will.  Barring incident, we’ll meet after, to discuss the practitioner, and then again, to talk about the day it all comes to pass.”

“There’s no backing out?” Charles asked.

“You have no ground to retreat to, Charles, you haven’t for a long time,” Maricica told him.  “We’re all on paths that were decided for us.  Yours ran you right into the mud, Edith’s will take her far from Matthew.  Yet if you let me arrange it properly, these set paths will result in a grisly collision that pushes each and nearly every one of us out of position.  You’ll have your justice, despite everything, Edith will have Matthew, despite everything, and I’ll have what I want, despite everything.  The sole exception will be hers-”

Maricica pointed directly at the Carmine Beast, who watched from a day’s travel away.

“-which will destroy her, ending her futile, pathetic, and pointless existence,” Maricica said.

The Carmine Beast’s anger burned so hard in her chest that it startled Lucy from the scene.

The Carmine Beast prowled forward.  Her size could span the entire territory she managed, but for now she suited herself by being as tall as the treetops were.

“You’re so small,” the Carmine Beast snarled.

“And you, Carmine Beast, are vanishing in your significance,” Maricica said.  She unfurled her wings as wide as they would go, then stretched out further.  The forms she wore in shadow were revealed, insectile, vile, as ugly as her human body was beautiful, as bent as she was slender.  Still Fae, still entrancing.

“You bait me.”

“I do.”

“I don’t have to answer by acting myself.  I could eat you, yes, but I could send the worst sort of Other after you.  Goblin after goblin.  Unceasing.  I know where to find you.  It is my right to rub out an existence I see as more harmful than good.”

“You could,” Maricica said.  “But I can give you what you want.”

“You would destroy me.”

“Interesting how those are one and the same, when you don’t wish to die or be destroyed.  Do you know what your fatal flaw is, Carmine?”

“Enough words.”

“You’re so desperate for a peer on your own level that you lower yourself to ours.  You could do more, but you won’t, because it’s so very lonely at the top,” the Faerie said.

“Lucy.”

Zed’s voice.

“And with that,” Maricica said.  “You leave yourself vulnerable, held back, smaller than you should be, while you, as I said, vanish in significance.”

“Lucy, Verona thinks your count is wrong.  You haven’t been counting the scenes you’re in right.”

Maricica moved her wings, stirring them.  Vast as they were, they shifted leaf, dust, and grass.  Small insects took to the air.

“Lucy, when’s the last time you had a thought of your own?”

And, the Carmine saw, a small Fairy of the Dark Fall court held something in its hand.  The movement of air blew that something from hand to air.

The Carmine Beast blinked, hard, as a stabbing pain penetrated the orb of her eye.

“The sharpest thistle from a field of thistles, all grown untouched by light,” the monstrous Maricica told her.  “Left greedy, even, for that light, as you’re greedy for something else.”

“We’re pulling you out.”

“That’s it,” Maricica said.  She drew herself together.

She looked different to the Carmine’s eye.  The Carmine blinked fiercely, shaking her head for a moment.

“Curse set, to take the light from your eyes and blind you to certain things.  Everything in motion.  By the end of spring, you’ll die and be butchered ignobly.  By the end of summer-”

“Charles Abrams will have your throne,” Lucy finished.  “It’s fine.  I’m out, pulling out- just gotta find the door…”

Lucy, drenched in river water, stirred, blinking madly as she tried to make sense of what was around her.  Reminding herself of reality.

“You got in deep,” Zed said.  “Spooked us.”

“Really spooked us,” Verona said.

Lucy nodded, swallowing.  “How did I lose count?”

“The Sable,” Zed said.  “He punctuated the end of one scene and brought about another.  You didn’t count that.”

Lucy made a face, shaking her head.  “Zed.  It’s Charles.  Charles apparently takes the throne, unless that thorn was meant to reach me, here-”

“That’s the kind of thinking about Faerie that messes us up,” Avery said.  “I think it’s okay.”

Lucy shook her head.  “No, my point is, you said Raymond was hard to get in touch with.  A few times.  You said that was usual, but…”

Zed’s expression changed.  He went to get his phone.

Lucy accepted help in standing.  Her body didn’t feel quite like hers.

She had to triple check her eyes and Sight worked okay, in case being so connected to the Carmine as the curse was applied had affected her.

Avery gave her clean bottled water to rinse her eyes with, to be safe.

“Charles?” Verona asked.  “As the mastermind?”

“As the person at the start and the end.  Um, Maricica taking over in the long stretch of middle to keep his forsworn nature from twisting things out of their control.  But Charles is meant to take the Furs, and Charles…”

“Is still in captivity,” Zed said.  “Ray’s on the phone.  He’s got Charles.  He knows his stuff.”

“Are you sure it was Ray?” Lucy asked.

“Pretty sure.  Faerie and Technomancy don’t usually jibe.”

That out of the way, Lucy walked them through everything.  Every step, including Charles.

“Can we bribe the goblins?” Verona asked.  “And… do something about Ken?  The strawman ploy?”

“We have options,” Lucy said.  “And a week to put them into effect.”

“And one more Alcazar ritual to do?” Avery asked.

“After dinner,” Zed said.  “Verona’s still woozy, you’re wobbly, and I’d rather have you guys on your best if we’re having Avery tackle the hard part.”

“Oh boy,” Avery said.

Next Chapter