So it's more or less the end of the week now, and time to update people on what's been going on.
The tl:dr; version: Because of the large number of people who rolled up to buy ebooks from the Ebooks Direct store (see the earlier message here), and the very many generous folks who dropped cash into my Ko-Fi (and please bear with me while I get all the thank-you messages sent!), "Project: Escape" is a go.
And thank you all again! You folks are all, absolutely, stars. 🥲
So this is how things will now unfold (and I designed this getaway to be as stress-free as possible, so it mostly runs along lines, and routes, that I've often traveled before). Here, pretty much, is where I'll be.
On Wednesday May 6th I fly from Dublin into Zürich and catch a train to the western Austrian lakeside city of Bregenz. I'll be there for a few days, chilling as much as possible. (Though work will also be happening... as work always seems to wind up happening when I'm over there. It's a good town for that.) ...The image at the top of the post is a summertime shot of the lakeshore, not far from the Bregenzer Festspiele* and the town's Casino.
Bregenz is familiar territory, where I've spent a good bit of time both on my own (on writing trips) and with @petermorwood. We often stayed here overnight on our way in to Munich to see the folks at the production company for whom we wrote Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King / Sword of Xanten / Die Nibelungen / whatever other name you know it by. It's a small, pleasantly walkable city with an artistic bent. Yet you can also sit lunching at a cafe's outdoor table, feel a shadow pass over you, and look up to see a passing golden eagle from the nearby mountains sailing by low and idly scoping out you and your entree...
After a few days in Bregenz, I'll take a ferry up to Konstanz, a town I've been past before but where I've never stayed. (Here’s the ferry’s route…)
…There I'll sit still for a few more days (ideally taking some time to see the archaeological museum there). After that I'll grab a train back down to Züri, crash there for one last night, and then fly back to Dublin earlyish the next morning.
And after that: Back to business as usual... in, I very much hope, a somewhat improved state of mind. I mean: no way I'm going to stop missing Peter any time soon. That, I'm pretty sure, is now a permanent feature of my basic state of being. But having spent a little while in a place where it'll be impossible not to think about all the good times we had together in that neck of the woods, I think that'll make a big difference to me, especially at this difficult time.
Naturally I'll be posting here from there, every now and then, as things come up to be shared. It's a nice town: scenic. (And besides that, sometimes you see unusual things in the shop windows. (Like this...)
...Meanwhile, for the time being I'll leave the original "Seeking escape" post up, in case anyone still wants details about the ebook bundles on offer. (The prices really are low, and I feel no great urge to raise them right now... because honestly, if there was ever a time people might want cheapish distraction from the junk going on in the world, this might be it. Yet a sad reminder: we cannot sell into the UK due to Brexit.) ...And if anyone wants to drop something into the Ko-Fi toward a glass of wine or a chocolate-heavy dessert, well, don't let me stop you. 😅
Once again, everybody: thank you so much for your kindness. It's so much appreciated. ❤️
And now it's time for starting the pre-packing laundry...
ETA: attn @greggs-mistflower: The sculpture in the background, as it turns out, is called “Hommage an Brigantium (Tribute to ancient Brigantium”), and the more pictures of it I view online, the more I’m starting to think there is NO angle from which it can be viewed that isn’t at least potentially rude. And some are REALLY a lot worse than others… Bear with me a sec while I add some. Honestly, I’m starting to wonder what the sculptor was thinking of… 😏
*This, BTW, is the facility where the James-Bond-Shoots-Up-The-Opera-Performance sequence was shot for Quantum of Solace.
CW: Captivity, brief references to whipping and a couple vague ones to beatings and noncon, this is mostly Plot but also… we love heroes scheming.
Don’t we?
-
At midnight, Kira was ready.
She thought it was midnight, in any case. There was no easy way for her to tell, but it certainly felt like hours had passed while she had wrestled herself out of the old-fashioned dress, with its tight lacing and odd neckline, through sheer willpower, spite, and more than a little furious anger.
She might have torn a handful of stitches along the left side. It made her think of Guilford Wentworth dragging the knife through Areyto’s skin, the siren’s pain just another decoration for him to admire in this mansion bought with magic.
Kira had run herself a bath, even dipped fully under the water so it could soak into her hair. She had stayed in the tub for so long that the water grew cold over her cheekbones, licking and lapping at her temples. She’d warmed it with a quick few moves of her finger, a little magic pulled from the world around her and channeled through one of the first symbols she had ever learned, to ease it into a comfortable heat.
Maybe the wealthy daughters of noble families learned fancy magic first, but Kira had been born into a family that had neither money nor magic. Her own talent had been the first in her family in generations, if ever, and no one had quite known what to do with her. Her first spellwork had been practical… and also stolen, in a way.
She’d started off using symbols she’d learned by watching learned magicians on the street, drawing them over and over with sticks in the dirt until she got them just right and felt the pebbles warm to her fingertips. Her magic for years had been focused on helping to heat the washing-water, boiling broth for soup, coaxing a wet cloth into a warm compress when her mother was ill and only Kira was there to care for her. Cooling a drink to nearly-frozen slush in the heat of the summer, watching her mother smile and ruffle her then-short hair, praising the son she didn’t know was her daughter.
Although there had always been magic that she could do without the symbols drawn. Little things that no one ever noticed, like urging seedlings to sprout in the gardens by certain houses in town as she walked by them or whispering to the wind to blow just so through the hair of handsome boys Kira had found herself watching more and more often as she grew older. Funny, how she’d thought at first she must be feeling what people called love, and only later understood that it wasn’t that she was falling in love with the boys, but that she wanted to be like them, comfortable in a body that never felt hers.
When she asked about apprenticeships, they said she had a strong natural talent. A pity she didn’t have the money to buy her way into the King’s court, of course, but-
Her breath caught.
What if she had, and Guilford Wentworth had caught sight of her then? Would she be in a position to protect herself, or even more vulnerable? There was a cost to turning away an offer from a king’s advisor. What if her mother had never died, and their livelihood had depended on Kira doing whatever she must to survive?
Would she have accepted the marriage, if it meant her mother would never want for anything again?
The thought had been unwelcome, unwanted, and she’d sat up so fast water threatened to splash up over the sides of the tub. Kira had absently netted easy magic around it so it would slap back into place rather than spilling to the floor, hearing in the back of her mind the siren whispering wild magic.
No. Humans had none, and it was impossible for any to be wielded by them. The siren just didn’t understand human magic, that was all. For Areyto, after all, the moon’s magic had always been at hand, coming when he called.
Until that Atabei Montgomery had bound the ocean of power tight and handed it like a wrapped present to Lord Wentworth.
Kira had wrapped her hands around her hair, squeezing the extra water out, watching it fall back into the tub like a shower of rain. It was a ridiculous luxury to waste magic on warming her towel as she used it to dry off, but there wasn’t exactly anything else she could do with her magic, alone here in this room.
Useless little magics might be all Guilford Wentworth would leave to her, once he had what he wanted and the siren downstairs was wrapped up tight for another ten years, and she herself just as firmly wrapped up in Wentworth’s desires. Just sitting around half-brainless until she was needed to perform the spell again.
Smiling like an idiot in the portrait painted of her, or staring solemnly out but frozen in time, never able to take one step out of line. Just a memory, a cautionary tale.
Once she finished, she stepped naked out of the bathing room, and shivered as she felt the portraits on the walls all watching her as she moved. It felt as if the weight of years pressed at her from every angle. Atabei Montgomery’s eyes especially seemed to shift. A trick of the pose, of course - Kira had seen a hundred portraits painted this way. It was still hard not to feel she was being judged here, for what she was and what she wasn’t.
The others - those dead wives, daughters, and sons - all looked into the middle distance, with dreamy smiles or a silent, screaming misery that could only be read by those who knew what they were looking for.
It was an expression Kira could see her own future in.
Her future with Ford. Two miserable faces in oil-painted portraits, married until Ford wasn’t useful any longer to whatever Guilford Wentworth planned for his children.
She had ground her teeth together until her jaw ached as her thoughts once again cycled to a future that she was absolutely determined not to allow. She could not be so easily cowed, and she wouldn’t give in. Not now, not ever. She would leave this place. There would be no portrait painted of her. No hideous Wentworth children at her feet.
Not that she could bear children anyway, but she had no doubts children would be either made or taken from elsewhere and then presented to her to raise like a happy little wife once she’d been truly lost to the siren’s song. Once her mind had been overrun, overwritten, like painting over the pages of a book until the words vanished beneath smears of color.
Kira had groaned, taking in a deep breath and then exhaling just as carefully, trying to focus on the feeling of lungs expanding and contracting, the cool air over her tongue. She had to stop thinking about it. Fearing the future before it arrived was just a victory for Wentworth, in the end, one she couldn’t afford to give him.
As she had worked the tangles from her wet hair with the wide teeth of a wooden comb, she found her eyes meeting Atabei Montgomery’s, the small strokes of oil paint seeming to catch Atabei in a moment of solemn contemplation.
Contemplating her.
“You might have been ruined,” Kira whispered. “But I will not be. I can stop him. I will.“
It seemed, for a moment, like one painted eyebrow and one corner of Atabei’s full lips quirked up in a kind of disbelief, both sudden and new and frozen in time, more than a century in the past. The look had always been there, or it hadn’t, and Kira suddenly couldn’t quite remember which.
The portrait seemed to mock her. Do you think yourself so much stronger than me?
“Yes,” She answered out loud, matter-of-fact, knowing it was insanity to speak to oil paint and canvas as if it was a conversation and doing it anyway, “Whatever you did, it must be undone. You created this monster, and I will unmake him. I will fix your mistake.”
That face seemed to say, You, little girl, will kill his siren?
Kira’s mouth twitched at the corner, a matching wry smile to the implied one Atabei wore. “No. I won’t kill him. I’ll save him, from what you did, and I will see him to the ocean to go home. And then…” She grunted in pain as her comb caught on a knot, jerking at it impatiently until the tangle gave way with a sound not unlike yanking laces too quickly undone. There was a snap.
Kira swore, softly, as she realized she’d broken one of the teeth on her comb. She had to pick it out of her hair and groaned, throwing the chipped triangle of wood right at Atabei’s face.
When she looked up again, Atabei Montgomery’s serious expression looked at her without changing, but she still could have sworn she saw the barest shift at the corner of the dead woman’s lips. Almost a smile.
Kira felt rather than heard a whispered best of luck.
She swallowed, tearing her eyes away from the painting and shaking off the sense of being haunted. The only prisoners lingering in this house were she, the siren, and maybe Ford.
There were no ghosts here that didn’t have still-beating hearts.
Right?
In the wardrobe, she found a simple shift of ivory to pull over her head. Once that was on, she dug around further and discovered a dressing gown - or a robe, really - of pale blue silk with embroidered flowers in white that tied at the waist. It had been shoved into a wrinkled pile along the bottom, which was odd. It was maybe the most beautiful bit of silk she’d ever seen.
The robe had an odd sort of faded scent, sea salt and sunshine, some sort of bleached wood smell. At least she was more or less covered up now, neck to ankles to wrists, just how she wanted.
It felt like, even alone in here, she needed to guard the sight of her skin from Guilford Wentworth’s leer.
Moonlight flashed against the window as the wind blew the clouds above at breakneck speed, and she found herself captured by it as it cut through the bars and fell across her bed. Wind through the trees outside made the silvered light seem as if it were moving, shimmering.
The moonlight reached for her, the goddess with her cool shimmering fingers grasping at whatever she could find here. The touch just brushed over Kira’s skin, like a nail scraping lightly along the back of one hand.
Somewhere down below, the siren began to sing. His voice was sharp as broken glass, plaintive and sad, and Kira suddenly tasted saltwater on her tongue, felt the tide lapping at her ankles, pulling gently as if to drag her out to sea. When she looked down, though, there was only the bedroom’s wooden floor. The voice rang through her, around and over and beneath. It beat in her blood, calling to the water there. It settled in her, made of her a bit of wood washed ashore after a ship was destroyed by storm.
There was no compulsion in the song, only the depth of the siren’s misery and loneliness, working its way into her. He did not want her to do anything, or he respected her request that he not spell her earlier. He only made her feel.
Kira’s breath caught.
Give him back.
A second melody cut in, and it wasn’t Areyto singing.
The new voice Kira did not hear - not with her ears, anyway. It snarled and snapped. It was not human, and yet she understood it all the same. It was a voice so old it existed before the vibration of sound through the throat began in even the smallest animals. It sang in melodies no human had ever heard or could ever have recreated.
Kira fell back onto her back on the bed, the moonlight cutting across her and pressing with the weight of hands against her shoulders. The voice’s song felt like she tossed and turned in heavy white-capped waves even as she laid motionless. Her eyes were wide, staring up from the drifting dark to the hope of sunlight shimmering on waters far above.
She choked on saltwater down her throat even though her body breathed slow and even, unchanged.
Sirens sang like this, and not like this at all.
This was a song that came into being a long time before the waters did. It was the song that created them, the ancient power that gave life to the ocean’s waters and disdained the way people tried to invade it. This voice was a ringing bell everywhere and nowhere at once. It was the first man frightened of dark waters that seemed to never end, hesitantly putting one toe into cool tidewaters. It was the song of the first siren who reached long-fingered claws out to close slowly around his ankle.
It was the first siren’s mother, the mother of all sirens. It was her all-consuming rage. Cooler than the sun but far deadlier for it. A reflection of light from the sun, but turned to her own purposes.
She thought of Lord Wentworth declaring there were no gods or goddesses, and caught herself in a giggle, slapping her hands over her mouth to capture it.
If she laughed now, it would come out like a scream.
Instead, she swallowed and forced herself to take deep breaths, again and again, until her head felt too light and dizziness swept her. She rocked in the waves that fooled her by holding her like a mother’s arms. Lulled her into complacent near-slumber as sharks circled, hoping to scent blood and open their mouths to bare their rows of razor-sharp teeth.
Just like Areyto, in the room downstairs - opening his mouth too wide, ready to tear out her throat.
But the sense of water was only in her mind.
Below, Areyto’s song continued, lilting higher, harmonizing with the heavier voice. Begging and pleading in words that Kira didn’t know. The way that gods spoke to their children was not meant for man’s mind to grasp.
“I will not go mad,” She said, hoping that the determination she pushed into her shaking, weak voice would help her keep the promise she was making, if only to herself. "I am imagining this. I am tired and frightened and this is not happening to me. It’s only his singing, he is driving me mad.”
She closed her eyes.
He wouldn’t do that, would he? Areyto wanted her help.
How could she help if she went insane?
The voice snarled, dark at the sightless deep far under the waters, with a fury that made Kira’s very bones shake beneath her skin. The moon scratched along her scalp with a hint of claws that could not quite break skin.
Give my daughters back my son.
Kira hitched in a breath. "Please,” She whispered, voice breaking, creaking and cracking like a ship rocked by waves. The goddess spoke like a hurricane, and it would rip her apart and leave driftwood bleached to wash up on shore, a memory of lives lost disappeared into the deepest oceans where bones dissolved in days and there was no light at all. There is a cost to risking the waters. “Please, please let me not go mad here. Please, please, please…”
Give. Him. Back.
There was the sound of a great crack against the window from the outside and Kira jumped, letting out a breathy scream, shooting upright.
Below her, Areyto’s song cut off at once.
When she sat up, nothing was there but the night sky, the moonlight covered up by clouds. It was suddenly so dark in the bedroom that Kira could barely see to light an oil lamp, and even then its bouncing light seemed so faint and so small.
How long she sat there, staring at the window terrified that the moonlight would come back, she didn’t know.
It was only interrupted by a knock at her bedroom door.
Kira swallowed, pulling the robe tightly around herself. Her heart raced so quickly it all seemed to be one long beat. “Come in,” She called, and found a weak smile for herself when her voice came out perfectly steady and strong despite the fluttering beat of her heart and the way her hands were trembling.
The lock turned, and then the doorknob. First inside was Ford, wearing the same clothes he’d worn to dinner, disheveled and in disarray with a bit of hair hanging into his face. He came to a sudden stop as soon as he saw her, and she blinked back at him. His red-rimmed eyes weren’t on her face, but on the robe she wore. Something about his expression - startled and strangely foggy - made him seem much younger, like a child waking from a nightmare, or walking into one.
His pale skin made the new bruise on his face from his father’s anger at dinner stand out even more. She followed his gaze, frowning down at her robe, and then looked back up. “Ford?” She said, a little hesitant now. “What’s wrong? Is something wrong with my clothing?”
“What?” It seemed to jerk him out of whatever daze he had briefly fallen into. He flushed, shaking himself like a dog shook off water. “Ah, nothing. My-... my apologies-... you just-... I’ve seen that fabric… before, haven’t I?”
“Ah, I don’t know… I mean, I assume you have, but I found it in the wardrobe…”
Ford shook his head again. “I’ve seen it before. I know I have.”
“Perhaps your… your mother wore it…?”
“No.” His voice was sharp, and Kira nearly flinched away from it. It made him sound like his father, in a way she knew she could never tell him. He might never speak again if she did. “My mother never wore that. Who did…? Who wore…?”
Ford kept looking at her, and Kira shifted, slightly uncomfortable. It was an intense stare, but not the sort of stares she had fielded from men for years now. Nothing like Guilford Wentworth’s sneer. No, there was something about this stare that looked the way she had felt when she’d heard the moonlight speaking.
She knew without having to touch him that his heart would be racing, too.
“I’m sorry,” Kira said, almost sincerely. She pulled the robe as tightly around herself as she could. “I don’t know who would have worn this before. One of the wives, maybe, or… I don’t know.”
“No, of course you wouldn’t. It doesn’t matter, of course it doesn’t, it’s… it’s only that I-”
“Ford, stop frightening her and get out of my way.” A young woman shoved Ford unceremoniously to the side. Ford’s younger sister, clearly - and never had two siblings so clearly come from the same parents. They had the same sort of hair, the same jawline and shape of their eyes. The younger sister had simply been drawn with a gentler hand. “You big oaf, you’re frightening her. Let me be introduced before she decides to hate us both!”
“I-... yes.” Ford’s voice still sounded a little airy, but he must have been pulling himself back together. He cleared his throat, gesturing to the young woman beside him. It occurred to Kira that Ford was still just as drunk now as he’d been at the awful circus that had been their evening meal. “Ah, Miss Losna, this is my younger sister, Nat-”
“Nathalie, please!” The younger sibling was smiling before Kira ever got a full look at her face. She wore an echo of Kira’s own nightclothes but in a beautiful burgundy instead and the hem billowed like a ship’s sails as she came forward all in a rush. She wore her hair in a braid that hung down over one shoulder. She shook Kira’s hand with a firm, strong grip, before Kira had been able to even track her quick steps across the room.
The cool touch of her long fingers briefly made Kira think of the moon again, as did the shimmering light in her eyes. Nathalie Wentworth seemed like a softer sort of goddess. The way it might have been if the moon were gentle. She would have been the ocean, if the ocean carried men with a mother’s care to distant lands, rather than the way it roiled and toyed with sailors the way a cat might play with a mangled mouse.
“Hello,” Kira said, voice slightly faint. Ford was handsome, in a tragic noble sort of way. Nathalie, though, was effervescent. “I’m Kiraya Losna, the magician, your father… ah… hired me. Sort of.”
“The magician he lied to, more like. You can be honest with me.” Nathalie smiled, giving her hand one more squeeze before she let it drop. “We know what our father is. Also, I’m honestly only two years younger than Ford, so don’t let him act like he’s in charge of anything. I’ve got a better head for business anyway. Always have.”
“That’s true,” Ford said wryly, unoffended. His crooked, inebriated smile for his sister was warmer and far more genuine than any Kira had seen before. “I’m hopeless with sums. If it weren’t for Nathalie, I would’ve bankrupted our properties in the Colonies.” He turned away and back into the hallway, gesturing. “Come, siren. Kira, you’ve met it before.”
“It?” Kira frowned.
Ford shrugged. “Well, you know, Lord Wentworth’s… creature.”
The siren appeared in the doorway.
He did not move with the easy confidence of the other two, who were after all in their own childhood home. Instead, he stepped with careful feet, his eyes slightly down as if watching for a trap, and only lifted his gaze once he came to a stop.
Those dark eyes met hers, and not for the first time, Kira felt a shimmer of something like a net over her skin. One she didn’t even try to resist.
Areyto’s injuries from dinner were all healed, beyond some faded, faint bruising at his wrists and the careful way he held himself suggesting the cuts from Wentworth’s knife might still be lurking beneath his black silk robe. It matched his hair, set off his brown skin, but none of his handsome face or form captured her as much as the intensity in the way he looked at her.
“You heard?” He asked, not bothering to greet her.
Kira thought of the voice in her head, the sense of being blown off course by the storm, the grip of watery claws demanding and dragging her down. Areyto’s harmony, dipping over and under the stronger voice, begging it for… what? Rescue? She swallowed and looked away, feeling an odd sort of heat in her cheeks. “Yes,” She answered, half-whispering, glancing back at him. “I heard.”
Areyto brightened. It was a subtle shift of expression, and yet it changed everything. Harsh lines held with careful hostility softened. The sense of the weight of his captivity faded, and she could see beneath the surface the irresistible beauty he must have been, out on the water with his own kind, singing sailors to their deaths with joy in his heart.
She might have died happily with that hand closed around her ankle, those arms locked around her neck, letting his mouth against her ear singing his song be the last thing she knew.
“Heard what?” Ford blinked, looking between them, and Kira shook herself from the strange thoughts that seemed to come to her unbidden whenever Areyto was near. Ford’s words didn’t quite slur, but something about his speech seemed like his voice moved faster than his mouth. “What did you hear?”
Nathalie’s eyebrows were furrowed in confusion, but she took her brother’s arm. Kira was struck by the knowledge of what she witnessed as she watched the siblings move to the small table at the side of the room.
Wordlessly, Nathalie balanced her brother’s unstable steps as she led him to a seat, and she made it look like he wasescorting her. It was a move she’d probably used a thousand times at events or in public to cover Ford’s drunkenness. Ford’s younger sister seemed, in her way, a dozen years older than she should be.
The opposite of the way Ford seemed much younger.
“I heard…” Kira trailed off, wondering how to explain what had felt like madness overtaking her to a half-soused man years her junior and his lovely sister. Would it sound any less crazed if the siren understood her, but they didn’t? “The siren singing,” She said, finally. “Didn’t you hear his song?”
Areyto’s eyebrows shifted upwards, just slightly.
“Oh. Yes.” Ford nodded after a moment of blank nothing. He sighed, relaxing back into the rounded wooden back of the chair, toying with an empty glass that was there, next to the decanter filled with amber liquid. “I heard him. He sings when Lord Wentworth sleeps, sometimes.”
“I am forbidden from singing without his command,” Areyto said, stepping further into the room and walking past them all to the window. “But at night, it… loosens. A little, more and more. When I can sing in ways that are not his songs… I have to sing. I must."
He looked outside. Kira watched his black silk robe slip off one shoulder, baring the unmarked brown skin on his unpainted side. She knew his skin would be just this side of too warm, if she touched him.
“I understand,” Ford said. "Me, too."
Areyto glanced back at him over his shoulder, and the two shared… something Kira couldn’t quite read.
Ford coughed. "Not-... not singing, but drawing. I used to stay up all night when he was abed, sketching anything I could think of. He would tear the papers up if he found them, beat me black and blue for being useless, but my mother-”
His voice caught, his eyes watering a little.
Kira stayed at the edge of the bed, a safe distance away, even as part of her longed to lay a hand on Ford’s shoulder.
“My mother would hide them, if she found them first,” Ford finished, rubbing at his temples. “After my father died.” Kira knew that he was hiding tears, not embarrassment. Nathalie leaned over and whispered something, so soft it didn’t even travel across the bedroom. Ford nodded in reply, clearing his throat and straightening his shoulders.
The siren watched, looking thoughtful and not particularly sympathetic. “I remember your father.”
Ford winced. A cloud moved over his expression, a depthless bitter anger taking over the pure grief he had been far more ashamed of. Whatever connection he and Areyto had shared shattered at the words. “I am aware of why you remember my father, monster.”
The siren blinked, and then turned back to the window. Dismissing Ford's anger as if it didn't exist, darkening the cloud of it that weighed down the room.
Kira swallowed. “Please, let’s… we have much to talk about. I’d offer you a drink from what I think might be cognac in that decanter, but I’m… not sure that it is only cognac.”
“You shouldn’t trust anything my father-... not my father. Anything that Lord Wentworth gives you,” Ford said with a firm nod. “We’re all just pieces in a game, to him. If he must add something to your drink to keep you from walking off the board before he has finished playing, he will, and he’ll feel no guilt whatsoever when it’s done.”
Ford pulled the stopper off the decanter, giving a sniff to its contents.
He and Nathalie shared a look.
Kira watched the younger woman shake her head - only slightly. Ford exhaled, then replaced the stopper and turned away. “We should… talk about how we might play the game, too, then, and take it from him.”
“Scatter the pieces,” Nathalie said, smiling. “Leave him with nothing but the ruined board. Let him rule nothing, and die with nothing, and become nothing."
Kira found her eyes returning to the siren.
Areyto stared outside, and she knew without having to be told that he was praying, in his own way, for the clouds to shift aside and let the moonlight return. Let the goddess see her stolen son, here, waiting for rescue. His prayers went unanswered the cloud cover seeming only to deepen and leave him even more alone here on land, where he had never been meant to stay.
When the robe slipped off the other shoulder, too, Kira’s eyes widened at the sight of fresh, new red welts just peeking up over the neckline.
He’d been whipped as well, after she’d gone. After-dinner entertainments, perhaps. Kira’s stomach flipped and twisted. He'd been brutalized, while she was up here thinking she had anything to recover from. All she'd had to do was make unwelcome conversation with a man who couldn't seem to look at her face while Areyto bled for their entertainment.
Areyto had been bled, hung by the wrists, cut open, and even after she was gone... whipped raw.
While she soaked in the bath and soothed her tired muscles, the siren had no doubt been in saltwater that stung like acid trying to clean out the new wounds. He hadn’t been singing because of her or because he’d heard the moon, at first - he’d been soothing himself, trying to heal new pains and old ones. To remember, maybe, times when he had not lived every day in pain.
He deserved to know a life without pain.
“I will go further,” Kira said, voice hushed. She kept her eyes on a trickle of dark blood that moved like a touch, a tongue, down over the siren’s shoulder blade, disappearing back under black fabric. She watched his muscles shift, unconsciously, against the tickling sensation, the subtle wince that followed as his back protested even that slight movement. “We will not simply take Lord Wentworth’s game from him. We must do more than that."
Ford and Nathalie followed her gaze, looking over at Areyto as well.
The siren did not turn back, but Kira knew he was listening, even as his chin tipped up, and his eyes sought the moon that could not see him.
“We will make sure that the man is utterly undone,” Kira said, voice low. She was making a promise, and maybe Ford and Nathalie didn’t hear it, but Areyto did. He had to, or he might kill them all afterward because of what they knew, because of what could happen if he didn’t. “But if someone like Lord Wentworth discovered this, someone else smarter than he is might do so again and be more able to protect himself. We will do this, and free Areyto, and then we must make sure that no one else can ever do such harm to sirens again.”
This made Areyto turn around to face her.
Once again, the net over her head, the dark eyes on hers, as if the two of them were entirely alone in here. Something cold and briefly frightened shivered down her spine, meeting the warmer flame lit within. The two feelings warred for which would rule her thoughts.
He wasn’t even human.
“You have sisters,” She said, and the siren nodded without seeming to even blink. It felt like neither of them was quite breathing. “There are other sirens who could be captured like this. Marked and bound. We have to make sure it doesn’t happen.”
“Yes,” Areyto said, voice low. A bass note, a vibrato that stole down her throat. “How do you protect my sisters?”
Kira swallowed, and thought of her hours of studying the old magic books, even the ones that she had never been meant to read. She found, within herself, a smile.
To her shock, Areyto smiled back. Thin, and without quite showing his teeth.
“I think,” Kira said, “That I am going to need to learn how to paint a curse.”
“That’s impossible,” Nathalie said, eyebrows nearly to her hairline. “We can’t make those. It’s part of how it all works, I remember learning about it with my tutors, we can’t make curses with magic. It's not something magicians are even capable of.”
Kira found it hard to hold Areyto's gaze, now. The look in his eyes was a painful, weak sort of hope. He understood what she was thinking. She knew that he was scared to feel like anything good could ever happen to him again - it was a look Ford himself wore, too. Her eyes flickered to him, and took in the nearly identical expression he and the siren showed her.
Man and myth, beaten and bloodied, bruised and brutalized until neither believed that life could be anything but suffering as long as you were useful and discarded afterward. Toys tossed aside when broken.
The two were far more alike than they were different, even if one was not even truly a man, only a siren wearing a man’s face, and the other hated him for past transgressions that hadn't even been his own.
Both of them had suffered in ways meant to snuff out any hint of hope completely. They had been left so little of the future to believe in. It was hard to look at them and see it rekindled, fearing she would fail them and destroy it for good.
But Kira suspected that she held something, within herself, that Areyto could see fully and Guilford Wentworth hadn’t quite understood.
They had to use that advantage while they still had it, before even Kira was just another piece on the board, used to knock Guilford Wentworth’s opponents away until only he remained to rule.
“I need to know what is within me,” Kira said, splaying her hands out wide. “And then I need to learn how to make it so that Guilford Wentworth is the end of men who play with the gods’ children.”
“Right,” Nathalie said, but she was clearly too confused to have quite grasped what Kira was saying.
“Human magic can’t make a curse,” Kira explained, voice low, without taking her eyes off of the siren.
Areyto’s smile widened. For the first time, those black eyes sparkled, and it was a look just for her.
“Right, it’s not even that it’s forbidden, it just doesn’t happen for us, it isn’t in our blood. Magicians can't-"
"Human magicians cannot," Areyto said. Nathalie glanced over at him, eyebrows furrowed, then back to Kira.
Kira leaned forward, as far as she could. “Listen to me, Nathalie. Here what I am telling you. Human magic cannot draw curses.”
“Yes…”
“But I've read every book ever written on magic, and I know something that you don't know about it. Something that Lord Wentworth certainly doesn't know. What human magic cannot do... wild magic can.”
“You could escape,” she says one day, while he eats the food she brought him. Banana bread with nuts in, buttered. Cold milk to drink. “I would help.”
Who will help you? “Where would I go?”
“There are-safe houses. On the news, I see stories about pet-lib groups.” She bites her lip, looks down. “If I got you some supplies… if you wore clothes covering your scars… you could get away from here.”
“Maybe.” He’s looked out the windows, and seen only other houses like this one, in different colors, the road stretching past more of the same. The suburbs, the owner calls it. “I could try.”
She looks up and smiles, her real smile that brightens her eyes. He smiles back.
Old Friends taglist: @painful-pooch @justplainwhump @redwingedwhump @maracujatangerine @honeycollectswhump @tragedyinblue
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Old Town Road (AKA The “Hob is a Horse Girl” Fic)
By @arialerendeair and all art by @amielot (Art Masterpost!!)
Chapter: 2/?
Pairing: Dream/Hob
Rating: Explicit
Art featured in this Chapter: Dream and Hob Escape the Circus, Dream Collapses Getting Into the Barn
Summary:
Hob helps to rescue Dream - a rare Unicorn Centaur from a decade of captivity at the hands of Roderick Burgess.
Dream is injured, and severely malnourished, and over the next few weeks as he heals and grows stronger - he and Hob grow closer.
When Dream sets off to return to his home, Hob accompanies him, and the two of them grow closer and closer, until they find themselves unwilling to let each other go.
Will they manage to find their happily ever after together?
(It’s me, of course they will - just an adventure or seven first!)
Read on Ao3!
~!~!~!~
(Chapter Preview!)
Unfortunately, even though they were in town for a full week, Hob knew that he needed to do some proper planning if he wanted to break the centaur out and get away with it. But, thankfully, he'd made enough friends, that it was easy enough to start getting what he needed. He bought a nice knife and holster and tucked it away in his belt, with an easy excuse that he wanted something on hand if he was dealing with the Manticores regularly. (No one questioned him when he pointed out he was their regular feeder.)
He started using his wages to buy drinks. Not for himself, but for others. Loosening tongues. Not getting drunk, but sharing a pint after a long day that he paid for was a sure way to get into the graces of many of the employees there. Paul's impressed nod and smile had meant he was doing the right thing, even as his stomach turned.
Thankfully, everything he was doing meant that he could continue getting the unicorn centaur small cups of oats as long as he collected the cup from one of the other horse's stalls. It worked well, and hopefully, it was giving him a small modicum of strength through all of the stuff Burgess made him do as part of a routine. He had almost everything in place, except for one final thing.
Hob planned to rob Burgess blind. Despite what the man had said the first day they'd arrived in town, he'd been making excellent money, and the shows had been sold out almost every night. Which meant that somewhere, there was a great deal of money just lying around waiting for someone to take it. He was in the middle of running an errand for Paul when he caught wind of precisely what he needed to hear, at last.
39. "I shouldn't care for your life, but I'm starting to and it's becoming an inconvenience."
Alrighty then! Ages later with a new prompt. Hope you find what you were looking for lmfao.
The princess flinched as the knight touched her shoulder. The light brush sent a sharp chill through her skin and into her bones. Her thighs recoiled in reflex and the knight dropped her hand.
"I'm sorry," the knight said, her face still set in malice but her eyes sincerely apologetic.
"No, your hands are frozen!" the princess hissed. "What, did your metal armor suck every little wave of heat that your body every generated?"
"That's impossible," the knight whispered, kindly. "My body generates heat every time I eat. And I have cold hands. It's a birth thing."
The princess' lips parted with the intention of releasing a teasing remark but the knight put a finger on her lips. Her brows furrowed, her shoulders hunched, annoyed at the interruption, but she heard the heavy footsteps accompanied by clanging of metal. Her shoulders stayed recoiled.
"Stay right here," the knight whispered close to her ear, and the princess' own hands seemed to be covering up with layers of soft snow.
The knight stepped out of hiding and approached the sound of footsteps. She heard a long, dragged wirring and a quick creak of metal, assuming that the other guard was removing their face shield.
"Greetings, Ryan," she heard. "What brings you so far from your post? Perhaps an errand from the queen herself? Or did you fancy a stroll? I hear the feast had succeeded in forging a path of hurried feetmarks to the relief stalls."
"Nothing of what you presume, Madam." The guard had a gruff, clobbered voice, seeming to emerge from a mouth of shapingly bad teeth. "I'm on patrol. Why are you not in your bed chambers?"
"Did I not mention the feast?" The princess could hear the knight smiling. "If anyone asks, do be vague. Mention a thing or two about a stroll."
The princess wished someone would give the poor guard a bottle of oil for each creak the metal suit made. She heard him mutter salutations and farewell and deduced he'd kneeled for the knight. She exhaled a long shaky breath that she was surprised to realize she'd been holding in. The discovery alarmed her quite well and she choked into an involuntary gasp that sounded more like a sob.
Silence.
The princess wished no more than the metal to start its little intercourse again to drive out the terrorizing tranquility her burst of surprise initiated. She clamped her now freezing hands over her mouth as more sobs followed and she swallowed them in.
"Did you hear that, Madam?" the guard said, trying to be quiet but his heavy voice boomed in the silence otherwise. "Did you bring someone with you?"
It was a judging voice. The princess tried to occupy the darkest corner of the shadowed hiding, hand still pressed over her mouth.
"I hardly think that concerns you, Ryan of the Guards." The knight's voice had hardened. "Now, I believe this corridor is perfectly safe. Why don't you get along?"
The princess regretted wishing for the metallic squeaks. She pressed her body deeper against the wall as the guard rose to his feet, his armor's arrangements now seeming like threatening gongs to her. She clasped the hand that covered her mouth with the other, well nigh of releasing a pained groan as the cold seared through her skin.
"Your accomplices are indeed not worth my concern," the guard said. "But I shall leave no stone unturned."
The princess heard the rise and fall of a heavy foot which was admittedly hard to miss as the guard's suit pronounced each aspect of his movement. But the squeals of machinery stopped abruptly as the foot landed.
"I'm afraid I cannot let you pass, Ryan," the knight said, her voice dangerously low. "You'll frighten my company."
"If it's your company, I promise to inflict no terror. Unless it's someone compromising."
"I cannot let you be the judge of that either, so forgive me."
The princess heard a sharp thud, followed by a gurgling sound. Then came several loud crashes like the sound of dishes cascading down but instead of long drawn out crinkles, it was abrupt and sharply brought to a stop.
"You can come out now, princess," the knight said, her voice kindly as before.
The princess crept out of the shadows, her grasp on her mouth loosening but still in place for fear of further intruders. She applauded her decision as she saw the guard lying face down on the polished floor, one of his arms tucked underneath his body, possibly as he'd been violently interrupted before he could reach for his sword. The knight stood over him, half his size, looking down maliciously.
"Wh- " the princess stuttered. "Why did you -? Will he be alright?"
The knight smiled at her, genuinely amused at her concern. "He'll be fine," she said. "I'm positive."
"Why would you do that?" the princess demanded, bundling up her gown and striding towards the knight. "You could have alarmed the entire armory. You'd have been beheaded if they knew you're helping the princess escape!"
The knight, still smiling, expressed a painful expression behind her eyes. "I know I shouldn't have, princess. But I did. I cannot answer why. Although it certainly seems to be an an inconvenience now."
The knight jutted her chin outward to point behind the princess. She turned skeptically, her hair slapping the knight across her face. But she didn't have the time to apologize. Another guard had noticed them. And they seemed to recognize the princess fairly well.
"Should've stripped off his armor before knocking him out," the knight said and cursed colorfully before grabbing the princess's hand.
Yep...blue dot, Sebastian which is between both, if this hits, the weather folks say it may be just as bad as Andrew, anyone from Fl knows what Andrew did
Please.. Stay safe, hope it turns or eases.. Doubt it since its along water, remember escape routes, mulch for your doors for flooding (mulch can be reused for gardens sand makes mud and sticks, trapping you inside), stay settled in the middle of the house or bathroom no windows, have enough water and canned foods, just...stay safe ey? Pray for a mirical?
(THANKFULLY it didn't smash Puerto Rico <3 they have a chance to keep rebuilding)
