Chương 52: Chapter 51: The Coward's Daughter

They held back at the mouth of the street, half-sunk into the shadow between two leaning buildings, and watched. The house sat exactly as Elma remembered it from the last time she'd stood outside it—same warped shutter hanging a finger's width crooked on its hinge, same patchwork of mismatched shingles someone had clearly repaired themselves rather than pay for properly.

Smoke curled thin and gray from a neighboring chimney, carrying with it the smell of boiled roots and something sharper underneath, medicinal, the kind of smell that clung to sickrooms. No Alloys. Elma weighed the street twice to be sure, feeling nothing but the ordinary, unremarkable pressure of ordinary people going about ordinary business.

Two neighbors filed out of Jorm's front door as they watched, heads bent together, voices too low to carry, throwing one last glance back at the house before parting ways down the street. Jorm hadn't said a word since they'd arrived here. That, more than anything else, was the detail Elma catalogued and couldn't set down. They crossed the street quickly, ducking through the door Jorm pushed open without knocking.

Inside, the air sat close and warm, woodsmoke and boiled herbs thick enough to taste, the light dimmer than the street outside, filtered gold through a single greased-paper window. A woman sat near the low fire, wrapped in blankets despite the heat of the room, wheels tucked beneath the chair that held her upright. Her head came up sharply at the sound of the door.

"Who—" Her eyes found the snake mask first.

"Jorm?" Jorm didn't move. Elma noticed that before anything else—the particular stillness of it, the held-back weight of someone stopping herself from doing something her whole body clearly wanted to do. She reached up and pulled her own frog mask free, and only then did Jorm's hand rise to do the same. Merideth rolled herself closer, wheels catching once on the uneven floorboards, her gaze sliding warily past Jorm to the four strangers crowding her doorway.

Elma saw the bruise before Merideth could think to angle her face away from the light—a dark, yellowing mark along the edge of her lower lip, days old already by the color of it. Elma filed it without comment. There would be time to ask, later, if there was a later that called for asking. Jorm crossed the room in three quick steps and folded her arms around her mother. It didn't look like the last time.

Elma remembered the last time well enough to know the difference—that had been unguarded, spilling over before Jorm could catch it. This was careful. Deliberate. A hug built by someone who needed her mother to believe it was the same as always, holding on a half-second too long to sell it. Merideth's arms came up around her anyway, uncertain over her daughter's shoulder.

"Who are these people, Jorm? The city guard came through here, looking for you—""They're friends." Jorm pulled back.

"I'll explain everything. I promise. Right now we just—we're tired, and we haven't eaten since morning." Silk stepped forward and lifted the bundle of raw meat, offering it up. Merideth looked at it, then at the four strange faces crowded into her narrow front room, and some of the wariness finally eased out of her shoulders.

Lucien hadn't gotten three words into offering to help before Merideth waved him off with the flat, practiced authority of someone who'd been fending off exactly this kind of insistence her whole life. He ignored it anyway, which seemed to be quickly becoming his whole personality this week, and took up the knife and a pile of onions before she could argue further. Behind him, four extremely capable individuals sat around the table doing absolutely nothing useful.

Vector had already found a shelf of books, taken one, and settled down to read it. Repera was attempting, with great seriousness, to touch Elma's hair, while Elma was doing her best not to fight her and having to physically restrain herself from doing so. Silk sat with her arms folded, radiating the specific silence of someone thinking very hard about something she had no intention of discussing. Lucien decided he was, once again, the only functioning adult in any room he occupied, and got to work on the onions.

He hadn't known, until about ten minutes ago, that Jorm was this good a liar. It was mildly unsettling, watching her spin a story for her own mother—Elma's identity, the two of them cast as her guards, the manor gone unsafe, the nearest attempt on Elma's life offered up as proof of it—with barely a hitch in her delivery, true things and false things stitched together seamlessly enough that Lucien himself would've believed most of it cold.

He found himself wondering, not for the first time today, what else the girl might have told him with that same steady face. Merideth seemed to believe her, mostly. Still moved with a certain wariness while she worked the meat over the grill, but she believed her.

"The heir of Veraxys." She said it quietly, glancing past him toward the table, where Elma sat with her hair drawn close against her shoulder, Repera making increasingly determined attempts at it.

"She came through here before. I didn't place her that time." Her eyes flicked to Lucien.

"You were waiting outside for her, then? That first visit?"

"Yes. Of course." The lie came easier than he expected. So that part hadn't been an exaggeration. Elma really had come to the city before, on her own, without a single adult in Veraxys the wiser.

"Clever of her, hiding her hair," Merideth went on.

"I'd have known her lineage the second a single strand showed."

"You'd have caught that? Just from a strand?"

"Of course." She turned the meat, unhurried.

"You're a Kresnik, aren't you?" Lucien's knife stopped halfway through an onion.

"How did you—""The color." She nodded at him without looking up.

"It's not a natural brown. Still carries that faint metal shine underneath, if the light catches it right. Yours was meant to come in silver."

"Huh." He resumed cutting, mostly to have somewhere to put his hands.

"You seem remarkably unbothered, having a house full of nobility drop in on you unannounced."

"Not my first time around your sort." She set the tongs down.

"My late husband. Jorm's father. He was someone, once."

"Desmond," Lucien said. Her hand went still on the grill.

"You knew him?"

"No—someone just called Jorm 'Desmond's daughter,' back in the city. That's all I've got."

"Was he—" Meredith's breath caught, thin.

"Was he unkind, whoever said it?" Lucien weighed the question and decided, quickly, that he didn't actually want the answer badly enough to make her say the rest of it out loud.

"No. Not particularly." He let it drop there.

"Salt?"

"There." She pointed left without turning, hand already reaching for the wheel of her chair.

"No—I've got it." He was staring at the chair before he'd finished the sentence, and he knew it the second she caught him at it.

"Oh, don't start with that face." She rolled back a few inches, arms crossed now.

"I manage fine on my own most days. Don't need the pity."

"It's not pity." He held up both hands, surrendering.

"If anything I'm jealous. My legs are done. Completely finished. I have walked farther today than I have in my entire life combined, and it turns out following small, extremely opinionated people around a city all day is not a job suited to a man of my constitution." That got a real laugh out of her, loud enough that Repera looked over from her hair-based campaign against Elma.

"You don't have to stand there suffering for my benefit, then." Merideth tipped her head at an old closet in the corner.

"There's a spare in there." He dragged it out with theatrical gratitude, one wheel locked stiff and refusing to turn, and spent a minute working it loose with a splash of the olive oil she handed over without being asked. When it finally gave, spinning free under his palm, he let out a breath like a man setting down a great weight.

"There." Merideth held the salt out to him.

"No, no—hang on." He wheeled himself the short distance over instead.

"I want to actually try the thing properly." She laughed again, shaking her head, and nodded toward the door instead.

"If you're that committed to the wheels, you can put them to real use. Water's out at the well." Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

"That," Lucien said, already backing away from the idea, "sounds like a job requiring actual upper body strength. Do I strike you as a man in possession of that?" He turned toward the table instead.

"Vector." No response. The boy hadn't so much as looked up from his book.

"Vector." Nothing.

"I'll grab it," Jorm said, already on her feet and out the door before Lucien could object. He sighed, long and put-upon.

"That boy is going to be the death of me. Slow, humiliating death."

"I can imagine." Merideth went back to the meat, amused.

"Though you're lucky, having someone like her along." A small nod toward Silk.

"She's a very good guard," Lucien said.

"Please." Merideth didn't even glance up.

"I know exactly what a guard looks like at someone they're guarding. That is not what that is." Lucien turned, half against his own better judgment. Silk was already looking somewhere else entirely, arms still crossed, sitting apart from the rest of the table, and clearly bothered by something.

Elma sat at the table, weighing exactly how hard it would be to make Repera vanish through entirely mysterious and unprovable means, and concluded—reluctantly—that Vector would probably notice. I could eat her, the Other said. No.

"Vector. Your sister." He didn't look up from the book. Silk leaned in.

"Psst." Elma blinked at her.

"We're short a fifth," Silk murmured.

"Lucien can't fight. Registration's for teams of five." Right. Jorm had said that, back outside the Bastion. Elma filed the gap and had no idea yet how to fill it. Across the table, Vector's book snapped shut. He leaned in without being asked.

"Registration closes tomorrow, by the way." Elma's jaw tightened. So he heard whispers just fine. Shouting his own name apparently required a separate, more strenuous effort.

"That's a problem," Silk said.

"Is it?" Vector threw both hands out, expansive.

"Who's insane enough to turn down joining us? We're the strongest team that's going to walk into that arena." Jorm came back in with a bucket of water, set it down, and had barely reached the table before Merideth redirected her toward some other task entirely. She left again without complaint. Vector chuckled, watching her go.

"Poor thing. Never ends for her, does it. You should try my method—stop hearing people when it's inconvenient. Works wonders."

"You're useless," Elma said.

"And you do what, exactly?" He spread his hands.

"Nobody asks the Princess of Veraxys to fetch water. I'm just leveling the field. Call it equality."

"Jorm seemed off when we came here," Silk said quietly, her eyes fixed on the girl's retreating back.

"Does Merideth hit her?"

"I… don't think Merideth is capable of that," Vector said.

"She wasn't like this before." The words were out before Elma had decided to say them, some part of her caught up in the pull of the conversation despite herself.

"Might be the father, then," Vector said. Silk tilted her head.

"Her father?"

"Sekar called her Desmond's child. You caught that, right?" They both looked at him blankly. His brow furrowed.

"You don't know who Desmond is."

"No." He checked over one shoulder, then leaned in further, voice dropping.

"You've heard of Dissonants?" Something flickered across Silk's face—recognition, and not the comfortable kind.

"No," Elma said.

"What's that?"

"Never seen one myself. Never seen the Tide up close either, honestly. Just stories." He turned his cigar-thin patience toward the subject properly now.

"When the Tide's roots connect to a Resonant, it doesn't kill them outright. It hollows them. Turns them into a husk that answers to the Tide instead of themselves. It made the Tide stronger. Every nation got scared, so they made it law—the moment those roots connect, you're obligated to end yourself before the connection finishes."

"And if they don't?" Elma asked.

"That's the part that didn't work. Someone's about to die anyway, most people don't exactly reach for the honorable exit. So the law grew teeth. If a Resonant gets consumed, their family answers for it instead. Taxes that eat them alive. No more legal protection. Most of them lose their homes inside a year and end up in the woods." The woods. The stretch of it between the manor and the city. The people that Jorm brought food to when they visited the city.

"It's cruel," Elma said, and heard herself say it out loud for what might have been the first time in either of her lives.

"Works, though." Vector shrugged, forcing the motion into something casual.

"Enough Resonants started actually killing themselves on schedule once the stakes got that high. Except her father, apparently."

"Who was he?" It wasn't really a question by the time it left her.

"Desmond Zaitstein. He ran the Silver Bastion before Sekar did. Probably the only reason Jorm and her mother made it this far without starving in a ditch somewhere. Whatever connections he left behind still hold some weight." His voice dropped further.

"I heard rumors about Jorm before. How tough her life was. Some people felt bad for her. They'd offer her help in private, when no one was looking. But there are those who don't. They were even calling her names. The coward's daughter—""What are you three whispering about." Vector nearly came out of his chair. Merideth set the plates down around them without waiting for an answer, unbothered by the sudden silence she'd walked into.

"No spices?" Elma asked, looking down at hers.

"Lucien mentioned you don't care for them." Merideth nodded toward the same plain dish in front of Repera.

"Good." Elma gestured for Vector to switch seats with the girl.

"No point," Vector said.

"She'll just follow you anyway." Lucien and Jorm reappeared a moment later, and the table filled in around them. Vector declared, around a mouthful that made the claim somewhat hard to take seriously, that this was the best thing he'd eaten in his life, and that the two of them should open something together. A restaurant, presumably. He didn't specify.

"All Merideth," Lucien said, waving it off.

"It wouldn't have come out half this well without him," Merideth said.

"He's better with a knife than he lets on." Something in Silk's face went tight at that, small and immediate. She kept eating, mask dangling loose at her jaw, hiding the scarred half of her mouth even as she ate. Was she jealous? the Other said.

"So." Merideth said.

"What's your plan?"

"We keep her safe." Lucien tipped his head at Elma.

"Until Valerius comes home."

"I see." Merideth nodded slowly.

"If there's anything I can do to help with that—I'm not much, but I can try." The suns went down outside while they ate, the Solarvines along the street catching their slow evening glow through the single window. The light caught the bruise on Merideth's lip. She'd told them she'd fallen off her chair. Elma knew better. Jorm seemed to know too. She was still oddly silent. Elma reached for the candle at the table's center and lit it with a small fission.

Green light bloomed low over the wick, bathing the table in a ghostly green.

"That's the green fire," Merideth said, leaning in slightly.

"I've heard people talk about it. Can you make a normal one?"

"No."

"Huh. That's strange, even for a Resonant." Elma went back to her green lit plate, chewing slower than she needed to. Did the color mean something? If it had something to do with the Shepherd, then Sable's own fire should have carried some trace of it too, and it didn't. Sable's burned the color fire was supposed to burn. Only Elma's came out wrong. She filed the question somewhere she could reach it again later and looked up.

"Do you know how to call an Equitor." Merideth froze mid-motion, fork halfway to her mouth.

"An Equitor?" She set it down slowly.

"That's—that's not a small question. Depends which one you mean."

"The Scale."

"What would you need with one of those?" Lucien asked, sharp. Elma didn't answer him. They hadn't told her why they were leaving. Why would she tell them? Merideth took a breath before she spoke again.

"There's no verified way to call one. Not a safe one, anyway."

"There are unsafe ones?"

"Not exactly ways. More like—sometimes the only thing that gets a god's attention is making it angry. For the Scale, that would mean actually breaking whatever balance it's holding somewhere. Or breaking a limit it's set on purpose." She shook her head.

"Nothing a mere human could manage, as far as anyone's ever recorded. And if they somehow could—I don't think that's attention anyone should want."

"I see." Elma picked her fork back up. Well. It's something, the Other said. You sure about this, though? It might not help. It might just erase us instead. Better than staying on Sable's leash. We don't have another option. He was quiet for a moment. As you wish, then. Full and heavy-eyed, Vector announced he'd wait until morning for Elma to make good on the teleportation and asked, through a yawn, where he was meant to sleep. Merideth laid bedding across the floorboards in the back room for him and Repera.

Lucien stretched, called it a long day, and said they'd start properly tomorrow before wandering off to claim his own spot on the floor. They ended up in rows, close together in the narrow room, breathing slowing one by one into sleep. Elma didn't join them. She'd known since they had arrived here that Jorm was carrying something she hadn't said out loud. It sat under everything else she'd done all evening—the silence, the forced hug, the too-quick redirection every time the conversation drifted anywhere near her.

Whatever it was, it belonged to Jorm alone, and Jorm intended to keep it that way. The night deepened around the house, quiet settling over the row of sleeping bodies. Near its middle, Jorm rose without a sound, drew her cloak on, and slipped out the door with Gund strapped across her back.