Chương 41: 1.12. Farm-to-Table Unlit

"Right." Annalise clapped for attention as she strode into the firelight by the carriage.

"Family meeting. Couple pieces of news." Tiago looked up from the lumpy quadruped he was whittling.

"Where's the hex-engine?"

"Ditched it on the roadside," Annalise said.

"I'm a horse girl, me." She scratched her dray's mane.

"Hello, Meaty. Who's a lovely boy. Who is so lovely. You are." Demetrius flicked his ear unenthusiastically.

"The news, mother," Ofelia prompted, her nose buried in a doublewide hardcover novel.

"Right." Annalise gestured Seth into the clearing.

"First off: say hello to the latest member of the retinue." Tiago thumbed a long shaving away from his work-in-progress.

"No shit?" Annalise proudly put her hands on her hips.

"That's right. Seth il Gutierre, welcome to the al Ydris gang." Seth affected a formal bow.

"It's an honor."

"Told you," Ofelia said to Tiago, who shrugged. Seth straightened up.

"Told him what?"

"Don't worry about it," Tiago said.

"Told him you weren't a worthless crook," Ofelia said.

"Feeli," Annalise warned.

"Be nice."

"I said he wasn't."

"Seth'll be traveling with us for the remainder of the 841 quota season," Annalise said.

"Which brings me to announcement number two. Next on the agenda for the al Ydrises and guest is a seraph hunt." Ofelia oohed.

"Throwing him into the deep end, then?"

"Don't let Ofelia spook you, Seth." Annalise gave him a light bump with her shoulder.

"I do all the work on most of the seraphs."

"I wasn't talking about deep end like Seraphs," Ofelia said.

"I was talking deep end like Anna." Annalise smacked her lips skeptically.

"It'll be fine. Just when I'm seraph hunting, you might wanna give me a wide berth is all, Seth. I get a bit icy."

"I'll adjust," Seth said, though he didn't have any idea what they were talking about.

"This would be the Laramme red-feather?" Tiago asked.

"If it is indeed a red," Annalise said.

"I'd like to make it to Laramme, gear up, and ask about it there. But we'll be moving pretty and public on the road, so let's stay ready for it to try something." Ofelia raised her hand.

"What about your head?"

"Seth found us Rohan il Agante's ledgers," Annalise said.

"I'm not worried. Once we've tackled the seraph, we'll puzzle out where to go sniffing for Alice." Tiago set his whittling knife aside.

"What if the buyer is trying to, I dunno. Eat its brain or something?"

"I don't need its brain." Annalise sniffed her armpit.

"What I need is a bath. As does Seth."

"Do I stink?" Seth asked.

"Probably." Annalise raised his sleeve with a thumb and forefinger against the crusty crimson stain on it.

"But we're both covered in the blood of about four dead fellas apiece, is my concern. Let's aim to be trotting into Laramme looking spick and span, hmm? Our first time there, at least."

"You ever been to Laramme, il Gutierre?" Tiago asked.

"Once," Seth said.

"Didn't look around much."

"What were you doing? Stealing from someone?"

"Uh—" Seth wondered how often he ought to be lying to this solemn-faced young man.

"Scamming someone." Tiago shrugged.

"Same difference." Seth felt a gray spike of defensiveness at that.

"Well, I didn't chop any heads off." Ofelia gave a thin smile.

"Get ready to bid that part of your life adieu, Mr. il Gutierre. From this point on, you step into a town's limits, everyone'll look at you like you're rolling plague."

"You get used to it quick," Annalise said.

"Stream's about two minutes that way. The kids'll do laundry while we wash up." Tiago sighed, stood, and stretched.

"The debasements we suffer in the Sorcerer General's name." Ofelia turned the page on her book.

"Have fun."" We, Feeli." Tiago flicked the edge of her hardcover as he passed her.

"Shift that skinny butt." Ofelia pouted.

"It's cold down there."

"Bring a blankie, your Majesty." Tiago ducked into the carriage and emerged with a basket of roadworn laundry, in varying shades of black.

"I'm not touching your underwear." Seth followed the al Ydrises down a grassy hillock, toward the bubbling churn of the River of St. Hanimak. A mist rose from its surface, suffusing an end-of-summer chill into the air. Annalise, unbothered, plopped down on a protruding chunk of eroded limestone and unlaced her tall boots. The sun was an emerald thumbnail across the water. It sent reflections playing across the paperwhite skin of her calves as she tugged them free.

"I've been fantasizing about this." She ran a hand through her black bob.

"My hair is unspeakably manky." The younger al Ydrises strolled to the water's edge with their baskets and basins. Seth dawdled.

"Should, uh—should we take turns, then?"

"Look at that. A chivalrous thief." Annalise chuckled dryly as she undid her tunic.

"I'll go on in first and submerge all my bits so you don't get scandalized." Her tunic's topmost button flicked out of its hole with the eagerness of a long-suffering warrior relieved from duty.

"If the gentleman would care to turn away, the lady is getting her ladies out." Seth cleared his throat and turned away. Behind him were the silky sound of clothes being shucked, and then the splish-splash of a body wading into the water.

"Bring the soap out with ya," Annalise called. Tiago held up an ashtallow bar and tossed it underhand to Seth. He caught it, stripped down to his linens, and hustled into the river. He hissed through his teeth as its dark water encompassed his stomach.

"St. Borac's balls, that is cold."

"Is it?" Annalise's silhouette turned to him. He caught the curve of her lower back, wide and smooth and lethally honed as a scythe blade, before he turned away.

"I think when I went unlit, I got a little less sensitive to it."" I think you're just a tough nut." Ofelia adjusted her blanket further around her shoulders and huddled over her basin. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

"Do you mind if I ask?" Seth scrubbed the muck from his arms.

"How you all ended up going unlit, I mean."

"It's not a dark secret or nothing." Annalise sloshed around behind Seth. He remained facing away from her with some determination.

"I was part of a penal legion up north. Winter War of '32." Seth's washcloth slowed.

"What were you doing in a penal legion?"

"Killing seraphs, of course."

"What'd you do to get put there, I'm asking."

"What I was accused of," Annalise said, "was killing my husband."

"Did you kill your husband? Is that an untoward question?" Another husky laugh.

"No, I didn't. And yes, it is. But I did set you up for it."

"Why'd they put the blame on you?"

"Well, I told him in the middle of a crowded market square that if he ever hit either of our children again, I'd kill him. And then he did it, and then he died."

"Oh," Seth said.

"That'd do it."

"But it really wasn't me," Annalise said.

"Not even being funny. A bottle of Maskayan garnacha pushed that daft bastard down the stairs before I had the pleasure."

"Father died as he lived," Ofelia said as she wrung a shirt out.

"Drunk and confused." Tiago nodded.

"Yelling and getting in the way."

"So up north to the Winter War I went." More splashes behind Seth as Annalise scrubbed herself.

"I served as a hand-and-a-halfer. First into seraph dens and all that. Got a pretty good number of the bastards, too, but eventually one of them got me. Big, black-feather bastard banjaxed me pretty good. And by the time they'd stitched me back together, I was unlit. That's what a deep enough wound from a seraph can do."

"One of the rare unlit who got it right from the source." Tiago put his shoulder into scrubbing a particularly stubborn stain of what was either rusty mud or old blood.

"Pure and unfiltered."

"Yessir," Annalise said.

"Real organic farm-to-table unlit."

"Farm-to-table?" Seth asked.

"Necropolitan phrase," Annalise said.

"Means overpriced."

"How did your kids get that way, then?"

"She kissed Tiago on the forehead five hundred thousand times," Ofelia said. Tiago splashed water at her.

"Be normal, Ofelia." She hissed like a feline." You be normal."

"We drank her blood," Tiago said.

"Fastest and least weird way to catch it." Seth shook his hair out." That's the least weird way?"

"Sure it is," Tiago said.

"Compared to the alternatives. Not about to drink my mother's spit."

"That's so interesting," mused Ofelia.

"Blood being less weird than spit. You're right, but it's interesting. Anyway, now I taste lies. That's my Darkness. Capital D. It's what you call the power you get when you're unlit. And our mother's heads come off."

"What does Tiago do?" Seth asked.

"Tiago has a complex about his Darkness," Ofelia said.

"Tiago doesn't like to talk about his Darkness."

"I don't have a complex," Tiago said.

"I can swap minds with birds."

"He thinks it's prissy," Ofelia said.

"I think certain birds are prissy." Tiago held up a finger.

"Which is true."

"And sometimes when he comes back to his body the bird's made him piss himself," Ofelia said.

"Sometimes you piss yourself when a truth-tasting knocks you unconscious."

"That's not true. You'd have cackled about it so much if it was true."

"I've been sparing your feelings."

"You've both pissed yourselves more than I can count," Annalise said.

"When we were babies, she means," Tiago clarified.

"This isn't a pissing-yourself kind of family. So don't go about as if you have permission."

"I'll do my best to hold it in," Seth said.

"No promises when we meet that seraph, though." This won a chuckle from Tiago. Ofelia held up Seth's dirt-encrusted pants.

"Do you want these washed, Mr. il Gutierre?"

"They're sort of my only pair at the moment," Seth said, which was true, and "I didn't have time to retrieve any of the rest before we skipped town," which was a lie.

"I can lend you some of mine." Tiago pinned up another pair of knitted socks along a neat row he was lining.

"We can pick up some replacement threads in Laramme."

"As long as they're black," Seth said.

"I'd feel out-of-uniform otherwise." Tiago scoffed.

"Of course they'll be black."

"New clothes, more cooking oil, more oats to feed the horses, more blood to feed the scabbard." Ofelia ticked the line items off on black-polished fingers.

"Some books, perhaps."

"If Laramme has books, I'll buy 'em," Annalise said.

"Better knock on wood." Ofelia obediently rapped her knuckles on her washbasin.

"And a few boar spears," Tiago said.

"We're on our last one."

"Oh, yeah." Annalise snapped her fingers.

"Good thought, Sunshine."

"You folks hunt much boar?" Seth tried not to sound eager, but ever since the crud he'd been dreaming of what he could do with some fresh meat and good cookware. It had been too long.

"It's for seraphs," Annalise said.

"Nothing beats a boarer for taking a seraph. Spade leaf blade, lugs on the side to keep it from sliding through and mauling you. They get splintered to fuck half the time, but what can you do." The vision of an enraged and impaled seraph thrashing its drayhorse bulk across the forest floor furrowed Seth's brow.

"I'd think a gun would be preferable."

"For the smaller ones, yeah," Annalise said.

"I've shot a gray-feather before. But seraphs suck up hexis in this big area around them. Bigger the seraph, bigger the aura. For the real gowls a gun won't do you no good. Even if they could puncture the hide, they misfire at anything less than five hundred paces."

"And then they're upon you," Tiago called from shore.

"Can't outrun a seraph." That sounded pointed to Seth, but he let it slide.

"Back in my day, when I was pure bile and bachram, going toe-to-toe with a seraph with a broadsword was no big deal," Annalise said.

"Used to go in on them with the executioner blade. Now, I like a spear."

"It seems to me like you're still firmly in your day, Madam Verdugo." A smile tinged Annalise's voice.

"Does it, now?" Ofelia set a shift aside and wiped her hands on her black pinafore.

"Please wait until we're not in earshot to flirt with our mother, Mr. il Gutierre."

"I'm not—" Seth's face heated.

"I don't mean like that. I'm just saying that she's—we got jumped in the woods and she killed a half dozen guys."

"Feeli knows what you mean," Annalise said.

"She's just being a little shitehawk. Pass the soap, if you please. I'm mostly underwater. Won't scandalize you." Seth turned. Annalise was in the river up to her wide shoulders. She held her hand out and the swell of her chest lifted soft and shining up from the water, and Seth handed off the soap and averted his eyes again.

"You'll get used to the weans," Annalise continued.

"And they will be very polite, won't they?"

"As long as I'm able," Ofelia said.

"As long as he is," Tiago said. A few more minutes of scrubbing and chattering and cheerful insults in the way a family has when nobody is afraid of anybody. Then Annalise returned to shore, and got dressed, and the al Ydrises led their new employee back to the carriage in the gathering dark. The Verdugo swung a boot onto the carriage's step and muscled up to its roof.

"Now the way it usually works, sleep-wise, is the kiddies get the carriage and I sleep in a tent nearby." She removed a sizable bundle of canvas from the roof and tossed it down to her son.

"We can get you your own tent in Laramme, but in the meantime…" She sat in cross-legged thought.

"I dunno."

"I don't mean to be a jerk," Tiago said, setting the bundle down, "but it's already a squeeze in the carriage."

"Mom brought him home." Ofelia leaned on the carriage door.

"I'd say if anyone needs to share, it's her."

"I can just put a bedroll out in the field," Seth said.

"Not fussy."

"G'way outta that, Seth. I'm not gonna tell you no more stables then make you sleep outside. Fall's coming and it's rainy." Annalise clambered down from the roof.

"Help me pitch the tent and you can share it with me." Seth cleared his throat and refrained from commentary on the innuendo.

"How much room is there in this tent, exactly?"

"It'll be fine," Annalise said, which wasn't an answer.

"I'll stay bundled up. Might brush up a little bit, and the air'll be a little catchy, but the worst it'll get unlit-wise is maybe a couple colorless hairs. Swear to St. Hallas. And then you've got your own tent." It was half-fine. The tent was warmly insulated, with plenty of downy quilts and furs to bundle into, and it wasn't as small as Seth had feared (was fear the word for it? he wasn't sure). But Annalise was similar in her sleeping hours to her waking hours: noisy and utterly unafraid to take up space.

Shortly after a cheerful "G'night," she'd rolled onto her side and begun snoring lustily, which spared Seth from venturing into the awkward no-man's-land of bedtime conversation. But then she just as promptly rolled onto her back again, splaying her limbs out the same way he'd seen her the night he stole from her. Her calf carelessly lay across his, warm as a fireplace, and as pressed up to the canvas as he already was there was no room to retreat.

It was very warm, her calf, even through the loose linen pants she'd worn to sleep. Warm and heavy and with an unexpected level of smush for how muscled she was. He'd heard unlit were cold as the grave, like a corpse; Annalise wasn't. Seth accepted his fate with stoicism befitting the matured and dependable man he was determined to be. He fell asleep wondering if perhaps she might get cozier against him in the night. He awoke untouched and momentarily confused.

His groggy mind tried to catch up with the spike that had awakened his body. The blankets had been thrown askew and piled mostly onto him. The small hour pressed its sage-colored twilight in little pinpricks across the canvas tent. What time was it? What was that noise? He heard it again. Annalise was curled back up on her side, facing away, breathing hard and harsh, each exhale ending in a vocalization just at the edge of a syllable. A hoarse, whimpering nnuh, repeating in rhythmic triplets.

He lay staring and unsure as her wide shoulders shook. The tent flap opened to the misty predawn. Tiago al Ydris put a finger to his lips and indicated by a palm-down wave for Seth to stay supine. Seth obeyed and watched the agonized Verdugo's silent son pass something into the tent. A wooden training sword, its business end wrapped thickly with rags, its handle prodding his mother's wrist. Like a striking snake, Annalise's hand shot out and seized the sword. She hugged it to her heaving chest.

Her whimpering slowed. Ease returned to her tightened frame. Whatever fit she was in ceased. Tiago repeated the shushing gesture to Seth and shook his head. He closed the tent; his silhouette melted from its surface.