Chapter 32: Sheltered from the Storm

Chapter 32: Sheltered from the Storm

Siobhan

Month 11, Day 28, Saturday 6:00 a.m.

Dryden and Siobhan sprinted through the dark alleys and poorly lit side streets as if their boots were winged.

The coppers who hadn’t been driven off by the shadow-familiar spell gave chase, but the philtre of stench had taken a toll, and attempting to sprint with streaming eyes, snotty noses, and roiling stomachs was enough to handicap anyone.

When the storm clouds broke, sending fat rain globules pelting out of the skies to be hurled by the wind like little stones, Siobhan grinned and only ran harder. No dogs would track them after this, not past the magically overwhelming philtre of stench and the flooding rain.

She realized soon enough that she recognized some of the streets they were on, and as they ducked into one alley, through a side door that led through an empty kitchen, and out into another alley, she realized they were taking one of the Stag’s pre-arranged escape routes. She had memorized it when setting up the alarm wards, just in case.

By the time they reached their destination, one shoddy house among a row of equally shoddy houses on the outskirts of Gilbratha and well into the Mires, she was too tired to run, well out of breath and completely soaked, but they seemed to have thoroughly lost their pursuers. It was still an hour or so before first light, and the streets were almost completely empty.

Dryden knocked on the back door of the house, and they waited, shivering as the pellets of rain slapped into them sideways, driven by the force of the wind.nove(l)bi(n.)com

Footsteps from inside heralded the opening of the door, just a crack.

When the woman inside peeked out to see who had knocked on her door at such a profane hour of the morning, Dryden took off his mask.

With a gasp, she undid the chain lock, waved them in, and shut the door as soon as they had made it past the threshold. “Are you bein’ followed?” she asked, tugging her patched wool robe closer around her body.

“I don’t believe so. Not any longer, at least,” Dryden said.

The woman’s house was small, little more than two rooms, as far as Siobhan could tell. The door in the corner was open, and she saw the little forms sprawled out on the floor stir.

A child, no more than seven or eight, rose and moved to the doorway of the bedroom, peering suspiciously through tired eyes at the two of them. His clothes were patched and rough-looking, and his limbs thin, edging on bony.

The woman noticed and said, “Go back to bed, Callum.” She pulled two painstakingly cut, padded, and sewn quilts from a chest in the corner by an old rocking chair.

The boy didn’t move, still staring at the two of them. “Are you comin’ too, Mama?”

The woman sighed, pushing a few loose strands of hair back from her forehead in a motion that seemed born from habitual stress. “Yes. Now do as I say.”

A couple of the other children stirred as Callum returned to the pile of bedding on the floor of the second room, but they didn’t wake.

The woman tossed them the quilts, her eyes resting a little longer on Siobhan. “Stop drippin’ on my floor, then. Come sit by the fire.” She motioned to the hearth, which, along with the fireplace and chimney, was the only part of the tiny house made of stone. The bricks were white, no doubt having been chiseled from what little remained of the southern white cliffs. “I’ll have it stoked up again in just a moment, my lord,” she said, half bowing to Dryden.

Dryden sat at the edge of the hearth, less hesitant than Siobhan.

“Any injuries? Someone you need me to fetch or pass a message to?” the woman asked, adding wood from the sparse supply in the box beside the fireplace.

Dryden looked to Siobhan, who was still clutching her shard-covered, bloody hand to her chest.

Siobhan shook her head. “It’s not that bad. I can handle it myself.”

The woman nodded and bustled about, putting a kettle atop the iron slab that shared space with the chimney, allowing the fire to heat it.

Siobhan reached into the leather satchel at her waist, realizing only then that it was Sebastien’s school bag, and should never have gone with her as Siobhan. ‘Oh well, there’s nothing to be done about it now. I can only hope this isn’t the mistake that sends the edifice of my deceit crumbling to the ground.’ She trembled, and couldn’t tell if it was due to the cold and the wet, or the full realization of what she had done, in its aftermath.

Her fingers found one of the healing salves within the satchel, a half-empty jar of headache reliever. With the forefinger of her good hand, she dug some of the oily mixture out and began to apply it to the bloody shards stuck to her left palm. The oil helped to counteract the stickiness of the honey and adhel juice mixture, and the minty pain-relieving properties of the concoction managed to provide some relief, both burning and numbing the wounds. When her hand was free of glass, she dug out the nick-healing salve she had created the week before, which was perfect for this kind of small injury. A few minutes later, her palm was back to normal, except for the pinkish, vaguely spiderweb-shaped scars across its surface.

“Be careful that those aren’t noticed,” Dryden said.

“Of course.” The scar was distinctive, and would remain on Sebastien’s hand when she reassumed that form. It was a small enough thing, but enough small mistakes would add up to her ruin.

“I...don’t know. I’ll think on it, though I don’t know that any terms they would accept would be tolerable to me. And please, Siobhan, call me Oliver. After a night such as ours, I think we’re past the silly formalities, don’t you?”

“I suppose.”

He gave her a real smile, then, tinged with fatigue but no despair. They fell into silence for a few minutes, shifting slightly to expose new sections of their bodies to the warmth of the fire, before he said, “Will you be able to get back into the University without them noticing anything untoward?”

Siobhan sighed. She hadn’t yet considered how exactly she was going to achieve that. “Tomorrow—today—is Saturday. I was planning to spend it doing alchemy, but I think I might take a nap instead. As long as no one notices that my things are missing before I get back—and they shouldn’t unless they look in my trunk—and as long as I’m able to retrieve everything from the alley I so haphazardly hid it in, I should be fine. I’m well known for strange sleep habits by now, so no one should find it suspicious when they wake and find me missing.” She rubbed her forehead again and wished she had more headache-relieving salve. Her jar had been used up on getting the glass off her hand. “I really am not suited to this.”

He quirked an eyebrow up. “Not suited to what?”

“All this...” She waved her hand vaguely. “Excitement. Adventure.”

He snorted. “I’m not sure that’s true. You seem to find yourself in these situations often enough, and you perform with surprising adroitness for someone who truly doesn’t desire anything more than to sit in a library and research all day.”

She straightened, turning a scowl onto him. Her mouth opened, and then it closed again. “There are so many things wrong with what you just said, I don’t even know where to start,” she said finally.

He snorted, and then, seemingly unable to hold it in, wadded a section of his blanket over his face to muffle the sound and devolved into outright laughter. When he was finished, he looked back up at her and grinned. “Your expression was amusing,” he explained, ignoring her continued scowl.

She let out a snort of her own, much less amused, and settled back down to stare at the fire. “Well, it’s not so much that I mind excitement, but that I mind being anything less than ridiculously and unreservedly over-prepared for any excitement. I...I have goals too, you know, and I’m sure getting where I need to will not be without struggle. It’s that I’m not ridiculously over-prepared for the things I’ve been getting into. I’m scrambling just to keep my head above water, and it seems I keep being bashed in the face with how stupid and thoughtless I am, and if I am so inept I don’t even realize how inept I am until I’m slapped with proof...” She took a deep breath and kept herself from rambling.

“You’re being too hard on yourself. We saved a life, maybe even more than one, tonight. Everyone makes mistakes. The important thing is to learn from them, right?”

She shook her head, sneering slightly. “Learn from your mistakes? That platitude is so obvious it’s useless. Of course you should learn from your mistakes. If you’re an average person with no ambition, maybe doing that can keep you alive and relatively content. For people with real goals, and real opposition to those goals, it’s not enough to keep making stupid mistakes and simply learning as you go along. Sooner or later, you make a stupid mistake you cannot recover from. Mistakes are inevitable, but stupid mistakes due to lack of planning, preparation, and basic foresight are not. I cannot be prepared for every eventuality, that is true, but I should have at least enough prudence to look at my past failures and extrapolate future failures from there. I failed to imagine everything that could go wrong. Sure, I took some convenient measures to ready myself for negative eventualities, but I didn’t make the effort to truly mitigate the dangers I knew I might be involved in.”

She took another deep breath and looked away from his solemn gaze. “Dryd—Oliver, I knew the coppers might come after me, if something went wrong. I knew the Morrows were attacking your people, and even injured one severely. I didn’t imagine that I would be called in to help fight against them, but...why did I not prepare myself for a fight at all? Some sort of barrier or protection spell could have been the difference between life and death tonight, or against the coppers if they had found me. Why did I not learn any? Why didn’t I have a blood-clotting potion? You gave me a list of useful battle potions and the like, and I experimented with a handful of them, but nothing more. If your emergency response team had been fully kitted out with a couple of each, maybe things wouldn’t have gotten so bad in the first place.”

Her voice grew strained. “Maybe the Morrows wouldn’t have been able to bring down half the building, and that man, Cooper would still be alive. Even when we arrived, I could have done things better. The philtre of stench is based more on physical particles in the air than magic. It might have incapacitated the Morrows as soon as we arrived, if I had thought of it. A man died tonight, and this still could have been so much worse. There are a hundred different ways tonight could have ended in complete disaster, and I was not prepared for any of them. Aren’t you the one who says the only way to avoid your subterfuge being caught out is to be truly meticulous with both planning and execution? This is the same.”

He was silent for a few moments. “Alright. But by that logic, this was really all my fault, not yours. It wasn’t your responsibility to be prepared for something like this. They aren’t your people, they’re mine. If not for my own lack of foresight and preparation, you would be asleep in your bed right now.”

She sighed deeply. “Something being the fault of one person does not make it less the fault of another. I could have changed today’s outcome for the better, and I didn’t. The fact that you might have done the same doesn’t make me less responsible. It only means that we both failed.”

He reached out and squeezed her shoulder. “Well, we will learn better. No more stupid mistakes.”

She felt her muscles relaxing subtly under the touch and gave the fireplace a small smile. “My grandfather used to say, ‘If you aren’t over-prepared, you are underprepared.’ I remember thinking as a child that he was just paranoid from living too long, that the world wasn’t actually out to make every possible thing go wrong.” She let out a small huff of wry amusement.

He squeezed her shoulder again, then withdrew his hand and lay down on the edge of the stone hearth. “I’m going to close my eyes for a bit. We should be able to leave once the storm passes, with a little grooming to make sure we don’t draw attention.”

Siobhan hugged her knees to her chest and kept staring into the fire, wrapping herself more fully in the borrowed blanket. She had known, when Oliver rode up on the horse and asked her to help protect his people, that she wasn’t prepared to do so. She had known she was underprepared as soon as the bracelet on her wrist grew cold, in fact.

She thought of what she had seen tonight. The frightened people, the blood, the death. If things had gone only a little differently, she could have been hit by one of the Morrows’ attacks, or captured by the grasping tentacles of the copper’s spell. She could be dead, or in jail, or expelled from the University. She shuddered at the thought, a visceral reaction of fear and rejection.

‘It wasn’t worth it,’ she admitted to herself. ‘If things had gone differently, I would have regretted my decision to help. I value my own life and safety more than that of a stranger’s. And yet...and yet, I cannot imagine myself saying no when Dryden asked for my aid, even without the threat of the blood vow hanging over me.’ She bent her head, combing her fingers through her hair to dry it in the warmth of the fire. She knew a spell to help repel water, but she was too tired to cast it.

‘The desire to help people who don’t deserve their misfortune and the desire to ensure my own personal safety are contradictory. But...they are both part of me. I must understand myself, because you must understand yourself before you can change yourself. And you must change yourself to change the world. So. Being honest, fulfilling my desire to help isn’t worth it if putting myself in danger means I lose my freedom and magic. I’m too selfish, and I’m not interested in becoming a hero or a martyr.’

She tried to make herself believe it, because she knew it was true, but something inside her still rejected the idea of walking away while the Morrows attacked Jameson and Misha and the others.‘Plus,’ she reasoned with a little too much cheer to totally trust the thought, ‘my blood print vow doesn’t allow me to refuse favors to the Verdant Stag unless I find them morally reprehensible. I don’t have entirely free will in the matter. So...what do I do? If nothing changes, something like today will happen again.’

She reached into her vest pocket and pulled out her Conduit, staring into the crystalline depths lit up by the orange flames. ‘Well, the answer is always “seize power.” If you don’t know what you need, take power, for it can be converted into almost anything else.’

Those were her grandfather’s words again, but they seemed right. ‘If I’m going to be getting myself into situations like these, I must grow powerful enough that I can actually handle them.’ She began to make a mental list of useful preparations, things to learn and items to carry. Excuses she might start setting up now that could help her explain her way out of scrutiny or blame. Her eyes began to droop and her forehead fell forward to rest on her knees. Slumber reached up around her like tendrils of a dark cloud from the abyss.

She slept for a time, restlessly, her mind dancing with flames, blood, and fear worn old.

A searing pain from her chest woke her.