"Oh dear...what's happened now?"
Mirk had expected to find the usual scene waiting for him when he trudged into the bordello's back room with Am-Hazek still leaning hard on his shoulder — everyone gathered around the big table, talking and laughing and arguing over one another, passing around a bottle. Instead, there was nothing but the sound of crying and sniffling. And a very distant hissing.
The crying was coming from Elijah, who was doing his best to put on a brave face as Yule cleaned a long, ragged gash down the length of his arm at the nearer end of the table. But the snot dripping from Elijah’s nose and his red, brimming eyes were impossible to hide. At the far end, Fatima had plucked a few cunning devices out of her bag to make repairs to her cane, which had been snapped in two.
Mirk decided to try Yule and Elijah first, when his question was met with nothing but silence. Am-Hazek didn't comment either as Mirk led him to the chair on Elijah's opposite side. Mirk helped him sit down before turning his attention to Yule.
"I'll be surprised if you all even make it to your little birthday party," Yule commented dryly, as he tossed the rag he'd been cleaning Elijah's wound with aside and dug a suturing kit out of his bag. "This is just the first."
"What happened?" Mirk asked again, that time to Elijah.
"It...it was terrible. It had at least nine arms....and five mouths....no eyes..." Elijah's own eyes grew glassy, and he shook his head to clear away the memory of whatever had slashed open his arm.
"It wasn't even a big one," Fatima replied curtly. "Could have been a lot worse."
Mirk sighed. "Something in the Abyss hurt you, Elijah?"
"No, it was Fatima," Yule replied for him, rolling his eyes. "You should know how dangerous that place is if you don't bring along your own pet monster to fend off the rest. But he's just as useless," the older healer added. Elijah gave a pained yelp as Yule put in the first stitch.
"What do you mean?" Mirk asked, scanning the room. "Monsieur Am-Hazek and I would still be walking if he hadn't helped..."
Mirk trailed off, finally spotting the source of the hissing. The far corner of the room, furthest from its counter full of mirrors and the curtain separating the back room from the rest of the bordello, was particularly dark. Unnaturally dark. Mirk lowered his shields and focused. It was difficult to sense with Elijah's bright, urgent pain clouding his mind, but Mirk thought he could pick up faint pinpricks of another aching that was much more subdued. But also much more alarming.
He got up, crossing the room and going to the edge of the unnatural pool of darkness. A few weak tendrils of it reached out toward him. Not in a malevolent way, but a searching one. As if seeking balance, warmth. "Messire? Is something wrong?"
The voice that issued from the darkness was full of more misplaced hisses and clicks than usual. "The...bread."
Mirk ventured into the darkness, despite the warning Yule snapped about it not being worth it. It was as if he was suddenly enclosed within a small pocket of midnight. Genesis had propped himself up in the corner, his overlong arms wrapped tight around his midsection. The commander's eyes were closed, his teeth clenched against the pain Mirk could only feel the faintest edges of, even with Elijah's pain no longer distracting him. "What do you mean, the bread?" Mirk asked Genesis.
"The...wedding bread."
The wedding had been over a week ago. The glass of wine that Genesis had choked down had cleared from his system within a day. From the look of things, the bread was a whole other matter entirely. Mirk took a step closer. "May I feel?"
"If you...must," Genesis hissed, after a lengthy pause. Mirk wasn't sure what to make of the expression on his face. Brow lowered, eyes still shut tight, teeth and neck bared. Hesitantly, Mirk reached out and touched the back of one of Genesis's hands.
It was difficult to feel anything with all the chaos in the way, through the familiar static that swelled and ebbed along with each of Genesis's deliberate, deep breaths. His heartbeat was faster, almost as fast as that of an ordinary human in good health. And the whole of his midsection, that unforgiving snarl of innards that refused all sustenance besides the choicest cuts of meat and tea that was more sugar than liquid, felt jumbled. As if it was trying to rearrange itself to work around the swelling and pain.
Blinking his eyes to clear away the mental image of Genesis's insides, the way the chaos curled and twisted within him and somehow kept him alive, Mirk sighed once more. "I suppose the stomach potion won't do any good now, will it?"
Somehow, Genesis went paler than his usual bone white at the mere thought of it.
"What can I do? Would lying down help?"
Mirk waited, patiently, for Genesis to crack. But just as he began to hiss the beginnings of a command through his teeth, the pocket of night they'd both been wrapped up in vanished, along with the tension in Genesis's limbs and the look of strain on his face. The commander blinked a few times, prodding at his midsection with a long, delicate finger. The dark film that had lowered over his eyes cleared after a few more blinks, returning them to their usual piercing blue. "It has...passed. For now."
"Methinks it'd be better if you explained, Genesis."
"...explained."
"I've seen you walk around a broken leg that'd have anyone else screaming for hours. Why is this...?" Mirk couldn't think of a way to explain himself. At least, not in a way that didn't sound patronizing. It was unfathomable to Mirk that Genesis could ignore wounds that should have made him faint dead away while an upset stomach immobilized him. But the pain Mirk had felt was real. And if it'd been able to seep through Genesis's chaotic aura, it had to be severe.
"It’s not that I...do not feel the pain of wounds such as the one you mentioned. It is that they are isolated. A single point. Precise...cause and effect. This allows for a certain degree of focus. With concentration...the pain can be ignored. Injuries that are more...systemic cannot. Fevers. Infection. Poisoning."
The bread had been a bit much, but Mirk wouldn't have called it poison. Then again, he was at least half human, and angels were notable for their hardy constitutions. Mirk had seen his father eat a paté that had been left sitting outside in the sun without any ill effect. Though he’d brushed the flies off first. Genesis, on the other hand, was...Genesis. "What part of the bread made you ill?"
Genesis shook his head. "All of it. Grain can be...tolerated, on occasion. As can egg. But spice..."
The bread had been more spice than grain, if Mirk had to guess. He sighed, resisting the urge to reach out and comfort Genesis, to put a reassuring hand on his arm or pat his hand. "You should have said something, Genesis. If I'd known that spices could make you so ill, I would have said something to Mordecai's grandparents."
"The t'akakk is invaluable. One must...make sacrifices. When necessary."
Or perhaps Genesis didn't want to display his weaknesses so openly, to let it be known to anyone that cramming a spiced biscuit down his throat could cause him more damage than a blade. Either way, Mirk thought it best not to press the issue. Genesis appeared to have recovered, at least for the time being. And Mirk was aware of everyone back at the table staring at them, including Fatima, who'd finished fixing her cane, and Am-Hazek, who still seemed a bit green around the edges from having taken Lord Kinross's form and being yanked halfway across London by an unexpected arm of shadow.
"Monsieur Am-Hazek has come to speak with you," Mirk said, gesturing back at the table. "Methinks it's something to do with the djinn..."
After brushing off the lapels of his overcoat and correcting his posture, Genesis went to join the others at the table. Mirk followed, deciding to sit between Genesis and Am-Hazek, lest either of them need a healer. Yule still had his hands full trying to get Elijah to stop flinching away from his needle.
"Feeling better, comrade?" Elijah greeted him, with an attempt at a smile that still held a hint of fear along with a more obvious wince.
Genesis frowned at the mage. But after a pointed nudge from Mirk underneath the table, he spoke up as well. "I...am in your debt. My concentration lapsed. With the abyssals."
"Don't worry about it," Elijah said, trying to shrug and immediately regretting it. "You were absolutely right about Kinross's family spell, by the way. Wish you could have been there to see how easy it was to take apart once you looked at it the right way."
"You...obtained the gems?”
Fatima nodded. "Good thing Kinross has so many of them he probably won't notice they're gone. Your minder says that the fakes sounded off," she said, her tone still a bit incredulous.
Genesis turned to Am-Hazek next. "Will they be sufficient to...allow the djinn to recover their strength once they are freed?"
"Yes, Comrade Genesis. They are much larger than the gems the Am-Djinn usually employ. But there is one thing I wish to speak with you about."
Am-Hazek drew the velvet bag of gems out of his pocket, pulling its string free and dumping them onto the table. The noise drew Yule's attention; his shock at the size of the diamonds wobbling on the table was so sharp that both Mirk and Elijah winced. Mirk at the feel of his surprise, and Elijah at him pulling the suture thread too tight.
"You think he's not going to miss that?" Yule asked, glaring down the length of the table at Fatima. "You're delusional. I don't care if Kinross owns the whole mage quarter, no one's going to just ignore losing those. You could buy three mage quarters with that many."
"You just don't realize how rich these bastards actually are," Fatima countered. "Maybe working with the nob has made you blind."
For once, Mirk didn't need to step in to mediate. Am-Hazek did, picking up the largest of the diamonds and staring into it, watching the way the glow of the room's yellow magelights seemed to pool in the center of the gem. "You both have made sound observations, comrades. However, my concern about Kinross is more particular."
"Particular?" Fatima asked.
"Here," Am-Hazek said, leaning a hair closer to Genesis and tapping at a certain point on the gem's surface. "At first appraisal, the diamonds appear to have had their impurities removed and nothing more. But the most crucial shaping has already been done. This angled section. It accounts for the curious effect on the light. It is one of the sacred angles."
His interest overwhelming his reluctance to stray into the personal space of others, Genesis leaned in as well. He squinted against the light caught in the stone's center, but it wasn't enough. Genesis's eyes filmed over black, his head tilting to one side. "They have...already been prepared for djinn."
"You are correct, comrade. For one of the crafting kinship lines, I believe, owing to their size. Ra-Djinn or Ir-Djinn."
"Lord Kinross's djinn is a Ra-Djinn," Mirk murmured, a chill like someone had just thrown open the back room's alleyway door running down his back.
"I don't understand why the Ra-Djinn would be handing their kin over to a human. They must know about how the humans treat the djinn they send them, that they don't understand the role of a Li-Djinn as we ourselves do. Either something has happened on the home realm and the Ra-Djinn have decided to remove the other crafting djinn from the hierarchy, or..."
"Or?" Fatima prompted.
"They no longer care that they're condemning the djinn they send here to a slow and painful death."
Mirk could feel tinges of that hardness in Am-Hazek now, that focus he'd only been able to assume was there before by the way all of Am-Hazek’s attention had been captured by the diamonds, just as the gems were cut to capture the light. Am-Hazek slipped the diamond he was holding back into the velvet bag, then gathered up the rest. Delicately, deliberately. As if they cost ten times more than the fortune they were worth.
Am-Hazek had gathered his wits while he'd been tending to the gems, and his polite mask was back in place as he offered the bag out to Genesis. But his words kept their edge. "Forgive me if I'm mistaken, Comrade Genesis. But I'm given to understand that one of your particular interests is revolution."
Genesis, for once, managed to get the shape of a smile right. But the warmth wasn't there. "Yes. But this is...your task. I am not a djinn."
"Certainly, comrade. I understand that every situation is unique. But perhaps our interests might be in line, to an extent? Lord Kinross and Seigneur d'Aumont are humans, from what I've observed. I strongly suspect both of them are involved in this trade. And you are..."
Decidedly not human, but also not anything else. Genesis nodded nevertheless. "Perhaps we could come to...an agreement."
At the far end of the table, Fatima sighed. "Don't get ahead of yourselves. First, we've got to get the collars off those djinn. And get rid of Ravensdale. I don't give a damn what the rest of you people do afterwards, but until Ravensdale's gone, none of us can get what we're after. I've got the bow done, that was my part of the bargain. Where's the arrow?"
"It is nearly complete," Genesis said. "Another two days. Perhaps three."
"That doesn't give Alice a lot of time to get used to it, but it is what it is. Fine. What about your end?" Fatima asked Mirk, propping her elbows on the edge of the table and leaning over it, staring hard at him. "My girls haven't heard anything about any party floating around. Are you sure he'll come? He has to see it's a trap."
Mirk nodded. "Methinks I won't ever get a proper response from him, but I'm sure he'll be there. And it's important that he thinks it's a trap, Comrade Fatima. Otherwise he'd never bring one of the djinn with him."
"How can you be sure he will?" she asked, her eyes narrowed.
"He will," Mirk replied, with a helpless shrug.
He knew he couldn't give Fatima what she wanted, hard confirmation through overheard gossip or stolen letters. It was intuition. Ra-Darat's comment about Ravensdale not bringing any djinn with him since he'd first forced his way into polite society had sparked the idea, but everything beyond that was nothing but an inkling, a feeling Mirk got from every time he'd watched how Ravensdale moved through the world. Only when Ravensdale felt the most secure, when he knew no one would challenge him, at the balls and at the Festival of Shades with all his most loyal commanders around him and the pile of dead to serve as a warning, did he go places without any djinn ghosting along behind him.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
But a ball half-full of strange mages, ones who had no reason to treat him with respect? Mirk had done his best to tell anyone who'd listen about who was coming — Lazare Rouzet, the strongest dark magician in all of France, who had his sights fixed on Casyn's daughters, Lord Kinross, who'd sent a warm confirmation note before Mirk had robbed his vault at the ghosts' counting house, Herbert d'Aumont, who'd fallen so easily under his godmother's manufactured charms that he hadn't even needed to prod Seigneur Feulaine into putting a bit of pressure on him. And, more discreetly, he'd made a show of being happy to report that all his dearest friends would be there besides, ones who would have otherwise never set foot in a noble ballroom.
If Ravensdale had done any digging, which Mirk was sure he must have, he'd know who that meant. Genesis. He was the crux of Mirk's plan, along with Seigneur Rouzet. Ravensdale would be so preoccupied with both of them, with making sure that Genesis didn't stab him in the back and that Rouzet didn't snatch Catherine out of his grasp, that he wouldn't even consider that the weapon they'd all spent months working on wouldn't be pointed at him. Ravensdale barely thought of his djinn at all, other than as sources of potential. They didn't count as people to him, to most of the people beyond that bordello backroom.
Mirk didn't know how to put any of that intuition into words, into the sort of facts and figures that Fatima would trust. Which was why when she rolled her eyes and started muttering about contingencies, all he could do was shrug once more.
But Genesis intervened on his behalf.
"I believe there is no need to concern yourself with it. This is...his part," the commander said. In an offhand way, with a wave of his hand, still preoccupied with Am-Hazek's request for aid. As if his comment was the self-evident truth. "He understands these things. If he believes Ravensdale will be there, he will be there. The question that remains is which djinn will accompany him."
The conversation continued from there — some of the air of discontent cleared from Am-Hazek beside him at the prospect of a topic he could give advice on, and soon all the talk was sailing clear over Mirk’s head, with Elijah joining the spirited debate over the magic on the djinn's collars, his encounter with the abyssal forgotten in light of a new magic puzzle to chew on. Mirk didn't mind. He let his mind drift, dwelling on the much more pleasurable feeling of the warmth spreading out slow from his center, his satisfaction at having Genesis's confidence. His trust.
At least, that worked until he noticed the pointed look Yule was shooting him from across the table as he continued to stitch away at Elijah's arm. All Mirk could do in response to that was shrug as well. But he had a feeling that he'd be hearing from Yule later about that. It was just a matter of when.
- - -
When happened much sooner than Mirk had been suspecting.
The meeting at the bordello had cleared up sooner than Mirk had been expecting too. Fatima and Elijah had both scurried off to their own collection of grimoires to prove their points in the debate over the djinn that had no clear winner, while Am-Hazek had gone off somewhere that was more to Genesis's liking to discuss the matter of events on the djinn home realm and how best to handle them. Though Am-Hazek didn't seem cheered by the prospect of having to get back to Madame Beaumont’s through the Abyss, he was willing to bear it, if only to find out what information Genesis had to give him.
Which left Mirk with Yule. And when he was with Yule, all roads led to the older healer's favorite tavern, the least expensive one nearest the healers' dormitory. Mirk was glad to go with. After all that had happened that evening, he needed a drink. Even if that meant getting needled by Yule the whole while.
"You're completely hopeless," Yule said as he hauled open the tavern's door. It was heavy, reinforced with steel bars after being broken one too many times by a rowdy fighter. "Anyone who wasn't a total idiot would have caught on already. And I'm halfway sure he has, even if he is a total idiot. Since when has he ever had a good word to say about anyone?"
"Methinks you're being a little harsh, Yule," Mirk said, drawing his cloak tight around himself to hide his fine gray suit as he followed him inside. Genesis had been considerate enough to fetch his cloak for him through the shadows before going off with Am-Hazek. Yet another thing that proved his point, in Yule's opinion.
The older healer was distracted for a moment as he did his customary survey of that night's drinkers, his hands on his hips as he passed judgment on the subdued crowd of men. A cluster of the newer Easterners were having a drinking contest with a contingent of Bavarians who were very much the worse for wear. A group of low-born officers, judging by their better clothes and the maps they had spread out on the table, had claimed the best spot nearest the fire.
Another grim-faced group of fighters — from the Irish company, considering how Yule dismissed them all without a second glance — were propped up along the tavern's back wall, mud-splattered and dazed. They must have been shepherded to the tavern to have a bracing drink while their combat healers picked away at their lingering wounds. A few mages had claimed the bar, all of them lost in their cups and their books.
Among them circulated merry barmaids and a few braver washerwomen. And there was a pair of women at a table in a corner who were without a doubt working for Fatima, judging by how they were arguing over a small bundle of papers. There was a man with him that night, in much better clothing than the others at the tavern, a waistcoat and breeches that were at least tailored well, even if the trim and the buttons on both were cheap.
Yule heaved a sigh and trudged on toward the bar. "No one decent comes out in the middle of the week anymore."
"Because you've already tried your luck with all the sots," retorted a barmaid who'd overheard him on her way back to the bar for fresh drinks. She returned Yule's muttered curse and glare with a grin, giving him a pitying slap on the back. "Give the poor bastard one on the house to start with, Pete," she called out to the barman. "Since the nob's with him, we can count on the tab no matter how deep he gets in his cups."
"Aye, but if he stiffs us, you're paying," the barman retorted, though he was already pulling down a bottle from a shelf.
"You wouldn't do that to us, would you?" the barmaid asked, turning her attention to Mirk. An older, familiar woman, ample in the chest and wide in the hips. One of the handful K'aekniv always tried his luck with and who always turned him down with a roll of her eyes and a motherly pat on the head.
"Of course not, mademoiselle. It's only right to repay your debts," Mirk said, returning her grin.
"What a sweet little thing you are," she said with a chuckle, dropping a wink as she heaved her refilled tray up onto her shoulder and ventured back into the crowd. "Come back when you get a few years and a couple more stone on you."
It was Mirk's turn to sigh as he slid onto a stool at the end of the bar beside Yule. "Leave the bottle, please," Mirk said to the barman when he came over with the expected glasses. He hesitated, so Mirk fished out a few coins to reassure him. As always, it did the trick.
"No one ever gets what they want in this hellhole," Yule grumbled, snatching up his glass and draining it. The second he only sipped at, crossing his legs at the knee as he brooded over that night's events.
Mirk elected to go slow from the start. There'd be a pile of letters a mile high waiting for him with the house matron, reservations for the upcoming ball. He'd never get through them if he was too tipsy to keep his penmanship even.
"Do you seriously think this is all going to work?" Yule asked him, after a spell of companionable silence punctuated by the sound of arguing in languages Mirk didn't understand from the direction of the drinking contest. "It's too complicated. Everything has to go just right, otherwise it all falls apart."
For what felt like the thousandth time that day, all Mirk could do was shrug. But at least he managed to stop himself before invoking the Holy Mother and all the saints like he wanted to, knowing full well that'd only worsen Yule's already black mood. "I...well. Methinks it'd be better if we all didn't think about that. I'm sure if one part goes wrong, we can find another way. But we can't know what that'll be until it happens."
"Not thinking about it isn't going to make it any more feasible. And what's it all for, anyway?" Yule lowered his voice, leaning in close as he topped off Mirk's glass. "No one's following your pet skeleton anywhere other than you and the ones who already follow him anyway. And you and I both know that's not enough to keep control."
"You're right, Yule. But it isn't right, what's happening to them. To any of them," he added, gesturing around at the tavern, packed to the rafters with the K'maneda's worst off. No amount of raucous laughter could hide the deplorable state of the Easterners' and the Bavarians' clothes, the way half of them had open sores on their necks and on the backs of their hands. Or the pain of the men of the Irish company, a constant weight in the back of Mirk's mind, making him feel guilty for sitting at the bar getting drunk with Yule instead of going over and helping the combat healers.
Even the officers by the fire weren't that well off. The boots on their stretched out feet were better than the average fighter's, but not by much. And two of them had taken theirs off to give swollen ankles a bit of extra warmth and air.
"Nothing good ever happens here. That's never changing no matter who passes out the gold," Yule said crossly, swirling the drink in his glass. But he was looking off over Mirk's head, at where the Irish company was propped against the back wall. Though the older healer had his shields up tight, Mirk got the impression that Yule’s crossness was more at himself for thinking of healing when he wasn't being paid for it rather than directed at him.
"You should be helping them," a low voice said from off behind them. Yule went rigid, his fist clenching so tight around his glass that Mirk reflexively called it to himself, prying it from Yule's hand before he could shatter it. "But if you're not going to do that, at least you can look at this."
Mirk looked over his shoulder. The man behind them looked familiar. He had a fighter’s build, but wore a fine dark green cloak lined with gray fur. Mirk couldn't place him until Yule hissed his name through his teeth, as the man eased down onto the stool on Yule's other side. "What the hell do you want, Ambras?"
Ambras. The healer who'd left the Twentieth to serve as the personal healer for the nobles in the Fourteenth. The one who'd come and taken Elijah from them when he'd been brought to the infirmary with the unknown Destroyer's arrow in his chest. And who'd broken Yule's heart, though the older healer never would utter those words.
"Information. And you're the only one who's got half-angel friends." Ambras drew a sheet of mage parchment that'd been folded into quarters out of the pocket of his cloak and slid it across the bar to Yule. "At least one of them should know how to read."
Yule didn't take the parchment. "Why should I help you?"
"It's not for me. And it's not about you. As soon as the spring contracts are over, the Butcher's going back to Donegal and finishing what he started. Asked me to figure out what this meant for him."
Slowly, Yule looked down at the folded over parchment. But he still refused to speak.
"Prove you're better than those heathens, he said to me. You know what the English do to people they think are heathens."
"I'm well aware," Yule finally replied, picking up the bottle to replace the glass Mirk had magicked out of his hand.
"You've got family there. Do it for them."
It was the wrong way to pull at Yule's heartstrings. Either Ambras had forgotten what Yule's family had done to him, or Yule had never told him. Extending one shaking finger, Yule pushed the folded over parchment back toward Ambras. "Fuck off, Ambras. The next time you speak to me, I'll be the one putting your head above the infirmary doors."
Hissing in frustration, Ambras shoved the paper back at Yule. "Fine! But at least look at those sorry bastards in the corner when you tell me no. You know they'll be first. They're already half dead as it is. And here you are having a cozy drink at the bar with your little lordling."
Though he cursed himself as he did it, Yule put down the bottle and snatched up the piece of mage parchment, nearly ripping it in two as he unfolded it. He scanned the page with eyes gone dark with rage, then threw it back at Ambras. "What the hell am I supposed to do with this? I don't read whatever the hell this is."
"Fucking listen for once!" That time Ambras bypassed Yule, leaning back on his stool and shoving it at Mirk behind Yule's back. "Like I said, you're the only one with an angel who knows how to read."
Cautiously, Mirk took the parchment, watching for Yule's response. But the older healer was caught in such a fit of rage that it was like nothing in the world existed besides the burning Mirk could feel threatening to crack through his own mental shielding. It was so intense that even the combat healers tending to the Irish company stopped their work, though none of them dared to look over at the bar.
Mirk read the parchment himself. It was full to the edges with a circular script that was familiar, but that Mirk had never mastered. High angelic, the sort only used in Imperial correspondence and records. The person who'd written it hadn't practiced in a very long time. The oblong cast to the circles, the way the dividing lines that bisected them varied so much from letter to letter, all of it made it difficult for Mirk to pick out the words. It was very different from the immaculate, economical penmanship of the Imperial scribes. Or the steady hand of the artisan who'd crafted the family ledger in his father's library.
"Methinks I can understand a little..." Mirk said, pressing more of his potential into his mental shielding in an attempt to dim the force of Yule's rage and focus. "Do you know what this is supposed to be? Is it a letter?"
"A spell. I think."
"Percy needed to go to you to sort that out?" Yule hissed, the venom in his tone making Mirk wince.
"For all his gold, he's as good as a wild mage. He can pay people to craft his spells for him. Everything he does himself is hack and smash."
Before Yule could get in his retort, Mirk spoke again, shaking his head and blinking hard to clear all the dancing circles and loops from his vision as he held the parchment back out to Ambras behind Yule's back. "I'm afraid I'm not much better at formal spells. Especially angelic ones. My magic isn't suited to it."
Ambras refused the paper, shoving it back at him, roughly. It was an act of desperation, Mirk could feel. But all Yule saw in it was a threat, one he responded to with a precise jab of his elbow into Ambras's side, hard enough to make him curse and hunch over the bar. "If he says he can't do it, he can't do it. Take out your frustration on yourself for once."
"All he'd need to do is change one word," Ambras wheezed, rubbing at his side. "No one would know how to fix it."
Mirk could tell by the competing rage he felt rising up in Ambras, a patient, calculating darkness that rivaled Yule's wild hatred in its strength, that he needed to do something soon, before the pair came to blows. He held the parchment up close to his nose, scanning for any word in it he might know. But most of what he knew were building block sorts of words. And the names he'd stared at as a boy in the family ledger, the ones he'd traced with his fingers as he'd laid on his stomach on the rug in front of the fire, imagining what the hundreds of inhumanly perfect and gleaming figures that'd produced his father must have looked like.
At the bottom of the parchment, he saw something that looked familiar. Like a name. It had been erased again and again, one of the few words where all the letters were perfectly formed. Mirk mumbled his way through the letters, sounding them out one by one. "I...ma...n...ael..."
His hands went slack; the parchment floated down onto the bar. Imanael. And Percival had stormed into the infirmary last week, demanding that they hand Samael and Sharael over to him...
"Did you find something?" Ambras asked. While Mirk had been lost in thought, he'd left his stool and circled around to Mirk's other side, to get further away from Yule.
Mirk looked up at Ambras, letting his mental shields fade back to normal, trying to pick out anything through the cacophony of Ambras and Yule's combined anger. He could feel nothing past it. A clever ruse, if Ambras wanted to make sure that no empath glimpsed his true intentions. And Mirk didn't know the man well enough to tell if there was any hint of deception hidden in the scowl that screwed up his broad, full lips, or if there was anything abnormal in the coldness of his dark eyes.
"Do you have something to write with?" Mirk asked him. "And something to take off the old markings? Even if I don't understand the spell, methinks there's one word I can replace."
Ambras turned and looked down the length of the bar, snatching a half-eaten roll off the edge of a half-asleep drunk's plate, handing it to Mirk without looking at him as he searched his robes for something to mark the parchment with. As Mirk made a show of tearing off a morsel of bread and wetting it, then carefully using it on the parchment to try to lift off the old markings, he struggled to think of what to do.
By the time Ambras had come up with a bit of graphite, Mirk knew what his only option was. There were three names he could write in high angelic, the ones he'd looked at the longest, those on the last page of the family ledger. Where human letters, clumsy and plain, had been added alongside the angelic. Mikael, his father. And Kae, his sister. But naming them would do no good; not even the grandest high angelic spell could bring back the dead.
It was a stroke of luck that his godfather's name was so odd, that it took more letters to spell in high angelic than it did when written in human letters. It took the same space as Imanael's. And Mirk had memorized it well, always wondering when he'd come back to visit again, with all his stories of how the Empire had been back when his father had been nothing but a twinkle off the ends of his great-grandfather's feathers. Aker.
Mirk wrote it as fast as he dared. Then he pushed the paper and the bit of graphite back at Ambras, shaking his head. "That's all I can do. I’m sorry."
Ambras folded the parchment back up, tucking it away in the folds of his cloak along with the graphite. "Better than nothing," was all Ambras had to say, not even seeming to see Mirk. He glared off over Mirk's head at Yule for a long, tense moment before he turned on his heel and stormed out of the tavern.
Slumping over the bar, letting out a slow and shuddering breath, Mirk reached for the bottle. It was empty. Yule must have drained it while his attention had been fixed on the parchment. Wearily, Mirk lifted his hand to signal the barman for another.
"Hope you did it wrong," Yule grumbled as he slumped over as well, glaring over at the barman, to add the weight of a threat to Mirk's waving.
Mirk desperately hoped that he hadn't. But he knew Yule wasn't the right person to tell about the incident. At least not then. Not when the slightest offense could send Yule running out of the bar after Ambras with murder in his heart. "Methinks this is it," Mirk sighed, propping his head up on one palm as the barman hurried over with a fresh bottle.
"What is?"
"You always ask me why I never take a chance. Why I don't just get things over and done with between..." He trailed off, digging another coin out of his purse and trading it for the barman's bottle.
"Spit it out," Yule insisted, snatching the bottle from him as soon as Mirk had refilled his glass.
Mirk sucked down half the glass, sighing again. "I couldn't bear it, Yule. If Gen ever looked at me the way you look at Ambras."
For a moment, Yule went tense again, the neck of the bottle clanking against the rim of Yule's glass as it came a hair's breadth away from overflowing. Then the older healer snorted and shifted over, topping Mirk's glass off for him as well.
"You are more clever than people give you credit for.” Yule threw back his glass and sighed before moving on to drink straight from the bottle. "Or maybe I'm the idiot."