Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When the amber ate Quirin, Quirin ate the amber back.

It seemed more comfortable for it to encase his heart too, and not just his body. If he was going to die in this thing, he might as well accept it.

(Quirin had learned that fighting against the inevitable was a fool’s errand.)

But it turned out, he did not die. This was surprising to everybody. Naturally, who could have expected anything different? The kingdom attempted to free him, but more for cold scientific curiosity on one hand, and basic human decency on the other. It wasn’t nice to let men decompose for all the world to see.

Varian, of course, did not give up on Quirin. He insisted his father was still alive, but everyone saw this as an obvious sign of Varian’s mental instability. Even after Quirin emerged from the amber intact and alive, they still considered it a sign of Varian’s mental instability. It was just that the boy had been lucky.

Quirin was lucky, too. Very lucky. He didn’t even suffer in the amber. Instead, he had known a peace unlike anything he had felt before, and it had just seemed like one of his dreams.

Strikingly vivid dreams reigned over Quirin’s life. Ever since he could remember, he had dreamed of things with such veracity and liveliness, it was impossible to tell what was real and what was not, even when he was awake. This could make the morning after a dream disorienting, the first hour or so sorting out the world again.

No, phoenix birds did not hatch from his pumpkin patch and roast all those orange- and green-hued baubles until Old Corona decided to go in the pie making business.

No, the villagers did not crown him with crystal--a frippery thing which he promptly knocked off his head to shatter on the cobblestone below.

No, he hadn’t been fighting twenty Neserdnian warriors on the edge of a great yawning chasm whick overlooked a field of carnivorous red poppies. Neserdnia was a peaceful ally, and Quirin was certain they didn’t go into battle with ostrich plumes in their hair anyway.

Ludicrous dreams weren’t Quirin’s issue. The real trouble came when he dreamed of ordinary things, so that even his body became confused, and confused sleep for, well, awake. He was quite the sleepwalker.

Learning to walk meant learning to sleepwalk. One of his earliest memories was of the safety of his mother’s supple arms enclosing him. She had cooed over him, “Did you want Mommy so much you couldn’t go one night without me?”

“Don’t cuddle him,” he remembered his father saying. “That’s only rewarding him, and he’ll never stop. He’ll hurt himself. He’ll fall into the fire.”

“Nonsense, nonsense,” his mother had replied. “I’ll catch him every time.”

And until her death, his mother did catch him every time.

Ulla had gotten the fright of a lifetime on their wedding night. She had awoken at midnight to find him standing at the end of the bed, hurling the fireplace poker around in swordsman stances.

Once she understood he wasn’t to murder her (“Murdered on my honeymoon? I was never so dramatic!” she objected), she found it fascinating. He didn’t explain the potential embarrassments that came along with the whee and glee of it.

“It must be a sign of a diseased and dangerous mind,” she teased, after they had settled into the manor. She ran a quill against the bridge of his nose.

“Then that makes you a horrible judge of character.” He leaned over the desk to look at what she was scribbling out. “I guess I don’t know I’m dreaming.”

“I always know when I’m dreaming.”

“I’ve known someone like that before. He’d dream of launching himself off the tallest spires, and then soared for ages and ages, all over the place. Even up to the moon. He’d eat canapés with moon-men.”

Her nose scrunched, and the freckles on her cheeks went a-dancing. “I’ve nothing so fantastic. I just realize I’m in a dream and sit back and enjoy the show. How do you feel about belladonna?”

“Er, like I don’t want to be murdered on my honeymoon.”

Ulla tried multiple alchemical and mechanical solutions to get him to stay put, short of hogtying him to the bed, but nothing worked. After he settled into married life, the sleepwalking stopped anyway. It began anew when he got that letter from Donella. It never stopped after that, and Quirin blearily realized this was his life now. By the time Varian was ten, he had become adept at leading Quirin back to bed.

So when the amber ate Quirin gentle, it seemed like one of those sleepwalking episodes again. This is a dream, this is a dream, he told himself. After all, what was real and what was not anymore? Who could tell?

This was how Quirin started out his letter to Varian, when he was being eaten gentle.

Son ….

Perhaps a man being eaten alive shouldn’t concern himself with writing a letter—alternatives of either incessant praying or shaking a clenched fist at the sky seemed more appropriate—but he must get this last thing said. His last exhale.

Above all else, know how much I love you ….

The amber that crawled up Quirin, almost in a temperate caress, reminded him of a novel he had read once. It was about a woman who sought to preserve her paramour exactly as he was, so, by performing a series of strange and devilish acts, she convinced a fairy to capture her lover’s soul in a trinket. In the novel’s chilling and incongruous end, she swallowed the trinket.

It was really gross. He ought to have read better novels.

Shaking himself from such morbid thoughts, Quirin pulled against the amber, but it held him fast. But it could have been worse. It could have hurt.

… and how proud I am of you.

He pulled and pulled against the amber, but the amber laughed.

He trembled, but not because he was cold. The blizzard howled and flung snow, blasting the laboratory windows until they shook, but the amber was pleasantly warm. Like a cushion. On the inside of a coffin.

A sudden paroxysm overcame him, and all his stoicism in the face of death was gone. He screamed, pounding his fist against the amber, “Help me! Help me, dear God, help me!”

I never could have asked for a better son. I have kept much from you. I am sorry, but please believe me, I did it out of love.

His body parts encased in amber weren’t even numb; numbness implied existence. He couldn’t even feel the reality of them, as if the amber was erasing him in the world’s most gentle annihilation. He was too terrified to look below the surface, into that ravenous chamber, to see if there was anything left.

He was being dissolved. Painlessly.

Forgive me for not finding out sooner what had happened to your mother. I would have gone looking for her, but the road is dangerous, and I couldn’t stand being separated from you.

What would happen to Varian once he was gone? That’s what terrified him more than his own fate. If Varian survived his foolish endeavor in the storm (how it made Quirin sweat to think of Varian out there!), Quirin hoped Porter would take him. He trusted Porter more than anyone. But if he didn’t take Varian, then who would? Varian was so young, so misunderstood, and with such crushable dreams. Anyone who took him might bruise him with their ignorance.

“Not Ward, dear God,” he moaned. “Not Ward.”

Not that he thought Ward would take Varian, but what if the man did? Ward would crush Varian to smithereens. He would make Varian work in his father’s mill or milk cows and forbid him from doing alchemy. Hadn’t Ward come to his table at the Greasy Spittoon only three days ago, interrupting an otherwise pleasant lunch, just to ask Quirin to please stop whatever magic the boy was up to?

“It’s not magic,” Quirin had replied. At his elbow, he had felt, more than heard, Porter trying to stifle a laugh. “It’s alchemy.”

Ward’s bulbous nose quivered. “Call it what you want! It doesn’t matter, right. Don’t you even know what he did on Wednesday?”

“Haven’t a clue.”

“Not me either. But he scared my cows to death! Becky won’t give milk.”

“I’m sorry, Ward. I’ll tell him to stay away from your paddock when he’s doing his experiments.”

“That’s no fix at all! He’s dangerous!”

“Well, I’m sorry—”

“Hold your fancy-pants horses, Varian’s not dangerous!” Porter said. He always said things designed to start a fight. “He’s only reckless, like all boys his age.”

Ward scoffed. “Me, take your word for it? Not a chance. You’re so fond of him, anyway.”

“I’m not, particularly.”

Quirin nearly spat his cider out. “Thank you, Porter, my dear friend,” he said, dryly.

Ward tapped Porter on the chest. “You’re biased. You’re over there all the time, you don’t think I don’t notice? You probably have him doing spells for you.”

It was Porter’s turn to nearly spit his drink out.

“Just like your sister,” Ward continued. “The way she puts on airs for ‘tutoring a genius.’”

“Balderdash. Balderdash to both. Janice grumbled about him all the time. Too smart for his own good, she always said. And I go to Quirin’s house to see Quirin, not his son. And it’s not like I see him when I go over there anyway. He spends all his time doing heaven-knows-what in that lair of his!”

“See …” Quirin had later said, to a snickering Porter, “it’s terminology like that that fuels these kinds of misconceptions.”

A colossal bang against the side of the house jerked Quirin back to the present. That’s right, this wasn’t a dream.

The breath stopped in his throat and his ears practically creaked to listen as another something thundered against the side of the house. Could someone be trying to get in? Even Varian?

But nothing more came, other than the continual howling of the wind.

Quirin’s skin crawled. He sweat, he trembled, he cursed this day. There was nothing else he could do. That, and focus on this letter he was writing.

From the moment of your birth, he wrote, you have been my pinnacle.

Your father

He read it. It was hardly a great letter, but it said what he wanted to say in what little time he had left. He prayed Varian would not grieve over him too hard.

The amber went softly over Quirin’s head. He struggled, but, in the end, it was a relief. This was all just a dream, after all.

They called him the Peacemaker.

This is what the villagers of Old Corona called Quirin on “Appreciate Your Local Government Day,” when they wanted to embarrass him. Which, mission accomplished. Look at how red his face got! Especially when the deputy-burgomaster, Porter, made teasing speeches about his ability to “expertly settle disputes over pastureland, pest problems, and noise complaints! And we don’t mind he’s a foreigner to boot!”

Almost no one brought that up anymore, not once Quirin started being burgomaster. He’d been with them so long (no accent, no less!), it was easy to forget he wasn’t from around there. They even had to explain it to each other the first time he ran for office.

“I thought the law was no foreigner could take office, but I guess I was wrong.”

“He’s foreign?”

“Of course, he is! He came the same year the King and Queen got hitched.”

“Hitched isn’t a respectful word.”

“Well, they were hitched all the same.”

So, the story went: he came out of nowhere and moved into that old eyesore of a manor house and accompanying lands. The kingdom had seized it years ago for the prior owner’s propensity to commit tax fraud, who had shouted, “Fight the man!” as they carted him away in chains. Then Quirin moved in without a penny to his name, so the rumor was the manor was a gift after he had mysteriously served some dignitary on the road. (He was too demure to say what, but they generally thought it was because he had changed a broken wagon wheel for a diplomat.)

“It’s a waste, all that brute strength taken to nothing but growing vegetables,” some of the men said, dismayed for all his cherry-picking and wheat winnowing. “He’d be a better lumberjack!”

“He could move up the ranks quickly if he joined the Guard,” others said.

“That’s too violent,” was the general assessment after a time.

He was a gentleman, they realized.

Not one of those stuck-up, highfalutin ones, but gentlemanly all the same. He moved his body with great care, with the gentility that came from the high-born.

Ward, former guard and current dairyman, said that Quirin moved his body with too much care. In the way a man moves who knows he is capable of great violence, but keeps it restrained. Everyone laughed at grumpy old Ward, who hated Quirin anyway. The only man in the village who did.

Old Corona loved their man of peace.

But Quirin had fathered the devil incarnate, who disappeared him someday, and then went murderously mad with guilt. And that was the end of their Peacemaker.

Unknown to all but a very few, an amberous monument laid in that condemned manor home. A mausoleum of orange glow, darkened but for the sunlight that passed by the little window, keeping alive their peaceful burgomaster.

As gently as the amber had eaten Quirin, the amber belched him out.

He hadn’t even had time for his breath to run short when the world opened itself assailable to him again. Breathe. Breathe. The air was fresh. Open his eyes, and he saw clearly.

A vibration pinged up his vertebrae. He was still alive?

The crystal was melting. It dripped off him like candle wax, but unlike wax, it melted without heat or wetness and collected into golden reflecting pools that dissolved without smoke. Suspending him, the amber eased him down, until his feet found the stonework. And it all dissolved away. Was he sleepwalking?

His lips tightened when his legs trembled and gave way under him. His body was saying something, and his brain was trying to catch up to it, but then his son—thank God, Varian was okay!—was shouting, “Dad, you’re alive!”

Varian launched at him, skittering along the floor in a slide that must have scraped his knees. Quirin caught Varian against his heart, arms so eager for his son his nailbeds pulsed with pain. By the moon’s course, Varian had come through for him! It was all right.

And that vivid, distressing dream he had had, evaporated, and he remembered it no more.

Chapter Text

Quirin wasn’t one of those anti-monarchy republicans. He had few issues with monarchy, since they had mostly done right by him. King Edmund had his eternal loyalty, and King Frederic was not objectionable, and so they had nothing but his firm respect. When a member of a royal family deigned to look down their fancy, incest-tinged nose at him, it was an honor.

But having one in his home was almost enough to make him a stringent republican.

Princess Rapunzel was simply too much.

Quirin wanted a nap. He had been out of the amber a solid twenty minutes, and all he wanted was a delicious nap in a downy bed on a cloud of pillows. What he got was sitting at the kitchen table while the Princess flitted around him like a bird.

She declared, “I’ll go fetch water!” and swooped out the door with all the excitement of a day spent at the candy shop.

Heaviness pressed his limbs down, and even deeper still, until his heart felt like it was going land on his stomach. In this silence and peace, guilt over his frustration with Rapunzel was rising in him.

Don’t be mean now, he told himself.

He got up to look out the window. Where was Varian? The boy had left ten minutes ago to borrow eggs from the neighbor. Quirin had asked, “Are the chickens not laying?” but Varian whipped out too quick to answer.

But looking out this window ... well, yes, that’s what he thought he had seen when Varian went out. A landscape that was what was generally called: verdant. Not at all as it was only a few hours (?) ago. The sky had been rather put-out then, with the clouds all scrapping with each other; and the grass, perhaps green, had been buried under two feet of crusty snow. But now, the sun broadcasted bright, agreeable hues as clouds spilled across the sky like grains of rice on a tablecloth. The grass wasn’t only green, but spring-time green, and the smell of chamomile wafted on the breeze. A woodpecker chiseled at a tree somewhere for its dinner. In other words, it was a typical Coronan day.

So maybe he’d been in that amber more than a few hours. Maybe even days.

But where were all the black rocks? There had been dozens along the edge of the Wall there, and now there was nothing but a few black smudges.

Quirin turned away from the window, astonished.

Rapunzel came in with a bucket sloshing water against her hip. “Your neighbors are so kind! I had to beg Earl to let me draw the water. I’ve gotten water from the pump in Corona Square before, but to draw from a well? Whoo!” She disappeared into the pantry, clashed some glass together, and came back out with a bottle. “I found wine!”

She rinsed some cups, against his objections, and they mixed water and wine together, setting aside a little cup for Varian. “It’s a celebration after all!” she said. Then she began to clean his kitchen, which just about knocked him over.

This girl was a bird. Like a yellowhammer bird (because she could be nothing but), she screwed about the room, flicking her hair and singing a song with every word from her delicate throat. She was as much a bird in his home as a caged parrot in the home of a rich old heiress. A creature of pure animation. Like a man who has been released after a long imprisonment, she was so full of freedom it spilled out from her fingertips.

He grimaced a smile and sat back, drinking water, just letting it all happen.

She cleaned like she’d been bred for it. She swept, dusted, washed, and chattered about this-and-that. His China with the little blue flowers was adorable! Oh, it was a wedding gift? How lovely! And the silverware was quite sturdy, and the table was oak, no?

Every time Quirin tried to stop her, she laughed and told him to relax.

“Don’t be too ambitious!” he protested.

“Hah hah, not at all!”

What he wanted to say was “Don’t be too gregarious!” but that would have been a touch too rude. What was he to do with her?

Thank goodness! The door creaked open, and Varian appeared.

After taking one look at Quirin, he was tossing his basket onto the tabletop and flinging himself into Quirin’s arms. How fragile he felt, like Quirin was clasping a dandelion puff. Quirin ran his hand through that blowball of hair. But Varian looked at him as if he should be the one to disappear on the breeze.

Rapunzel graciously remained silent, emptying Varian’s basket. Strawberries and radishes, probably picked from their own garden, sprinkled the table. After saying “Dad” just once, Varian pulled away to help her wash them. Quirin’s arms felt empty.

“What happened to the eggs? Are the neighbor’s chickens not laying either?” Quirin teased.

Varian darted white eyes at him. “Oh, you know. Ate ‘em all. You know how Freya loves … loves her omelets.”

Squat was all Quirin knew about Freya’s eating habits. But it seemed those eating habits meant a pathetic dinner.

Rapunzel and Varian murmured over their washing, like thieves conspiring over their loot, before Varian broke into that nervous laugh of his. After patting his shoulder, Rapunzel whirled around.

“I have an amazing idea! We need cake! It’s a celebration, after all.”

Varian scratched his arm. “You know, it’s awfully late. The bakery—”

“Oh, I will find cake!”

Quirin’s eyebrow went up at such self-assurance. Especially for cake at four o’clock in the afternoon.

But Rapunzel’s ideas, once made, were to be executed in a moment. She was already pirouetting out the door, skirts all a-twirl, with a basket tucked under her arm.

“She’s very …” Quirin said, once she was gone.

“Yeah.”

As Varian puttered about, cleaning the kitchen and wandering in and out, empty-handed, from the larder, Quirin took stock of his boy. A trickle of unease bothered him. It was as if something about his son had changed. Some detail had changed, but he couldn’t grasp it. It hovered around his head, like a gnat.

Ah, he saw it! When Varian shot off his tiptoes to sweep at a cobweb, his pants came up and showed off too much leg. As if he had grown!

Varian had aged! Yes, that was it. His face was leaner and—yes, Quirin hadn’t noticed before, but now it was certain. Didn’t Varian’s shirt snug too tight across his shoulders, and didn’t his sleeves ride too high above his wrists? Even his voice had matured, which Quirin had first thought was a certain rasp from high emotion.

Quirin shut his eyes. There was some other reason there was no eggs, other than foxes having gotten into the coop. There was something Varian was nervous to say. Look at how he fluttered about, picking up one chore before dropping it halfway done to pick up another.

Clearing the tightness out of his throat, Quirin asked, “How long was I in there?”

Varian kicked over the broom. After placing it just-so in the corner, the way a jeweler sets a gemstone, he turned, clutching his hands to his chest. He spoke in a half-whisper. “Almost … almost a year and a half.”

Almost ….

Almost what?

Almost a year and a half.

A scream bulged in Quirin’s esophagus, banging on the walls of his throat to get out. It hurt to push it down with a quiver of his tongue. It hurt to swallow. It hurt too much to ask for the date. But Varian told it without being asked, and Quirin found all his bones fleeting away. He caught himself by pressing his elbows against his knees. Was he to become a puddle on the floor, no more than a marsh of a man? That would be more believable than this.

A dream, a dream. This was some dream. To grasp it would be to grasp the wind.

Quirin’s father had told him to pinch himself when he thought he was in a dream. Quirin grabbed the flap of skin between his thumb and forefinger and pulled. It hurt, all right.

So now panic was politely introducing itself to Quirin’s vibrations. He fit his fingers together, pressing hot, slick palms together. He hadn’t felt panic like this since Ulla—

“Dad?”

Quirin jerked up at the naked vulnerability in Varian’s voice. Varian stood against the wall as if he’d been abandoned on some mountain top.

Quirin held his hand out. “Come here, son.”

The door crashed open. Varian spun around while Rapunzel danced in. Quirin dug his fingers through his scalp.

“You were right,” Rapunzel said, setting her basket on the table. “There wasn’t any cake. But there was gingerbread! And I got some bread for a song. So cheap!”

Varian rubbed his face before he turned around and helped her pull out her haul, which was much more than just gingerbread. There were sausages, cheese, relish, sauerkraut, apricot jam, pickled herring, and butter.

“Varian, go fetch my coin pur—”

“Don’t you even dare!” Rapunzel cried.

“But Princess, this is too much!”

“Oh! How many times do I have to tell you, this is a celebration?”

So, for a celebratory dinner, they ate sausage sandwiches of stale bread and drank weak wine in the dining room. And their dinner party was as awkward as the food, so there was that. Varian was as shy as a newborn fawn, his smiles at Rapunzel timid and his speech halting. Quirin’s tongue was as useful and sparkling as his swarming, dull head; if Ulla had been here, she would have laughed at him. Only Rapunzel wasn’t awkward, but she could be comfortable in a room full of infuriated dragons.

She spoke all about her trip to the Dark Kingdom. About her adventures at Terapi Island, Pinacosta, some spire, and Vardaros. It was a tough conversation for Quirin. When she first mentioned the D.K., Quirin froze, then grinned something silly and soft while stabbing his fork repeatedly into the jar of pickled herring. It was a nice pickled herring, not at all deserving of such abuse. Varian and Rapunzel didn’t seem to notice.

“But what … where is Cass?” Varian asked.

Rapunzel’s smile quavered, before becoming strangely fixed. “When we got to the Dark Kingdom, Cass, uh … Cass took the Moonstone.”

Quirin dropped his fork.

“So, she’s having her own adventures right now. Oh, look, I left the gingerbread in the kitchen! Let me get it.” Rapunzel dashed out.

Quirin leaned towards Varian, dropping his voice. “It’s six o’clock. Is she staying all night?”

Varian’s eyes lit up. “Can she?”

“Heaven have mercy on me!”

It wasn’t that Quirin wasn’t grateful. He was immensely grateful. He was beyond grateful. He hoped he could have a grandchild named after Rapunzel. But why wouldn’t she leave? Why did it feel like she was smoothing some sharp corner in their little home, trying to throw a cloth over the unseemly things? Did she think he was angry?

She returned with the gingerbread, and a few minutes later, blessedly, there was a knock on the front door. Rapunzel said she’d get it. Leaning back in his seat, Quirin waited to see how it would turn out having a princess as his porter.

The dining room was close enough that they could hear her conversation at the door. Rapunzel gasped as she opened it. “Eugene! Oh, it worked! We’re celebrating. Did you bring it—oh, you brought Pascal too!”

They could no longer overhear her as she stepped outside and closed the door.

Varian lay his head on the table, a dangle of brown gingerbread in his lips. It bobbed up-and-down as he chewed it in small measures. He looked lonely.

“Where’s that vermin of yours?” Quirin asked. “Why isn’t it here, begging?”

The loneliness only seemed to swamp over Varian all the more, and he melted into the tabletop. “Ruddiger ran away.”

Quirin sighed. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

A few minutes later, they heard Rapunzel’s conversation again as she opened the front door.

“You didn’t even bring a guard, Blondie,” a male voice—presumably this Eugene—said.

“Where I go, I don’t need guards. You know that.”

“I know, but there could be leftover Sapori—oh! Oh, I see. You don’t want anyone feeling un-com-fort-able—”

“Hah hah hah!” Rapunzel guffawed. It was a legitimate guffaw. Like listening to a pub full of lumberjacks on Arbor Day. Very un-princesslike. “Hrm, hrm, Eugene.”

“Alright, alright, alright! Let’s at least get you home before midnight. Everyone’s kinda freaking out.”

“Okay, okay.” Rapunzel stepped into the dining room a moment later. There was a mysterious green something-or-other on her shoulder. What was it? “Fun’s over for me, I guess. Eugene’s being a mother hen. I have to get home.”

Quirin shot to his feet. “Princess, I can never thank you enough—”

“Stop! It was my pleasure. And … kinda my duty.” Smiling, she gave him a salute that brought tears to his eye. It was just that bad.

She tried to keep him from walking her to the door, but he still had some manners in him. It was a tough go, since Varian wanted to keep his arms wrapped around Quirin’s waist as they went, but they got there.

Varian let go to slip her a hug. “Thank you, Rapunzel.”

“I’m so happy I could keep my promise.” Rapunzel squeezed him back, holding his hand. “That gingerbread looked so delicious. Do you mind getting me a piece? Just for the road home.” Her face shone as Varian skittered away.

“Princess—”

Her hand on his shoulder stopped him, her face as if all the light had been sucked out of it, cheeks suddenly gray instead of their merry pink. “Varian is a very, very good son.”

Quirin prickled all over, as if he’d walked through a brier patch. She had said it in that sunshiny way that was uniquely hers, but it still seemed dreadfully important.

She dropped her hand as Varian came running back with gingerbread wrapped in a napkin. “Thank you so much! Oh Varian, take care of yourself!”

One last hug to Varian, and she was out the door, bouncing towards a man and a trio of horses and a carriage. She turned to wave, Eugene waved, and even the green thing on her shoulder waved. Quirin waved back before shutting the door. Blessed peace and quiet. The songbird (nice kid) had left.

Varian had already gone into the dining room to pick up the dishes.

It was chilly, so Quirin started a fire in the sitting room. Was the firewood stacked against the wall the same stuff he had chopped over a year ago? It was perhaps best not to think about it, but it was nice to be ahead of the game for a change.

He should go help Varian, but a wave of weakness overtook him, and he collapsed on the sofa. Sorry Varian, he’ll make it up later. But for now, he needed to make a reckoning of this new world, with all its additions and subtractions.

Addition: a birthday each for him and Varian. Varian was fifteen now.

Subtraction: his sanity. Varian was fifteen now.

Addition: he survived the amber.

Subtraction: his sanity.

Addition: Varian, somehow, had come through for him.

Subtraction: his sanity.

Typical.

Before Quirin could sum up just how much of his sanity he had lost, Varian appeared in the doorway, rubbing his elbow. His eyes meandered around the room while avoiding Quirin’s part of it. The Princess’ company had been irritating, but there had been value in it. They weren’t ready.

“Maybe I should play something,” Varian murmured, sitting at the fortepiano.

Yes, music would soothe them. Quirin scrunched back into the sofa, settling in.

Plunk-bang! went the piano.

“Oops, sorry,” said Varian. He tried playing more but kept fumbling over the keys. “It’s been a while. Should we read something? The agricultural report—oh!”

The agricultural report would be outdated by now. So, Varian knelt before their little bookshelf. What would he choose? Their tastes were so contradictory. Varian’s books were Manuscript for Deciphering Cryptographic Messages, Chemical Collections, Book of the Composition of Alchemy, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. And for fun, the insipid Flynn Rider series. Quirin’s books were serious literature and poetry: The Sorrows of Young Werther, Candide, The Song of the Nibelungs, The Poems of Ossian.

Smirking, Quirin asked, “How about … Ossian?”

Varian’s eyebrows looked like worms thrown onto a hot tin roof on a Corona summer’s day. “Oh, come on. All right, it’s De Re Metallica for you.” He reached for that book; the thing seemingly created to give Quirin headaches.

Quirin had to peel his eyebrows from the ceiling. Varian had discovered sarcasm. What a sarcastic little devil he was now!

But all was right when Varian revealed he hadn’t become a sadist as well: he bypassed the accursed book and swept out One Thousand and One Nights instead. It was the only piece of literature they agreed upon.

“I thought, perhaps, Ossian, because you’ve learned to love poetry,” Quirin said, eyes angled at the ceiling knowingly.

“Dad, I hate it more than ever. It’s still … what’s that word?”

“Anathema.”

Varian sat on the sofa and looked at him with a long stare. The lamplight reflected off his eyes like reflecting off clean, clear glass. Then he bent his head and started The Tale of the Hunchback.

It was a ridiculous story, where a succession of men try to fool another into erroneously believing they had killed the titular hunchbacked man. For a comedy, no one laughed at it, and as Varian read, Quirin scrutinized his face. Before story’s end, when it was revealed that the hunchbacked man wasn’t killed at all, the thing Quirin was waiting for happened, in their quiet moment. Tears welled in Varian’s eyes, then dribbled down his cheeks. He kept reading, until Quirin plucked the book from his hands and tucked him under his chin.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” Varian sobbed. “I’m so sorry. I hurt you.”

“It was an accident.”

“I should have listened. Can you forgive me?”

“Of course.” Quirin shushed him gently.

“Did it hurt?”

“No. Not at all.”

Varian leaned back, rubbing his eyes, and the calculations whirring through his brain practically audible. He looked up, shyly. “Did it feel like you were … like it was—”

“It was nothing. It was a blink of an eye.”

“Did it feel like a prison?”

“I felt nothing. Maybe I dreamed, I’m not sure.”

“Well, could you see or hear?”

“It was just a moment, Varian. I didn’t see or hear anything.”

Letting go a breath, Varian crushed his cheek against Quirin’s shoulder. “I’m just so happy you’re okay.”

“It must have been hard for you.”

Staring down at the book in his lap, Varian idly flipped the pages back-and-forth, until he found another story to read. It wasn’t long after that that Quirin yawned three times in succession, and asked if it was okay he went to bed.

“I know it’s early, but I’m beat.”

Varian shrugged. “Yeah, it’s … it’s fine.”

After lighting a candle to carry to bed, Quirin stood at the door, looking at his son. The book, balanced on Varian’s knees, somehow seemed enormous. The sofa was huge, like the yawing mouth of a whale about to swallow him up.

“We can have a nice, long talk in the morning, okay?” Quirin said. “A nice long one.”

A shiver seemed to dart through Varian, but then he smiled tremulously, and answered, “Sure.”

Chapter Text

For a man who hadn’t slept in a bed for over a year and had been begging for it, Quirin barely slept once he got there. First, how was he supposed to sleep in a bed that was more rat’s nest than human's, with the sheets scattered and bundled and shoved to the bottom, which was not how he had left it? Second, his extra pillow was nowhere to be found—not under the bed, not in the closet, not on the dresser. Excuse him and call him fancy, but he liked the plushness of a second pillow. So much for that.

Grumbling, he went to bed anyway and spent half the night sneezing his head off, until he threw his one lone pillow across the room in a flurry of frustration. He fell asleep after that, only to be awoken a few hours later by someone banging on the front door. To tell by the noise, that someone had given fourteen sugar-rushed toddlers pogo sticks and told them to have a go at it.

“Where’s the fire?” he grumbled as he threw the door open.

A gasp met him. A gasp like what an oyster-diver takes before going under. Which is to say, a big one.

Quirin peered through the gloom of a dark, crispy-aired dawn, and found the mailman. Goodness gracious, the postal system kept early hours, but five in the morning?

“Isn’t it a bit early, Ambrose, even for you?”

Ambrose gaped. As extraordinarily pale as he was, practically albino but for his vivid blue eyes, he made for a handsome man. But he did not look handsome this morning. His pallor was so exaggerated, that with a green woolen cap wrapped around his ears, he looked like a walking cauliflower.

“Did you have a letter to deliver or what?”

Ambrose’s mouth fell open, bobbed up courageously, then plummeted again. Finally, he asked, weakly, “That you, Quirin?”

“Uh, yes, it’s—oh! Yes, Ambrose. It’s me.”

Quirin had forgotten. His heart became tender. This was what “as if seen a ghost” looked like. He didn’t much like having it directed at him, but for Ambrose, it must be worse to feel it.

As blood trickled back into Ambrose’s cheeks, he surged forward, stumbling over the threshold to press a hand against Quirin’s shoulder. He snatched it back, as if surprised to find Quirin solid. “You’re alive!”

Quirin laughed. “As you see.”

“We thought you were dead.”

Taking Ambrose by the elbow, Quirin pulled him in. “You’re letting in mosquitoes.”

They stood in the entryway while Ambrose recovered from his shock. He rubbed his eyes and slapped his cheeks, and then looked at Quirin with dinner-plate eyes. “What happened?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I—yes, of course. I’m sorry.” Ambrose rolled the extra fabric of his untucked shirt between his fists. He jerked when Quirin asked him where his mail bag was. “What? No, I just came because I saw your chimney smoke. I thought …”—he smiled—“I thought some troublemaker had sneaked in and wanted to chase him off. Not too smart of me, was it?”

“Chimney smoke?” Quirin murmured, frowning. “I must have stoked the fire.”

“You don’t … remember?”

“I mean, in my sleep.”

“Oh!”

“Well, I doubt Varian—”

“Varian!” Now all that color was gone from Ambrose again, his ice-blue eyes darting to the various doorways in the hall. “He’s here?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Oh! Er, I mean … I just didn’t realize. I mean, ye-yeah, Freya said she’d seen him the other day, I thought it was ju—just her madness talking. She was telling it to her chickens.” Ambrose fumbled for the doorknob. “We’ll catch up. They got the Greasy Spittoon open again—in the same building! And we’ll bowl or … or something.”

Quirin’s tongue had glued itself to the roof of his mouth at such a display. He had to suck it down again before saying, “Sure.”

Ambrose backed away, over the threshold, down the steps, and onto the pathway. That untucked shirt flopped in the wind. “I’ll let Porter know you’re here.”

“Please do.”

“He doesn’t get up ‘til late though, you know.”

“The life of a scrivener.”

Ambrose jerked himself around on stiffened legs and ran off, stopping intermittently to stare at Quirin and wave, before running away again.

“The man’s become a lunatic,” Quirin muttered. “Where else would Varian be?”

To be fair, Ambrose had thought he was dead. The poor man couldn’t be thinking clearly.

Quirin dismissed any thought of returning to bed. It was too early to be up, but too late to go back to sleep, so he went to get ready for the day.

By the time he got back to his room, the sun was shining through the windows, revealing what he had been too tired to notice the night before. His room was a disaster! The important papers he kept sorted at his desk were scattershot all over the floor. There was an inch of dust on everything. No wonder he had sneezed so last night. And his secret trunk was out, which was how he had left it, but not with half the contents unwrapped and scattered around. He huffed. It was like coming home from a long trip to find your underwear on the roof!

At least the closet door had been left closed, so the clothes inside were clean (if slightly musty). He dressed, skipped the shave, and went to make breakfast. As he walked the halls, now he noticed that, not only was just his room in shambles, but the entire house.

Dust, dust, dust! Caked-on, flouncy layers of it, on any horizontal surface. And what about the thick, billowy cobwebs in nearly every corner, and the mouse droppings along the floorboards, as if an entire mischief of mice had had the oyster salad à la cholera? And the flies. Oh, the flies! Hundreds of desiccated corpses, with legs twisted up in macabre benediction towards the sky.

He and Varian made their share of mess, but this was ridiculous. So he believed no one had lived here for a year and a half. (But then where had Varian been?)

And what was more, all this dirt and grime didn’t explain why everything was such a jumble. Again, he hadn't noticed last night, but every item on every piece of furniture was either knocked over or laying in a heap on the floor. Even the books looked as though someone had taken them out from the bookshelves and shoved them back in again with no care at all in the world. An earthquake was the only explanation for this level of disorder, but Corona received them but rarely. As in, never. Outrageous.

A worser thought brought Quirin to a halt in the hallway. By the sun and moon and the stars in their courses above, if this was the state of their home, what were the fields like?

Trembling in horror, Quirin got to the kitchen, where he found Varian. The boy was standing at the table, his back turned towards the door, pouring himself a cup of water. His polished ankles didn’t so much peep shyly from under too short pajama bottoms but burst out. Like a flamboyant ringleader through curtains at a circus. One more thing to add to the list of things to be done: buy new sleeping clothes.

“Up before me?” Quirin teased. “What’s this?”

Varian jerked, spilling water across the table. When he turned, he was all startled owl, eyes stretched to their limit. Wordlessly, he wrapped his arms around Quirin’s waist.

Quirin held him and felt him tremble, cursing himself for a fool. He needed to think. For him, a year had passed in no time at all; to Varian, it had probably been a lifetime.

Suddenly, Varian was ripping out from under his arms, whirling to dab at the water across the tabletop. Quirin dropped his arms.

Varian spoke like a runaway coach. “I’ll … I’ll get breakfast together. There’s a few more vegetables in the garden, and I’ll make some bread—oh! I forgot. The mice got into the flour. How c-can mice eat raw flour? Doesn’t it taste awful?” He rocked forwards-and-back, swiping at the deep circles under his eyes.

“Did you get any sleep at all?” Quirin asked.

“Sure. A little.”

“Stayed up all night in the lab, I suppose.”

Varian shook his head. At Quirin’s raised eyebrow, he said, “No, I really didn’t. I don’t even—look, I just couldn’t sleep!”

Quirin poured water into the cup and handed it to Varian, who took it with jittery fingers. “It’s okay.”

Varian rubbed his right hip, his stare vacant. What was Quirin to make of this skittishness?

He shushed the unsettled feeling pricking at his sternum and made coffee. If Varian didn’t want to talk about what was bothering him, Quirin would not force him.

He should change the subject. “Do you know what happened to my other pillow?”

“Oh!” Varian clinked the cup to the table and shot out. His footsteps bounced down the hallway, were intercepted by the slamming of a door or two, and then were replaced by a shuffle-muffle and clink of falling glass. Why Quirin’s pillow should be in the lab was beyond him. After a few more moments of careening around the house, including up and down the stairs, Varian came breathless back to the kitchen.

Quirin didn’t say anything, lifting the coffee beans to his nose, sussing out if they seemed okay. What was the expiry on coffee beans?

Later, with Varian’s promise to make breakfast, and a belly full of coffee that tasted like decade-old lemons forgotten in the back of a witch’s pantry, Quirin went to see the damage.

He could have cried. A year of neglect to a farm was not a happy look. Dusty, sloppy fields, bare of all except weeds. Not a good sign of profits to come. Especially since, without animals, they must buy milk, cheese, and eggs until he bought another cow and chickens. Besides also a couple of plow horses, which did not come cheap. Profit? Hah hah. What a joke.

He was heading his way back home, skirting the edge of where his property met Freya’s, when a hundred glints of blue bouncing sunlight caught his eye. As he approached, he recognized them as dozens of blue-and-white glass nazar strings hanging from a tree. These eye-shaped decorations were foreign, but in his travels, Quirin had learned people hung these as protective amulets from the “evil eye.” Freya had been hanging them scattered about her property for years, but he had never seen so many hung in one place before. Like it was a sort of super-protection directed at his house.

A dark figure moved with the trees. As it entered a sunny place where the canopy broke apart, he saw it was Freya, dressed in her florid scarf, walking her chickens as though they were pets. They would have been her pets, since she cuddled them and spoke to them and even dressed them in funny outfits for the holidays, except for her tendency to slaughter them whenever she got a hankering for a roast-chicken dinner. It was how everyone knew Freya was as batty as all get-out.

Quirin was about to call out a greeting to her, but then choked himself on a laugh as she began making the rudest gesture at her chickens. Thrusting a fisted thumb at them, as if to say “got your nose”—but that was not how she meant it. Quirin had found that out too, on his travels. That one time he had burst half-dressed into a camp of middle-aged Italian women, all because a bear had surfaced from the same river in which he was bathing.

Well, it was always hard to tell if Freya did things because she was foreign, or because she was madder than an elephant with a head cold. He would let her go her way, lest he’d be the receiver of that obscene gesture. And he probably would.

Deciding he’d had enough of this strange morning (it wasn’t even eight yet!), Quirin went back home to get breakfast. He was dreaming of pancakes and scrambled eggs and toast. But what he got was leftovers laid out from their unsatisfying dinner the night before, along with a cucumber from the garden.

That was it. Time to take matters into his own hands.

He checked in the pantry and larder, and what had he been thinking? The shelves were empty except for the aforementioned cobwebs and unappetizing mouse droppings. He kept forgetting, but only two days ago (more than a year ago), their pantry had been fully stocked.

Quirin sat to make himself a stale sandwich when Varian came in and sat too, picking at a thin slice of salami.

“When you spoke to Freya yesterday,” Quirin said, “did she seem exceptionally mad?”

Varian wrapped his salami slice into a tight roll. Tighter and tighter.

“Well?”

“Y-yes. When I tried to get eggs from her …” Varian bit his lips, brow furrowed, before busting out a sharp, relieved laugh. “Yeah! She’s gone completely nuts!”

“What did she do?”

“When she saw me, she started screaming in her language and doing this with her hand.” Varian mimicked the same gesture Quirin had seen her doing earlier. “Do you know what that means?”

“It’s just superstition.” Upon Varian’s continued demonstration, Quirin barked, “Varian, put your hand down!”

“Why?” Varian looked at him with mouth open in wonder, then with a wry smile. “Is it rude?”

“Extremely.”

“Huh. I’ve never seen anyone do it before. Not even in—”

Quirin glanced up at the abbreviated comment, but Varian was slurping up the salami roll, chewing and chewing.

Quirin served some pickled herring onto his plate and discovered he’d forgotten he had poked it full of holes last night. “You’re going to need to run into town and pick up some food.”

Varian froze while lifting a strawberry to his mouth. “Me?”

“Yes.”

The strawberry fell from Varian’s hand and bounced along the tabletop, leaving spots of juice in its wake. When Varian swept up the spots, it left smears on his fingers like spots of blood. “Well, well, Dad, you know, this place—I don’t know if you noticed—but this place is a pigsty. I have a long day cleaning it. And I also don’t have any cleaning alchemy, so it’s going to take for-ev-er.”

“I am not going.”

“But it’d be good for you! Exercise. Stretch your legs, yeah! And you can get caught up with everyone.”

“The last person I saw almost went running for an exorcist, Varian. I am not seeing anyone today, not until Porter has time—”

“It’ll be fine. It’ll be totally—”

“Varian!”

Varian swallowed. “Yes, sir?”

“Get the money.” Quirin rubbed his temples while Varian went to the cabinet in the next room, where they kept their pocket money in a pouch.

When Varian came back in, he gasped and ran over to grip Quirin’s shoulder. “Are you sick?”

“No, but I am very tired.”

“Okay. Okay, I’ll get going then.”

“You don’t have to go this very sec—”

But Varian had already gone.

While Varian was away, Quirin picked what he found out of the garden. There was only a meager offering, since what was growing was only the self-sowing plants: cucumbers, strawberries, asparagus, and radishes. It was all rather frustrating, and he couldn't even blame the gluttonous raccoon for this scarcity.

When he went back into the kitchen, carrying his basket of vegetables like a moon-besotted vegetarian, he couldn’t believe his eyes when Varian walked in as well. How could the boy have gone shopping so quickly? Had they moved the town while he was in the amber?

They placed their baskets on the table. The contents of Quirin’s: vegetables and fruit. Varian’s: one singular loaf of bread and a block of Gouda.

“Uh, were they out of food?” Quirin asked.

Varian flushed. “Not enough?”

“What do you think?”

Varian looked away, rubbing his hip.

Quirin huffed in annoyance. “What’s wrong?”

“Can I just … can I just go lie down? I don’t feel well.”

“It’s because you were up all night.”

Varian kept his silence, rocking from foot to foot. It was true, he didn’t look well. His face was unnaturally pale but for two spots of color on his cheeks, as though from a fever, and his eyelids were thick and raw. Quirin put his palm against Varian’s forehead. If anything, Varian felt cool, not hot.

But Varian—he leaned forward into Quirin’s hand, and pressed his owns hand over it, holding it against his forehead. “Can I just go lie down?” he murmured, his tone colorless.

Quirin stared. It was as if he had never seen his son before. Words stuck in his throat like dry pebbles. Why couldn’t he speak?

Varian dropped Quirin’s hand and turned away, dragging his feet from the kitchen. After a moment, there was a squeak from his bedroom door.

The blood-sound thumped thick in Quirin’s ears. What was this sudden fear?

Varian’s lie-down didn’t last long. After an hour, he was up again, cleaning the house.

From the age of eleven, when he surpassed even his tutor’s skills and brought an end to his formal schooling, Varian had been in charge of the house. After a morning of chores, he helped on the farm, and spent the afternoons studying. He cooked most meals, thinking of it as an extension of alchemy. In his cleaning, he applied his alchemy too. He seemed to understand Quirin was very busy with working the farm and leading the village and occupied himself without complaint.

It was good to see Varian hadn’t lost his industriousness over the past year. He swept and dusted and brushed the broom against cobwebs with practiced ease, without the clumsiness that had once been endearing. Quirin helped, but goodness gracious, he was little more than useless! He didn’t remember being in the amber, but his body did. Tiring easily, he had to sit often, drinking water and wine for fortification. In these restful moments, he balanced a quill and paper against his knee and drew up plans for getting the crops going again.

It was in one of these moments, when Quirin sat making plans on the sitting room sofa, that he decided to approach the subject of clothes. Varian was stretched out on his knees, cleaning the fireplace, which gave Quirin a perfect view of just how badly his clothes fit. What a ragamuffin.

“Don’t you have any new clothes?” Quirin asked.

“I’ll clean up.”

“Those are too small. You haven’t been wearing them the past year, have you?”

Varian swept the ashes carefully into the dustpan. “I’ve had other clothes, but I don’t like them.”

“Well, wear them.”

Varian’s mouth became firm. “It’s only one outfit.”

“We’ll go shopping for food tomorrow, and we’ll see the seamstress while we’re there. I’ll spend some marks on something nice.”

“I’m fine with these. Couldn’t we skip it?”

“What are we to do about food, Varian?”

A knock at the front door interrupted them, and since Varian was hardly in a state fit to be seen, Quirin arose to answer it.

A man dressed in purple livery was on the other side of the door. His eyelids rode low over his eyes, as if he was shielding himself from the horror of visiting the humble and dirty countryside. A palace servant.

“A gift from the Princess.” The words smoothed out from his mouth like a worm from the dirt.

Behind him stood three more liveried servants, emptying a carriage from baskets, bags, and boxes, stacking them teetering high in their arms. They were rather used to getting their way, and Quirin barely got out of their way before they were walking past him into his home, past the sitting room where Varian watched them with wonder. Somehow, they seemed to know where the kitchen was, where they divested their baskets, bags, and boxes onto every available surface. They made two more trips while Quirin stood in the middle of all this, running a hand through his hair as things piled up around him.

“I really can’t accept—”

The servant oiled more words from his mouth, with as much interest as he might observe it was yet another sunny day in Corona: “A good day to you, sir.”

And they were gone.

Quirin put his hands on his hips and sighed.

Food. It was all food. Ham, preserves, sausage, eggs, cabbage, potatoes, cheese, honey, coffee, rolls, bread, butter, tea, sugar, flour, various spices, nuts, bacon, asparagus, tomatoes, apple cider, Läckerli, and even a cold roast goose. Gratitude warmed Quirin, but he was also a little embarrassed and nonplussed besides.

Laughing, Varian hefted a bag of flour half his size into his arms. His eyes danced. “I guess you can save your marks, Dad.”

“This doesn’t get you out of getting clothes,” Quirin grumbled.

They spent the rest of the day stowing the food away. They had a brilliant dinner in which they were quite pleased with themselves, and Varian finally began to relax, putting off his nervousness, being amused and telling jokes. It couldn’t have been a better end to the day.

After dinner, Quirin retired to the sitting room to plan the farm again, while Varian stayed in the kitchen to clean the dinner mess. Sitting at the desk had Quirin’s legs prickling all over; he wasn’t used to being inside all day. He stepped outside to breathe in the evening.

Corona had fallen into the earliest stages of sunset: the mountains were painted purple as the sun dipped behind them. In the deeper shadows, a few aspiring glowworms blinked yellow and green. Somewhere, Agnetha, the shepherdess, was kulning her cattle home with a song haunting, foreign, and ancient. There was no way he had missed more than a year of this. This was a dream.

The prosaic sound of feet on gravel awakened him to the reality. Porter appeared out of the gloom, walking down the walkway.

Porter, the deputy burgomaster, his right-hand man. Quirin’s best friend.

Few villagers understood why they were such good friends. They considered Quirin as salt-of-the-earth type, and Porter as the exact opposite. While Porter would never be in position to call himself a gentleman, he played the part. He loved to cross his delicate ankles at dinner and sigh, and with an aristocratic tilt of his head, say drowsily, “It’s this pesky working for a living that keeps me from being utterly dissipated.” The villagers rolled their eyes but voted him for deputy burgomaster every year.

Which suited Quirin just fine. Porter moved as though every action was against the dullness of life, but worked with an efficiency and intelligence that showed his worth. He was the town’s scrivener, reading and copying the legal texts most Old Coronans would not understand. His sister, Janice, was the village tutor. They were educated, but not high-and-mighty, and understood Quirin was not just some backwoods farmer. They were people Quirin could be himself with, not the village leader.

Quirin waited while Porter got close. When the man reached the bottom of the porch steps, he breathed out deeply, his gray eyes opened like two huge maws—a greedy expression. After a moment of hesitation, he came up the stairs and rested his weight on one upturned hip.

“Quirin.”

“Took you long enough. When did Ambrose tell you?”

“This morning. Early this morning. Too early. I thought the ninny had a nightmare.” Porter put his hand against Quirin’s shoulder, a fleshy weight. “And then some dingbat from the capital came and I had to deal with that and then the people and … I had to think.”

“No wonder it took you all day then.”

Porter laughed as Quirin led him inside to the parlor, where he sat at his favorite seat at the table and propped his ankle on the footrest. Quirin begged pardon and blew the dust off the tablecloth, before pulling a third chair up to the table. Then he went to the kitchen to get something to drink. The room was empty, but the back door was open. He found Varian in their scrappy garden, fingers aglow with glowworms.

“Porter’s inside!”

The glowworms spilled out from Varian’s hands, who wafted up around his head. Their green light cast weird shadows on his face. “Huh?”

Quirin pointed inside, then took three cups of apple cider to the parlor. After distributing the cups, he sat, and they each took long pulls.

Porter coughed and looked at the third cup, before smiling at Quirin. “This is unreal.”

“You really think so?”

“There’s that earnestness I’ve been missing. When did you …?”

“Yesterday. The Princess and her … magic hair.”

“Really? Well, well, yes, someone said they saw her. Earl, was it? At the well. He was chasing sheep around, I presume. That makes sense.

“You see, they—these dingbats from the capital, I should know them, right?—took down the sign outside. Yesterday. The one saying to stay away. Did you know you were condemned?” Porter frowned. “Why didn’t she get you out last year?”

Quirin looked towards the third cup. Where was Varian?

“I couldn’t begin to tell you.”

“Hmm.” Looking around to adjust the curtain that was brushing the back of his head, Porter said, “I ignored the ‘Condemned’ sign.”

The backs of Quirin’s legs hardened into posts. Porter’s eyes darted to the door, but when Quirin turned to look, no one was there. “That must have been strange.”

“There isn’t a word that exists in any language that aptly explains it. But yes, yes, it was strange. You know, if you had wanted a vacation so bad, you could have just asked.”

“Ha!” And because there were a hundred thousand questions piling up behind Porter’s eyes, none of which Quirin could answer, he changed the subject. “Tell me what I’ve missed.”

So Quirin learned about how Old Corona had been suddenly evacuated more than a year ago, to the new land granted to them. Most of them lived in tents before slowly being sent off to various towns. Once the black rocks retreated back into the earth, they were permitted to return and rebuild. Only half of the standing buildings were currently usable, and parts of the town might never be recovered, but they were rebuilding, slowly.

Quirin asked a question that panged him. “Who’s the new burgomaster?”

Porter smiled rather too cutely.

“Oh, they gave it to Janice!” Quirin responded, slickly. “How does it feel being brother to a burgoma—pardon—burgomistress?”

“I see you’ve lost none of your wit.”

“Congratulations, Porter.” Raising the cup to his lips, Quirin smashed down the prick of pain in his chest. This wasn’t a rejection—he’d been basically dead, hardly a contender for his old position.

“I've missed you. I don't look as funny without my straight man.” Porter's mouth twisted into a half smirk, before falling straight. His eyes looked distant as he stared into the cup he spun on the tabletop. “How is …” His expression was tight, unlike his normal lazy ease. He darted a look at the third cup. “How is Varian doing?”

“Doing.” Quirin’s vision blurred as his eyes pinched. “You’re not the first person to be strange about him today. Ambrose just about lost his mind.”

“Not everyone has heard yet. We only got news of the pardon this morning.”

It seemed as though Quirin had fallen out of his chair, but that wasn’t right, because he was still sitting in it, looking at Porter has if the man hadn’t made the most absurd statement.

Pardon?

Pardon, but “pardon”?

Excuse his pun, but “pardon”?

He had misheard Porter, of course. That wasn’t panic like a galloping horse in his veins, and he hadn’t heard Porter right. There were a thousand alternative “P” words to think of. And rhyming words. Like garden. And Spartan. Parson (a good contender, since it also began with “P”). Ah yes, they hadn’t heard about the “jargon.”

“P-pardon?” Quirin asked, grinning.

“Are you making a pun? Well, it’s good if you can joke about it. A lot of people—”

“What the Devil are you talking about?”

Porter’s eyes shot upwards, then widened. “They … Quirin, you don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“They didn’t tell you?”

The decorative ridges of the tin cup cut into Quirin’s palm as he squeezed it.

Somehow, the gray in Porter’s eyes faded into white as he said, “Varian has been in prison for the last year.”

Chapter Text

The amber had destroyed Quirin’s hearing, shedding crystallizations everywhere, underneath his skin, into his hands and feet, into his heart and brain, and now, as he realized, into his ears.

This was the conclusion Quirin came to, sitting in his parlor, with Porter eying him from the other side of the table.

Porter had just told him, with a sturdy and serious voice (not in the breezy tease which characterized his speech), that “Varian has been in prison for the last year.”

“Well, that’s not helpful,” Quirin replied, spinning his cup on the tablecloth.

It wasn’t helpful at all when Porter narrowed his eyes and tilted his head in what seemed like disbelief.

“That’s not helpful at all,” Quirin repeated.

If Porter had really wanted to be helpful, he should offer to get a … what was it? An otolaryngolo—an ear doctor!

“Orphanage,” Quirin corrected.

Porter also wasn’t helpful when he answered “No, not orphanage. Prison.” And he definitely wasn’t helpful when he said, “No. Prison. P-R-I …”

“O-R-P …” Quirin insisted.

“You know what? I’m going to go. I’m just gonna … yeah,” Porter said shrewdly, and then showed himself out. His heels clicked stylishly on the stonework as he went, except they were too rushed to come across as the devil-may-care attitude of a man-about-town. Almost like he was fleeing.

Quirin watched him go, with no farewell or doing anything like a good host, before going to find Varian to have that talk he had promised. The hallway from the parlor to the kitchen seemed a mile long.

It was all pure nonsense. Porter had meant “orphanage.” Because that’s where children without parents go.

(Except, there was the feeling within him of ... he was chillingly certain it was prison!)

It was all very simple. Varian hadn’t been put into prison-prison, but had been detained by the state and put into some sort of juvenile “troublemakers” orphanage, probably because he had done something foolish with alchemy again. Quirin hadn’t been there to explain Varian hadn’t meant ill by it (whatever it had been), but merely suffered an overabundance of brains and an under-abundance of caution. The boy was reckless, but not ill-intentioned. Never ill-intentioned.

Quirin pinched himself between the thumb and forefinger, and yes, he was awake. And he had figured it out. Good job, Quirin!

He walked into the kitchen with a flutter of relief patting him like a man does to his dog.

Horror smacked him at the door.

The kitchen was aglow with hot and fire from the hearth, and Varian stood at the table, scrubbing a cloth across it. His knuckles were brilliant red, chapped from dipping the rag into the steaming pot of water nearby. He scrubbed at the same spot on the table as if he was sanding it, his breath quick and tinny. Here he’d been, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning a room already clean.

He stood up when he realized Quirin had entered the room, wringing the cloth as his cheeks went cadaverous gray. Quirin could only guess how his own face must have looked; he couldn’t even feel it. Varian bobbed.

Gripping his hands together, Quirin knocked his knuckles against his lips. He would handle this calmly. “Porter said—”

“No!”

Quirin’s jaw went slack.

Varian threw the cloth against the table, his face pinched into a scowl. But underneath that expression, the truth: his dark eyes were two deep pools with some frightened creature lurking below the surface.

“No!” he shouted.

Quirin stood by and let him run out. As Varian passed, how thin and desperate his breath was.

It was times like these Quirin knew to control himself more than ever. To make himself soft. On the edge of nauseous, he trudged up the stairs to Varian’s room, having to stop once and hang off the handrail, breathing.

By the time he entered, Varian had already thrown himself into bed and tossed the blanket over his head, so like a child. Quirin poised himself on the edge of the mattress, dipping down into it, looking at the shape of Varian huddled under the covers.

“Tell me what happened.”

Silence passed. So much silence passed, Quirin thought Varian refused to speak. Just when he was going to ask again, Varian spoke, although in a voice so small, Quirin had to bend to hear it.

“What did Porter tell you?”

“That you were in prison.” Quirin rubbed his palm against his brow. “For a year.”

“It was not a whole year.”

It didn’t matter how long it had been.

Quirin jerked the blanket from Varian’s face. Varian faced the opposite direction, his freckles standing out stark and tall from his cheeks.

“What happened?” Quirin asked.

“What did Porter say?”

“He didn’t tell me anything, but if you think you can lie—”

“I’m not!” Breathing deeply, Varian covered his mouth, swallowing hard. “I know I should have told you earlier … but I …. Can we talk about this later?”

“No.”

Varian whipped the blanket over his head.

“Varian?”

He didn’t answer.

“You can’t hide from this.”

He still didn’t answer.

“Varian!” Quirin put his hand on Varian’s shoulder and tightened his grip, until his back teeth hurt. All his prior denying silliness was wrenched from him, and he grasped anger in its place. “If I have to find out what I need from someone else—”

“No! No, I’ll tell you everything! I just need time to think.”

“You’ve had ‘not a whole year’ to think about it. We—”

The blanket went flying back as Varian scrambled out of bed to Quirin’s side, a flurry of kneecaps. Was he going to run again? No. He dropped to his knees, pulled the chamber pot out from under the bed, and with heaving shoulders, threw up. Quirin put bracing hands to Varian’s trembling shoulders. When Varian finished gagging, he rocked himself on his knees, gasping.

“Don’t move,” Quirin said.

He fetched a cloth and cup of water from the kitchen. Varian cleansed his mouth, his movements fragile, as if he was shocked at the aggressiveness of his own vulnerability. Quirin put a hand against Varian’s forehead. He didn’t feel feverish, although his eyes were unusually bright and liquid. Then after pushing the chamber pot out the door, Quirin sat against the bed beside Varian. Varian’s lips were so blanched they looked like ribbons of twisted paper.

He was rubbing his hip again. The way it moved caught Quirin’s attention, how it went up a fraction of an inch before coming back down, as if sliding over something in Varian’s pocket.

Quirin tapped his fingers against his knee. He should let this go, just for tonight. They’d been through too much too quickly. But the need to know pounded on him. How could he fix what was broken and bring peace to their lives if he didn’t know what was wrong?

Quirin reached towards Varian’s pocket.

Gasping, Varian clamped both hands over his hip. Moisture—thick, black, and inky—gathered on his eyelashes.

Quirin wrapped a hand around one of Varian’s thin wrists, feeling the heartbeat quick and quavering, like a bird’s wing beating in his palm. He then slid an arm around Varian’s shoulders and waited. Varian kept his hands grasping over his pocket, his face turning red with a fight no one was fighting. Then slowly, the wild desperation in his eyes ebbed away, and his hands loosened. He sat still while Quirin pushed his fingers into the pocket and pulled out the paper inside. Varian leaned away, resting his temple against the mattress.

It wasn’t actually paper, but parchment. Very official, its authority stamped in the curling edges.

Quirin propped himself forward on his knees, and with fingers both numb and tingling, unfolded the parchment. Were it his hands doing this? They seemed to belong to someone else. But the parchment was like velvet under his fingertips. The smell of ink punched him in the nose.

It was a lengthy note, signed by Princess Rapunzel and stamped with the seal of the Kingdom of Corona. He scanned it for the important pieces: “Hereby signed by Rapunzel, Acting Queen, on this day”—Quirin jerked. Only two days ago. “… in consideration of act of loyal service to Crown and Country … bravery … resistance to usurpation by hostile foreign actors ….”

Quirin spared a glance for his son, but Varian still had his back turned.

—conviction for the crimes of—

None of this was real. He was still trapped, and this was just a dream, a concoction of his fevered mind to make sense of his imprisonment.

He barely comprehended what he read:

“Princess Rapunzel, by the grace of God, of the Kingdom of Corona, Acting Queen, to all whom it may concern:

Know ye, We in consideration of act of loyal service to Crown and Country, acts of great bravery and risk of life and limb, in resistance to usurpation by hostile foreign actors, are graciously pleased to extend Our grace and mercy and do remit to the said Varian, son of Quirin and Ulla, of Old Corona, the unserved portion of his fixed-term imprisonment imposed upon him for the following convictions:

And pardon and remit the convictions for the crimes of: High Treasons, Rebellions, Kidnappings, and Assaults upon King and Country:

And forthwith, forbid prosecution for any other alleged crime occurring before this date,

By Her Majesty’s command.”

Quirin read and reread the parchment a half dozen times, until the shaking in his hand became so violent he couldn’t read the words on the page anymore. His heart beat like he was being chased. He laid the parchment to the side.

The sickening sweetness of nausea rose up in him and he swallowed the saliva that filled his mouth. Breathing through his nose, he clenched his eyes and waited. After a moment, over the sound of his own heartbeat and straining muscles, and through the dark world he had made for himself, emerged another sound: Varian breathing. He listened to that. In this amber he made for himself, he listened to that.

Varian cried out, “Dad! Your hand!”

Quirin opened his eyes and looked. He had been pinching the webbing between his fingers again, pinching so hard he had dug in his nails and broke the skin. Blood flowed out, bright and grisly.

It didn’t matter.

He seized Varian by the shoulders. Varian mewled and clamped his eyes shut, and stiffened like a cold and rigid doll in Quirin’s hands.

“Look at me!” Quirin demanded.

Varian shook his head.

“Look at me!”

Varian obeyed. Quirin grabbed his chin and tilted his face up, probing into those engorged black pupils. Was this child (this man, maybe) not really his, but some changeling? Varian trembled.

Quirin let loose and arose, going to the nightstand to splash his thumb with the cup of water sitting there. The blood dripping down his palm was warm. While he cleansed himself, he ran his tongue along the backside of his teeth, counting each one. Three times, before the bleeding stopped.

“Tell me what happened,” he rasped.

Varian clasped his hands to his chest and quivered on his knees. But he told the story. In a voice almost as low in the dirt as he looked, like a chirping bird fallen from its nest, he told the story, twisting his face away until all Quirin saw was the edge of a pale cheek.

“I convinced Rapunzel to help me steal the Sun Drop Flower. When that didn’t work, I built a machine and attacked the castle.” He went on like this, sparing the details and going for the blunt truth, with no excuses or explanations. And even in this way, he explained the end of it all: “I helped Rapunzel to fight off the Saporians. That’s why the pardon.”

The room fell to silence.

What was there to say?

Quirin sat on his knees, leaning back against the bed, and bent his face towards the ceiling. His thoughts were so silent even he couldn’t hear them.

A ragged whisper touched his ear: “Dad, say something. Dad, please say something.”

What was there to say? There was nothing. Quirin couldn’t even move, his limbs caught in the same old quagmire from the past year. An ache squeezed the back of his throat, but he willed it away.

The sound of shuffling tipped his face down. Varian, with hunched shoulders, had turned towards him. His eyelashes casting deep shadows on his cheeks, he pushed himself forward on his knees inch by inch, until he was knee to knee with Quirin. Then hesitating, trembling, questioning, he laid his forehead against Quirin’s chest. And waited.

Quirin listened to Varian breathe. Those heavy sighs, with the slight tremble at the end of the exhale. That forehead was as hard as ivory against his collarbone.

He understood the question. It was like swallowing a spoonful of briers.

Quirin tilted his cheek against that waiting head. What a power he had! What a monstrous, awful power. If he so chose, or even if he wasn't careful, he could crush his son.

He still had nothing to say, but he took Varian into his arms. He waited for his heart to wrench to its expected end, but there was nothing. So he whispered, “I love you.”

Still, he felt nothing.

But Varian melted, and his sharp shoulder blades jerked into Quirin’s palms. He wept not the bawling, confused cries of a child, but the great, hitching sobs of an adult who has awakened to the cruelty that was within the world, and within himself. This was not how Varian cried before.

Quirin cradled his son—his strange, heartbroken son.

Quirin felt peculiar. He felt so peculiar, like somehow the pieces of his life weren’t adding up, like the things that had happened before had no bearing on the things that were happening now.

It was morning, and he had come outside, because it was the thing he was used to doing. What happened last night had nothing to do with today. He simply got up, got dressed, and came out, where two red deer, glorious and sublime, were surprising him by fleeing from a thicket, their rumps bouncing brown and white in the rhododendron bushes.

Quirin stopped and watched them. If only he had his crossbow. Yeah, hunting was a wonderful idea. Such a freeing idea. To feel the anticipation of loading a bolt into the groove, of containing that tension in his hands, and to wait, breathless, before depressing the trigger under his ambitious finger at the right moment, and then snap! Satisfaction, if he hit his target. And if he brought home dinner, at least he would have done something right.

(He didn’t know what to say.)

Although he had spent another sleepless night, he had gotten up earlier than usual. When he had looked out the window, a rich orange light had crowned the edge of a bleak sky, like a bit of lace at the bottom of a celestial skirt. As if last night had not happened. And after he dressed, he nudged open Varian’s bedroom door and peeked in. Varian looked asleep, still in the same position Quirin had left him last night.

Last night … last night had nothing to do with today. It was its own little world, cut off from this one.

For all its weightlessness, he remembered it well enough. He walked the edge of the fields, and remembered the feeling of Varian’s head against his chest. How the eager cries had soothed into quiet gasps, before slipping into the gentle, deep sighs of sleep. Quirin didn’t remember how Varian had gotten into bed after that (he was cut off from that world, after all), except he must have been the one to put his son there.

Yes, that was right. After Varian had fallen asleep, Quirin had lifted him into the bed, smoothed the blanket over him, and then sat, pulling the bangs back from Varian’s face and peering down at the waxy forehead, smooth and rounded like lamp glass. He had rubbed a thumb against the red freckled cheeks, still so lustrous like a child’s, and wanted to kiss those cheeks to see if it could stir his cold heart. He was afraid. He did not kiss that cheek.

When he awoke this morning, his heart was still cold. It was how he knew last night existed entirely within itself.

Outside, the air was cool and fresh, and his breath rose up in pockets of mist, as they do when the world is full of possibilities. But as he surveyed the fields, the sun rose in its strength and the land lightened to show its full measure, and Quirin saw the reality.

It was hopeless.

Birch seedlings were growing in the pumpkin field. Stubborn birch, not so easily discarded as simple weeds. Everything needed a plowing, but he had no horses to pull the plow. Everything needed cultivating, but he had no farmhands, and no man could do it all alone. And because there had been no harvest, there was no seed.

It was simply impossible for one man.

(He didn’t know what to say.)

What he should do is do nothing and allow the fields to fall to bitter shambles, in a passive destruction. But because there was rhubarb and asparagus growing in the garden, and because the cherry trees were laden with red, he chose a field to pull weeds.

It didn’t take long for the sweat to spring out of him. It was only mid-morning, but beams of sunlight, peeling through stubborn gray and white clouds, cooked his back. Mist clung still to the darker corners of the world. There was no reason to be hot already.

Quirin powered through a growing weakness in his limbs, tearing through weeds. To tug on them—how they clung to the earth with desperation, fighting him, in that ancient battle ever since Man invented agriculture. Sweating, he pulled until his rabid tenacity finally overtook them, and their roots split, in wholes or halves or to tiny shreds. A slap of juices against the earth. The rip of them, the stench of dirt as it smacked up in clods, the bite of rough stems in his hands—even his gloves couldn’t protect him. Yet, through it all, he felt cold.

He fell to his knees, and bending over the pile he had made, growled between clenched teeth, “I’ll burn every last weed! I’ll burn every last weed!”

By late morning, waves of floaty nothingness wafted over him, and he could have lifted up from the planet, as victim to the vagaries of the wind as a nebulous dandelion seed. His pulse beat the blood-sound in his ears. All right. So his body was making demands that he shouldn’t ignore.

His thoughts turned to Varian. Varian should have left out some breakfast by now. The boy always awoke ravenous. He’ll have set something out by now, like he always did.

But when Quirin went inside through the kitchen door, he found a bare table. There was nothing. Not even stale bread. There wasn’t even a fire in the hearth, so it wasn’t as though Varian had cooked something for himself but nothing for his useless father. Was Varian even up? Of course, he was. He must be.

Quirin went to find Varian, figuring that the boy must be in the lab—except as he passed by the sitting room, a movement from within caught his eye. Ah! What? Varian was laying on the sofa, bare feet tucked up on the cushion. Ridiculous!

“Varian!” Quirin’s soles came smacking down as he stomped in.

Varian shot up, an odd illumination in his face.

“What are you doing? We have work to do! It’s after ten—”

Varian’s abyssal eyes silenced him. All the words in Quirin’s mouth fell out, tumbling down the front of his shirt. Rubbing his mouth, as if to gather them up again, Quirin wondered what Varian’s look was. The look was … the look was fright.

Quirin walked the circumference of the room, to get the steam out of him, before standing in front of the sofa. “What’s wrong?”

Varian shook his head, mouth hanging open. He seemed to be waiting.

Running out the door so early in the morning, without a word to Varian, hadn’t been smart. Not now. Not when Varian had only last night asked that question, in that way.

Last night and today were tied, and Quirin could not forget it.

“I’ll make breakfast,” Quirin said, gentling his tone until it was almost too fragile to hold. He cleared his throat, searching for that strength. “But you need to get dressed. You slept in that, right? Get dressed. I need your help today.”

Still looking blanched and petrified, Varian nodded. “Yes, sir.”

They did not need for Varian to become melancholic. Quirin would keep him busy—too busy to think.

While Varian dressed, Quirin got together a simple and cold breakfast of fruit, salami, and bread (oh, when would they be done with this stale bread!). He stopped often to drink water, but it seemed too warm, and he was tempted to risk drinking it unpurified, straight from the well, to have something cool in his mouth.

Varian came to the table, wearing more clothes stretched like a tent over a pole, and ate in fitful little bites, daydreaming more than eating. Where his sleeves rolled up were much too tight, pressing and leaving a trail of red marks on his arms. That was irritating. What was more irritating was that he could wear that shirt at all. Quirin had long given up the dream of a son that took after him, especially since Quirin had been nearly his adult height by age sixteen, but Varian seemed determined to top out at a height not even reaching Ulla’s.

The strawberry Quirin chewed turned to mush as he chewed it past the point of necessity. No man could eat a strawberry with these thoughts in his head! What if … what if the reason Varian was so small was because of prison?

He’d heard of children not growing because of not getting good food or even from being abused. Had prison done this? While he had been in there, had Varian gotten enough to eat? Had he been warm or cool and had he slept? Most of all, had he been safe? Prison was for cruel and idle men, to terrorize each other. Had they terrorized Varian?

“We need to get you some new clothes,” Quirin murmured, wondering Had they? Had they?

Varian looked as if Quirin had asked him to stick an awl up his nose and twist. “Do I have to?”

“You can become a nudist on your own time.”

Varian flicked his eyes away. “I mean, do I have to go to town?”

“Do you plan on taking up textile making? Weaving? Spinning? Sheep shearing?”

“I just thought, maybe, they could come here.”

“Seamstresses and shoe cobblers don’t make house calls.”

“They could.”

“No.”

Varian furrowed his brow for a minute. “Maybe you could take my old clothes and have the seamstress make them over again, just a little bigger.”

“Oh, beloved heaven!”

Slamming his eyelids like fleshy shutters, Varian said earnestly, “I have decided to become a hermit.”

“Even hermits need clothes.”

With those words, Varian hid his face in the table.

Quirin was not being harsh. He remembered something his childhood priest had once said: “The way of despondency is profitless and self-indulgent, where the cruelties of the world become magnified to gluttonous extravagances.” That was how the man had spoken, like big words had an expiration date on them. But, nonetheless, what the man had said was true. Secluding oneself was a good path to melancholy.

But these weren’t the thoughts told to a child. Quirin would guide Varian with an unyielding but gentle authority, as he always had. (Now that he admitted that last night and today were linked.)

The weather had only gotten more oppressive by the time they went out to the fields. The sky was a shadow-silk, but thick and cloying humidity had moved in, making Quirin’s shirt stick to his back. They pulled and cut bushes, anything too stubborn to be pulled up by a plow, and Varian’s arms showed white instead of their regular tan. This work should fix that.

For two hours they worked this way: pulling, ripping, tearing, cutting. Working in rows, they worked towards each other, and then silently moved on to the next row when they met in the middle.

But the end of the second hour, Varian suddenly stopped. He was near the midpoint of the row, a dozen yards or so from Quirin, when he sank to his knees and turned his back, his arms going around himself in a clasp. Even from where Quirin was standing, he could see how Varian’s fingertips turned white, and how his crisp little shoulders convulsed.

A monster of a black gadfly landed on Varian’s back. It crawled over the landscape of his back, its elongated and engorged body pulsing. Its six wizened legs twitched, and at times stopped and rubbed together, like the hands of a miser counting his coffer.

That floaty nothingness was over Quirin again, and he held his breath, trying to breathe. The wind rushed through him and picked him up, and the earth fell away under his toes. Drifting over those dozen yards, Quirin found himself above Varian, and then his knees failed, and he was kneeling in the dirt too, brushing away the fly as he pulled Varian’s back against his chest. His forearm tingled where Varian clung to it, and then Varian was pushing his hand up to press against his hot, smooth forehead. Wet was in Quirin’s palm, and a shock wave swathed across his body, to his fingertips and toes. How could heartache feel so real?

Instinctively, the words that had spilled away from Quirin earlier spilled out again, not to be lost this time, but for Varian to hear: “I’m with you. I’m here.”

He knew what to say now.

Chapter Text

There was a ghost living within their four walls. That’s right, a ghost! A faint one that didn’t wish to be seen. It lurked in the corners and peeked out from behind the doors. Whenever Quirin turned to look, it vanished.

I’m not here, it said. I was never here, no matter what you have thought all these years.

Quirin wasn’t a superstitious sort, but the air in their home gave him the heebie-jeebies. It was stifling, like trying to breathe from the inside of a volcano. Everything was set to explode, a column of ash and smoke settled like a lid over the hot kettle of their lives. Opening the windows did no good. The breeze that went tickling over all the green crops that weren’t Quirin’s, making them to dance, and enticing the trees to waggle their leaves--that gentle, good breeze steered clear of them.

Blaugh. Being haunted was no fun at all.

But nope, Quirin wasn’t superstitious (although he could tell a good ghost story) and forgot about being haunted. It was just a silly thought bouncing around his head, probably somehow drifting in there through some microscopic wind tunnel in the amber. He would focus on life. Life was just ordinary business.

Ordinary business wasn’t precisely exciting, but it got him up in the mornings. It got Varian up too. Or rather, Quirin got Varian up in the mornings.

“Varian, Varian, it’s time to wake up. It’s time to work,” he’d say, pressing a thumb into a skinny but pliant arm.

Varian always awoke the same way: with one eyelid peeling itself from one eyeball, then a hard squint, with no intelligence in that eye, before the second lid sprang up. Then both lids smacked down again, and an inhuman groan proceeded from beneath. Auuugagghh. Then, disbelieving, “You’re here.”

Quirin always let that go. He’d pop down to the kitchen and make breakfast while Varian got dressed. After breakfast, he rushed Varian outdoors, talking about all his big plans.

“I’ve been looking over the figures, and I think we can handle one-eighth of the farm between ourselves. We’ll grow easy crops and focus on the orchards. We’ll put in some long hours, but we can do it. The full moon will be our friend.”

Varian would shovel, hack, and saw without a word, bleary-eyed and bleary-faced, drifting in a state of automation. He only ever perked up when a villager came by.

Inevitably, there was a villager. Porter had done a burgomaster thing and called a town meeting to explain that: no, the pressure hadn’t gotten to Ambrose—Quirin was indeed alive and kicking. This meant any number of villagers dropping by to see the dead-man-walking for themselves, which also meant a number of escapes on Varian’s account. He vanished with the whimsical breeze continuously, leaving his spade abandoned in the dirt, ages before Quirin even realized somebody was coming.

“How are you?” the villagers asked Quirin, but with the real question in their eyes: How are you?

There wasn’t so much a hint but a blaring, fiery trumpet of quizzical, uncertain fear behind their every word. Their eyes drifted curiously around (between bouts of looking at him like he was a miracle), hedging towards the manor, before darting away, as if they weren’t able to hold on to courage anymore. When they fixed their eyes on him, it was gently pitying.

And Quirin said all the things he should say, leaving it all vague and rather meaningless, like their questions to him. They had treated him this way two times before, with graceful and delicate compassion, when he’d been through some loss. So frustrating! This wasn’t like those times. No one had died. It was just ordinary business.

Varian languished in their haunted home until the visitors had gone, or Quirin came in, and they whiled the night away over backgammon. Quirin made Varian play until his blinks became sluggish, and his once luminous eyes became wan, and then it was off to bed. Quirin fell into bed himself, limbs quivering, aching from exhaustion. But what else was there to do? Above all, Varian mustn’t become melancholic.

This plan to keep Varian working, so he wouldn’t fall into despondency, took its toll. Strange and alarming dreams plagued Quirin. He dreamed a gadfly flew into his eye, one as big as the one that had tormented Varian. Even after he had jerked himself awake, his eye hurt with a phantom pain, where it had collided in his dream. Later, he dreamed of a baby crying, but no matter how and where he looked, he could not find the baby. Most distressing of all, he dreamed of a yearning shadow figure standing at the foot of his bed.

“Varian? What are you doing?” Quirin asked it.

“I …” The shadow-Varian reached out, some begging in his arms.

“Go back to bed.”

The next morning, Quirin lay awake in bed, shaking off the unsettling freak of this dream. Morning sunlight, shifting soft as silk, moved across the ceiling in arching beams. The sun could go put itself back to bed, as far as he was concerned. Nothing was getting him up.

But … Varian might be awake by now, trapped in some dreary fantasy.

Quirin got up.

The shiver from the past few days walloped him in the back of the head and rifled through his pockets, then tramped up and down his spine like a hobnail-booted cat. He quivered in the sun, feeling not just cold, but glacial. The pang he had felt with Varian in the field had faded, but now his heart felt aphasic and gagged.

“It’s only transitory,” he muttered, putting on his socks. “I only need to take care of Varian, and I’ll feel warm again.”

They would return to the days when Varian was so full of joy, he was mindless with it.

Quirin shivered.

Varian was still asleep. Quirin shook him by the arm, and the boy awoke as he always did, languidly, his eyes barely opening as if starved for sleep. He stared dully at Quirin, and then away. He didn’t say what he always said: “You’re here.”

What was Quirin to do?

Work, that’s what.

“Get up! We’ve overslept.”

When Varian came down to the breakfast table, he was no peppier. He ate listlessly, sighing often. Finally, he said, with a voice of heartbreak, “I wonder if Ruddiger’s okay.”

“I’m sure he’s fine. Raccoons are solitary and can take care of themselves.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Varian hung his head only more, nearly face-planting into his oatmeal.

Quirin cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, son. It’s hard to take the wild out of an animal.”

“But Ruddiger’s not wild. And he doesn’t like being alone.”

Standing, Quirin gathered their dishes. Even Varian’s, although he had barely touched it. It didn’t matter; he wasn’t going to touch it.

“What do you mean? I thought you said Ruddiger ran away.”

“No.” Varian picked up their cups. “I pushed him away.”

Today was a day for tilling the garden.

They couldn’t forget their garden. The crops brought them money, but the garden would keep them from starving. So they would till. They each took a shovel and went down the garden rows, loosening the dirt, digging and turning, digging and turning. That persistent exhaustion smacked Quirin around again, even though soft white clouds veiled the sun, keeping them cool. He flagged. He couldn’t even keep pace with Varian, no matter how much water he drank, no matter what he ate at lunch.

Porter’s “Halloooo!” after lunch was a welcome break. He came around from the front of the manor, followed by Ambrose, who had slung his mailbag crosswise over his chest.

Varian stiffened and dropped the shovel, but before he could dash off, Quirin swooped an arm around his shoulders. A fist clasped the shirt in the small of Quirin’s back, but Varian stayed put. Good. He needed to see this hiding was unnecessary.

“Hello, Porter. Ambrose,” Quirin said.

Porter’s eyes, like hummingbird wings, flickered at Varian, but he smiled lazily and easily, and greeted Varian with a “Hey-o!” Ambrose kept it all business, pulling out a letter from his bag that looked decisively official, what with being emblazoned with the Royal Seal of Corona.

“Ambrose is being all”—Porter twiddled his fingers—“industrious, but I came to escape work. Couple of us fancy gents are bowling at the Greasy Spittoon tonight. We need someone to look down on, you bumpkin!”

“I don’t know. This looks serious,” Quirin answered, taking the letter from Ambrose. There was a dancing, smiling daisy painted in the corner of the “official” royal letter, and knew it was anything but serious. But that weakness was still on him, not preventing his movements, but was always present, as though it was keeping its hand on his shoulder, the way his father had done. He should rest.

Porter and Ambrose left, and he and Varian went into the house after a few more hours. Varian said he would make dinner, so Quirin sat on the sofa in the sitting room, guzzling water and trying to recover his strength. While he rested, he opened the letter.

It was an invitation to Rapunzel’s birthday celebration in three days. This celebration had once been a memorial, but it had always been a public affair, with a standing invitation extended to one and all. But to receive a paper invitation like this meant they must go. A man doesn’t refuse a royal, and besides, she had done so much for him and Varian.

A sharp pain chipped at his heart, but it felt healing. Like squeezing the knot out of a sore muscle. Did the Princess understand what she was doing by sending this invitation? It seemed unfair to accuse her of shallow waters just because she wasn’t still.

But this meant they needed to get Varian new clothes forthwith!

Varian had said he had clothes that fit him. He also kicked up a fuss at the suggestion of going into town, so Quirin would make things easier on the boy. (Maybe by this act of kindness, he could—feel something.) He would take those unwanted but fitting clothes of Varian’s to the seamstress, as a guide to make something else. Maybe it would make a seamstress pitch a fit, but it would do for now. Most of all, it would give Varian extra time to get used to the idea of going to Corona.

Tucking the invitation into his pocket, Quirin went into Varian’s room to find these mystery clothes. Ah, augh! The room was a disaster. While he was a despot when it came to the house, Varian was prone to slovenliness in his room. Piles of books, notebooks, commonplace books, parchment and paper; vials of an alchemical nature, only some of them empty; old inventions; new inventions; the guitar; quills and inkwells; linens. All this lay scattered about, beside the myriad other personal effects and old toys that Varian had outgrown.

There were only the same old pants and shirts in the wardrobe. Quirin groaned. But then, maybe the linens in the corner weren’t linens at all.

Sure enough, when he poked through them, he discovered a shirt, pants, gloves, a long coat, and—what was this thing?—something red. Quirin took them down into the kitchen, where Varian was stirring up a rip-roaring fire in the hearth.

“I take it these are the clothes—”

Varian swooped around, ripped the clothes out of his hands, and cast them into the fire. When Varian whipped around again, his face was more ablaze than the fire itself.

“I told you I don’t like them!” he shouted.

Quirin stared with gaping mouth, before the smell of burning cloth awakened him to his senses. Maybe he could somehow save them. If he reached quickly enough—with the tongs, he’d—but what was he thinking? What a stupid thought! He couldn't fix it.

He turned from the fire and towards Varian’s huffing face. “That was completely unaccept—”

“They’re my clothes! And what are you doing sneaking around my stuff anyway?”

Quirin dropped any pretense for rational patience. “I wasn’t sneaking!” he snapped. “I was trying to help you.”

“I told you—”

“I don’t know what you’re thinking, but you need to straighten up.” Quirin held up a finger. “We are going into town to get you clothes. Tomorrow! We’re invited to the Princess’ birthday in three days.”

“I don’t want to go!”

“Too bad.”

Hands forming into fists at his sides, Varian sputtered, “Well, it will take them more than two days to make my clothes!”

“That’s fine. You can look like a guttersnipe at the festival.”

“Fine!” Varian flung the fireplace poker into the stand. “You can make your own dinner for a change. I’m not hungry.”

“I’m going out for dinner!”

“Fine! Run away!” With that, Varian raced out and took for his room.

Quirin’s jaw dropped. Then he shot out the door, at Varian’s fleeing back, “You clean that pigsty while you’re up there!”

That’d teach him for making impertinent remarks!

Clothes?

Clothes?

They were fighting over clothes now?

They haven’t fought over clothes since Varian was two, when the matter of wearing any clothes at all had been the bone of contention. Ay, how could Quirin have lost his temper over clothes? It wasn’t like him. And a horrible idea, especially now, when it felt like his and Varian’s lives were only being suspended above a precipice by the flimsiest of bubbles.

Quirin scrubbed at his face in frustration from one end of town to the next, until he reached the Greasy Spittoon, and modeled his expression into peace and contentment. But it was the biggest lie he ever told, and all night, there was a rumble within his stomach that had nothing to do with greasy tavern food.

But he smiled and laughed, and all that time spent in the amber meant nothing—he could still bowl a mean game. All the villagers, who were at first delighted to see him, were soon cursing his name and accusing him of cheating, even as they were buying him dinner. He sat on a bench, surrounded by all this revelry, the man-of-the-hour, smiling, laughing, telling jokes, and slapping mosquitoes. If he slapped mosquitoes with more force than was necessary, what did it matter? The red marks on his arms would fade.

They tried to keep him there late. Mason used the excuse of requiring his expertise on a pest problem.

“Do you know how to get rid of raccoons? The little blighter’s eating my currants!”

That was an easy question to get out of: he had never successfully gotten rid of any raccoons.

Porter’s arrival was an excuse Quirin couldn’t get out of so easily.

“He is a despot, a brute, a dictator, a feckless enemy of the people!” the men cried, as Porter sat down with rolling gray eyes. “Duel him to the death! Duel, duel! Who is the one true burgomaster?”

“Is the rabble making noise again?” Porter asked.

Quirin didn’t fight Porter for who had the divine right of kings after all, but he still went home too late, long after nightfall. The house was dark when he got in, the fire in the sitting room just a glimmer of orange in the deep. When he went to his bedroom, he found Varian asleep on his bed.

He knelt next to the bed, and feeling warm suddenly, although the fire wasn’t but more than embers aglow, he swept the hair from Varian’s forehead. What a beautiful boy his boy was! Had he really been so impatient with his son earlier?

Varian opened his eyes, the embers in the hearth reflecting two licks of light deep in his pupils. It took a moment for the bleary confusion of being awakened to lift from those eyes.

“I’m sorry I yelled,” Quirin said, putting a thumb against Varian’s clammy cheek.

“Me too. Dad, please don’t be angry with me.”

Quirin slid his arm under Varian’s head, until the nautilus of Varian’s ear rested in his elbow. “I know you’re scared, but it will be fine. I’ll be with you.”

“I just wish I had some time. Everything’s been happening so fast.”

The corners of Quirin’s mouth cemented, as, deep in the recesses of his heart, he felt a stirring. Seriously? Varian felt like things were going too fast? Quirin had lost over a year in what seemed a minute. If anybody was getting to know fast, it was Quirin!

And what a screaming idiot he was to allow his weariness to make him cranky. Varian had every right to feel scared. He was just a boy.

“I just …” Varian rubbed his cheek where Quirin had touched it. “No one wants to see me.”

“That’s not true—”

“It is true!”

The fire crackled. That snapping wood shot a needle into Quirin, as an ugly suspicion came to him. Was there a tangible reason for this fear of Varian’s?

“When you went to town the other day …” he asked, tightly, “did something happen? Something bad? Is that why you came home so quickly?”

Varian sighed. “No. They just don’t want me.”

“Varian, Ambrose offered to give us a ride to the festival. He wouldn’t have done that if …. And it’s not me the Princess wants at her party.”

Varian’s eyes were distant, until a flicker of a smile teased the left side of his mouth. “Maybe it is you she wants. She might have some very important questions about farming.”

“Critical, of course.”

“Imperative.”

Rapunzel was sending more than just an invitation, but also a message. The pardon meant Varian wasn’t to be punished, but the invitation meant he was forgiven.

“She’s a nice girl,” Quirin murmured. “A good girl.”

It was enough. Varian seemed more relaxed; his head was heavy where it rested in Quirin’s elbow. But when Quirin readied to get up, stiffening his arm to rise, Varian said, hollow-voiced, “I did such things.”

A long moment of silence passed. Quirin’s tongue became a pool of melted gelatin in the bottom of his mouth. He didn’t know how to have this conversation.

Aware of the passage of time, time in which Varian was waiting, Quirin began to speak—slowly, haltingly, hoping the words would come to him as he spoke them. “Your mistakes—”

Varian spasmed. “It wasn’t mistakes! They hate me!”

Quirin put a hand to his shoulder. “Listen to me. People don’t hate children for making mistakes.”

Varian was quiet. It was too dark to clearly see the look on Varian’s face, but the tension in his body released, like a punching an awl into the bottom of a bucket full of water. When he sat up, Varian left a cold place where his head had laid on Quirin’s arm.

“I’m going to my room.”

After Varian had gone, Quirin lay in bed, all night, wondering: had he done something right? Or wrong?

Old Corona had become the land of the sighs.

All day long, Varian was making his best impression of an asthmatic harmonica player. Sighs, all the day long. Sighs at breakfast. Sighs out in the garden. Sighs at lunch. And now that they were out in the garden again, preparing a lettuce bed, sighs, sighs, sighs.

Haah, sweetly. Eee-ha, preponderantly. Huuh-uuh, wistfully. Haah, eee-ha, huuh-uhh.

“Uh-oh, Varian, look. This shovel got rusted.”

Haah.

“Let’s grow a different variety of lettuce this year.”

Eee-ha.

“I’m going to put this earthworm in your hair.”

Huuh-uuh.

Varian wasn’t sighing over rusted-out shovels, new varieties of lettuce, or earthworms, of course (maybe the earthworms, a little). Half of the sighs were directed at the orchard, tree limbs irresistibly hung with cherries, like decorated with heavy red beads. A perfect place for a raccoon, except there were no raccoons.

The other half of Varian’s sighs were directed at his own chest. There wasn’t anything Quirin could do about these sighs. He had said what he had said about the clothes, and furthermore, he had not the ability to make raccoons appear out of thin air.

Eventually, Varian bit the bullet, and asked, “When are we going to get clothes?”

Quirin took a minute to toss rocks out of the garden. Giving Varian another day to get used to the idea might be best. There was no rush anyway, since there was no chance of getting anything new made before the trip to Corona.

“Let’s go tomorrow morning,” he said. “I can borrow a catalogue from the seamstress today. Figure out what you want to order tonight.”

Varian sighed.

After reaching a stage in their garden prep that satisfied even Quirin, he left for town, promising to bring home something special. He visited the seamstress first thing (got a little lost, before he found her in a strange corner, next to the blacksmith), and then puttered about town, trying to find something exciting to take home. If only there was something that would brighten Varian’s countenance. But it was hard to focus, what with half the town rearranged, many of the buildings empty, or others newly built and looking strange.

Too bad. He didn’t even know where they had moved the bakery. If he had to go another morning eating that stale bread, he was going to lose his mind. And it appeared that was exactly what he was going to do. But here was Franklin’s Leightonward Mercantile, in the same old building as before, only the eastern wall was a piecemeal of new siding. There was nothing here to cheer up Varian, but Quirin could buy some lettuce seed. At least one of them would be cheered up!

Franklin’s shop was an enormous stock of every farmer’s supply imaginable, with racks and racks stuffed to the brim, but only ever one person at the counter to assist customers. This meant a wait, and what was worse, Mason was at the counter. Mason was the last man in town who was ever in a hurry, and looked to be settling in for a lengthy session of breeze-shooting with Franklin: the way he leaned against the counter, with his back caving in to make itself comfortable, meant he was in for the long haul.

Quirin went to look at the shovels—nope, nope! Even the rusty one was still serviceable for now. He didn’t have the money to buy unnecessary things. Pivoting on his heels, he drifted back over to look at the seed, where he overheard Mason’s and Franklin’s conversation.

“Why don’t you get a dog?” Franklin asked. “That’d take care of it.”

“Dogs make me sneeze. I set out traps, but it’s too smart for ‘em.”

“Then sit out one night and shoot it.”

“I’d hate to do that. I ain’t a monster!” Mason grumbled. “I’d let it stay around if it didn’t eat all my currants. Cute little thing. Too bad it’s a pig.”

“Have you tried garlic?”

“Garlic? I’m trying to get rid of raccoons, not vampires!”

“It’s just what I heard—”

“Garlic will never work!” Quirin roared. He crossed the store in three continent-crossing steps to pound his fist on the counter. Franklin and Mason stared at him. He hadn’t meant it; it was just that his heart was beating so fast. “Sorry. It’s only the answer is apples!”

Mason rammed his fist onto a tilted hip. “Quirin, you done gone lost your mind. Apples? How’s that going to chase away a raccoon? It’ll only entice it.”

“Exactly! Mason, I think I can take care of your raccoon problem.”

After extracting a promise from Mason not to have him arrested for trespassing, no matter what he might see or hear, Quirin left the store to head for the blackcurrant fields right away. He was in a bit of a rush, since Mason admitted he had put a bounty out for the currant-thief.

“If you wanna catch ‘im, be my guest, but I’d hurry if I were you,” Mason had said, squinting an eye. “I paid Castor to shoot if for me, if he can.”

Quirin stared. “You paid Castor to—! But you just said you’re not a monster!”

“I ain’t. But Castor’s an unrepentant anarchist. He don’t care.”

Quirin walked from one end of the store to the next, before talking to Mason again. “Is he a good shot?”

“He’s better not be shooting up my currants, that’s what!”

“Well, how much did you pay him? Did you low ball him?”

“Fifty marks.”

“Fifty marks! I thought you were a cheapskate! Listen, Mason, you’ve got to call him off. I’ll take care of it for you.”

Mason looked at him with heavy eyelids. “For fifty marks, I suppose.”

“No, no, I’ll do it for free.”

“Hmm. Well, if I see Castor, I’ll tell him to stop. But you’ve gotta get rid of that raccoon today or else I’ll sic Castor on it again. And Castor might already be out there. He seemed eager for the money.”

“Of course, he is! Fifty marks!”

That was when Quirin ran off, with Franklin yelling behind him, “Be careful ‘cause Castor is as bloodthirsty a young man as any, and probably a bad shot to boot!”

Mason followed it up with, “Ya blamed fool!”

There wasn’t anything to argue with Mason: this was the most foolish thing Quirin had ever done. But now was not the time for cold, calculated rationality! (Even if this was only evidence his brain had melted along with the amber, but he was in too good a mood to let it bring him down.)

He was never so grateful as to see Porter as he was now. Porter was lounging against the side of the blacksmith’s, angling a garnet-red apple for his mouth.

“Porter! Don’t eat that!”

Porter jumped out of his skin. “What?”

“Are you busy?”

“Just evading the citizenry.”

Quirin took him by the elbow. “Come with me. I need your help.”

“Moi?”

Ten minutes later, they were standing near the edge of Mason’s field, looking out over row after row of his blackcurrant bushes. The berries were in various stages of ripening, some yellow, some purple, and others black as midnight, looking like so many bunches of perfectly round, tiny grapes.

“Look at how evenly spaced the rows!” Quirin cried. It brought tears to his eyes. Mason was an artist.

Porter was not impressed. He looked from one row to the next, one elegant eyebrow raised like a pup tent over his twitching eye. “You want me to stand here and do what now?”

“Catch a raccoon.”

Porter’s face drained of all color. “You want me to tackle raccoons?” he asked, weakly. He looked again at the fields. Stronger, he asked, “What raccoon?”

“I’ll flush him out. If he doesn’t let me catch him, he’ll run this way.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because he’ll be going towards the woods. To hide.”

Eyeing the woods behind himself skeptically, Porter asked, “Wouldn’t he just go around me to get there? It’s a lot of woods.”

“No, he’ll go right to you.”

“Why?”

“Because you are holding the apple.”

Porter eyed the apple in his hand now, turning it so the light caught it every which way. “Quirin, not to bring up a sore subject, but ever since … you know … have you felt as if a piece of you has died? Like say, your sanity?”

Quirin knelt to make sure his shoes were on good and tight. If he was going chasing after raccoons, the last thing he needed was tripping over his own feet. “You’re the second person today to suggest I’ve gone mad.”

“Oh really?” Porter asked, sweetly. “And what about it?”

“It’s just … it’s weird, that’s all.”

Quirin ran to the left side of the field before he heard Porter’s doubtlessly sarcastic response. Then he remembered, and shouted, “If you see Castor, tell him to back off!”

“What? Quirin, are you sure you’re all right? You’re acting a little …”

“It’s nothing. It’s just paranoia mixed with hysteria.”

Porter scratched his elbow. “Well, as long as you know.”

Then looking left and right for Castor, Quirin went up and down each beautifully maintained row, keeping his eyes peeled. Mason had good reason to complain. Devastation everywhere! Mason must have cried himself to sleep every night. There wasn’t a blackcurrant bunch that had gone untouched. The ripest of berries had been surgically plucked, leaving the lesser ones behind without so much as a scratch. Yes, this was the work of a smart raccoon—and possibly birds, but most definitely a raccoon.

Porter did his dull duty of waiting in front of the woods. Whenever Quirin reached the end of a row near Porter’s side, Porter would shoot him an expression that should have knocked him and his descendants over dead—even the ones not born yet.

“You look a fool!” Porter shouted, whenever he thought Quirin could hear him.

No doubt. But if Quirin’s suspicions were right, this could be the end of all Varian’s sighing.

Whatever it was in the fields, it made Quirin run the half of them before making a sign there was something other than a lummox bumbling around it. There was a rustle in the bushes.

Quirin’s heart skipped not just a beat, but an entire symphony. “Castor, that’d better not—”

A little gray blob darted out from the bush and took off down the center of the row, straight for the woods. Quirin set chase.

“Porter, it’s coming!”

And come it did, a blur fuzzing along the grass. Porter stood stiff, and stiffer still as it came for him, and stiffest of all as it was almost upon him. Then, just when Quirin shouted, “Get it!”—Porter dropped the apple. The blob changed its trajectory to swoop the apple up and then rushed past Porter for the woods. Porter stood with his hands fisting his trousers, watching it disappear into the undergrowth.

Quirin leaned against Porter to catch his breath. “You let it get away.”

“It was coming this way.”

“That was the point! Come on.”

These were proper woods that abutted Mason’s land, not manicured orchards, full of bushes and ferns and all sorts of rocks and moss and creepy-crawlies in the deep. They were soon brought to a standstill, looking from one branch to the next. Quirin pushed air out between his lips, and wiped his forehead, before stepping lightly through the brush, peering around trees and over bushes.

Porter followed, grumbling. “You said you needed my help as a burgomaster. Chasing vermin is not in the job description.”

“Sure, it is. Remember all your speeches about my handling pest problems?”

“That was just me making fun of you. I was trying to get you to resign.”

“Why?”

“I was tired of always doing the paperwork.”

Carefully parting a privet bush, but finding nothing hidden in its folds other than the most horrifying crab spider, Quirin replied, “Who does the paperwork now?”

Porter took off his hat to swat at a wasp. “Er, well, it’s still me. My deputy is a good-for-nothing nincompoop.”

“I experienced the same.”

“Hey!”

“Well, you must know I only kept you around for the paperwork. That way, I could do the fun stuff.”

A squelch came from Porter’s shoe. “This is not fun!” he hissed. “I just stepped in mud.”

Quirin was about to ask him what a squeamish popinjay like him was doing in a farming village, when there was a sound. A sound not like the others.

Quirin shot scrutiny everywhere but didn’t see anything. “Did you hear that?”

Porter listened, and the sound came again.

“Crunch crunch crunch.”

Porter chuckled, daintily. “Ah, yes, it sounds like some little devil is enjoying my snack.”

Quirin put his finger to his lips, and followed the sounds, with Porter on his heels. They stepped carefully, silently, roving around trees and over a fallen log, until they came to a place where the crunching seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. Porter’s left eyebrow went up, then down, then sideways, until Quirin gestured that it was echoing off the trees. It had to be close.

Quirin, like Porter's eyebrow, looked up, then left, and right. Then he looked down and spotted it.

A black and gray striped tail, poking out from under a spindle shrub.

Tiptoeing close, Quirin remembered his training from days bygone. Careful, careful. Porter froze where he stood, then put his hands up, as if to say, “I’m out of this. Go for it.” And Quirin went for it, although achingly slowly. Until his joints almost seemed to creak. But he snuck along until he was only two feet from it, where it continued to nosh and crunch, and seemed to have not noticed Quirin. Then Quirin crouched, reached out, and after saying a little prayer, grabbed it by the tail and pulled out.

“By Jove, it is a raccoon!” Porter gasped, disgusted. “Eating my apple!”

The raccoon, hanging upside down, made a noise like, “!?”

“Ruddiger?” Quirin asked, hoping this wasn’t some random raccoon he’d pulled from the wilds.

The raccoon dropped the apple, and looked at Quirin, rubbed its eyes, and then looked again. Then, with a squeak, it flew at his face.

“It’s gone rabid!” Porter screamed. “Hang on, I’ll get a stick!”

“No!” Quirin screamed back, under the onslaught of an ecstatic raccoon pressing soggy kisses against his forehead. Managing to grasp Ruddiger around the wriggly middle, he peeled Ruddiger off his face, and held him out at arms-length to get a good look. “You haven’t missed too many meals, have you?”

“!!” quoth Ruddiger.

Quirin smiled, probably the first time he’s ever done that at a vermin. “It’s time to come home. Varian’s waiting for you.”

There was no telling if there were bloodthirsty boys running around, ready to blast a murder of shot at anything with stripes, so Quirin had to make a lot of hasty promises. After first lecturing Ruddiger on not recognizing him (“It hasn’t been that long, has it?”), he promised Ruddiger an entire bushel of apples and a permanent place on the sofa, even if he left enough fur behind to knit a cap for a frontiersman. All this, just to keep Ruddiger from running ahead.

Ruddiger stopped scampering at Quirin’s feet and allowed himself to settle in Quirin’s arms.

“I thought you in danger from the raccoon,” Porter said, shaking his head. “Now I see, the raccoon is in danger from you!”

“Go back to your paperwork,” Quirin replied, turning towards home. He held on tight and whispered into Ruddiger’s ears (the last he needed was to be accused of more insanity by being observed talking to raccoons), “Varian has been missing you.”

Ruddiger chirped and cooed, content to stay in Quirin’s arms, until Quirin crested the bridge and the manor lay ahead of them. Ruddiger’s claws dug into Quirin’s chest as little paws readied to spring forward.

“Now, hold on. We made a deal.”

Smidgens of gray ears flattened, but Ruddiger sank down, and let Quirin carry him the rest of the way.

“Shh,” Quirin said, before stepping up the landing and slipping himself past the front door. He stood in the entryway, priming his ears for where Varian might be. Even Ruddiger primed his ears, cocking his head this-way-and-that, earflaps swiveling. But not hearing anything—not from the bedroom, or kitchen, or lab—Quirin called out, “Varian?”

A mutter came from the living room, like the world’s longest sigh.

When Quirin got there, Varian was lying down, facing the back of the sofa. Putting a hand on Ruddiger’s head, to keep him from leaping away, Quirin padded up to the sofa. Varian didn’t budge.

Quirin cleared his throat. “Varian, you lost something. Now, I found it, but don’t lose it again.”

Blinking slowly at first, and then quickly, as Varian seemed to register what Quirin had said, Varian squinted and turned his head. “Wha—”

Ruddiger leapt out of Quirin’s arms, chittering a thousand miles a minute. Varian lay, too stunned to move, staring at Ruddiger on his chest. Then he sprang up into a sitting position.

“Ruddiger!” Varian swept Ruddiger into his arms, squeezing until there was a raccoon squeak. What joy he showed. What unmitigated joy! He kissed Ruddiger on the head like a mother to her baby. He stuffed his face into gray, speckled fur. He complained it tickled when Ruddiger buried a wet nose into his neck, but he let it happen anyway. His eyes glowed, blue as bioluminescence. He was no longer just a human, but a celestial being, his smile the crescent moon toppled over, and his laughter a star song.

Varian turned his electric eyes towards Quirin, and Quirin couldn’t help himself. He crushed them both against his chest, until there was not only a raccoon squeak, but a boyish one as well.

“Where did you find him?” Varian gasped.

“Eating a neighbor’s crop.”

“Oh, Ruddiger.”

“Cha-cha-cha-cha-cha!” Ruddiger replied, throwing his arms out. His nose quivered when Varian squeezed his love handles, but all was forgiven when Varian took him the kitchen, calling him, “Buddy, buddy.”

All night, it was “Buddy, buddy.”

And Quirin told himself, “Good job, good job!” He felt warm again.

And in a few days, they would be going to Corona, and Varian would be re-entering society. If this didn’t make them feel at peace, nothing would.

Chapter Text

Varian had exited society with a bang. A conflagration that would put the half of Koto's fireworks to shame, even if they all exploded at once. That’s what they had told Quirin, and that was exactly what he would have expected. True, he wished the nature of the bang had been different, something with more pizazz and less flame, but there was no use denying the truth: Varian was not one of those destined to live in this world without making sure everyone knew about it. For a man of Quirin's temperament, it was nerve-wracking.

But when Varian re-entered society, it was with a whimper. And that was exactly what Quirin was hoping for.

They went into the village to go clothes shopping, and … nothing happened. Nothing bad, at any rate. Despite Varian’s fear to the contrary.

They had a rough start the morning of. As they were walking out the door, Varian had swooped Ruddiger up to lay across the back of his shoulders.

Freezing with his hand on the doorknob, Quirin cringed, then smiled, and sing-songed, “The shoe cobbler is no place for a raccoon.”

Varian blinked. “He won’t be any trouble. He can even wait outside.”

Ruddiger nodded, enthusiastically.

Did Quirin want to explain that that was the worst idea ever? That it would mean leaving Ruddiger alone in a town that potentially still had gun-toting, bounty-hunting, blood-thirsting Castors running around in it? That Ruddiger shouldn’t even consider putting one furry paw off their property until Quirin confirmed said murderous boys had been called off? Did he really want to explain all that?

Of course not.

Quirin lowered his tone. “I already told you, Varian.”

A flash of hurt darted behind Varian’s eyes, like a startled quail running from one bush to the next. But he obeyed. He put Ruddiger down on the bench, and said, “Sorry, bud.”

They were on their way.

At first, Varian showed his displeasure by shuffling a full five feet behind Quirin at all times. But the closer they got to the village, the closer Varian got to Quirin. He was at four feet as they passed Freya’s chicken coop. He was at two feet when the first of the suburban houses appeared. By the time they got to the village square, Varian was essentially glued to Quirin’s back, sticking closer than a brother. Quirin nodded at the other villagers and led Varian through the marketplace, calm as a sail in the doldrums. After all, this was just another ordinary day.

It seemed fairly ordinary. The people went about their business, shopping or selling, or repairing buildings, without seeming to give them more than a first glance. There was one rude, young boy who stared, but he was chased off when Quirin asked him why he wasn't in school. Rude children notwithstanding, it was an ordinary day for all.

All right, true, the seamstress and cobbler were both quieter than usual, especially Hans the chatterbox, but they did their jobs and promised the goods by next week. And okay, when they visited the bakery, Mr. Thrumble didn’t sneak a cookie to Varian like he used to, but Varian was getting too old for that anyway. And yes, the townspeople could have greeted Varian more (or rather, greeted him at all), but Varian didn’t give them a chance, keeping his head as sunk around his shoulders as a shipwreck at the bottom of the sea. Not even the changes in the village Quirin pointed out made Varian so much as wink—his scuffed-up shoes were what drew his utmost attention.

Even for all that, the trip was a success. When they got home and Varian released the breath he was holding, Quirin asked, “Was that so bad?”

“No, I guess not.”

“So, you think you’re ready to go to Corona tomorrow?”

It took a second of head scratches, but Varian eventually nodded and smiled shyly before escaping to make lunch.

These whimpers were pretty good.

It was getting harder and harder to get out of bed in the mornings.

It was the morning of the Princess’ birthday celebration. It was five o’clock, and Ambrose was coming to get them at six. And Quirin was rolling out of bed, nearly landing on his face, to walk to the basin to splash cold water on his cheeks. He needed to wake up.

Oh, ye heavens, to think this recent difficulty of waking up in the morning had anything to do with age! Had he aged in the amber, or no? It felt as if he’d gained a few decades or so in there. Unfair.

But a man on the way to a party didn’t have time to ponder the slowly approaching fingers of death. All he had time for was to swipe a razor over his chin, dip his sleepy body into clothes, and bumble downstairs to make a quickie breakfast. It was made by the time Varian came down, Ruddiger’s tail draped around his neck like a scarf.

“Morning, Dad!” he chirped, cheerful as a holiday.

It took a lot of effort for Quirin to answer just as cheerfully. “Sleep well?”

“Uh-huh. You know, I don’t think you’ve sleepwalked once. It helps to catch up on sleep when you don’t have the old man wandering the halls all night long.”

“All right, smart aleck. See if I let you sleep in again. Sit down and eat your breakfast.”

They ate at the kitchen table to save on cleaning up later. Varian ate with appetite, throwing bits of food at Ruddiger, laughing at how Ruddiger caught them. He laughed when Ruddiger yawned, but then, everything made him laugh. Even when it came time to clean up. Bumping the plates was a laughing affair. Dropping the silverware on the tabletop was hilarious. Saying “oops!” as he beat the broom against the floor, knocking the furniture or Quirin’s feet or even his own, was a comedy skit.

“It’s going to be a great day!” he crowed.

Quirin thought, How much longer is this to go on?

Varian knocked a jar of beans off the counter. Beans shot out to the four corners, bouncing like so many glass marbles, brown and trembling. Varian dropped the broom, while his hands went fluttering to his eyes. Curling his hair between his fingers, he took shuddering gasps.

Quirin picked up the broom and swept the beans into a pyramid. “I’ll be with you, Varian.”

Varian choked.

“It’s going to be okay. It was yesterday, wasn’t it?”

“There’s going to be so many people.”

“Good. Let everyone see at once how the Princess wants you there.”

Quirin poured the beans back into the jar and turned to find Varian wringing his hands. “She’s sending a message. Don’t you trust her?”

“I guess so.” Varian reached down to pet the raccoon at his ankles. In a half-whisper, he rasped, “She saved my life, you know.”

“What?” Quirin grasped the broom until his wrists ached.

The clock struck six. Ring-ding. Six times.

Varian swept around, reaching for his goggles on the table. “I don’t want to talk about it.” He smacked the goggles on, stretching the headband until it snapped against the back of his ears. “Can Ruddiger come?”

Ambrose might not like having animals in his carriage, but Quirin said yes anyway.

It became a moot point when they went outside to meet Ambrose. Ambrose had already pulled up in the carriage, right on time (as a postal employee, he was remarkably punctual). He made no expression as they began walking up, but his daughter, all of six years old now, peeped eyes like a pair of bluebirds over the side of the carriage.

She screamed, “Kitty!”

Ruddiger jerked to a halt at Varian’s feet and looked up with a pleading expression even more desperate than the ones he gave at the dinner table.

“Oh, hah hah!” Varian patted Ruddiger on the hindquarters. “Maybe you’d better stay here, bud.”

Ruddiger gave a sound like, “Whew!” and bounced off towards the orchard, his tail corkscrewing behind his rump.

At every turn, Quirin was shocked by the time he had missed. Ambrose’s twin boys were just blobs of humanity the last time he had seen them, barely walking. Now they were rough-and-tumble, pulling their sister’s hair, pointing their behinds at each other (which they found to be the height of excellent humor), and ejecting spit wads over the side of the carriage. Gretchen, their harried mother, carried a plump, white baby at her bosom. Presumably, one of the baby-boom babies Porter had talked about. Gretchen sat in the back with the children, her back turned towards her husband instead of sitting with him on the driver’s bench. Her face was stern and cold, her smile curt as Quirin introduced himself to her baby. She didn’t say anything to Varian at all, who lifted himself into the back with a soft “How-do-you-do?” Perhaps, this was marital strife. Hopefully, this had nothing to do with them.

Ambrose’s carriage was nothing more than a glorified wagon. He had installed benches in the back for easier sitting, but the paint was faded and peeling like a snakeskin, except the snake underneath was more geriatric than what was on top. It desperately needed a new suspension: Quirin sat next to Ambrose, and not five minutes after they started down the road, he felt something shake loose from his kidneys. It was probably something he really needed, too.

Quirin hid his discomfort with a steady stream of conversation with Ambrose, while throwing frequent glances over his shoulder to check on Varian. Varian made do by scrunching himself into the furthest corner he could find and gazed at the countryside with an inordinate amount of attention. Once, one of the children tried to engage him, but he just stared until the little boy went away.

Halfway through the ride, when Quirin felt his liver work its way down to his right kneecap, Percy and Emmi went rushing by. Those two were still acting like newlyweds, whooping from their little two-seater while Percy urged his horse into racing speed. Emmi yelled something incoherent as they passed, and then standing alarmingly in the carriage, threw a handful of candy into the back of theirs. Quirin whistled. Her aim was remarkable. The children shrieked.

“Do you remember, Gretchen,” Ambrose cooed, “being like that before the kids?”

Gretchen sniffed. “You can’t even afford a carriage like that now.”

Yowch. Marital strife then.

To allow Ambrose privacy for his hurt feelings, Quirin craned his neck around to look in the back. The delighted children were scrambling for the candy scattered all over the floorboard. Varian silently watched them leap about.

Maybe feeling better now she had slung her arrow at her husband, or perhaps out of irrepressible maternal quality, Gretchen picked up a piece of candy and tossed it at Varian. He wasn’t expecting it, and it bounced off his chest. It lay between his feet, but when Varian glanced at Gretchen, he must have seen something in her face: he shyly reached for the candy. It was the sucking sort, looking like horehound, which Varian despised, but he still ate it. When Quirin checked on him again fifteen minutes later, he was sitting on the floorboard with Ambrose’s daughter, playing pick-up-sticks, a game made especially exciting by the bumping of the ride.

The festivities were well underway by the time they bounced into Corona. Ambrose parked them a full half-mile from the city entrance along the shore, there were already so many carriages parked there. Only foot traffic was allowed into the city during festivals. They agreed to meet back up at the wagon by such-and-such a time, quite late, and then Quirin and Varian swept into the crowd crossing the bridge to the city.

The crowd was bigger than Quirin had seen at any time in the past, with a more celebratory spirit. Coronans possessed an ineffable love for festivities, and this one would be a true celebration this year, without having a memorial attached. But it meant being crushed by a crowd, jammed into a tight spot on the bridge, and being sold silly wares by the hawkers who had parked themselves on the parapet since before sunrise.

Quirin put Varian in front of him, to be the more able to keep an eye on him, as they slowly trudged forward. He leaned down to ask, “What do you want to do?”

Varian shrugged.

Quirin scratched his nails into his palm. Ah, so frustrating! Varian used to be more puppy than boy at these things, wriggling to do all and see all and consume all, with eyes bright as lacquered robin’s eggs. This glum prospect wasn’t what he was hoping for. They were standing next to a hawker selling candied apples, for goodness’ sake, and Varian didn’t even glance in that direction!

The crowd did what it had been threatening to do and came to a standstill. Quirin tried to spot what the holdup was, scanning over the top of the crowd, but only saw a mass of humanity converging onto one narrow gateway.

“Looks like we’re going to be here a while,” he muttered.

Being in this traffic jam gave them the perfect opportunity to overhear the conversation of the two blabbermouths behind them. And blabber they did.

“Clarice says the King and Queen won’t be making an appearance today,” said one woman to another.

“Tsk tsk tsk.”

“They’re still very confused, the poor things.”

Varian started rubbing his hip, and Quirin realized he must have come all the way to Corona with the pardon in his pocket. Quirin frowned.

Darting a dirty look at the ladies, but only finding the bland expression of the deeply ignorant, Quirin racked his brain for what he could do to make this better. A couple of old windbags weren’t going to ruin their day.

Then he spotted the hawker, holding up a beautifully round and glossy candied apple. Quirin was not going to practice the self-restraint that was typical for him.

After a flip of a coin, Quirin slipped a candied apple into Varian’s rubbing fist. Varian looked back, surprised, but his eyes showed a glimmer of their former brightness. That was it: they were going to eat the city.

Once they made it in, Quirin drove Varian to try and eat and drink and look and buy and play, buying everything good to eat, until Varian looked green with the extravagance of it, but satisfied. They ran up and down the boulevards, spending money without prudence at all. And their spirits lifted. It was impossible to not be infected by the spirit of gaiety that surrounded them: to hear children screaming and the bells jangling, to smell freshly baked bread and to have it warm in your hand, to taste the zing of perfectly ripened berries rupture in your mouth, to feel the flap of flags and pendants in the breeze. A banker dropped his purse, and the coins flying against the cobblestone made music. The banker, in the spirit, laughed.

For the first time out of the accursed amber, Quirin felt happy. If he could only give it to Varian. If he could liquefy it and feed it to Varian, he would do it. If he could wash Varian with it, in a baptism of glee, he would do it. If happiness was a vapor, he would make Varian a cloud!

They stood with fellow onlookers along the shop facades, waiting for the parade to pass by. He knew just what to say to make Varian wear a genuine smile. How he knew what to do he didn’t know, only it must be his paternal instinct.

Quirin bent close so Varian could hear him over the clash and cymbal of the band, and said, “You did good, coming today. You’ve made me proud today, son.”

At first, Varian stared without blinking; then with eyelashes fluttering, he looked away, his cheeks flushing as pink as the candied apples. Quirin was so swelling with love, his words were too full to be uttered, and they stood silently, watching the parade go by.

Shortly thereafter, Princess Rapunzel burst out of the crowd like a sunbeam breaking through a cloud. Her face was haloed in joy. That man, Eugene, followed behind her.

“Varian, you made it!” she squealed. “Thank you for bringing him, Quirin.”

“Yes, we got your invitation. Should we have found you first?”

“Oh no! There’s nothing formal about it. I just wanted to make sure my friends came!”

Varian, closed as a rosebud, blossomed when she said that. He looked at her as if he would gladly hook an aether string on a fishing pole and pull down a planet for her. If it would only please her. Did she know what she was doing? Her actions seemed too spontaneous, nothing more than the work of the moment. It didn’t matter. Whether premeditated or not, it had the effect.

Varian put his hand out, and Rapunzel enclosed it within her own.

“I have a special lantern I need you for,” she said.

“Me?” He shot Quirin a questioning look as she put her arm around his shoulders.

Quirin waved him away. “Just don’t blow this one up.”

“Oh, Dad, that was, like, four years ago.”

“That was you?” Eugene asked. “I remember that. You took out three dozen other lanterns!”

“You have to tell me the story!” Rapunzel gushed.

“Well, I was trying to make the lantern glow green and extra bright, but I—”

Their conversation faded as they disappeared into the crowd. Goodness, Varian had been speaking with that tone of bright contentment, a way he only spoke when speaking of alchemy. That gave Quirin an idea. He’d been needing to get Varian a gift for his upcoming birthday, and now that he had the opportunity, he knew just what to get.

He made his purchase before thinking of the practicalities—such as, how was he going to hide it from Varian? It was wrapped in nondescript brown paper, but he didn’t want Varian making any educated guesses, knowing he had bought it in Corona.

Ah, the answer to his minor catastrophe! Porter was leaning against a streetlamp, yawning his head off.

“Porter! I thought you don’t come to these things.”

“I don’t, but a burgomaster must make an appearance.”

Quirin pumped his hand. “It’s not that impressive, you know.”

“Now, now, don’t discourage my ambition now that I finally have some. Come eat something with me. Distract me from … all this.” Porter waved his fingers over the crowd dismissively.

They walked down the street, dodging rambunctious children and even more rambunctious merchants. Porter pretended to self-importantly pick a piece of invisible dust from his sleeve.

“Guess who has a meeting with the Princess herself tomorrow? Second meeting in a week. And also guess who was invited to her little pseudo-temporary-emergency-queen coronation thingy this morning?”

Quirin laughed. “That’s a little too ambitious.”

Porter looked up with surprise, before settling into a smirk as he caught on to the joke. “You never know with these royals. Always wanting to make alliances. There is that unmarried sister of the Queen’s, after all.”

“And I suppose if you were twenty years younger, perhaps the Princess herself …”

“Augh! Easy, Quirin, easy. Remember, you are the geriatric here. I am merely distinguished.”

“Hmph.”

“Even if I was—ahem!—something-something years younger, I’d have competition with the royal boyfriend.”

“He’s royal?” Quirin couldn’t fathom it. Not such a wastrel like that, unless the man was from one of those kingdoms.

“That’s the rumor.”

They found an empty table at a café. A hassled-looking waiter with purple-and-gold paint smashed on his cheek told them the menu of the day with a speed that left them breathless.

“Could you imagine being married to her?” Quirin asked, once the waiter was off and away with their order.

“That’s creepy, Quirin.”

“No, but imagine finding a hair in your soup.”

Porter whooped with laughter.

They passed the time with drinking coffee, eating croissants, and calling each other creepy old men. They had reached a stage in their friendship where they regularly accused each other of the grossest moral degeneracies.

After an hour or so, a cool breeze blew the back of Quirin’s knuckles, making his hair stand up. He lowered his cup of coffee long gone cold and looked around. Dusk would soon be here and time to release the lanterns.

He threw his package into Porter’s lap. “Keep that for me, will you? Bring it by when you get back.”

Porter shook it next to his ear, frowning when it didn’t make more than the slightest of rattles. “You trust me with this?”

“Porter the scrivener, no. But Porter the burgomaster …”

“Throw it in my face, why don’t you?”

Quirin said his goodbye and navigated the crowd, stopping once to buy two lanterns from a vendor. How was he going to find Varian in this crush of humanity?

Never mind! Varian found him, sneaking up behind to slip an arm around his waist. Varian took a lantern, with clear eyes and red cheeks.

“What was the special lantern?” Quirin asked as they headed towards the docks.

Varian blushed, rubbing behind his ears. “Remember her telling us about Terapi Island? Well, a bunch of lanterns have collected there over the years, and she found one her parents had written a message in a long time ago. So, she wanted to write a message in one now, to the future. Rapunzel wanted”—he blushed all the harder—“she wanted her friends to sign it.”

It was impossible for the Princess to realize what good she was doing.

Quirin borrowed a pen and ink from a nearby restaurant, and they scribbled messages on their lanterns to the future. Then they took their lanterns to the docks and released them, and watched the colors kaleidoscope across purple water and amethyst sky, ten-thousand-thousands glowing like phosphorescent jellyfish all around them.

It had been one of the most joyous days in Quirin’s life.

They didn’t reach home until very late, but this was the thought that played in Quirin’s head all night. Thoughts of peace and wholesome love, and a warmth that seemed abiding.

Apparently, Gretchen and Ambrose had made up, and it was safer for Quirin to drive them home rather than Ambrose, who wanted to make goo-goo eyes at his wife all night.

When they pulled up before the manor, Gretchen offered to awaken Varian, who had passed out with the rest of the children. She gently shook him awake, and he popped up and grabbed the lantern they had brought, pretending like he hadn’t fallen asleep at all.

Ambrose came around and Quirin jumped off the driver’s seat to exchange places with him. After watching Varian stumble into the house, Quirin looked up at Ambrose.

“I want to thank you,” he said, “you and Gretchen, for what you’ve done today. It’s very kind.”

Ambrose’s reply was soft, so as not to disturb the sleeping children. “Well, you’ve always been a good neighbor and a good leader, Quirin.”

A pang pierced Quirin, and he turned quickly to hide it. He had thought …. No, that wasn’t what he wanted. These kindnesses weren’t supposed to be for him. He wasn’t the one who needed them.

Standing at the front door, he waved them away before going into the house. Varian had left the lantern near the front door, so its brightness was enough to lighten the otherwise dark entryway. Quirin picked it up and swung it around, sending a beam of light down the hall. But then he saw something that made him ram his tongue into the back of his mouth to keep his heart from crawling up into it. Maybe he needed kindnesses after all.

Varian stood at the other end of the entryway, leaning a shoulder against the wall. Ruddiger was curling around his ankles, but all his attention was directed towards the heavy oak door at the end of the hall—the door that led to the laboratory. In the darkness, it seemed twelve feet tall and looming massively and dangerously over them, and what lay beyond it was something too malignant to tell.

If Quirin could only bar that door ….

Taking a calming breath to soothe the fire in his veins, Quirin stepped forward. “Varian.”

Varian jumped and jerked around, his face startled and white, as though he had been caught in some naughty act. He waited while Quirin came close and put a hand on his shoulder.

“We had a lot of fun today, huh?” Quirin asked. That was not lead in his stomach.

Nodding, Varian gave a smile that wavered.

“It’s late.” Quirin put a hand to the back of his son’s neck. “Go to sleep.”

In his bed, Quirin pounded his heels against the mattress in frustration, only once, not enough to bring Varian running. What was wrong with him? The intoxication of the day had gotten to him, and he had acted foolishly. He had indulged in spontaneity without understanding his own feelings. What was he going to do with that package in Porter’s care?

The message he had written on the lantern had been, My son, you are branded onto my heart. May you forever walk in joy, grace, and peace.

What a laugh. How could Quirin expect to bring Varian peace when he didn’t even have it himself? And how were they to ever get there, especially if he banned Varian from alchemy forever?

Chapter Text

The night of the festival, Quirin paid the price for neglecting his body. A fever raged through his brain as he lay in bed. He kicked his legs until the blanket wrapped around his ankles, but there was no relief; his joints were squeezed by some tormenting genius. Both consciousness and sleep landed feather-light on his forehead, then lifted up again and floated just beyond him. Like a butterfly landing on a flower, with the same sort of ephemeral touch, but cruel.

He tore that foggy in-between state apart when something awakened him, but once awake, he didn’t know what it was. Laying there, he waited and listened, until he heard it again.

“No, no, no, no! Dad!”

“Varian!” Quirin ripped himself out of bed, and in an instant, was out to the stairwell, pounding his way upstairs. Another instant more, and he was throwing open Varian’s door and staggering into the bedroom. “Varian!”

Varian shot up in bed, turning immense, startled eyes towards his father. He blinked, then yawned. “Dad?”

Quirin stared. But he had thought—!

“Dad, what is it?”

He thought he had heard ….

Quirin passed his hand over his face. “You called me.”

Varian’s mouth hung open. “I’ve been sleeping.”

“But you called me.”

“I didn’t. What’s wrong?”

Wavering on his feet, Quirin looked around the room, and everything looked fine. He looked at Varian, and Varian looked fine. The cries Quirin had heard had been agonized, but here Varian was, looking nothing more than confused, a little alarmed, and bleary-eyed.

Knees fussing the blanket, Varian got out of bed. “You’ve been sleepwalking.”

“No.”

“Are you sick?”

“Was it a dream, maybe?”

Varian took his hand; Varian’s hand was almost too cold to touch.

They went back to Quirin’s bedroom, where for the first time Quirin realized how bright it was. The sun was up. It was well up. He’d overslept.

“The fields … I’ve already lost so much time,” he murmured, climbing back into the bed and straightening the blanket over himself. Then he grabbed Varian’s arm and pulled him close, heart thundering. “Nobody hurt you in prison?”

Varian inhaled. It was the first time they had ever mentioned prison. “No.”

Quirin let Varian slip from his hand, feeling himself drift away. “Nobody had better hurt you.”

“No, Dad.”

“Nobody … nobody hurt you?”

Varian’s deliciously cold hand was against his forehead. “No, Dad, no.”

“Good. They gave you your own cell. I’d kill anyone who hurt you.”

A disbelieving laugh hopped out from Varian’s mouth, but his hand ghosting over Quirin’s forehead shuddered. “You’re really sick. I’ll make soup.”

Quirin opened his eyes to see how pale Varian’s lips were. “Don’t be anxious. Not like the other night. It’ll be all right.” Then he put his arm across his eyes and fell asleep.

Voices tormented Quirin. Small voices, loud voices, soft voices, harsh voices. Voices that screamed and others that whispered, some that sang and others that were silent. Voices, voices, voices, like he had been thrust into a never-ending chorus. Voices, voices, voices, always speaking until it would make him mad. Most maddeningly of all, he didn’t understand a single one.

Maybe this one said, “I burnt it,” but burnt what?

Maybe that one said, “Where is it?” but where was what?

This one said to “Please listen” and he was listening for all he was worth, but his efforts were in vain.

All voices meant nothing.

No, Quirin, fool, don’t forget that voice. The one voice that meant something. The one that was like the first crocus of spring; small, purple, and bright against the snow. Varian’s voice.

“Here’s soup. Can you eat it?”

“Lay down. Everything’s fine.”

“I brought a compress.”

Once, Quirin thought he heard Varian crying, but when he looked, Varian was tucked into the chair beside the bed, holding a bowl of soup and head nodding for wishing for sleep.

“This is my fault,” the little purple crocus said.

Quirin put his hand out, and Varian put his in it.

“It’s not that bad, it’s not that bad,” Quirin groaned, watching the ceiling where spots burned before his eyes, halos of sun bouncing off his corneas. Varian laid cold compress after cold compress on him, which he tore off for the unhelpful, soggy messes they were.

The next time he dreamed of the voices, he could understand.

“I remember the last time you told me he was sick.”

“I’m not lying.”

The door shot open, and Porter tramped in, followed by Varian. Quirin forced himself into a sit, but his head swam away from him, like a trout jumping upstream, so he held it in his palms. Porter’s hand against his back was an oppressive heat.

“He needs the doctor,” Varian said.

“Yes.”

“Will … will you help?”

Doctor Byron came and touched him with hands that soothed: a doctor’s good touch. Quirin instantly felt better, if but for kind, adept hands and a man who knew what a bedside manner was. Doctor Byron was an angel.

Quirin took it back.

Doctor (Monster) Byron bled him until he lay in a near faint. When the bowl went away, Quirin said, “Don’t let Varian see—” but it was Varian who took the bowl away, not even growing pale at the sight, keeping all the blood in his face (unlike Quirin), although his lips were drawn tight against his teeth.

The next time Quirin awoke, Doctor Byron was gone, and Varian pressed a glass to his mouth. “Medicine.”

“Of your own design?”

Varian laughed weakly. “No. From the apothecary.”

Quirin drank it, and the clatter in his brain diminished to a whisper. The medicine soared through him. Or maybe, he soared through the medicine. The muting of his pain blanketed him, although the side effect was a world caught in a golden haze, now just a mist of impressions. The better he felt, the less he saw. He only knew feeling. The feel of Varian’s fingers on his wrist, the touch of bedclothes being adjusted, or the tickle of hair against his forearm. Or, in the hearing of the repetitious whisper, “They’re helping this time. They’re helping this time.”

This hearing and feeling were nice, and sweet, and comforting, and Quirin saw nothing.

He traded pain for blindness.

Quirin was miserable because of the fever, but Varian was miserable at his own two hands. There were many reasons (none of them tolerable) why he might torture himself, but trying to get him to do something else was out of the question. The most moon-besotted Moonstone Acolyte would be more obedient. Even at his sickest, Quirin would motion at Varian to run off and play with Ruddiger or take a bath or something (especially the bath), but then he’d ruin it by pressing his lips together at some pain ripping through his kneecaps or into his side or some other indefinable part of his body, and that would bring Varian running to fuss at the blankets, or to slap a compress over his eyes. Laid out on his back as he was, at times only slightly miserable, at other times convinced he would die, Quirin could do nothing. They would both suffer.

So while Quirin lay in bed in pain, Varian painfully worked himself to death. While Quirin ate gruel (doctor’s orders), Varian ate gruel too (not doctor’s orders). If Quirin took medicine, Varian went to town to get it. When Quirin slept in bed, Varian scrunched up in a chair next to the bed, his knees a pillow under his chin. It didn’t look precisely comfortable.

“Sleep in your bed, Varian,” Quirin urged as the days went by.

Varian only smirked and replied, “Impossible. Ruddiger has taken over it.”

“The evil of raccoons knows no bounds.”

When Varian awoke in the mornings, he cracked his young back and made faces like a man with decades on him. Quirin knew it! A chair did not a good bed make. Not even an alchemist could make his body say otherwise. And as the days wore on, so too the bags under Varian’s eyes.

On the fourth day, after watching Varian rub his red-rimmed eyes for the third time at only four o’clock in the afternoon, Quirin asked, “Do you know what vicarious means?”

Varian pursed his lips and looked down at the book he had been reading from. “That word isn’t even on this page.”

“My mistake.”

Varian yawned with a mouth wide enough to allow Quirin to count every one of his teeth, like counting two rows of gleaming quail eggs.

“Go lie down, Varian.”

“I have to start dinner soon.” Another yawn conquered him, and he put the book on the nightstand. “Maybe I’ll just close my eyes a moment. Don’t let me fall asleep.”

“I won’t.”

Stretching over to the bed, where he rested his head on his forearms, Varian murmured, “Don’t let me fall asleep.”

“I said I won’t.”

Varian’s eyes slid shut, but there remained a certain pulsing tenseness in his body. He breathed shallowly, until Quirin took his hand.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Quirin said. He stroked his thumb over Varian’s wrist until Varian’s breath deepened and slowed. Then Quirin carefully slid up and sipped his medicine, watching the world as though he wore glasses made of cottonballs.

Two figures burst through the door. Varian jerked awake. Whoever these people were, Quirin was going to give them the tongue lashing of a lifetime. Or, more likely, throw up on them.

“Apologies,” Porter’s dazzling voice said. It sounded as though that package Quirin had bought in Corona landed on the dresser. “I knocked, but nobody came a answering!”

“We just wanted to see how much longer he was going to fake this illness,” said the other figure, which sounded like Porter’s sister, Janice. Quirin’s eyes were awash in medicine, so he couldn’t make her out, but her voice, with its distinctive huskiness, was impossible to mistake.

Was she still the same as before the amber? She sounded the same, but did she look the same? Not her outward appearance, since she dressed simply and finely in a demonstration of good breeding, but her demeanor and countenance. Her essence. Was Janice still like an Ingvarri warrior woman, with ferocious changeable eyes flashing above inflamed cheeks, her thin mouth screwed into a shout? If she were an animal, would she still be a unicorn, of peace but also war, virginal but with a horn blade-sharp?

The medicine was playing tricks with him. What he could make of it, her head appeared about ten sizes too big for her body, like she was an oversized teaspoon. But Janice was much too untamed to be a dainty teaspoon, she’d never allow it. That hat! She was wearing that hat, that’s what! That milkmaid’s bergére hat that was shaped like the moon and about the same size thereof. He hated that hat!

“I see you’re back from Corona,” Quirin said at her, laying down. He pulled the blanket high up his chest to cover his nightclothes. When he wasn’t so sick, then he’d be embarrassed. Maybe later, maybe. If he remembered. (He’ll definitely be embarrassed.)

He just then remembered why she had been gone these weeks. “Porter said you’d been helping your brother out with his house.”

“A mast fell through his roof. Someone had to watch the kids.”

“He lives by the shipyards then.”

“Not really.”

Janice came close enough to the bed, where Quirin was able to make out the features of her face, haloed by the hat. Yes, still a fashionable Amazon.

“Hello, milkmaid,” he rumbled.

She tsked. “Still calling me ‘milkmaid?’ I hoped you’d given it up.”

“I hoped you’d given up that hat.”

Her laugh was incandescent. “Malingerer!” She threw her despised hat onto his dresser and then seemed to notice Varian, who had tucked himself a dark sprite in the corner. Her white hand flew up to her auburn hair, tucking her bun into place. “Hello, Varian.”

She held her hand out, and after a moment, Varian placed his within hers.

“Hello,” Varian said, timidly.

“I’m here to relieve you of your sad, pathetic, troublesome burden.”

Quirin harrumphed. “What you want is to put a pillow over my face.”

“Never. I leave Porter do all my dirty work.”

“As always,” Porter sighed, sliding into the chair.

Janice tucked Varian’s arm into her elbow. “Come, I’ll make you something to eat. And I brought bee sting cake. And also, you need a bath.”

Varian ran a hand through his hair. “That bad, huh?”

“I never say anything offensive.” She and Varian walked out, shutting the door with a soft click.

Bless Janice for her ease. And bless Porter too. After Janice brought up a bowl of water and towels, he helped Quirin wash himself and dress into a fresh nightshirt. He smiled wryly at being called a nursemaid.

“I’m just doing it to get out of work, you know. My typical M.O. I’d normally leave you to Janice and all the pillows, but my days are spent avoiding the Princess.”

“She’s here?”

“Yes, darling girl put together a construction crew. A lovely construction crew. Especially the candy man.” He laughed. “Well, I guess it’s not too bad. Old Corona is being rebuilt faster than ever. She’s been more help than … well.” Even through the haze in Quirin’s eyes, his smile was glowingly fake. “But the little sweetheart seems to think it’s a party, with a banner and treats and togetherness and everything. She’s a real something-something.”

“The word is—”

“Malingerer, you talk of a sweet girl like that?” Janice called out as she came in. She pulled up a chair to the other side of the bed. “I’ve convinced Varian to go to bed.”

“Witchcraft.”

“Well, I couldn’t watch him be that nervous wreck anymore.” She clasped her chin in her hand and regarded him. Were her eyes brown today or green? They changed so much.

He looked away and waited.

Janice never disappointed. “I thought you dead,” she said.

“Well … well, maybe I am.”

It was supposed to be a joke. Nobody laughed.

“What happened?” Porter asked.

Porter had surely been dying to ask, but Quirin didn’t want to talk about that. He wanted to talk about this. About how, ever since he came out of the amber, it was as if he’d been jerked out of a dream where he had been falling, except he never woke up. About how the house was being haunted by the boy Varian used to be. About how he wanted to shake Varian for even looking at that door the other night.

But, he answered Porter. He told them about the argument and accident, and how Varian went running out into the snow for help. About how he’d been stuck and watching that thing come for him, convinced it was going to kill him.

His body stiffened, like he was back in it again. “I don’t know why it didn’t kill me. Why didn’t it kill me?”

And then more words spilled out of him without his natural inhibitions—words about the incredible terror, unlike anything he’d ever known. And about the letter he had written.

“It was ruined when I got out. He asked me what I wrote. I said I was proud.” Barking a humorless laugh, he fisted the mattress sheet and pulled until it slipped out. “What a lie.”

Janice took his hand within her own when he kept pulling and pulling on the sheet, and it was slipping and slipping, but he kept grasping for it, for something to hold onto. He hadn’t had anything to hold onto when he had been consumed.

He clung to her hand.

“He never listens,” Quirin spat. The blood was suddenly too thick for his veins, and he gasped for breath. He had been holding back a flood, but he couldn’t do it anymore, and the gates opened. “He never listens! Why doesn’t he listen, that—”

Another word spilled out. A word that blasted through him like buckshot and made every bone screech. A word he didn’t even know was part of his vocabulary, and he would have beaten another man for saying it about Varian. A word that was hateful and untrue. A word that thrust a thickness into his throat that glued it shut, like a fist reaching in and holding his tongue, tightening with each sloppy gulp. He concentrated on loosening the back of his throat, just so he might choke.

He was choking.

“Quirin!” Porter snapped his hands to both of Quirin’s shoulders.

It was enough. The back of his throat opened, and because the illness had left him so weak, like he was vanishing, he was powerless against the tears that came.

“I don’t mean that. I didn’t mean that. I love him.” He crushed his lips against his teeth to muffle himself and panted through his fingers. Varian couldn’t know his father was shattering beneath his feet. “What am I going to do? I failed him. My little boy that I love.”

All his strength escaped like water through his fingers, and he sank into the pillow. Janice put her fingers under his palm and pressed his knuckles until he pressed back. What was he going to do?

For three more days, the fever burned through him until it burned itself out. When it did, he still had no answers.

Chapter Text

When Varian was eleven-years-old, tragedy struck Old Corona. One of their citizens, a man named Felix, was murdered by highwaymen at Dead Man’s Curve. “Dead Man’s Curve” was supposed to be a misnomer, but the murder was still enough to earn any number of sarcastic and infuriated remarks about the utility of the Guard. That was bad enough, but what was worse: Felix’s eleven-year-old son had been with him. Castor had been spared his life, but ... well, what was every parent to do but be heart-chilled and ponder monstrous dreams at night?

Quirin had been among the group that found the cart that bronze-skyed mid-morning. Could he ever forget the sight of Castor’s white-face and tear-dewy cheeks? It was a little too easy to imagine Varian in the same situation, weeping helplessly throughout the night as he sat next to his father’s cooling body.

“I remember a time when every boy knew how to fight!” Darwin raged in the town meeting that night.

And probably a time when they tilted at lances, too.

Oh, he should not be insincere, Quirin rebuked himself. Darwin was regularly a blowhard, but in this, he had every right. Felix was Darwin's son-in-law, and Castor his grandson. What was more, his point was sound. Every boy learned self-defense in the Dark Kingdom, even if they were expected to grow up as mild as a June bug. And if the roads of Corona were going to be dangerous, then they had best do the same.

Ward ferociously volunteered to be the trainer, as fired up as he was for losing a brother-in-law, and classes were to start in three weeks.

Quirin told Varian this over dinner one evening.

“It’s time you learn to defend yourself,” he said.

Varian looked at him blankly, meatballs puffing steam into his nose. He smiled, and flopped his hand in that dismissive way of his. “Oh, Dad. Is this because of Castor’s dad? I’ve got it covered if anyone attacks you. I’ve made these bombs out of the glass balls from that peddler—the one with the crazy-looking eyebrow, you know? I’ll get them—”

“I suppose that’s what all those sounds coming from Miller’s pond have been for the last three days?”

Varian paused, half-risen to his feet. “Well, yeah! They explode in a cloud of gas! I’ll get one!”

“No, stay here.”

Varian sat, looking owlish. This child was on the cusp of a moody adolescence? Oh, sure.

“You will learn proper self-defense.”

“You mean like punching? I don’t want to punch things. Sometimes the boys like to fight but, you know, I’m always—Out. Of. There.”

“Yes, son, that’s the prob—” A headache was prowling behind the back of Quirin’s eyeballs. He sighed. “Ward has offered to teach you boys self-defense.”

“Ward? But he’s a milkman! I mean, okay, if you say so.”

“Before Ward was a milkman, he was a guard.”

“Really? Boy, talk about coming down in the world!”

Quirin almost fell out of his chair. “There’s as much honor in being a milkman or … other things as—!” Clearing his throat, Quirin unruffled his feathers. “He is going to teach you the staff.”

Varian’s eyes glowed. “You mean fighting like in the Flynn Rider books? Will we be learning swords too?” he shouted. A vibration in the hand that clutched his fork sent a meatball skittering across the table.

“Just the staff.”

God forbid they give anything sharp to Varian.

Quirin had Varian assist him in making the quarterstaff, exactly to Varian’s meager height. Varian was a pile of questions, and Quirin had to answer them carefully, and sometimes even claim ignorance. Then Varian spent a week reading a manual he had bought off a peddler. Upon reaching the end, he threw it away in disgust, wondering why there was so little geometry.

“It’s not so much a matter of math,” Quirin said. “I mean, er, I think. You have to learn to move your body.”

Varian wriggled and tried it out, shaking his legs here and there, kicking a lamp off the side table. Then he cried, “The laundry!” and went running to the kitchen, where he had left the tablecloth boiling clean over the fire. “It’s okay, Dad! Ooh, I got it so white!”

His boy was hopeless.

Not even Ulla had been so domestic. She had had bigger plans with her alchemy than getting the whites whiter, which was what Quirin had loved about her. If he hadn’t understood her field, he understood her scope. He’d had enough of adventuring, and Ulla had just been getting started, but Varian was practically a housewife. A housewife prone to the regular explosion, but still. How was he going to manage fighting lessons?

The day came they were going to find out. Quirin set the staff in Varian’s hands (he had confiscated it after preventing one too many accidents), and Varian set off, already swinging it over his head.

“This is awesome!” he crowed, running out the door.

He came back home a few hours later, glowering.

“How did it go?” Quirin asked.

“Ward told me I ask too many questions.”

“You mustn’t pester the teacher, son.”

“It’s just ‘cause he doesn’t know the answers,” Varian said, darkly, but wisely. “I don’t think I’m cut out for this physical stuff, Dad.”

“No?”

“Castor rapped me on the knuckles. On purpose! I know he’s angry about what happened to his dad, but we weren’t even supposed to be hitting each other yet!”

“Bruises are to be expected.”

Varian spent the early evening nursing his bruised knuckles, glumly rubbing a salve of his own design onto them. Then he spent the late evening in the bath, screaming for more hot water; he had put something itchy in the salve, and in his zest to apply it to his knuckles, he had applied it to his hands, his right shin, forehead, chin, neck, and belly button, besides. He spent the late-late evening tinkering in the lab (not making another salve, Quirin prayed), until Quirin yelled at him to go to bed.

Quirin feared this spelled the end of Varian’s martial training.

But the morning found Varian out with the thrushes, practicing an oberhau move rather badly. He never got it right, and then used the quarterstaff to knock plums out of the trees for breakfast. The thrushes weren’t anymore impressed with this than Quirin was.

(This was all from Ulla’s bloodline, surely.)

After spending all his free time terrorizing the local fauna with the grunts and screams of a child pole vaulting off a quarterstaff, then came the time for the next lesson. Varian wore his gloves this time. His satchel, stuffed with a rather large lunch, bounced off his shoulders as he went.

An hour later, Quirin, having just finished up his own lunch, opened the front door to find Varian and Ward heading up the path, halfway to the manor. Quirin scrubbed his hands with a towel while he waited for them. If he could only scrub away the feeling in his chest so easily. There weren’t any signs Varian was injured, but as they approached, so did the most ghastly smell. An absolutely vomit-inducing stench!

When they stepped up the stoop, Quirin saw there was no blood. But there was a scatter of unnatural bright-blue across Varian’s cheeks and arms, a color Quirin didn’t have a word for. And Varian reeked.

Varian looked between Quirin and Ward, his eyes wavering. “I’ll just … uh … go take a bath.”

Ward had the presence of mind to wait for the door to shut before he lit in. “We’re done.”

“This is only the second lesson.”

“He used magic.”

Quirin rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s not magic,” he said, weakly.

“Call it what you want! I can’t—”

“Ward, please, where is your patience?”

“I won’t do this! I have a dozen boys I’m trying to take care of, and until you get some control over that little hellion, I won’t be doing this!” Ward snarled, before turning and stomping away.

Quirin threw his hand up in disgust. Ward would see Varian’s bright little spirit snuffed out. What a waste of a man! But there was no use getting angry with someone who would never change.

Then, girding his loins, as it were, Quirin re-entered the house. Varian was in the kitchen, putting a pot of water to boil. He flashed his eyes at Quirin as quick as a spooked grouse, but even then, Quirin saw how his eyes were outlined in red.

Quirin poured a bucket of water into the pot. “He said you used magic.”

Varian clicked his tongue. “I told him a hundred-thousand times it’s not magic.”

“What did you do?”

“Well …” Eyelids heavy and down, Varian stared into the pot.

Quirin pulled two chairs out from the table, setting them side by side, and sat in one. Varian sat in the other, clasping his knuckles between his knees. He’d had the wherewithal to have thrown off his foul-smelling gloves somewhere. (Hopefully, not with the rest of the laundry.)

Varian spoke, voice cracking, “I just didn’t want Castor hitting my knuckles anymore. So I rigged a tiny, tiny—the tiniest—popper on my glove, so if he hit it, it would surprise him.”

Quirin was used to not understanding half of what Varian said anymore. “What is a popper?”

Raising his eyes in excitement, before lowering them again after meeting Quirin’s face, he answered, “That’s just what I call them. They’re like, you take a little bit of … of stuff kinda like gunpowder”—he flashed an uncertain look at Quirin—“and you wrap it in paper, so when you throw it or hit it, it makes a popping sound. It was just supposed to scare him.”

“So he hit your knuckles?”

“N—no.” A glimmer of a smile eased Varian’s mouth. “It was Ward. He was correcting me on my grip.”

Quirin rubbed a hand over his mouth, wiping the edges of his lips down into a respectable frown. He was disappointed, but Ward deserved it. Even if he couldn’t approve of making explosive devices to frighten the other children.

“Don’t you think this was excessive?” he asked.

“Oh, but I messed it up, because it exploded in—in this sort of …” Varian used his entire body, hands, arms, legs, torso, and all in a mimicry of a great blast. “Heh! I think I must have put some hydrogen sulfide in there, cause it made the most tremendous stink bomb! You should have seen the other boys scatter!”

Varian got up to see if the water was warm yet, then obviously finding it not hot enough for his liking, sat back down, putting his chin in his hands. Quirin put a hand to the back of his neck.

“Am I kicked out?”

Quirin rubbed his hand down Varian’s spine.

“Can you convince him to let me back?”

Quirin stood to check on the water himself. The boy stank.

“I promise not to do it again. No alchemy, this time. No matter how rude Castor is being. I promise.”

Once, Quirin had seen a fox snatch up a rabbit not three feet in front of him. He would never forget the look in that dying rabbit’s eyes, the moment it knew it was caught, and it realized the harsh, surprising reality of the world in which it lived. It was the same look Varian was giving him now, and because he couldn’t stand it, he turned his back.

A single parent could not afford the luxury of being ill, but as helpless as Quirin was in the face of his fever, Quirin learned to make do. His body refused, but he, at least, still had his mental faculties. Any moment not spent in sleeping or groaning, was spent in thinking. He was still capable of considering his behavior, and be aghast at it. How it was possible to be, at once, both furious at a person and yet fervently loving them? He knew all about it from arguments with Ulla. And now, to his shame, he knew about it with Varian too.

But if he could only keep Varian from knowing. That was all that mattered. In every interaction, Quirin was gentle and muted. The fever raging through him must have had something to do with that, but he would gladly take any tool at his disposal, even if it was dying in bed.

Taking advantage of Quirin’s meekness, Varian never left the room. He was a Smother. If he detected Quirin’s internal disturbance, he didn’t show it.

“You should go lie down,” Quirin told him, on day six of his illness, when Varian had tripped at the door and doused wash water all over the wall.

“I’m okay.”

“How are we doing on food? I saw you eating not gruel.”

“Janice brought vegetables.” Varian smoothed the blanket, and then smoothed it again.

“Did she come up here?”

“Don’t you remember?”

Varian laid a cold compress on Quirin’s forehead. Quirin took it off.

“You should go lie down,” he said.

On day seven, Quirin’s fever broke. It didn’t just break—it was smashed to smithereens. He felt like he could ski off the cliff of Mt. Saison and do three dozen back-flips and a full turn before he hit ground. And he didn’t even know how to ski!

Not precisely. Quirin was trying to get out of bed, putting one foot down on the cold floor, then laid there thinking about putting the other one down, maybe before nightfall, when Porter came in.

“Don’t you ever knock?” Quirin grumbled, one leg hanging out in space, the rest of him tucked in, like a slowly oozing pat of butter in a hot dinner roll.

“What's this? Some strange form of bed calisthenics? You look like a pretzel.” Porter stood at the side of the bed, leaning over to look Quirin in the face, his face brown except where it was white at the top, at the place for a hat brim.

Quirin stared at him. “You look tanned.”

“Impossible. I’d never let something as plebian as the sun touch this skin.” When Quirin tried to rise, Porter put a hand against his shoulder and cried, “No, no! All right, smart-guy, I’ll be serious. You can relax. We got everything taken care of.”

Porter’s words were a mystery, until they weren’t. Then a dozen fevers and flus couldn’t have kept Quirin from the window, where he looked out to see ….

He pressed his forehead against the glass. “Thank you, Porter.” Bouncing off the glass not two inches from his mouth, his voice sounded distorted and strangely moist.

“I can’t take credit. All I did was boss some folks around.”

“How did you do this without me noticing?”

“We came in the night—well, no, you were just really out of it. And don’t get all misty-eyed on me. Not until you’ve had a chance to inspect it. I think we got them all, but there was some disagreement about one of the bits over that-away. And I think Marcus might have made one of his out to be yours and got some free work out of us. Or at least, he looked strangely satisfied about that onion patch.”

Quirin couldn’t take his eyes off all his beautiful fields. It must have taken the entire village working at breakneck speed to weed, cultivate, and till, until his fields weren’t dry plots anymore but doses of rich possibility, a damp, fertile, black earth ready for seed. And somehow, they had done it while working with the Princess on repairing the village.

A strangled “Aurrgh!” came from the doorway.

“Dad, what are you doing out of bed? Doctor Byron said you can’t do anything until he gives you the go-ahead!”

Satisfied, Quirin slid back into bed, and then was pulling Varian to himself by the warm, brown hand. In the face of so much generosity, how could he not be generous with Varian? What sort of father was he if he struggled with forgiveness?

He pressed his nose against the back of Varian’s neck, and thought his boy smelled like the earth. An earth that only needed the proper care and cultivation, and it would bring forth abundance and harvest, and only sweet things.

Doctor Byron didn’t give Quirin his permission to arise for another two whole days. What sort of wrong had Quirin done to receive this torture? But Quirin was a good boy and stayed in bed, although his legs tended to get away from him and bounce all under the sheets. Ruddiger, who had thought the end of the bed was a good napping spot, learned his lesson.

But Quirin survived his convalescence, and even Dictator Varian allowed Quirin to get up without doctor’s orders. So, morning-of, Quirin got dressed into going-outside clothes, whistling whoo-whoo-whoo, and went running down the stairs, feeling the strongest he’d been since the amber. He popped into the kitchen, where Varian was making a proper breakfast—delectable eggs and bacon—instead of that gruel he’d been poisoning Quirin with for the past week. That was how they knew Quirin was recovered: last night, when Varian brought gruel up for dinner, Quirin had thrown the spoon across the room and roared, “No more!”

Varian was off his game; the eggs were rubbery, and the bacon burned, but Quirin swallowed them down like they were the stuff dreams were made of. Even Varian seemed to be aware of his lackluster results: he nibbled only the bacon edges that seemed least like charcoal. But his face was as clear as a sunbeam.

In this rejoicing mood, Quirin remembered they had business in town.

“You have new clothes waiting,” he crooned, scooping the last bit of egg into his mouth.

Varian took the dishes to the sink, then bent over to unstick a burr from Ruddiger’s tail. “Okay.”

After Quirin spent the morning inspecting his new spic-and-span fields, they left for town. Ruddiger stayed behind to preen himself in a flower bed, sticking his nose up when Varian teased that there must be some special lady-raccoon that was new to the neighborhood. It warmed Quirin’s tea kettle heart. If Varian could joke, it meant he was becoming comfortable.

Pretty soon the village was spilling out before them, like a geyser exploding its banks, with the cacophony of a busy weekday afternoon in a small village. Many of the stores were newly open, celebrating after their long hiatus away. The smell of fresh paint and new wood and thatch spiced the air, and the banner, Rebuilding Old Corona Together, still wagged its belly in the breeze. People shouted their greetings at Quirin as they went by. It was nice to be wanted.

The seamstress made Varian try on the clothes to fit them, and such an odd feeling came over Quirin. The exact word for what he felt eluded him, but it was akin to nostalgia. The new clothes were transformative. With them on, Varian was older, capable, less a boy, almost a man. But then Varian was back to his old self, the boy in the blue shirt, and the reality of how much time Quirin had missed was more apparent than ever.

Speaking of time, they had to kill some of it to allow the seamstress her last alterations, so they visited the cobbler and bought Varian’s boots, then had a snack at the Greasy Spittoon. While they sat on the patio, the wind played havoc with their hair. With his hair blowing into his face, and trying to pry it back from his eyes—but how disobedient it was!—Varian looked happy. Quirin wriggled his toes in his boots, content.

Goodness, how content he did feel! It had been such a long time since he’d been just a villager, not in charge of anybody but himself and his own, and he was getting used to it. It was nice to be able to head back towards home, with his son trailing behind him with a crinkling bag full of new clothes, without having expectations on him. There were only greetings to accept, how-de-doos to answer, and pass the hubbub and lively shops, and if he spotted something that should be taken care of, he could trip past it, whispering, It’s not my job. He could get used to this.

And how many of these villagers worked on his fields for him? Such beautiful people.

Here was a man that probably hadn’t touched them, a man Quirin hadn’t seen since before the amber: Darwin, looking flimsier than ever, his white hair gauzy over the tops of his ears. He always had somehow looked like a loose chicken feather. But now he looked as though he’d been stepped on, on top of it all. Creeping towards them, rubbing his hands together and muttering to himself, there was a feeble vulnerability in him that hadn’t been there before, as if he had aged fifty years instead of just one. The forced evacuation must have been hard on him.

They had had their disagreements plenty in the past, especially since he was Quirin’s closest neighbor, but Quirin still put his hand up in greeting as they passed.

“Good day, Darwin.”

Darwin glanced up and then forward, and kept walking past, without acknowledgment. Well, you can’t win them all.

But then, as if the clock tower struck the hour, Quirin’s senses rang. He jerked to a stop.

There had been nothing grandiose to capture his attention. Just the barest impression of hasty movement in the corner of his eye. A scuffle of feet in the dust. A guttural and wet-gathering sound in somebody's mouth that ended in an explosive pthu.

“Pthu!”

Quirin turned to look what had happened, but didn’t see anything unusual. People were minding the small intricacies of their lives, and Darwin was retreating away, hoary head bobbing.

But then, Varian. Varian was standing with such an expression, as if a horrid crater had opened on his face, as if a young plant had been scooped from the earth before its time. He lifted a hand to his cheek to wipe away the wet splattered there. Varian stared at it in his hand, uncomprehending.

In three bounding steps, Quirin was on Darwin's heels, wrenching the man around by the shoulder. There was a flash of white eyes. Quirin’s fist pounded against the man’s despicable red mouth. Knuckles cracked against teeth. Darwin went down in the dirt, and when he looked up, a ribbon of blood spilled out between his lips.

“You touch my son again, and I will break every bone in your body!” Quirin screamed.

Darwin cringed. It was barely enough to mollify Quirin, who lowered his fists, vibrating, feeling the most dangerous he’d felt in years. The townspeople stood silent and staring. As their leader, he had made himself gentle. He had never shown them this side of himself before.

He spun around and gathered Varian under his arm. “Let’s go.”

Varian’s voice was hard. “Why did you do that?”

Quirin faltered. He looked down, but Varian’s face was turned away, his cheek like granite.

They beat back home, Quirin nursing such a hatred and bleeding in his heart. What an old fool! Darwin was an old fool with the compulsion of a two-year-old and the same sense of self-preservation. To have done that, right under Quirin’s nose. Quirin had gone easy on him.

Quirin feared Varian might cry, except he didn’t. When they got home, Varian quietly put his new clothes and boots into his bedroom, and then made dinner in the kitchen, whipping pots and pans around, standing patiently as steam and smoke rose up and created halos around his face. Their evening was subdued, although Varian played a little on the fortepiano, something he hadn’t done since the day Quirin came out of the amber.

“I’m going to bed,” he said, at nine o’clock.

“Son—”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Quirin did something he hadn’t done in years. He sat on the bed with Varian, one arm slung around his son’s shoulders, and read from a book aloud. They read to each other regularly, but not like this. This was so childlike, like tucking Varian in bed again. But Varian seemed quietly, painfully content.

And Quirin’s heart bled, possibly more deep and gushing than Darwin’s mouth. And with each gushing beat of his heart, out spilled a wish: a wish for the earlier days of bright, easy smiles, and the blue eyes without a shadow behind them.

Chapter Text

Strangely, ever so strangely, when Quirin and Varian awoke the morning after Darwin, and they met in the hallway, Varian greeted Quirin with a warmth he hadn’t had since before the amber. All the awkward self-consciousness was gone, along with the frightened guilt, and he looked at Quirin with bright open eyes. The sort of admiring look only a young son gives to his father. It seemed Quirin’s making Darwin a punching bag, no matter how upset Varian had been about it yesterday, had done them good.

Quirin’s knuckles were sore. He had really given it to Darwin! In the light of day, he admired how purple they were. There had been a time when he would have rebuked himself for sloppy form, but not today. What beautiful things they were, never mind the pain, and never mind the small voice that told him this wasn’t right. It felt right, and had seemed to restore something that was lost, not that he understood how.

Porter came to see him before lunch, while he was out sowing. Quirin watched Porter pick his way through dirt clods and over lumps of defrauded weeds of Quirin’s pumpkin patch. It was like watching a unicorn appear out of the mire. Porter had always before laughed at Quirin’s attempts to soothe tensions in the populace, saying that Quirin should let them slug it out. But now here was Porter coming to do the job he had once sneered at.

Poor, poor Porter.

“Where’s Varian?” Porter asked when he stood by, sweeping his hat off his head. He slapped it against his thigh, which didn’t bode well. It never boded well when Porter began abusing his hats.

Quirin dove his hand into his seed bag, and continued sowing. Porter followed him as he planted down the row. “He’s in the house.”

“Good. I’d hate for him to lose what minutia of respect he has for you. I mean to verbally castrate you, old boy.”

Quirin laughed quick. “The word is ‘castigate.’”

“Dear sir, I know what I said.”

The weather was proving punishing this year; it was going to be a sweltering day again, with the air still and oppressive. Sweat was already collecting on the back of Quirin’s neck.

“What was I to do?”

“Not that. Ward says he’ll go to the constable.”

An eerie, violent jet of uncertainty blew through Quirin’s frame. He hadn’t considered there could be legal trouble. But then, he buried his unease, along with the seed he was sliding into the earth, pushing it down until the dirt covered a bruised knuckle. “I was defending my son.”

“Ward’s defending his father.”

“Tch. What defense does Darwin need? You know what he did.”

“Hmm,” Porter said, turning the hat in his hands. “It wasn’t nice.”

Quirin shot around to stare Porter in the face. Seeds flung from his bag and fell out onto the earth in clumps. “He treated my son worse than the dirt on the bottom of his shoe!”

“It was disgusting.” Porter’s mouth was open fragile, like a fresh, young morning glory, before he was curling his lips together tightly. It was always interesting when Porter tried to have fortitude. “Darwin is old enough to be your father.”

“So what?”

“Quirin, this isn’t how you would have handled it in the past.”

“Then I was wrong!” Quirin strode to the wheelbarrow and plucked out the water canteen, then spat the cork into the tray. “Don’t try to work things out between us. Let them go to the constable. There isn’t a constable in the world that would prosecute me.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Darwin was already walking away when you gave him the business end of your fist, isn’t that right?”

“It was an unprovoked attack on a fifteen-year-old boy!”

After puffing breath out from two ballooning cheeks, Porter turned his eyes away, and said, very quietly, “Maybe Darwin was provoked.”

Quirin nearly dropped the canteen, unbelieving. Porter kept his eyes riveted on some unearthed worm writhing in the dirt. How quickly this had turned from what Quirin had done to what Varian had done. This was a betrayal, and Varian had already paid.

“For something …” Quirin’s voice was so low in his chest, it took all his power to get it out. “For something that happened over a year ago?”

Porter snapped his eyes from the worm to Quirin, that look of disgust on his face not much changed. “It’s been weeks, Quirin. It’s only been weeks—see, you don’t get it. It was only weeks ago that Junior allied with the Saporians.”

That … couldn’t be right, could it?

“That’s just …” Quirin wrenched the canteen to his mouth to drink, more so to give him time to think. After one swallow, then another, and then another, his heart was still pounding in his chest. He had to say something, but he didn’t know what. And that look Porter was giving him, such a pitying look, he couldn’t take it anymore, and he spat out, “He was in prison! A child in prison! What was he to do? Fight guerrilla warfare while the rest of the kingdom hid behind their mother’s skirts?”

“Are you saying the wee, little criminal mastermind didn’t know what he was doing? Wake up, Quirin! He built them a bomb. They were going to blow up Corona!”

Quirin’s pounding heart stopped, even though he didn’t believe it, not for a second. He could throw the canteen in Porter’s face for speaking such lies. Varian had never mentioned a bomb, only that he had turned on the Saporians when they were going to hurt the populace.

“You old gossip,” he growled, “you shouldn’t listen to rumors.”

“It’s not a rumor.”

“Your mouth is like a grave.”

“My brother had a ship mast fall through his roof because of that bomb! Don’t tell me I don’t know!”

They were both gesturing loudly now, hugely, arms flailing. Porter’s hat, abused and bending in the wind, gestured along with the canteen in Quirin’s hand, which was sloshing water all down his fingers.

“It doesn’t make sense, Porter! Why would he have a pardon if he was going to blow up the city? Why would he make them a bomb, only to turn on them?”

“You should have the answers to those questions!” Porter laughed sarcastically, his cheeks turning that vivid strawberry-spotted pink whenever he got not just angry, but irate. “Go on being a runner, Quirin. Keep your head in the sand.”

That image of Varian, bent heaving over the chamber pot, flashed before Quirin’s eyes. How could he explain that?

“I have to be delicate with him—”

“Delicate with him? People are scared, and you want them to pretend. You and this silly, little princess.”

“He earned his pardon!”

“And all it is is words on a paper.” Porter rolled his eyes, clear to the back of his head. “I’m the one who posted that pardon up in the village square for all the world to see, and how wonderfully vague it all is. It must bring you a lot of comfort.”

Quirin threw the canteen into the wheelbarrow, making the tray ring loudly, followed by the seed bag. “This isn’t fair. You used to defend him.”

“That was before, and not what … not what he did.”

There was that question in the back of Porter’s eyes, the same question that was in everyone’s eyes, and Quirin wrestled the wheelbarrow handles into his palms. He wouldn’t answer that question. He couldn’t answer that question, when he barely understood himself how the amber had happened.

“There is a pardon,” he said, “and that’s enough.”

“It’s not.”

“It’s going to have to be.”

“You push too much too soon.” Porter slapped his hat back onto his head and gave one last parting shot. “Go read the trial record for yourself. And maybe you can figure out how to defend Varian instead of this feckless insistence of his juvenile moral ignorance and—and punching feeble old men across the mouth!”

Porter marched away, in great broad strides, bom-bom-bom, and Quirin marched his own way, boom-boom-boom, pushing the wheelbarrow before him. The wheel creaked as he bounced it over rocks and ruts. He was so furious, he didn’t hear the footsteps coming up behind him, and had the fright of a lifetime when Porter’s voice suddenly came right over his shoulder.

“Wait a minute! I’m not done with you yet.”

Quirin kept on towards the barn, while Porter stamped breathlessly beside him. “What is it you want me to do?” he asked. “Abandon him? Toss him out? You want me to disown him?”

That word, ‘disown,’ was such an ugly word, he could barely stand to say it.

“Nobody wants that. You’ll do right by him, as you always have. Especially after …” Porter faltered. Oh, and what would he say “especially after” what, but Porter wisely let the words die. But it was the look he gave Quirin that was sepulchral, and Quirin remembered he had earlier called Porter’s mouth a grave. Porter’s lips were parted and pleading. “Open your eyes.”

Porter tripped over some loosened root, and Quirin, instead of stopping to make sure his friend was fine, went on. If some rabbit hole swallowed Porter right up, the man would deserve it, and it would bring Quirin some much desired peace.

But there wasn’t a rabbit hole big enough for Porter, and he bounced to his feet quickly enough to catch up to Quirin, who was pushing the wheelbarrow into the barn. Quirin abandoned it to start picking up, straightening some fallen pitchfork and shovels he had let topple over in an earlier puerile fit of laziness.

“I think you should leave, Porter.”

“In a minute.” Porter stood at the wheelbarrow, and thrust his hands inside the seed bag, letting pumpkin seeds run through his fingers. He then flicked his eyes towards Quirin.

“Now what?”

“What was that package you had in Corona? The one you wanted me to hide.”

Quirin was suddenly too exhausted to be angry anymore. His fights with Porter were always like this: explosive and quick to start, and quicker to end. “A birthday gift.”

“For the sake of the peace, would you not let him—”

“I’m not sorry for punching Darwin.”

Deep lines plowed into Porter’s forehead. He nodded. “Okay. Okay, fine.” His poor abused hat was swept off his head one last time and pounced against his thigh. “I’d advocate for us all to punch Darwin, but it wasn’t what I platformed on.”

“Ha ha,” Quirin answered, sarcastically.

“I’m going to talk to them. I’ll tell Ward he goes to the constable, there’s a good chance Darwin gets prosecuted for an unprovoked assault on a minor. But you know how Ward is. No promises. And please, for the love of everything holy, don’t punch anymore people.”

Quirin turned his back. Porter had said it: no promises.

Lunch was skipped, dinner awkward. Not that Varian knew.

“There was an entire clan of mice—I’m talking four generations!—living in the pantry! Ruddiger tried to chase them all out, but it was rough going. Wasn’t it, buddy?” Varian stopped his chatter, with all his words falling all over the dinner table like handfuls of rice, to turn his attention to Ruddiger.

Ruddiger smacked the end of a fork against the tabletop.

“Why is he at the table?” Quirin muttered, although he said it more out of instinct than a conscious realization of the world around him.

Do I ask him? Quirin kept asking himself. That was what kept taking up all the space in his brain. Do I ask?

Varian went on happily, completely unaware that an imbroglio of unsettling and enraging thoughts seemed to be shaking his father loose, even down to the change in his pocket. All those horrible things he and Porter had said, and the threat of prosecution. If Quirin got arrested, what … what a nightmare. But the bigger nightmare: Porter’s talk about a bomb.

“I wanted to talk to you about this letter Ambrose brought today. Do you recognize the daisies on it?”

Quirin didn’t believe anything about a bomb—he couldn’t believe it. But he was almost afraid to look at Varian, as if the answer would be right in his boy’s visage, and what if it was an answer he could not accept?

“It’s an invitation for … well, I guess you can call it a sort of party, I suppose. Not a fun party, but still.”

There was no way Varian would have built them (Saporians?) a bomb, but only a few weeks ago, Quirin would have never believed Varian capable of the things the boy himself had confessed to.

“Personally, I think calling in some professionals would be the smart thing to do, but wha-at do I know? Ruddiger, put that down.”

Do I ask? Do I ask?

But there was no way Varian had built them a bomb! Quirin could never explain how, but he knew it. The same way he knew when it was time to plant the potatoes, or just before the lettuce was about to bolt—not by the calendar, but some internal chronometer that warned him ahead of time. And his internal chronometer was telling him now that Varian was innocent.

Do I ask? How can I ask?

But above all, Porter was right: Quirin had no defenses for Varian. And if he was afraid to ask, he never would have defenses.

“How do I answer?”

Quirin jerked out of his quagmire. Varian’s face was bright and red in the steam of a bowl of boiled potatoes, his eyes raised in expectation.

“What?”

“Have you even been listening to a word I’ve said?” Varian’s lips tilted into a laugh. He held up an unfolded piece of paper, with purple and glimmery gold smeared on the back of it. “The invitation from Rapunzel.”

All Quirin could think was, Do I ask this terrible thing?

Out loud, he said, “Show me.”

Varian stood next to his chair, holding out the letter. (If he asked this terrible thing he knew to be untrue, what would it do? How would Varian take it?) Quirin took the letter with one hand, and pressed the other into the soft nodes of Varian’s back, where the flesh rose and fell over ribs like a hill country. Varian looked at him, before stepping closer.

And that was how it should be. Quirin could never forget that small, wriggling body he had held nearly sixteen years ago, that baby, barely human, who had wrapped tiny gossamer fingers around Quirin’s blunt, sausage fingers. Who had been clinging still when Quirin had guided him on his first uncertain steps. Of months of a boy climbing into his bed in the middle of the night, at first because he was afraid of monsters, and then because he missed his mother.

The letter was an invitation to a sort of overnight “construction-party” the Princess was throwing for the palace. “Because we missed you rebuilding Old Corona!” the letter cried, in florid letters. It seemed Princess Rapunzel could only tackle property damage through the same means: with lively social functions and potential (“lodgings provided”) midnight kitchen raids.

“Does she not understand what a party is?” Quirin asked. “Or construction?”

“Oh, ah! …No.”

Quirin flopped the letter against the tabletop. “Is this mandatory? The language is so …”

“Peppy?”

“I was going to say, ‘exuberant,’ but yes. Ye suns!”

Quirin looked at whom the letter was addressed to. It was to Varian and Ruddiger (!) alone, and not to him—which, thank heavens, he certainly hoped not!

“It’s in a week,” Varian murmured. “What do I say?”

The paper was butter smooth against Quirin’s fingertips and smelled of—he sniffed again to be sure—yes, paint …. This invitation was not mandatory. Not with expressions like, “It’ll be so fun!!!” and decorated with hearts and smiling daises tumbling all over the borders. The Princess still hadn’t learned that even her friendliest of gestures carried a forceful authority that most people must bow to, but Quirin trusted he had figured her out. After all, she had tried to wash his socks a few weeks ago.

“Do you want to go?” he asked.

Varian looked suddenly frightened.

Porter’s words, “Too much, too soon,” fluttered in Quirin’s brain like a moth caught in a jar. That was a taint he wished to wash himself of.

“It’s up to you,” he said, handing the letter back to Varian. His fork spun through his potatoes with the tiniest turn of his fingers. Yep, if he had but one talent, it was pretending to be at ease.

Varian looked shot through with an oscillation of emotion, crinkling the letter in his hand. The steady marches of both want and fear seemed to be clashing within him, as he stepped from one foot to the next, then rounding his shoulders as he pressed his hip into the table. Darwin did more damage then he would ever realize: just when Varian was feeling more secure about going out in public, Darwin had spat in his face.

With a little intake of air, Varian said, “I think … I want to go. Yeah.”

And with that, a blasted lightning bolt struck Quirin, almost making him drop his fork. An honest-to-goodness lightning bolt! An unforeseen possibility exploded him. Varian had done much more than just be courageous, but had also thrust out his vein-rich hands, and from between marble-like fingers, spilled nuggets of gold he didn’t know he had.

Quirin could go with him!

“I can go with you!” Quirin said.

Varian’s eyebrows flew up, before coming back down like a wake of vultures.

Quirin laughed. “All right, I’m not going to be the old man ruining your fun. I just want to visit the horse market.”

“The horse market?” Varian asked, disbelieving. “I thought you hated that place.”

“I do, but we need animals. Unless you want to haul everything by hand for the rest of your life?”

“Nah, I’ll just build …” Stumbling over the silence, Varian jerked his eyes down, dimmed with self-consciousness. Slowly, he folded the letter and put it into the pocket where Quirin knew he still kept the pardon.

Quirin cut his potatoes into perfect slices, before pushing his dinner plate away. If Varian could be brave, so could he. “There is a package in the top drawer of my dresser. Go get it,” he said.

Stick it, Porter.

Varian came running back with the package, and opened it at Quirin’s direction.

“I was saving it for your birthday, but I just realized I actually owe you two. So … happy fifteenth birthday, son.”

Lifting the alchemy gloves (utter curiosities) from the paper, Varian timidly let out a shy, one-sided smile that tempered his face into a glow. “Wow! These are so nice. They smell so new.” He lifted them, paper and all, to his nose and breathed. “Thank you.”

Quirin patted those grown-up arm garters. “I have no idea what to get you for your sixteenth, so you better tell me.”

“And I owe you one for your—”

“Don’t you dare say it.”

Snickering, Varian took off his old gloves and put on his new, and the look was complete: here was this creature looking more like a man than ever, body hedging away from skinny and onward towards slim, capable and stylish in his own nerdy way. Of the fourteen-year-old, nothing was left.

Quirin would ask Varian no questions. Not a question on anything. He couldn’t afford to disturb this tenderness they had. But he had to have answers. He couldn’t defend Varian without them. So he would get them another way.

When they traveled to Corona, he would go to court and see the trial record.

Chapter Text

It was a cozy morning that found Quirin and Varian riding Quirin’s two-seater towards Corona for Princess Rapunzel’s “Construction Extravaganza!!!” The rump of Ambrose’s borrowed horse, Hebe, flickered as flies landed on her dappled sides. She was a good horse, gentle and smart, the sort Quirin hoped he’d be able to find at the horse fair.

Not that he was holding his breath. The horse fair was where all the shoddy horses were sold by shoddier salesman. But since no one in Old Corona was selling a horse fit for Quirin’s purposes … well, there you have it.

“Heaven help me,” he murmured, and quivered in disgust, before remembering not to awaken Varian, who was snoozing his head off against his shoulder.

Varian wasn’t just snoozing, but snoring enough to suit a narcoleptic ogre. The raccoon sitting on his lap snored enough for an ogre’s narcoleptic fur hat. What a pair they made! Well, it shouldn’t surprise him they were falling asleep so easily. They had been staying up far too late every night, getting the lab back in order.

Quirin sneezed as some unnamed chemical smell tickled his nose. Since he came out of the amber, Varian had been smelling of meadows and soap, boyishly. But since the gloves, his smell was aqua vitae and ammonia, charcoal and sulfur, bitter of antimony and cloves and a litany of less foul-smelling ingredients, and many even pleasant, and others probably only known to God. Quirin had never thought he would have missed it, but he had. It was Ulla’s smell.

Another sneeze thundered out of Quirin, and Varian awoke with a huge, face-eating yawn. He sat up and blinked sleepily as they rode down the ridge towards the Coronan Sea. Corona Island looked like a wedding cake in the pink candied glow of the morning sunlight, decorated with white needle spires of the castle like spun sugar. It was the perfect contradiction to the uncertain rumblings within Quirin.

“Rise and shine,” Quirin told Varian. “Fix your hair.”

Varian ran his hands through his bedraggled hair, pushing his fingers through, but every strand popping up after them like popcorn in a hot skillet. Eventually, he just pushed his goggles back on, and all was normal again.

The air became electric as the carriage wheels went clack-clack-clack over the cobblestone in the bridge, and the crowds opened up before them, people getting their day started by running through the streets. They didn’t speak until Quirin pulled up to the castle gates.

“You have your invitation?” Quirin asked, wrapping the reins around his fist.

Varian jumped down. “Yes, Dad.”

“And your bag? Don’t forget your bag.”

“On my shoulder already.”

“And your vermin.”

“Oh, Dad.”

This was weird. Here Quirin was, dropping off Varian at these castle gates to spend the night in some fancy quarters, while Quirin checked himself into an inn only a few blocks away. All because it was “fun.” Oh, sure.

(Quirin kept his eyes from drifting towards the prison.)

“Do you remember which inn I’m staying in?” he asked.

“The Angry Porcupine.” Varian’s eyebrow came down. “Are you sure that’s a good place to stay?”

“The rule is, the worse the name, the better the place.”

“Oh! Pardon my ignorance.”

“I’ll send you a note once I know which room I’m in. And I’m picking you up tomorrow at ten, right?”

“Right-o.”

“All right. Have fun, I guess.”

Stay with the Princess, he almost finished with, but crammed the tip of his tongue into the back of his teeth to blockade the words.

“I’ll try not to bang my finger with a hammer, anyway,” were Varian’s last words as he was turning to go. Quirin watched him, where he hesitated at the gate, rubbed his hip once (so he still had that pardon then), and finally inched up to the guard. After showing them the invitation, the guards ushered him in blandly, their faces carefully neutral. Varian waved at Quirin with a clean, quiet light in his face, and with a jaunty tilt of triumph in his pelvis, while laughing at Ruddiger, who was waving too.

Telling himself that no one would dare bother Varian as long as he was by invitation by the Princess, the earthquake shifting Quirin’s ribs had settled into a mere tremor. He drove Hebe to the inn and checked in, promising to pay a pretty mark for not only his lodging, but also horse and buggy as well. Then, at a run down bistro, he ate a proper breakfast of mystery meat pie instead of the nuts and cherries he’d had on the road, and sat for a long time deciding if he should go to the court clerk first, or the horse market. Court clerk? Or horse market?

His inclination was to go to the horse market first, but deep down—or maybe not so deep—he knew what would happen if he went. He’d meander, discover it was time for lunch, go back and meander some more, and before he knew it, it would be dinner and the court closed.

And he had nothing to be nervous about. Varian had already confessed all, and going to look at the trial record was just to shut Porter up. If Varian had really been that bad, they never would have let him into the castle. It was important Quirin educated himself on the things Varian couldn’t say, all the intricacies, so that he could refute rumors and accusations with confidence and not with lips that flapped uselessly, like the wings of a dying butterfly. Like he had been with Porter.

So speaking this way to himself, Quirin went to the court.

If it were possible for a tree—perhaps a willow or an ancient aspen—to have grown legs and gotten itself a career, Quirin was seeing it before him.

In the court clerk’s office, a walking, talking tree had taken up residence and was doing public service, seated at a counter that had an entire flock of doilies living on it.

She said her name was Amelia Tan, and Quirin almost believed it. A wisp of a woman(?), her limbs and even facial structure were long and flat and craggy, more suggesting a birch in a lazy glade than a human being. What was more, she behaved like a tree. She was unmoved when Quirin asked to see the trial record for Kingdom of Corona vs. Varian of Old Corona. Her eyes—not even interesting enough to be blue or hazel, but inhabiting an indecisive color in between—were dead things.

“You see, lad,”—she breathed imperceptibly, each inhalation an eon, and each exhalation an age—“records regarding minors are sealed to the public. Especially that minor.”

Quirin hadn’t been called “lad” in thirty years, and wondered just how old this bat was. He looked around the room to see if it could help him in that regards (perhaps the judicious use of “miss” would butter her up), and all it told him was untold horrors. Nearer to the prison than he liked to be, the room was squat and stone-lined, smelled of peppermint, and—horror above all horrors!—housed a stuffed penguin. It stood in the corner, with eyes of glass that possessed more life than Amelia Tan’s; it also wore a stained, yellow cravat with a doily on its head.

Quirin cleared his throat. “Ma’am—”

“The court records are not just to fulfill the curiosity of the idle and ignorant. I’m tired of turning you people away.”

“But ma’am, I am the … er, minor’s father.”

He detected a slight—ever so slight—brightening in those limpid eyes, suggesting a living organism, but he couldn’t be certain.

“Hrm.” Her knobbled hands fluttered vaguely, before lifting out a form and quill from a compartment hidden behind the counter.

“Bureaucracy,” Quirin muttered, as he filled out the form.

She took it from him. “Please return tomorrow morning, and if approved, you will be allowed to see the documents in question.”

“Tomorrow?” he cried, dismayed. He only had one day to get this done. It wasn’t like he could bring Varian along with him! “Is there a way to get my request expedited?”

“No,” she breathed, as though the wind rustled a leaf or two in her canopy.

Would kicking the counter get him kicked out, or act as motivation for her to hurry it along? Well, he would try a different tactic than petulant acts of violence, since they had never seemed to have gotten him anywhere before.

He smiled. “Who does the approving?”

“The clerk.”

He dropped that smile faster than a hat. “But isn’t that you?”

“Yes.”

Quirin stared, and she stared back with all the intelligence of a dead throat. Well, he knew it was a long shot. This woman had no soul to reason with. She was nothing more than a drone. He had been in government, and knew how these things were.

Thinking about how he could conceive of a way to extend his and Varian’s stay another day, while simultaneously visiting court again without Varian knowing about it, Quirin went to the Bank of Corona to withdraw some cash. There, he received news so stunning he couldn’t articulate it, and next visited the horse fair in no state at all. He saw dainty Neserdnian warmbloods, metallic-sheened Galcrestian mares, chunky Pinacostan Heavy Drafts, and Chocolate Trotter bays, with tails so gossamer they gave the Princess a run for her money. There were pot-bellied donkeys, fuzzy-eared ponies, and even a zebra-horse mix called a zorse. He saw all these, but had eyes for none of them.

Eventually, a dappled gray named Nuthatch presented herself, a hefty horse that bumped his shoulder with a sudden drop of her head as he passed by. She jerked up with a puff of heated wet-breath, as though surprised, but then shoved her muzzle, soft as velvet, into his hand for a sugar-cube.

“A sweetheart, but strong too!” the smiley breeder oozed.

“Oh yeah? What’s wrong with her?”

The breeder’s mouth dropped. “Sir, I sell only good horse stock! Take her for a test-ride, you’ll see!”

It was the best Quirin could do, besides check her brick-like teeth. She obeyed him well, and was perhaps a little slow, but he needed strength, not speed. But what was depressing (besides the exchange of money), she would probably turn into the very devil the second he took her away from here, and the breeder already said he didn’t give refunds.

“I had two horses a year ago,” he told her, as he lead her through the fair. “Stormy and Balmy. I’m not sure what happened to them. Varian turned them out after he couldn’t care for them anymore. And the cow too. But he ate the chickens.”

She whistled through her nose.

“It was impressive, especially for him. He didn’t use to have the fortitude to slaughter chickens.”

They passed by another stack of wriggly ponies in a corral, with a faded denim-gray donkey in their midst, rolling on its back in the dirt. Nuthatch looked at them with liquid eyes.

He patted her on the flank. “Are you the sort that gets lonely? I can’t afford another one of you.”

The donkey sneezed in the dirt, and didn’t stop sneezing as Quirin led him and Nuthatch back to the inn, his coin purse depressingly light in his pocket. The donkey had been cheap, but not that cheap.

But what little change he had left jangled like church bells when he walked into his room and jumped out of his skin at Varian’s, “Hey, Dad!”

Leaning against the doorframe, Quirin waited for his heart to slow to a less hummingbird-ish pace. Once he felt human again, he fought down a frown. If Varian was already asking to leave, it couldn’t have gone well.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Innkeeper let me in.” Varian sat on the chair, his eyes all aglow and face spotted agreeably with his freckles. He didn’t seem upset.

“But why are you here?”

“I want to know if we can stay another day?” Then Varian went into a long, excited story which Quirin slowly teased out that Varian wanted to go on some sort of competitive treasure hunt.

“We’ll be rich! I mean, if I get there first. I could get any alembic I wanted! And you could hire everybody in the village to work for you. How’d you like to be a mogul? Anyway, Rapunzel wants to talk more about it when I get back.”

Quirin lay on the bed. He was kaput.

“Are you tired from horse shopping?” Varian asked, patting Quirin on the head.

“Yes. I bought a horse and donkey.”

“I thought you wanted two horses?”

“Yes, but … what were you here for again?”

“The treasure hunt.”

Quirin waved a hand. “Yes, go gallivanting across the country, if you want.”

“Thanks, Dad!” Varian went bouncing for the door.

Before he got over the threshold, it struck Quirin that this side-quest of Varian’s was perfect. Besides the fact it meant things were going well.

Quirin jerked up. “Varian, wait! You said the thing is tomorrow morning?”

“Yeah. But we’re supposed to be doing it bright and early. I don’t know if Rapunzel’s idea of bright and early is your idea of bright and early, but you know. The morning. Ish.”

“That’s perfect—I mean, it’s fine. I still have to leave tomorrow, so I’ll leave the horse here, and you can just ride her back once you’re done with your thing. I’ll pay for an extra day of boarding. Just make sure you get her out before ten the day after tomorrow.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem. Unless, you know, Rapunzel finds another way to avoid work.”

When did he get to be so sarcastic?

Quirin led Varian to the stables to show him the horse, before remembering he didn’t have any tack for her, trusting the stuff at home would work. So it was decided Varian would ride the donkey home. No problems there, as Varian was already making a friend of it by feeding it apples. Ruddiger, watching from a haystack, did not take kindly to this.

“What’s his name?” Varian asked.

“Clementine.”

Varian stroked the donkey’s ears. “I don’t think that’s a very good name.”

“Change it if you want, if he’ll learn it. You want to get some lunch?”

Varian stared with buttoned-up eyes, his mouth strangely bland. Looking away and then back again, he stammered, “They’re serving baked Alaska at the castle for lunch.”

“Oh, by all means then.”

Was this what it meant to have a teenager with friends: being abandoned for baked Alaska?

Hopping away from ex-Clementine (in between names now), Varian pushed something into Quirin’s hand. “You better keep this. Don’t want to lose it running over hill and dale tomorrow.” Then laughing a laugh that wasn’t a laugh, he scurried out in a hurry, pausing only long enough to let Ruddiger scramble up his legs to bark chastisements in his ear.

Quirin looked at what was in his hand. It was the pardon.

Deciding that ten o’clock in the morning was “bright and early” enough, even for a princess (plus hearing some noise outside his inn window that may have been a beginnings of a treasure hunt), Quirin went to see the court clerk. He hadn’t even eaten breakfast, what with a rumbling, hissing ghoul taking up all the room in his stomach, having moved in there some time between seven and eight in the morning.

But even at ten, it was still too early to set eyes on Amelia Tan, who still sat at the counter as though she had never moved from it, her eyebrows curling like two brown leaves. If roots were growing from between her toes to the floor in an obscene and grotesque tableau, Quirin wouldn’t have been surprised. He gave her a wan smile.

“Your request has been approved,” she respired. “Mary will take you to the reading room.”

Egads, there was another one here?

At the sounding of a silver bell, which was shaped exactly like an elven queen’s wedding dress, Mary appeared. Woe is him, though, because Mary was as far from an elven queen’s wedding dress as a woman could get. She marched out from behind a door that had been painted the sickly yellow color of a dying primrose, wearing a thin bow tied smartly around her neck. With head held lofty and shoulders like iron pauldrons, she clearly had aspirations.

Without so much as a smile, she led Quirin behind the door, then down a narrow and humid hallway darkened with soot, and then to a room sparse and tiny enough to please the most self-denying monk. On the wall, a pretentious pendulum clock see-sawed away. There was a tiny window, very high up the wall (presumably, to keep passersby from peering in), letting in just enough air to keep occupants from suffocating. And all else, in that Spartan and cellular room, was a desk, chair, and folio.

“Do not remove any documents,” Mary said, tersely. “When you are finished, you may let yourself out, but leave everything here. Inform Ms. Tan as you go. We close at five.”

Quirin couldn’t imagine the grim horrors that awaited him if he either removed the folio or stayed past five. He nodded, keeping serious in the self-importance of it all, and dutifully sat. Mary gave him one last suspicious glare before whipping out, leaving him alone.

“The place is inhabited by banshees,” Quirin muttered, before the humor of the situation vanished. There was that ghoul again, expanding the interior of his stomach, until he threatened to be sick. He moved the chair closer to the window to feel the scanty air on his face. The folio was abyssal black, covered with gold filigree at the edges, and someone, probably Amelia Tan, had written rigidly on the pasted-on label, “Case 85-0530-07.” The covering was slick to the touch, made of leather or possibly goatskin. No, it was definitely leather.

Shaking himself from such mindless, but soothing, drivel, Quirin opened the book and began to read.

The folio contained the transcript of the trial, although there were a few loose pages tucked into the back. (Would Amelia Tan or Mary come exploding in like enraged vipers if he displaced these pages? Of course they would.) He scanned through the transcript, hardly understanding what he was reading, mind growing dull at all the legal jargon.

But, there was still enough for him to understand. First, he was not surprised to see that a panel of three judges presided over the case, not the King. The judge panel was kept on for such cases, when the King couldn’t fulfill his judicial duties, or it would be inappropriate. There was no jury, which wasn’t done in Corona at all. (Even in the Dark Kingdom, jury trials were only for less serious crimes.) There was a court-appointed defense attorney, Coulson Noble, but Quirin had only a perfunctory knowledge of the court system, and no idea if this person was meant to be a good attorney or not.

The criminal charges bothered Quirin for a full minute (besides the patricide charge, which nearly shot him to the ceiling), before he figured out why.

“Why is the theft of the flower not listed?” he murmured, reading through the list again and again, to see if he was missing something. Breaking into the royal vault and stealing such an artifact was surely, to put it delicately, completely criminal, but no mention was made, not even breathed. No mention was made of the truth serum Varian had distributed either. Why not?

The first point of order seemed not to go well for Varian. The judges took Noble to task for Varian’s not attending the proceedings.

Hon. Punch: Mr. Noble, where is the accused? You must know by now that the accused is required to attend the trial. Or have the reforms escaped your notice?

Noble, Esq., Defense: I am requesting a waiver of presence, Your Honor, or else a special dispensation to allow the accused to be present.

Hon. Mayson: What dispensation?

Noble, Esq, Defense.: He is very young, Your Honors, and is in a distraught state of mind. He requires the presence of his pet. He cannot be parted from it. If he may either be excused, or at least allowed his pet.

Hon. Coster: His what?

Noble, Esq., Defense: His pet. A raccoon.

Hon. Punch: A raccoon? You mean, like a stuffed animal?

Quirin paused at that. This was the lawyer trying to emphasize Varian’s youth. That was good. Maybe this lawyer wasn’t one of those bloodsucking ones. But there was another thing to give him pause: they had let Varian keep Ruddiger. When Varian had said he had pushed Ruddiger away, Quirin assumed it had been like the horses and cow, letting them go because he couldn’t care for them anymore. But Ruddiger had gone to prison with Varian.

Quirin rubbed a thumb over his bottom lip. It had been kind to let Varian keep Ruddiger. And Ruddiger … blast, now he was feeling grateful towards a fur hat!

When he read on, the prosecution made a comment about having Ruddiger at the trial.

Smith, Esq., Prosecution: Your Honors, the State will indulge the accused’s waiver of presence.

Hon. Punch: You do realize, under the new code, this will make it more difficult for you to establish guilt?

Smith, Esq., Prosecution: If the accused cannot be in the courtroom without disrupting the proceedings, in one way or another, it is a concession we are willing to make.

“Oh, is that so?” Quirin wrenched from between his teeth. How was he going to get through this entire folio if just the first few pages were going to do this to him?

Next, Noble immediately argued down the patricide charge, since there was no evidence Quirin was actually dead. “The boy believes his father is still alive. And he may still be.” The charge was dismissed without argument from the prosecution, since they acknowledged that even their best alchemist consultants couldn’t explain the nature of the amber. Well, Noble had started off very well. Quirin would have to get him a fruit basket.

But of course, Noble could not argue away all the charges. Quirin read on. The State called in guards to testify on the two attacks on the castle and the kidnapping of the Queen. He had to pace around the room and think about that, when he saw the dates.

“Months after the accident. What was he doing in that time? Why wasn’t he with the others when they were evacuated? And why would he go after—”

He pushed his fingers together until it hurt. To think of Varian spending months trying attempt after attempt to get him out, and with each successive failure, Varian growing more and more desperate, until he lost all reason and became violent. It was the only explanation. The failure of the flower was the thing that tipped his poor boy over the edge.

Quirin sat back down calmly. He knew how this would end, no need to get upset.

And read on he did. The rest of the testimonies and evidence were sickening. Pages and pages of the damages and injuries sustained in Varian’s attacks. Carefully drawn replicas of the machines Varian had used. Even the testifying alchemist had called them “brilliant,” before seeming to remember they had been instruments of terror. Then the almost fanciful descriptions of the “monster.” Even the Queen and King testified. The Queen spoke of sleeping powder and being chained in the laboratory and being threatened with—!

Quirin turned away.

Varian had been straightforward about his crimes, but he had also been vague. Whether it had been his intention or not, by leaving out the details, he had hidden the horrors. Such things never could Quirin have imagined. Acid flooded the back of his throat.

How was it possible?

The table rattled, and it took Quirin a moment to realize it was his own bouncing leg that made it rattle. He stopped, quite easily. There was no need to get upset, he knew how this would end. And he kept turning those pages, bone-white page after bone-white page.

More of the Queen’s testimony. Another machine. Stopped only by a strange magical resonance, something that could not be explained. No one in the court speculated on it. The King testified of his own capture. Those silly “humane” traps, used for inhumanity.

And what explanation did Noble give?

“Varian is young.”

What a laughably asinine statement. Yes, Varian was so young. So where had this grown-up barbarity come from?

Finally, Quirin reached the end. (How long had he sat here? When he checked the clock, it showed lunch had passed, hours ago.) And here comes the verdict.

Guilty. Of course. How could his stomach clench to read that, as if he was under anticipation? He knew how it ended.

But he was not prepared for the recommended sentence.

Death by hanging.

“Oh!”

He threw the folio against the wall, and the loose papers tucked in the back went flying.

How could they? How could they? How could they recommend … to his Varian?

Quirin forgot his resolve to remain calm. That lawyer had been so stupid! He could strangle the man. He could place his hands around the man’s neck and do what he hadn’t done in years and get blood on his hands. Noble played right into the State’s hands! Maybe the man hadn’t even cared to reduce Varian’s sentence at all. If Varian had been in the courtroom, the judges would have seen and understood how young he was. How he couldn’t have meant those horrible things. They couldn’t have looked at that face and recommended the snuffing out of his life!

The folio’s corner was smashed where it had collided with the wall. Gathering the scattered papers, Quirin sat again, pushing down the ping in his gut. He mustn’t panic. He knows how this ends.

Now, at last, he turned to the loose sheets. Any death sentence must be signed by the King. The first sheet was a copy of the execution orders, but it was overwritten in large red letters: “Sentence commuted.” The next sheet was a copy of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy to commute Varian’s sentence to “25 years of imprisonment, not subject to transportation until reaching the age of majority and wholly dependent upon behavior in prison.” The last sheet was a copy of the same pardon that was in Quirin’s pocket.

Quirin slammed the folio shut, and felt just a little bit proud of himself. An incredible, indelible stillness came over him. He was calm.

The clock struck two.

Jumping to his feet, he tried putting the papers back in the folio. The thing was a wreck now, and they would be angry. When Amelia Tan and Mary saw this, they—their arms would reach out, and he could envision their fingers stretching towards him, twig-like and many membered, like the canopy of a tree, or a spider’s web, coming over him. He slid the papers into the back, took them out again, straightened them, smacking their sharp edges on the desktop to get them to be orderly. Then he shoved them back into the folio, and it was all crooked again, and he could feel the fingers of those fierce, tree-women on the back of his neck.

In the end, it took four tries to get it right, and then he was speeding out. “Thank you for your time,” he murmured to the banshees as he shoved out into the street, and then spun a half-dozen times in the square. Where was the inn? Where had he come from?

It’s to the right.

After a few more minutes, he found himself not at the inn, but instead at the Office of the Royal Guard, leaning over the desk of the receptionist.

“The trial for the Saporians hasn’t happened yet, has it?”

Fool, if it had already happened, the record would be back at the court clerk’s!

The receptionist sighed. “Not yet, sir.”

“What are the charges? It’s public information, right?”

As though his will to live had been snuffed out long ago, the receptionist pulled out a form. “Please fill this out—”

“Bloody—!” Quirin swept out. After another twenty-minutes, he was settling into the driver’s seat of the buggy, slapping the reins against Hebe’s back to get on their way. Nuthatch whinnied, tied to the back of the carriage, and looked towards the inn stable.

“The—the donkey’s staying here, horse. For Varian,” Quirin breathed, smacking the reins again.

He went easy once they made it out of the city, letting Hebe go at her own pace. It smelled like it was going to rain, the air crisp and humid, although the clouds were still scattered and white across the sky. Hopefully, Varian would be done with his treasure hunt before there was any chance of rain.

The way the reins were situated across Hebe’s back, and the collar going around her neck, suddenly seemed like a noose.

Quirin yanked back on the reins. Hebe puffed as she came to a stop, and Quirin was jumping out of the carriage while it was still rolling. His face found a patch of elderwort bushes, and with a bubble bursting in him, he heaved. There was nothing in his stomach since he hadn’t eaten all day, yet his stomach roiled and spilled out, and he heaved and heaved until his knees shook. Eventually, his brain got the message this was painfully pointless, and his stomach calmed enough to try for home again. Wiping his mouth, he went back to the carriage and snapped the reins, once again.

Chapter Text

The rain on the ride home was the only appropriate ending to the sort of day Quirin was having. Bad news at the bank, bad news at the horse fair, bad news at the court clerk’s. And now, a short pop of precipitation just to make him and the horses miserable—only just. When the dark shadow of the manor appeared out of the gloom, with the familiar sight of the Wall behind, over which went round and round the early stars of dusk—Quirin had never been so comforted. He unhitched Hebe from the buggy, and rubbed the slick from her and Nuthatch’s back. Then, after retreating inside to dress into dry clothes and stow the pardon in the desk, alongside all the other important documents, he rode Hebe back towards Ambrose’s house. He, stupidly, didn’t bring a light. Luckily, Hebe knew the way home, and she navigated the roads well, sidestepping the little uneven places and muddy spots with her excellent vision. Agnetha was kulning her cows home, awfully late, but there was no magic in her song tonight. Frankly, it was irritating. He smacked the reins against his palm.

That’s what it all was, wasn’t it? The lights of Old Corona held no warmth, the songs held no cheer, and he was eager to see the other side of the village.

Not soon enough, Ambrose’s just-shy-of-ramshackle house appeared with windows ablaze and children screaming in the yard, making tremendous disasters of themselves in the mud puddles. Hebe kicked up into a canter, and he let her take him into the stable, even if it was an impertinence to ride in without so much as a how-do-you-do. Nowhere was it within him to care.

Quirin had already had Hebe untacked and watered by the time Ambrose ambled in. Both of his boys were wrapped around his legs, whooping their heads off. Quirin couldn’t look at that.

“Quirin, how goes it?”

“Hello, Ambrose.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ll get it.”

“It’s my way of thanking you.”

Ambrose peeled his boys off his knees, telling them to go pester their mother. After they had zoomed out, he was quiet a moment, his breath heavy like the sigh of rain, watching while Quirin checked Hebe’s hooves for stones. Then, he ran a brush against her flank and took the mud from her legs, making light talk, asking about Quirin’s trip and how was Varian.

“Did you want to go to dinner at the Greasy Spittoon?” he asked, his blue eyes suddenly throwing the question out there.

“Tonight?”

“You’re footloose and fancy-free, aren’t you? No kids, no obligations, whoopee.”

“Well …”

Ambrose lowered his voice. “Gretchen is making meatloaf.”

The corner of Quirin’s mouth quavered out a weak smile. “Very well.” The last thing he wanted was people, but perhaps it would be best to get out of his own head for a while. Who knows what lay in those abysses?

Ambrose and Gretchen stood as silhouettes in the bright of their front door, while Quirin waited for Ambrose to tell his wife his dinner plans. She stood with one hand on a hip, and the other holding up a spoon, that intermittently went up or down, depending on Ambrose’s own gesticulations. When he came out, the lamp in his hand brightened the boyish, mischievous look in his smile.

“Whew! She knows I hate her meatloaf, but she hates that I hate it, you know?”

“Sure.”

Ambrose patted Quirin on the shoulder, and they went back towards those musicless songs and the dim lights of Old Corona. Hoping the Greasy Spittoon wasn’t busy tonight …well, it was foolish to have hoped. Of course it was busy, it was exactly what Quirin would have hated most of all. Half the men were here to dodge their wives’ cooking, and half the women were here to dodge their own cooking—to eat food that was worse than anyone’s home cooking, but that wasn’t the point, was it? He and Ambrose sat at the only available table, set smack-dab in the very center of the dining room, where the waitress would inevitably brush his shoulder with her elbow or hip as she went rushing past.

That same clumsy waitress brought them a lamb stew that smelled like the dredges of one of Varian’s failed alchemy experiments.

“Cook out sick?” Quirin asked.

She flounced away, nose in the air. Ambrose shrugged and lapped his bowl up.

Oh, merciful Heaven, Porter was here too, sitting at only just the table across the way. And—Quirin made a fatal mistake. In looking away, trying to avoid Porter’s eye, he avoided right into one of Ward’s. Ward sat looking as if Quirin had done something personal to his grandmother. Which, to be fair, wasn’t too far off the mark. They hadn’t seen each other since before Quirin busted Darwin in the lip.

What was most interesting was that, in that brief moment, the unspoken passed between them. Quirin wasn’t entirely sure what it was, but when Ward stood up, that felt right. Ward’s mouth looked as it always did before he came complaining, pursed, round, and hard like a snail’s shell. Quirin had always imagined the tongue inside like a slug, sliming along those concrete teeth, oozing alkaline secretions into that cavernous mouth. Lovely.

Ward brought his chair to their table, sliding it with a sharp clack of its legs into the flooring. Ambrose sighed.

“Good evening, Ward,” Quirin said.

“I have something I want to say to you.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“What sort of bully are you?” Ward spat, leaning forward. His shoulders stayed back, a remnant of the authority he had once, when he had been a guard.

Unluckily for him, Quirin was in no mood to be intimidated tonight. He wasn’t even in a mood to be offended, and felt a silly little smile slipping over his teeth. He dipped his baguette into the accursed stew.

“If you’re trying to get me to apologize,” he said, “may I suggest trying a different tactic?”

Ward and Ambrose both stared. Even Porter, across the way, was looking, and then shaking his head, ever so slightly. Quirin chewed.

Ward rubbed his mouth, his eyes sharp and twinkling. “All right. You’re right. Let’s talk. It wasn’t nice what Dad did, but—”

“I’ve already had my lecture.”

“Blast it, Quirin—”

Ambrose let out the most obnoxious yawn, stretching his arms until his elbows cracked. “Oh boy, I think it’s time we get going. Gretchen is waiting.”

“Ambrose, shut up. Let the man talk.” Quirin pulled his chair a little forward. “He’s never been afraid to talk to me. I’m not about to prevent it now.”

Ambrose didn’t even pretend. He just put his head in his palm and groaned.

Ward smiled openly. “You know my Dad. He’s not strong, you know.”

“Do I?”

“He didn’t deserve what you did. It’s not like he hurt the boy.”

“Really?”

Ward faltered, looking away to shift his chair. When he looked back, he didn’t look like he was having fun anymore. “I’m going to forgive you, Quirin.”

Quirin did not say the next obvious thing. He didn’t say the thing he would have said in the past. Instead, he thoughtfully swirled his spoon through that horrible the-cook-is-out stew, put it into his mouth, and swallowed.

“Quirin, no one blames you.”

A thrill went through Quirin. “For what?”

“I suppose you had a fight—”

“Now you listen to me.” Quirin leaned forward, his voice barely above a whisper. “It was an accident. If you hear anyone say anything else, you send them to me, and I’ll set them right.”

Leaning back, Ward looked unsure of himself, just for a moment. But then the shutters came back over the depths of his eyes, and only what was left was a gnawing look the both of them knew the meaning of. “Even so. No one blames you. Your hands have been too full, all these years.”

“I am under no delusion that you ever cast a vote for me during elections, Ward. But I never knew you were doing it for my own good.”

“Should have divorced the hussy the minute she walked out the door. Could’ve remarried. Maybe to a woman who would’ve stayed put.”

It wasn’t the most creative thing to say, but Ward couldn’t have done greater damage.

“It’s time to go,” Ambrose mused.

Quirin did not go. Instead, he tipped his drink against his mouth, and sipped it, and sometimes not even that, only just letting the liquid touch his lips. Ward slung his darts, with such hatred in every word, it was almost mesmerizing. He struck at Quirin’s dead wife, at his leadership, at himself. Every dart Ward threw struck its target, deeply, poignantly, painfully. But it felt sumptuous too, like a fascinating, self-immolating frenzy. There was warning in Porter’s eyes, and poor Ambrose was squirming, but Quirin was tired of being prudent. Where had it ever gotten him?

“He seems good at betrayal,” Ward continued on, his target shifting yet again. “Imprisoned for betrayal, pardoned for betrayal. Go figure.”

There was a pit full of snakes within Quirin.

Ward’s eyes gleamed, as if he smelled the snakes, and that mouth grimaced wide to reveal the slug inside. “The rumor is the Crown ordered you to take care of him. Is that what the Princess did? Order you to keep him?”

Quirin threw his drink in Ward’s face.

Ward bubbled and Quirin stood, but Ambrose and Porter misunderstood him, because they were grabbing him by the arms.

“I’m only leaving,” he said. They didn’t trust that (it was a fight just to let him throw money on the table), and they three moved as one out into the street. The other patrons, lifelong villagers of Old Corona, who had long known these three men, stared with startled, amused, or even disgusted eyes. It wasn’t often they were the ones giving the show on a Saturday evening.

“I’m sorry about the meatloaf,” Quirin murmured to Ambrose.

Ambrose rubbed his neck and turned towards home. Porter stayed.

“You deliberately let him provoke you,” he snappishly drawled, a wonderful achievement.

“I didn’t give him what he wanted.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Quirin shoved his hands into his pockets. They were suddenly cold. “A man like that doesn’t go to the constable over getting a little cider up his nose. It’ll offend his professional pride.”

Porter glowered, not even making a crack like he should have—something like, “I didn’t know milkmen had professional pride.”

No, Porter didn’t make any sarcastic comments like that. Instead, he spoke a little too earnestly: “Did you see the trial transcript?”

Quirin looked past Porter at the door. Ward would probably come through it at any moment. He should not be here when that happened.

Porter scrubbed his nails over his forehead, eyes bundled tight, before muttering, “I’m too tired tonight. I’ll be by tomorrow. Verbal castration.”

They went their separate ways, Porter back inside, and Quirin pointed towards home. Because he didn’t have a horse’s night vision, he stepped into the muddy areas of the street. It was strange, being the laughingstock. It didn’t seem to matter much though, other than letting the message out he was done making peace.

Somehow, he made it home without falling into a river of mud, and thank goodness, he had lit a fire in his bedroom before he had left. He wouldn’t have to undress in the dark. There wasn’t one more thing he could take today, not even so much as a stubbed toe.

“ ‘Pardoned for betrayal,’ I should’ve …” Quirin grumbled, as he ripped his shirt and pants off. “I should have said … I should have told him …” Getting into his nightshirt required too much focus for witty replies, even so long after the argument. L'esprit de l'escalier, indeed.

It would have been better if his cider had been chocolate milk. Only that would have wounded Ward’s pride more. Except, Quirin was not a child to drink chocolate milk.

And because he wasn’t a child, he put his dirty clothes into the basket in the corner, and not spread about the room, like he wanted to.

“Should’ve remarried, should I?” he growled over the basket. “You blasted idiot, she only wanted to …”

What had Ulla wanted, again?

Three figures hung like phantoms on the wall. They were dark creatures, shadow-forms, but for a tendril of red, lit up a glowworm by a stream of firelight.

Stepping close, he looked at the portrait. They had commissioned it when Varian had been born, by an artist who didn’t believe in the traditional habits of portraits, with the mild, staring faces and the solemn, worldly babies. The focal point had been Varian, cuddly and bright, instead of Messianic. It was hardly a proper portrait of the parents, with their faces turned in every angle other than at the viewer. But still, there she was. The only image he had left of her.

“Ulla, Ulla,” he murmured. Ursula. Her name means “little she-bear.” There was a time when he had thought that perfect. When he had even, embarrassingly, thought it romantic.

Why had she left again? Chasing after academic glory, that’s right. She had forgotten her focal point.

But he hadn’t.

The frame creaked beneath his palms as he tore the portrait from the wall. It landed a smudge against the floorboard. Everything he had ever wanted had been in that painting, and what did he have now? This painting was a mystery to him. A token of a cryptic past, beyond his reach. And Varian’s. To this day, Varian still sometimes gazed at it with a confused longing in his eyes.

Bending over, Quirin found the chain, and ripped it loose from the back of the frame. His hand stung where the chain had pulled taut. Then taking the painting to his wardrobe, he hid it behind his long, woolen jacket, and shut the door.

Resurrection. That was what the bear represented. But to resurrect, one must first be buried. But there was only one, tiny, nameless gravestone in the cemetery that got the yearly hyacinth, and nothing for Ulla at all. He hadn’t even had a body to bury.

So he would bury this now.

The first time she had brought it up, was on a trip to Mount Saison. They had gone for a picnic, then to while away the evening until the stars came out, so they might observe the Culshaw Comet. It came only once every one-hundred-and-eighty years. Ulla’s telescope lay in a bundle against a spruce tree, and she kept saying she needed to set up before the crowds came. Silly Ulla, who didn’t know no crowds would come, not when the comet took three months to cross the sky. She was convinced, but Quirin was sleepy, full of apple cake, and refused to move his head from her lap.

“I will smother you dead, dear husband,” she said, rubbing the corner of their blanket against his cheek.

“Empty threat.”

“Then I’ll keep rubbing it all over your face.” She dropped her voice into a mock-whisper. “It’s been in the dirt.”

“Dirt is my life.”

“But this is strange mountainous dirt, and it’s next to an anthill. It’s had ants peeing on it.”

He waved his hand, not even opening his eyes. “Speaking of small and peeing creatures, where’s Varian?”

“Just getting ready to rappel off the cliff, that’s all.”

“So ambitious for a three-year-old.”

“He’s where I can see him.” Her voice was a wink, lively and teasing. “Playing in the anthill I was telling you about.”

“He’s going to get bit.”

“Let him learn.”

Brushing a hand against her knee, he remembered how she had cried again last night. Just like it had happened only yesterday and not six months ago. It was why he had agreed to her sudden lark this morning, when she had shouted out that they must go comet-viewing tonight and no other. No matter how many plans made a month ago he had to cancel.

She seemed to know what he was thinking and ran a hand through his hair. “I’ve been thinking about a letter from Donella,” she said.

He groaned. “What now?”

“She has an interesting proposition.”

“Ever since we got married.”

“Listen for a minute.” She told him about some wonder of a library, with secrets to amaze and change the course of mankind. A lost library, hidden away in some pocket of the world, for which clues had been laid out across the many kingdoms. He listened vaguely to her, for she was always going on about some mystery, her life’s goals to discover the secrets and hidden axioms of alchemy: the Magnum Opus, quintessence, alkahest, prima materia, anima mundi, and others he couldn’t remember, much less pronounce. He didn’t understand any of it, and it made him love her all the more.

“And once you’ve figured it all out …?” he asked.

Ulla looked away, as though at Varian, but she bit her bottom lip.

Dread soured his belly. “But Seven Trials scattered across … Ulla, that would take months.” He pushed her hand out of his hair and clasped it. Her legs hardened under his scalp. “What about Varian?”

She laughed. “I know he already loves being in the lab with me, but he’s a bit young for a trip like that, don’t you think?”

No. That word, “no,” was poised on the tip of his tongue. No, to her being gone for months. How much would she miss, and how much would Varian miss her? No, to being on a dangerous road. He knew well what threats traveling presented. No, to never hearing from her, other than the letters that would come only too slowly. No, no, no.

But: what she had been like, these last six months. How almost like Janice, who was still wearing black after nearly three years. How almost like … like maybe even his own father.

“Ulla—”

“Daddy, look!” Varian landed on his stomach from some great leap, whipping a stick full of ants in Quirin’s face. Quirin jerked upright, spitting ants and trying to grab the stick. He missed the stick, over and over, Varian whirling it like crazy.

“Don’t get bit now,” Ulla said, sliding out from behind Quirin’s back. She plucked the stick from Varian’s hand and threw it away.

Varian wailed, and Quirin held him against his chest, looking at Ulla as she arose to fetch her telescope. She winked as she walked away, and there was something ephemeral in her gaze, as if everything she saw was like that comet, coming and going, not to return again in their lifetimes.

That night, Quirin dreamed of the voices again. Louder by a fraction, on the cusp of being understandable. Almost human, the way the wind shouts through silver tree birch boughs in winter.

“Please listen, please listen, please listen.”

He was listening. He was trying so hard to listen, but his ears were blocked. Covered by some hard, smooth, jagged, ragged thing. And maybe, by the vision of a noose.

The next day, Quirin was living a dream. Or living a life backwards. Where the only common thread through it was: so everything Porter had said had been true.

That was his first thought upon awakening, when he was able to chase the voices away.

So it was true.

He lived life normally, getting up to get dressed, shivering in the quiet place where the portrait had once hung. After a lonely, tasteless breakfast, he went outside to ground drive Nuthatch, tying her to leading reins and walking her around their yard. She listened to his commands beautifully. Perhaps, the horse-seller had told him the truth, for once. And in what he knew was an effluence of stupidity and impatience, Quirin decided to take her to the small plot he had been neglecting, abandoned for being too close to the river and the sedges growing too tall, to see how she handled the plow. The grass was up to his knees, but he would just see.

After hooking her up, and his accompanying “Get on,” she pulled the plow without hesitation, strong against the deep grass. It was such an easy, beautiful thing with her, it was easy to let his mind drift about so it was true. They had wanted his son dead.

He wished he could be in denial. What a comfort is denial! To insist that those written things had been lies, that their artful intricacies exceeded the sins. But instead, there was a taboo of certainty wriggling secretly within his heart, like a parasite: Varian had done all those things in the trial record. He had done even more. And it turned out, Quirin hadn’t needed Varian or anybody else to tell him about it—he somehow had known it, even when he hadn’t believed it.

What sort of father was he?

He was so caught up with these thoughts, he didn’t pay attention when Nuthatch made a series of odd steps. He still kept thinking, So it is true, but only until the plow handles bolted out of his hands with an electrifying ring and made a crack for his face. Gasping, he jerked to a stop, the plow tilting at an odd angle. It was a miracle he didn’t end up in a heap with it. Nuthatch blew her lips at him. He laughed. She was right, after all, to think him an idiot. But what was hidden in the grass?

Surely, it was a rock. Even a black rock, tucked hidden away like a bird’s nest, he thought when his hands brushed over something smooth. But when he parted the grass, he saw something strange, something he had never known before, and it chilled him thoroughly.

He hefted it into his hands. It was somewhat heavy, a sort of metal cylinder attached to a foundation, with pins jutting out of it. Beneath was a metal plate, cut with parallel grooves. It was something mechanical. He pulled the handle, and it began to run itself, playing a tinny, eerie tune. It was musical. It was a music box engine writ large. It was—

Quirin dropped it. The music stopped, but the tune stayed. He knew what this was. They had missed this when cleaning up after the battle.

Stomach gurgling, he turned, and went to Nuthatch, who had fallen asleep. He picked his feet through the grass, letting his feet fall lightly, feeling with his toes before stepping down. What more was there hidden in the grass? Spit clung to the back of his throat, and he wished, he wished, he wished he hadn’t found it.

Ding-ga-ding-ga-ding-ding-ding-ding, nonstop, in his head.

His spit thickened, and then he was rearing back, clambering to get the things into his arms. Once he had it, he scrambled down the slope towards the river, almost falling, but kept to his feet. At the river, he flung the monstrosity. It splashed, it sank. It was gone.

But he couldn’t get that tune out of his head. Just like the voices.

Quirin worked with Nuthatch a little longer, keeping her close to the road this time. There were the first signs she seemed, perhaps, a little lazy. She fell asleep almost immediately whenever he gave her a break, and then getting her going again was nearly impossible. No amount of “Get on,” from him awoke her, and he would have to shake the line across her back. She’d jerk her head, and would only then, wake up.

When she fell asleep once again, within only a minute of taking a break, Quirin knew they had enough for the day. He needed to be fair. The past few days must have been hard on her, with the stress of the horse fair, besides being brought to a new home.

As he worked on getting her unhitched from the plow, he heard uneven clip-clopping coming from the road. He looked up, feeling as if maybe he had ended up in a heap with the plow earlier, after all. Varian was coming home, bobbing along on the back of the donkey.

“Hey, Dad!” Varian called out. He smiled as he went by, not noticing Ruddiger was clinging to his backpack, wild-eyed.

When they got close to a dogwood bush, Ruddiger took a flying leap at it, bounced off its fragrant branches, and then into the grass. With tail cork-screwing, he skittered for the orchard, apparently to comfort himself with the rest of Quirin’s cherries. It seemed he didn’t enjoy the ride back home.

Taking a breath, Quirin fumbled with the lines, before leading Nuthatch towards the barn. Could he make a run for the orchard too? Varian had left the barn door open, and Quirin stood there a moment, before a nudge from a mare’s nose propelled him forward. What a strange and remarkable feeling! Was he really this lacking in courage? How surreal.

Pounding the fear down, the way he had learned as a knight (when he had faced much more terrible foes than his innocuous son), he led Nuthatch into a stall to untack her. Varian was in the other stall, running a brush through the donkey’s scrappy tail.

After clearing his throat, Quirin croaked, “How did he do?”

“Just fine, Dad. He’s a good donkey.”

“Have you thought of a name yet?”

“Not yet.”

Their brushes worked shushes through the room. Varian looked at Quirin, away, then looked again. Quirin had to try harder.

“How was your treasure hunt?” he asked. “Did you find untold riches?”

“Only mummies.” Varian said it almost as if he was holding his breath, with a laugh hidden behind his vocal folds.

Quirin left the stall to place the harness on the rack. He tried to wrap the lines into a neat coil, but he kept dropping them, until he threw them on the workbench in annoyance.

“How did the repairs go? Finish?”

“Yeah.” Varian heaved a sort of sigh. “While we went running around, professionals put on the finishing touches. Looks real good. I wasn’t holding my breath about the, uh—you know—blown up wall, but it fixed good.”

Quirin leaned into the tabletop. “What?”

“Stonemasons—like, actual professionals, not a ragtag group of Rapunzel’s friends—came in …”

“So there was a bomb.”

The scratch of bristle against hair ceased.

Quirin turned around, pressing the small of his back into the bench. “Did you build them a bomb to drop on Corona?”

Varian dropped the brush, and turned, with a face as cadaverous as the mummies he had joked about. “No, Dad, I didn’t do that!”

“It can’t have really been, can it?”

“No! Of course not. Dad, please, I—” Varian wrung his hands, standing in the middle of the room and looking around it, his gaze vague, as though searching for something. Quirin couldn’t begin to fathom what.

“How was the wall blown up?” Quirin asked.

“I … I built a small … It was just to—to—to—to keep out … oh! But not to hurt anyone! Not to blow up Corona! That was supposed to be something else. Something else so stupid and … it was so stupid. It was so stupid, it was so stupid!”

Dropping his chin to his chest, Quirin pressed his fingers over his ears. It seemed he could only hear horrible things today.

“It wasn’t a bomb! But it would explode—I didn’t mean—like everything else! But when he said he would use it … Dad!” Varian’s eyes landed on Quirin, and he stumbled forward, grabbing Quirin’s wrists, peeling them down. “Dad, please, write Rapunzel! She’ll tell you. She was there. She’ll tell you. Please!”

Quirin was done with dreams. So many times in his life, he had thought things unreal. But there was no way this was a dream. His brain could not cook up something so terrible. He felt numb, fingers tingling where Varian touched him.

“But Varian, you did such things.”

The blood had already drained from Varian’s face, but even that ghastly white became whiter still. His hands became sheets of paper, drifting away from Quirin’s.

“Why did you do it, Varian?”

Varian looked away. Quirin seized him by the shoulders.

“Why did you do it? Don’t you realize what they could have done to you?”

Varian craned his neck around, until Quirin shook him.

“Look at me! Don’t—! Why did you do it? By mercif—why?”

Quirin choked on his own breath, feeling his grip tighten. He took great, swooping breaths, but it wasn’t enough, the air fleeing away.

“Why? Why!? Why! Why!”

Varian shook, the whites in his eyes swaying.

“Why! Why! Don’t turn from me! Why!”

Quirin’s throat ached, as if someone was grabbing it, and his ears were ringing, as if someone was screaming. Then he realized he was the one doing the screaming, and it wasn’t Varian shaking, but Quirin was shaking Varian.

“Why? Why!?”

He wasn’t even screaming anymore, but shrieking, his own sound strange in his ears. Through it all, Varian remained silent but shook. That’s right. But it was Quirin doing the shaking.

“They would have hurt you! Why? Why! Why!”

Large hands fell gently on the bones in Quirin’s wrists, and Porter was there, pulling Varian away.

Everything was crashing around Quirin. Everything was crashing around him, splintering all around him, gunshotting all around him. Porter put splintery hands on Quirin’s shoulders, and said firmly, “That’s enough. Where’s that gentle demeanor?”

Quirin broke. He turned his back, but Porter’s hand was insistent on his neck, with another wrapping around. Then he was pressing his face into Porter’s shoulder and sobbing out his horror and frustration.

They had wanted to do something wrong.

He didn’t know he had said it out loud, until Porter answered, “Oh.”

The last time something like this had happened—when Quirin had finally accepted Ulla wasn’t coming back—Porter had been there too. Porter must think him a maniac.

The desperate spasm in his lungs became less desperate, and Quirin pulled away, sitting on the bench. He held his breath, let it out slowly, and looked up. Impossibly, Varian was still there, pressed wan against a stack of hay bales, a white little pearl hidden in the fog.

Until now, Quirin had always thought heartbreak was just an expression. He had suffered heartbreak before, but not like this. This was real. This was really breaking him, his chest bursting wide open like an oyster, the pain agonizing and choking. His heart tore loose, and blood filled his chest.

“Varian.”

“Dad—”

“I’m sorry, Varian. I lost control.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Quirin held his hand out, and Varian ran forward, fear and distress like two fresh bruises on his face. He didn’t run directly to Quirin, but dropped to his knees and threw his face into Quirin’s knees. “Please! Please!”

That kind of desperation chilled Quirin.

“Stand up! Stand up!” He pulled Varian against his chest. Fingertips pulsing, he pressed them into Varian’s neat little torso, feeling that ribcage irregularly expand and fall, unyielding.

Porter’s shadow blew wide across the floor as he walked out, letting the door slam shut behind him.

Of all the shaming things in Quirin’s life—in the loss of his inheritance, in the loss of his country, in the loss of his wife—he had never been so ashamed of himself.

Chapter Text

Quirin didn’t know how he was to keep going. How was he to keep putting one foot in front of the other, especially when the whole world seemed vanity, stupidity, and cruelty—and it was he that had made it so? All because he’d had visions of a noose.

There had been several times in his life that Quirin asked himself how he was to keep going. The answers varied. Sometimes, it had been complete strangers, whom he would never see again. Another time, it had been because a little boy needed breakfast. And today, it was because that same boy was currently making a racket downstairs, putting together a breakfast Quirin doubted he'd be able to eat.

There was only one thing to do. That was to be brave and go into the kitchen. And once he stepped through the door, there was only one thing to say.

“I’m sorry.”

Varian was standing at the table, frowning over a bowl full of blue-shelled eggs. His eyes didn't so much as even flicker away from that bowl. “One of them cracked,” he said. “I wanted to make French toast, but now—”

The boy couldn’t go on being silly, talking about eggs, with Quirin throwing an arm around his neck. He went silent as Quirin went on.

“What I did yesterday was inexcusable."

Varian said nothing. He continued to say nothing as Quirin pulled on his sleeves, up above knobby elbows, up to fleshy, bare, china-white shoulders, allowing access to a pair of frigid fingertips. Quirin was already sure he would never forgive himself; what would he do if he found out that, in yesterday’s insensibility, he had grabbed Varian hard enough to leave bruises?

As for Varian, when he finally spoke again, he said, “Did you want sage sausages for breakfast?”

They lived tremulously in the demilitarized zone between them, in the quiet places, almost separately, always gingerly. It was as though there were splinters under their fingernails. Varian worked in his lab, and sent packages to the castle, receiving letters in return. Quirin worked the fields, paid bills with a burdened heart, and wondered why Nuthatch was so sleepy all the time. They spoke to each other, almost never stopping, but the only thing they ever spoke about was food. “The potato salad needs more salt, don’cha think?” “The bread turned out nice.” “Radishes for dinner, I think.” Their vagueness and banality was almost laughable, except it was so real.

Night after night, Varian awoke Quirin, who stood at the front door with a butcher knife in hand. Varian would slip the knife away, shaking his head. “Dad, Dad, Dad,” he said, tsking his tongue. “You can’t eat sausages this time of night, especially in the garden.”

His eyes seemed so blue in the dark, almost like Ulla’s.

It was those blue eyes that made Quirin get out of bed in the mornings. Invariably, he stared at his own plain brown eyes while he shaved before his little mirror, and thought how nothing special they were. “Two-Day-Old-Coffee” a certain somebody tried to nickname him once, although she had abandoned it immediately in disgust. “So it’s not my best!” she had said with a shrug, but the sentiment had been true. Quirin was glad Varian had eyes like Ulla’s. His were like the slop at the bottom of a pond.

Ulla’s eyes had been mystery. Like looking into a murky sea, where beneath the dingy brine all the watery creation swam: all the whales, sharks, anemones, and the strange creatures of the deep, swimming right before your face. Varian’s eyes were like that, like pools of water, clearer and cleaner than air. If you dipped your finger in, those eyes would ripple. If you punched, they surged into a wave.

Quirin couldn’t let those eyes go on surging. After coming inside for lunch one day, he scrounged around for his bravery, and said, “I think we should talk.”

Varian stopped at the door to his lab, into which he had been preparing to disappear, carrying a box of alchemy junk in his arms. He braced the box against the door jamb, pressing into the other side with his belly. “What are we going to talk about?”

“Whatever you want to talk about.”

“Oh. You know, Dad, I’ve been pretty busy with this new project of mine. It’s really, really important. For the kingdom!”

“We could talk about anything you wanted.”

“Anything?”

“Yes. Anything you wanted. Even … even bombs. Or not.”

“Oh.” The box started to slip, and Varian snagged it mid-air. “Well, that’s all right, Dad. I’m pretty busy. You could just write Rapunzel, like I said.”

He passed into the doorway as he spoke, turning his head to side-eye Quirin. His eyes looked gray then.

So Quirin had fallen flat on his face. What else was new?

But his hopes raised some little time later, when Varian came into the sitting room, out of his regular clothes and into his scrubby for-making-a-mess ones.

Quirin slid closed his accounting ledger. “Yes, son?”

“I’m gonna go look at the fish traps. Get some dinner ready.”

It wasn’t what Quirin had been hoping for, but after Varian walked out, he looked over the accounting one more time. Yes, some little money should be fine. He wouldn’t let this splinter-living between them stop him. He wouldn’t even let avoiding Porter stop him. (And not even Porter had been by since that day.) Quirin would go into town. He had to go because of those impressionable, reflective eyes. And also, because in the end, there had been no bruises. At least, not the sort that could be seen.

The town cottages of Old Corona, huddling around the village square, seemed to crush their gardens together like the fashionable panniers of the gossiping ton. Even Old Corona had its shabby-genteel society, mainly the artisan class, who painted their fences white every spring as though liberally powdering their wigs. They imagined that made them genteel, not realizing what made them shabby: the clotheslines stretched over their vegetable gardens.

Quirin was passing this assemblage, on the way to the square, when a “Halloo, Quirin!” broke out. His heart said “how-de-do” to his feet. Janice stood at her dingy fence (unlike the others, Porter didn’t paint it every year), waving her hand. Had Porter told her how he had been acting? If so, she should have had the decency to let him sneak by.

“’Lo, Janice,” he murmured, stepping close.

Her gaze was bold with green eyes today, with no tinge of embarrassment, and her cheeks were attractively pink under the shadow of that blasted moon-hat. A basket hung under her arm. No, surely she didn’t know anything about his recent behavior. Unless she was a far better pretender than he realized.

“I wanted to talk to you,” she said, opening the gate for him. “Help me pick flowers.”

He entered obediently, if not hesitantly, and she took him around the elbow. He was trapped. Ye heavens, if only the miraculous times of the past would happen again. Turn him into a pillar of salt! Let the earth swallow him whole! Let a sudden lion come upon him and—well, no. That was going too far.

“I don’t have a lot of time,” he said.

“I want to talk about Varian’s birthday.”

They walked amongst the rhododendron bushes, on a well-worn path hard under their feet. Her garden was extensive, bursting with flowers and vegetables. The cucumbers seemed to grow in pyramids atop each other. The townspeople often asked Janice what her secret was, and her reply: “Child labor.” Quirin didn’t believe it. He had child labor at home, and his garden looked nothing like this.

Janice stopped now and again to pluck some flower that caught her fancy, cutting through their gentle stems with gleaming, knife-sharp shears. Here, a diaphanous poppy. There, a trio of winking snapdragons, or a verbena dripping nectar. The evening primroses were opening up, revealing their clean faces.

“You seem quiet this afternoon,” she said.

“Just admiring the flowers.” No, that would never do. He added, “Thinking about birthday presents.”

“He’s started up his alchemy again, hasn’t he? Of course. One of the boys told me there had been a tremendous boom from your house the other day. Course, he didn’t say it in those words. ‘A blasted boom-boom!’”

Quirin laughed politely. Maybe, the lion, after all.

“I’ll send him some salvia then. He always used to bug me.”

“Did he?”

“It’s an important ingredient.”

Her fingers twitched against his arm as she led him towards a rosebush. He cleared his throat.

“How are the lessons going?” he asked.

“The same. The same open-mouthed breathers, wondering what’s the point of math and literature when they’re only going to grow up to become farmers or farriers or candlestick makers. Lola is a bright young thing, but her parents took her away to work in their shop.” She pushed out her scanty lips as she cut a rose, the shears going sniiiiiip! “I hung Hortense by his ankles yesterday for throwing a worm into Molly’s hair.”

“In my day, teachers didn’t do that.”

“But it’s great fun!”

She cut out salvia by handfuls, purple bursting in her finger, and filled the basket.

“Surely, that’s too many,” Quirin said.

“I have no idea. It can be a birthday present. I made him a cake, like I used to, when I was teaching him his A-B-C’s and Euclidean geometry. That’s what I wanted you for. Pick it up when you head home.”

“Thank you, Janice.”

He wondered if it was too soon to make his excuses. She could be both forward or retreating, depending on her mood, and she must have more to say than to offer cake.

She asked him, “Do you sometimes wish you didn’t know Ulla was dead?”

Well, how was that now?

She had such a way of asking abrupt, startling questions out of nowhere. By now, they were strolling by her sacred corner of the garden, where there slept two headstones, one with columns, and the other with columns broken. Janice didn’t do the decent thing and put her headstones in the cemetery, along with everyone else’s. No, but she must keep close the ashes of her husband and child.

She brushed away some leaves that had landed on the top of the headstones. “It would be better, not knowing. That way, they can still be free.”

There had been a time when Quirin hadn’t known. He had only known that Ulla had chosen to go away, and the question hadn’t been, was she free, but had she chosen to stay away? He used to imagine the same scene, or even dream it: Ulla, after sending that last letter promising she was “so close”, arrived in that glorious, lustrous library. Her jubilation filled that mystical place like a cloud. And there, surrounded by all that shining, how humble the run-down manor in Corona must have seemed, and how dirt-covered her weary husband.

Quirin sighed. What was Janice trying to say? He had a grave already, one that was his and Ulla’s pain. And Ulla was his and Varian’s. They had learned to live with it.

Or maybe, she was saying, be grateful? He could have nothing.

“You’re making me dour,” he finally said, at a loss.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” Flashing a smile, she pulled him along. Just as abruptly she had brought up the subject, now she dropped it. “Have you considered universities?”

Now his stomach had joined his heart, playing kickball with his feet. “Well …”

“Now he’s sixteen, it would be a good time to consider it. He’s not so young anymore.”

“No, he’s not.” He rubbed a rose petal off his sleeve.

“There are some universities with wonderful programs. I’ll draw you up a list you can take with the cake!”

“Yes, ma’am.” He would take her list, although it probably wouldn’t do any good. What a comforting disappointment.

They had come near the gate again.

“Am I excused, Ms. Teacher?”

Laughing, she told him to stop teasing or else she’d hang him by his ankles. He left, happy to be away. He liked Janice, but she was inclined to bouts of darkness that threatened to drag everyone else along with her. For five years, she had worn mourning clothes, until Porter threw away her dyed veils and stockings. (Porter said he had to dodge fists for weeks.) Quirin didn’t want to live like that, always in mourning.

He went onward to the shops, bundling that heart and stomach back up to their rightful places. He couldn’t feel sorry forever. It could only get better.

Parkins’ Bookshop was still in the same old place, in the same old building, and with the same old dust on the shelves. Just like before, Parkins was happy to see him, and slid forward a book on cryptography and yet another volume on the genius of Demanitus.

“I don’t know,” Quirin murmured, looking it over. “He’s probably got it already.”

Parkins coughed. “It was only published”—he coughed again, more discreetly—“last year.”

Quirin put forth the money.

Parkins packaged the books carefully, wrapping them in plain brown paper, and stamped “Parkins” on the top in green ink. Tucking them under his arm, Quirin stopped to pick up a bag of black licorice (Varian’s favorite), and then at Porter’s and Janice’s to get that cake.

He stood in their entryway, looking at the list of schools she had written. Now, it was certain. Porter must have told her about how he’d been acting.

“None of these are in Corona.”

She pressed her fingertips together. “You know the college in Corona is an arts school.”

He looked at her, but she tucked the twine-wrapped cake box under his fingers. “Let him get a real education from a real alchemy master.”

She didn’t understand. But unwilling to discuss it with her—it was none of her business, anyway—Quirin put the list into his pocket. Somehow, he made it home with a birthday cake, two books, a bag of licorice, and a bouquet of useful salvia, without dropping any of them. He kicked in the back door to the kitchen, dumping the things on the table. The house was silent. Varian was still gone?

After hiding the books and putting the salvia into a pitcher, Quirin threw dough Varian had left rising into the oven, and sat on the back stoop, scrubbing potatoes. He was going to talk to his son tonight, about something real. They weren’t going to talk about food.

Varian appeared shortly, coming in when Quirin was scrambling to get the rolls out of the oven. Quirin assessed their particular shade of brown, tapping his knuckles against their hard tops. Still edible. Testing the theory, he held a roll towards Ruddiger. Ruddiger turned his nose away.

Bloody raccoons.

“What took you so long?” Quirin asked, giving Ruddiger the stink-eye.

“Sorry. They’re putting together the new water wheel.” Varian set the fish basket on the floor, rubbing his cheek vigorously around a grimace. A spot of light dropped from his bangs.

“Why is your hair wet?”

Jerking his face, as if a sea urchin had jumped him at the river, Varian snapped, “I was fishing, Dad. What do you expect?”

The barely salvageable buns were all but cooling embers, but Quirin went on filling a basket with them quietly. He would let it go. Insolence was better than what they’d been having.

“What’s this?” Varian asked, at the table.

“From Janice, for you. She made a cake too, but you can’t have that until tomorrow.”

Varian bent his head over the salvia, looking like a wary botanist checking for the tiniest of pestilential mites. Quirin sighed. If it had been better to know Ulla was dead, it was better to know what Varian had done. It was better to know what they had wanted to do to him, too, and to know the King had had mercy. Quirin couldn’t keep on grieving.

“Son?” Quirin reached out to touch Varian’s shoulder. His fingers were just scrapping cotton—

“I gotta get these to the lab!” Varian slammed the pitcher against the slope of his chest, bunching salvia under his nose. With pops of purple up to his eyeballs, he sprang away, and was out the door in a flash. After a minute of scurrying footsteps, came the slam of the laboratory door.

He hadn’t even looked Quirin once in the face.

Varian had just barely gotten down to the river when the slam of the front door brought his attention up, where he watched Dad head off into town. Wondering what Dad was about, Varian rolled his pants up to his knees, and cringing, picked his way barefoot through the river. Now where did he leave the fish traps? It would be awful if he lost them, because they were his only method of fishing.

Varian and his father were in great disagreement about fishing. Mainly, one loved it, and the other didn’t.

“Guess who doesn’t love it?” Varian asked, cringing at the slosh of river against his ankles. Splish-splash, a rough tumble from a small river, what raged and made noise because it wasn’t the sea. Varian shivered, but plunged ahead, his toes clinging to the rocks underneath. Ruddiger looked at him from the shore, cocking his head. “Fishing, Ruddiger! I’m talking about fishing. Guess who doesn’t love it?”

Ruddiger sat on his haunches and waited.

“Oh, so it’s you, is it? Well, I don’t like it either!”

“Don’t like it” was putting it way too nice. Varian didn’t just not like it. He despised it. Wait, no. He Despised it, with a capitol D! And italics to boot! Because fishing meant you get a fancy stick (that’s all, only a fancy stick), and wait quietly until something happens. If anything happens, there is a microscopic ripple, or a puny tug, and then you gotta pull. Even after all that, half the time there is nothing. Then you gotta do it again. Again and again. After a zillion hours, maybe you have something for dinner.

And that was why Varian preferred traps, those bottle-like baskets that lured fish within, but didn’t let the fish back out. With traps, you put the basket in the river, and go do something else for a couple of hours. When you come back, there are fish. Bingo.

“It’s not always about catching the fish,” Dad had explained before, about his favorite: pole fishing. “It’s about the experience.”

“You know, Dad, I can experience sitting around with a stick at home too,” Varian had replied.

Dad dragged him fishing anyway.

So traps were infinitely better than using a pole, but know what? There is an experience there too. It’s called sludge between his toes, frozen kneecaps, double-pneumonia, and slippery fish that stared at him with unblinking astonishment when he pulled them out from the river. And they kept staring, and would always stare, until he slipped them away into his creel basket, so they can stare at that instead. Trap fishing was a no-go from him. Remarkable no one had come up with a better idea yet.

Varian tossed a tiny carp at Ruddiger, who caught it mid-air, before wading back to land. While Ruddiger feasted, Varian sat at water’s edge, rubbing a little knife this way and that, murderizing so many fish that would much rather keep those things inside, thank you very much. After he finished cleaning them, he rubbed sweat and who-knows-what off his forehead, and sat on a big, flat rock, stretching out his legs to dry in the sun. Then, he burst into tears.

He stifled them quickly. Not even Ruddiger noticed, and Varian turned them to the wind to be chased away. This was getting annoying. It had been happening almost every time he had a quiet moment. There were a couple reasons. Dad being so upset was one of them. But mainly, it was the refrain: How could I? How could I?

Actually, it was super easy. See, Rapunzel is about as gullible as a sea-gull, har-de-har-har, and—

No, he wasn’t going to do that. A wonderful capacity for sarcasm had sprung up overnight inside him, along with that strange wellspring of rage, power, and manipulation, unlike anything he had ever known before. Hopefully, all that other stuff was gone, burned out in a long, cooling comet-tail, but the sarcasm remained. Varian couldn’t help it; it just came out of him. A couple weeks ago, Dad said it was okay to be honest sometimes. It had rubbed Varian the wrong way at the time, being told that. ’Cause know what? He didn’t have to be sarcastic and was totally capable of being honest.

He’d do it now (now that nobody was within earshot).

“I’m sad. But I’m also happy. Maybe, I’m an undiagnosed schizophrenic.”

Ruddiger shook his head.

“No? But you know, Ruddiger, it made me sad to be at the castle last week. But also happy. I felt... hmm, clean to help fix it up. But everyone kept looking at me. Except for Xaves.” Varian grinned softly. “Or maybe all those boring stories were just his revenge.”

Ruddiger’s ears flattened.

“Okay, okay, I did it again? I’ll start over.” Tucking his arms around his knees, Varian thought about happiness, because he’d spent ages thinking about sadness already. Dad made him blindingly, stupidly happy. In the first few days after Dad got out of the amber, Varian would creep down to his room in the middle of the night, and just stand at the foot of the bed, watching Dad sleep. Dad had been so real and so there, and Varian had drank it in, until he had felt This is what drunkenness must be.

(That stopped when Dad yelled at him to go to bed one night. Every now and again, Varian would remind himself it wasn’t a rejection, but just a sleepy father who didn’t like his son lurking in the night like a creeper.)

“Dad’s happy too, I think,” he said to Ruddiger. “Remember how he had came in yesterday, yelling they sold him a narcoleptic horse? He looked so angry, but he was happy too.”

Tears roared into Varian’s eyes again. He shivered, and—He shouldn’t think about it, but still, if he thought about Dad, he must also think about that day when he came back from the treasure hunt. Before, he had always worried about Dad’s anger and disappointment. But now, he worried about Dad’s pain.

It was why Varian couldn’t tell Dad things. Dad actually said they could talk about anything (actually!), but they couldn't. Varian wished they could, but Dad was already so choked up. And what was worse, if he started talking, Dad would start asking questions. It was better this way. Some things couldn’t be forgiven.

And this was exactly why he was sarcastic.

Varian scrubbed his eyes against his shoulders, and slipped his shoes on, pressing his feet down while tugging upwards with his fingers. When he set off for home, the creel basket bounced a rhythm off his hip that was strangely comforting.

The wind shifted just barely halfway up the hill, bringing with it the most exciting sounds known to mankind: industry. Male voices blared down the river, the way they do when men hammer and axe and do anything else burly. It must be the work crew down at Miller’s Pond, constructing the new water wheel before rye harvest was upon them.

Varian peeked into the creel basket, and all those flashy-dull dead fish eyes glared back at him. Well, it wasn’t like a quick look wouldn’t hurt the fish any. Ruddiger was having way too much fun down at the stream pool anyway, grizzly haunches wriggling and fluffing before leaping at the minnows that went darting back to the shadows. He wouldn’t be needing dinner anytime soon. Varian set off for the pond himself, leaving Ruddiger behind to play.

Along the way, he burst into the bower, bouncing up to snag leaves off the sentinel oak trees. The leaves resisted, but snapped off with protest, spewing out a scent of chlorophyll that punched Varian in the nose like dragon’s breath. It made him sneeze until he reached the hill overlooking Miller’s Pond. He found a soft patch of grass to sit in, where he wrapped leaves around his fingers, thinking so many thoughts. Thoughts about the skeleton of a leaf, and thoughts about the men below building. They laid and re-laid wood beams, lining them up into perfect rows, scowling over their disagreements, and howling gee and haw to each other, which they thought was hilarious. Varian felt the barest idea pricking his brain. Like, maybe there could be a sort of water wheel that caught fish, instead of water.

“Oi, hurry up, you oafs!” one of the men yelled at the others. “Susie wants me home before sundown!”

“Whatever the wifey wants,” another man answered, before making sounds like the crack of a whip. That was popular with the other men, who laughed their heads off.

Not Varian. And not just because he didn’t understand the joke, but because, for the first time, he realized how late it was. The sun was cozying up to the mountain tops. Dad was probably wondering where he was.

The shadows in the bower had grown long and deep by the time Varian hurried into them. Ahead of him, now that the trees cut down the sounds of the work crew, he heard more male voices. Younger, less direct, breaking into quick, boisterous laughter before going lazy again. The sound of boys when they are being indolent.

Castor and his cronies, Richard and Harry, came around a great fat ancient oak at the far end of the path. Richard and Harry carried a large crate between the two of them. Their speech between the three of them fizzled out when they set eyes on him. Which wasn't precisely comforting. Varian gulped. Castor wasn’t exactly Varian’s favorite person. And Varian surely wasn’t Castor’s. Castor was Darwin’s grandson, after all, and Dad had made Darwin intimately acquainted with the pointy end of his fist.

“Maybe,” Varian whispered to himself, hardening his belly into a stone, “maybe Castor’s found religion in the past year. Maybe he’s frowning right now because he’s recalling his own sins. Yeah. Ha ha. That.”

Varian played it cool. Real cool. Flashing a hand in greeting, he went on towards them. They stopped and watched him. But he stared at them direct, and it was fine. Something fluttery was behind his ribs, like a feather sloshing around a sea, but it was fine. It was probably just an aneurysm, that’s all.

Good golly, hadn’t they shot up in the last year? Barely recognizable now, they each probably had a foot on him and biceps. And facial hair. Facial. Hair. Look at those wispies under Richard’s chin! Those weren’t drawn on.

The closer Varian got, the more they stared, and the darker their expressions got, growing ever more silent, which was one of those impossible things, if you thought about it. (Silence wasn't a matter of degrees, after all.) Richard and Harry lowered the crate to the ground. There was one thing Varian had learned from watching the men in prison: it never ended well for the man who flinched first. He would make sure not to flinch.

When he got next to them, he stopped and looked into the crate. It was full of wild mushrooms. Enough to flavor every pot of risotto in Italy. “Wow. You’ve been mushroom hunting! That’s a lot of mushrooms. You … uh, going to make soup?”

Castor cocked his head to the side, smirking. His dark, smoky eyes glittered. “No. We’re going to sell them. To the new restaurant.”

“Really?”

“The owner will buy ingredients.”

“You saving up for something?”

Boy, was that the wrong thing to say. Their faces only went darker, the shadows in their eyes going deeper than the trees’.

“We’re making money for my mom.” Castor explained. “Since she had her money at the Bank of Corona.” He scowled and stepped forward when Varian failed to react to such a non sequitur. “You know, the Bank of Corona!"

Blinking, Varian wondered why he should care about the Bank of Corona. They used the Bank of Old Corona, frankly.

Lips stretching in a rictus grin over his teeth, Castor spat, "You know, the bank you Saporians robbed!”

That feather in the seas of Varian’s belly turned into a whole flock of birds, each a shrieking starling taking a piece of him heavenly. He poured out on the ground, or maybe that was just his brain, rejecting everything Castor had ever said. Castor was confused. Saporians had never …

“Nah,” his mouth went, while he was scrambling for the last bits of him. “They didn’t—”

Castor’s eyes widened, and Varian regained control over his mouth.

“I mean, I’m not a Saporian.”

He whirled around to run—or actually, he tried to whirl around, but a fist was already slamming into his cheek. He stumbled, trying to dodge the next he knew was coming, but then did the worst thing.

He tripped over that stickin’ mushroom crate!

Fish scattered all around him as he landed on his back. Before Varian had time to lift his hands, the boys were on him. Everyone played their part. Varian covered his face, and they pummeled. See, everyone just doing their part.

Varian was certain they were going to give him a punch for every mark missing out of the Bank of Corona. There were kicks and stomps too. But it was over sooner than expected. Probably not even a tithe’s worth of punches had been foisted on him when Castor and cronies stopped, gasping. Maybe they were pleased with themselves. Varian couldn’t blame them for that. They’d done pretty good. They hadn’t gotten him in the face again, but they got everything else. His body didn’t hurt though, as though it was in shock and disbelieving. That’s okay, because his body would believe it soon enough.

Varian parted his fingers and peered through them.

Richard rubbed his fist, cheeks pink with exertion. He kicked Varian in the shoulder, not really a kick, only slightly more than a nudge. Almost a friendly gesture, like boys do when giving each other a hard time. “What’d they teach you in that prison? What a sissy.”

“Yeah.” Harold rubbed his knuckles, as if Varian’s elbows had been a little rough on him. Poor guy. “I thought criminals beat people up all the time.”

“You don’t say?” Varian asked, dropping his hands, feeling dangerous. (Or maybe, in danger.) “Are you done now?”

Castor squinted, as if trying to figure out fractions in his head. Softly, ever so delicately, he asked, “Why’d you have to go and say that now?”

Why indeed? It was like Varian wanted the atmosphere to shift from that simple animal violence to a cruelty that could only be human.

And Castor looked very human. His lips became pink, red-red pink, and quivering. “I think Grandpa Darwin had the right idea.”

This was when Varian made his first move for self-defense. He grabbed a fistful of dirt and threw it at their faces. What a joke. It was ineffective. It was actually the opposite of effective, because it opened up his torso. They had him pinned in no time. Castor sat on his belly, while the other two peeled his hands back from his face. He kicked and arched his back, but Castor only sank deep into the soft part of him. Every movement and breath became vibrant, soul-squeezing pain. He aimed his foot and rammed it into the crate, kicking out mushrooms, but they didn't care. Castor seized Varian’s head. Varian clenched his eyes shut. Do not react!

They took turns. Over and over. ’Round and ’round. Like it was a rainy Midsummer’s Day, and he was the maypole. The warm slide of their spit down his cheeks and across his forehead felt self-indulgent. But Varian did not react.

Varian must have misunderstood. He had observed, in prison, it was best not to react. Take all the fun out of it by being unbothered. But maybe he should have appeased them by shouting or crying, because Castor let go of Varian’s head and leaned back, dipping more into soft parts that were already soft enough, thank you. Had Castor tipped the scales from simple bullying into real sadism the past year? He used to sob over his times table.

After a moment of scrutiny, lips pursing out like his uncle’s, Castor jerked forward. His eyes widened, and through a grin, he asked, “Hey, there’s a rumor going around that Princess Rapunzel had to order your dad to keep you, instead of kicking you out. Is it true?”

Terrific electric strength bolted through Varian. He wrenched his arm from Harold and rammed it against the side of Castor’s neck. Castor screamed, almost as loud as the horrible crack that sizzled the air. It didn’t knock Castor off. But before Castor could react past his initial shock, a growling, spitting whirlwind of gray fur buzzed past Varian’s head and buried itself in Castor’s face.

Castor fell back, screaming, “Get it off!”

Richard and Harold jumped up to help. Varian scrambled to his knees, and beneath them stomping and reeling, he gathered up the fish. Are you really doing this? he asked himself, and, well yeah, how was he going to explain not coming home with fish?

He took off, checking over his shoulder. Ruddiger was giving them absolute misery and seemed uninterested in stopping any time soon. Each boy received raccoon fury as he leapt from body to body, or face to face, in some cases.

“Wow, he’s good in a fight!” Varian said, admiring. Eventually, when he was a safe distance away, he shouted for Ruddiger. Ruddiger popped off from some unfortunate boy’s neck, and together, they ran home.

He stopped at the river one last time to wash his face and brush the broken leaves from his pants. Then, kneeling beside the stream, he sunk his hands into the mud—into the deep, fleshy, stinking earth—and pulled up handfuls of sludge. He threw these clumps into the river. Madly, he felt like throwing the fish too, but settled for more mud. It plop-plopped, smacking into the water’s surface before dissolving away. Then, after rinsing his hands, Varian set for the march up the long hill towards home again.

He went through the door leading to the kitchen, where Dad was pulling bread out of the oven. It looked brown, ashy brown, a dirty smudge all along to top, just the same color as the mud. Not golden at all. Burned. Oh, what a cook!

“What took you so long?” asked Dad.

Oh, you know, just getting smeared into the forest floor.

Varian set down the basket and rubbed his cheek where Castor had hit him, turning his face away. Ruddiger gave him a staring, eager look, urging him to do something. Like tell Dad!?! Think again, buddy.

Instead, Varian was going to try everything he could to get out of there. Like get himself grounded and set to his room, apparently.

“I was fishing, Dad. What do you expect?”

Dad didn’t take the bait though, so Varian had to resort to hiding his face in the salvia. When Dad got close, Varian pressed his fingertips into the tabletop, until the blood dammed up in a fresh ache.

He had never seen Dad weep like he had the other day, not even when they found out about Mom. What right did he have to put another burden on Dad?

“I better get these to the lab!” He scrambled out the sentence faster than he could breathe, and keeping his face tilted away, dashed out, nearly tripping over the threshold. The laboratory never seemed like so much a sanctuary, even though it had, at times, been a prison. When he slammed the door behind him, even locking Ruddiger out, he felt he could breathe again. And know that there was no way the Saporians—

With a hand clamped over his mouth, he wept.

Quietly, Quirin prepared dinner. He opened the creel basket, flipping the lid so it bounced against the back end of the basket, and found fish. Good. He was expecting that. But he wasn’t expecting them to be covered in dirt. The fish, with their poor, dead doll-eyes, seemed astonished what wrongs had been done to them. Quietly, here too, he dipped them into a bowl of clean water, where the detritus made clouds of dirt in the bowl. In the past, even only a few days ago, he would have been annoyed. But he was beyond the capability of being upset anymore. Only just tired and quiet.

Varian didn’t make a reappearance until dinner was ready, washed and dressed from his fishing expedition. He sat at his place, sliding the plate towards himself, without raising his head. Mournfully, he ate with his head resting on his outstretched arm, feeding Ruddiger bits of asparagus from his plate. Quirin might break convention and pull out that cake early, the birthday gods be hanged.

Opening his mouth to say something to that effect—but wait? Varian had dropped a piece of asparagus on his stretched-out arm, and when he raised his head to flick it off, Quirin saw something dark on his cheek. Was that the beginnings of a bruise?

“What happened to you?” Quirin asked.

Varian looked up, mute and startled, until Quirin pointed a fork at his cheek. “Tripped,” Varian grunted, before laying his cheek back down again.

“Are you okay?”

Varian slid Ruddiger an entire asparagus spear. It still seemed conversing about food was all they were capable of.

“You didn’t secure the latch on the creel—”

“Sorry, okay?”

Quirin swallowed. “That’s not what I meant.”

Was Varian more injured than he was letting on? Quirin felt his eyes narrow in scrutiny. Or was this still because of … what had happened?

After dinner, Varian perked up, sitting contentedly at the writing desk, drawing a diagram for some alchemical monstrosity that hopefully wouldn’t explode for a change. Maybe, his quietude had only been dreaming up contraptions. In the end, Quirin didn’t pull out the cake, and they had a sedate evening before retiring to bed. It wasn’t what Quirin had hoped for, but it was what he could live with. For now.

He was awakened out of a dream by the creaking of a door. It was impossible to see what time it was, because the fire had died down to only embers in his fireplace, which meant it was no time to be getting out of bed, especially for a growing boy.

Sure enough, when he got up and went upstairs to Varian’s room, what did he find but an empty bed? Well, my, my. What was the boy doing?

It didn’t take a genius to know where to find him. He was in the lab, of course, back to the open door, pulling out a flask from a shelf. In the flicker of candlelight, the shadows fell around him like sheets waving on a clothesline.

“What are you doing?”

Varian whirled. “Oh, hi, Dad, hi.” In some confusion, he brought the hand holding the flask up towards his face, before making a course correction and smacking the other one behind his ears to scratch away. Rather vigorously. Like, he needed a flea bath.

Quirin remained silent.

“What are you doing up?” Varian asked. “It’s late!”

“I noticed.”

“So …” His grin was enormous. “What are you doing up?”

Quirin leaned against the door jamb, bundling his arms together. “I think the question is, what are you doing up?”

“Hah, well …” Varian’s eyes drifted towards the flask. “Ju—just getting some salve for my cheek. It’s kinda sore.”

For a boy with a sore cheek, he was sure holding the rest of his body rather stiffly, like a scarecrow wearing a nightshirt. All the hallmarks of a boy afraid of getting in trouble. Elbows glued to his sides, and beneath the worn edge of his nightshirt, legs firmly clamped together—

Quirin darted forward. “I thought you said you tripped!”

“I did.”

“I see, down a mountain!”

Varian looked at the smatter of bruises purpling up and down his bare shins. “Okay, it was just I met a Cossack.”

“And he squat-danced all over you, I suppose. Joke all you want, but it isn’t funny. Upstairs. Your room.”

The whole way up the tower, Varian complained Quirin was making a big deal out of nothing. He was fine. He was brilliant! It was nothing at all, and can’t you see that, Dad? Quirin let his silence speak for himself and turned on Varian when they got into the room, yanking up the ragged sleeves. Sure enough, bruises all along his outer forearms. Classic self-defense wounds.

“Who did this to you?”

“Just some boys. Just a tussle amongst the boys, you know. Boys will be … boys.” Varian dared to produce a half-formed grin. “You should—”

“If you tell me I should see the other guy, I’m going to lose my mind.” Quirin held the flame, dancing on candle-point, against a lamp wick that flared the room into a warm glow. “How many boys?”

Varian’s lips wavered, as if he were holding back a grin—fully formed, this time. “The issue of numbers doesn’t really matter. If you consider intellect, I’m sure I had them at the disadvantage.”

“You’re very clever with the jokes tonight.” Quirin couldn’t have made his tone any flatter than if he paved over it. “Let me see.”

All the jokes seemed to have been inflating Varian, keeping him buoyed, because now he deflated. “Aw, that’s okay, Dad.”

Quirin stared. Never had he imagined Varian would deny him. Why would he? Unless … A horrible thought. Varian had said before that no one had hurt him in prison, but what if he had been lying? If there were people in this world who had thought about putting a noose around his neck, surely, there were worse people in prison. Was Varian trying to hide some evidence of that?

A tremble bit chunks out of Quirin, one vertebrae at a time. He held out a hand. “Varian?”

Varian turned his shoulder. “I told you—”

Quirin grabbed him by both shoulders, and jerked him close, still and set. Fiercely, he said, “I don’t have patience for teenage bashfulness.”

A struggle contorted Varian’s cheeks, swelling under his freckles, brown and full, like tonight’s over baked rolls. But he lowered his eyelashes and complied.

Quirin almost lifted his nightshirt right then and there, but Varian wasn’t a little boy, after all. He was entitled to some dignity. Quirin jerked his head at the bed, and Varian sat on it, sullen and bitter, but submissive, keeping his gaze vacant.

“I don’t understand,” Quirin said, moreso to distract himself from his own fears racing through his head like a fox chase. He angled the lamp and candlestick on the nightstand to focus the light. “Why were you trying to hide this from me?”

“Because I didn’t want you going Medieval on anyone else.”

If he thought that would scare Quirin off, he didn’t understand his own father. Quirin only pulled the blanket up to Varian’s hips without compunction, and then lifted the shirt. There Varian’s torso was, even in this dim light, looking like someone had smashed a bushel of blueberries into his torso. Very large blueberries.

“What did they do? Hit you with the broadside of a barn?”

“I assure you, Dad, there were no barns.”

Scowling (he didn’t think he had ever been sarcastic as a teenager), Quirin palpated for broken ribs, but with Varian’s assurances he wasn’t having a hard time breathing, Quirin moved towards Varian’s back. Glowering like a perniciously faced bulldog, Varian sat forward.

After being satisfied about Varian carrying scars from prison (the answer was: no), Quirin applied salve to Varian’s back before pulling the nightshirt down. “Show me your hands.” He took one glance at them before dropping them. “What beauties they are.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Not a mark on them. Did you hit back at all?”

Lips hard set, Varian looked away.

Quirin stood and stoked the fire in the fireplace since Varian complained the salve was cold. Then stupidly, he went ahead and stoked another fire as well: “I don’t appreciate you hiding this from me.”

“Ha, if I had worn my pajamas, I would have gotten away with it!"

“Haven’t we learned a lesson about doing our laundry more frequently?” Quirin stepped towards the door. “You’re seeing Doctor Byron in the morning.”

Varian yanked the blanket up to his neck. “I’m not!” After Quirin walked out, Varian shouted after him, “Don’t waste your time asking for Doctor Byron. ’Cause I’m not seeing him!”

Quirin went back in. “I’m not going to argue with you about this.”

“Then what’d you come back in here for?”

Did Quirin earlier think he was too tired to be upset? Oh, foolish man he was!

While Quirin was still formulating a response, a sudden paroxysm seemed to shiver down Varian’s arms, and he slid supine in bed, yanking the blanket over his head. From under it, his voice came muffled, “Why’d you do that? I’m not a child!”

“Says the boy hiding under the covers.”

Saying nothing, Varian opted for a frustrated puff of air. Quirin made his own puff of air too, looking at that huddled mass. This was his fault, of course. Who wanted to confide in a madman?

“I can’t not have you checked out,” he said.

“I’m okay!”

“Let’s make sure of that.”

A slide of the blankets as what was underneath jerked and wiggled, before coming still. And then Varian said, broken-toned, “Don’t make me.”

That tone was not what Quirin had expected. Silently, he sat on the end of the bed and waited.

The blanket lowered, and Varian flipped onto his stomach, throwing an arm over his ear. After a minute, he started. “In prison …”

Quirin slid fingers over his mouth, clamping his teeth down.

“In prison, they took us to doctors all the time.”

Whatever it was Quirin had feared to hear, it hadn’t been that. “What do you mean?”

“Just for check ups, I guess.” Flipping to his back again, Varian laid his hands across his belly, thumbs playing rosie-posie with each other. The candlelight lit only the barest edge of his face. “I guess they were making sure we were healthy. At least, as much as anybody could be there.”

For the life of him, Quirin could not understand what Varian was telling him. “Were the doctors harsh?”

“No. I’m pretty sure I was treated better than the others. The other prisoners complained I got special treatment, ’cause I think they did them together, all at once, but I was in a room by myself. The guards told them to shut up.” Once again, came up a forearm over Varian’s face, and he finished in a tone that seemed made of glass, glass, glass, “If I had said no, they would have only made me.”

After a moment of struggling with this, finding it to be far less cruel but more humiliating than what his imagination had offered, Quirin replied, “I see.” And he could. In a place where a person had no agency, even the best of intentions would seem violating. The discomfort of an examination must be magnified to the powerless. He imagined himself being shackled, in a room with strange men, and being told to disrobe.

Quirin shuddered. “But if you’re hurt …”

“I swear, Dad, if I was, I would see Doctor Byron.”

Varian’s clock was fancy and over-engineered, made up of all extras, with a dozen noodle-like parts and arms and spokes only Varian knew the meaning of. But still, it told the time.

Head as though wrapped in the coils of a relentlessly squeezing python, Quirin said, “Okay. Since you are sixteen as of fourteen minutes ago, I’ll let you make this call. I’m sorry if I made you feel …” He didn’t know how to articulate it.

At first, Varian lay very still, his face at rest. And then, he grinned wickedly, and said, “Sucker!”

“Varian, I swear!”

Varian threw the blanket over his head again, snickering to himself. But it was also so free.

This meant, of course, that Quirin was forgiven.

Chapter Text

They had a formula for celebrating Varian’s birthday. The late night before (and strange dreams about doctors and prison bars) meant it was going to be rough on Quirin, but he did it. He actually did it. He woke up excruciatingly early and did all the morning work, and let … Varian sleep in. Quirin fed the animals, mucked their stalls, and made breakfast. The household bellies were all on him today, the only day of the year they didn't share the responsibilities.

Mid-morning, Varian came downstairs beatifically, as fresh-milk faced as a cherub in a Renaissance painting. He said, “Ha ha, hee hee, I’ve had a great morning—ow! Whoa, but am I stiff!”

That stiffness seemed to be the only evidence of his trouble the day before. Besides the enormous shiner over his eye, which didn’t make Quirin feel murderous at all.

They ate cake and Varian opened presents, including one Ambrose delivered from the castle (a leather bound notebook that Quirin couldn't have even dreamed of affording). While Varian settled into the sofa with his new books, Quirin went outside to move his army of scarecrows around. It was his weekly habit to keep the birds away. When he came back in, Varian was dead asleep on the sofa, Ruddiger bundled up under his chin. It was all peace and sunshine, except something felt off. As if the house was full of hooks. No matter how he turned, Quirin felt as if he’d be snagged.

A suspicion slithered down his spine, about as comfortable as having a snowball shoved down the back of one’s trousers (not that Quirin would know about that, thank you to a certain yellow-eyed someone). Quirin went up to his room, and dug through the important papers at his desk. After he checked it over twice, he confirmed: the pardon was gone. It was probably getting warm under a sleepy, cake-filled belly.

Quirin clucked his tongue, and said, “Sorry, son, but I’m not going to be able to ignore the ankle-biters.”

It had to be ankle-biters, it just had to. Varian had called his mysterious assailants “boys,” and Quirin believed him. Excepting Darwin’s befuddling stupidity, no grown adult would dare tackle Varian like that, not unless they had really meant it. (Varian’s injuries, no matter how numerous, had not been the work of someone who had been serious.) So that left only young men, probably teenagers—young enough to be brave like that, and old enough to be so cowardly.

It was time to visit town. He needed to buy a new shovel.

Shovel buying might seem a simple and straightforward process, but it wasn’t. One must first rove up and down the highways and byways, looking into each storefront window, with the eagle eye spotting any male below 6’2”. Then came the time to peruse candles and pre-seasoned steaks, feel muslin fabrics, judge lamp oil, discuss taxes, watch someone weave baskets, bake bread, and polish silverware. Only after every avenue had been passed through and every store along the way inspected, could a man meander into Franklin’s to get that shovel bought.

There was nothing else to do but head home. It was probably better he didn’t know who—except, when passing by the square, Quirin saw what he’d been looking for: three boys sitting at a picnic table by the milliner’s, each of them trying to start a strange new trend. They wore scratches all over their bodies, as if made by teeny, tiny claws.

Well, well, he should have expected Castor, that rage-amuffin! That kid had been taking out his father’s death on everything smaller than him for years now. And of course, Richard and Harry sat bruised alongside him, always along for Castor’s ride.

Swinging his shovel over his shoulder, Quirin went over that way. Just for a friendly talk, see. When he got close enough to read the title of their book, Young Man’s Job Compendium for Making Easy Money, they still hadn’t noticed him. When he got close enough to hear them speak, (“What about being a mudlark?—What’s that?—Ew, haha, that’s perfect for you!”), they still hadn’t noticed him.

Talk availed much (except when it didn’t), and Quirin was only going to talk. Only going to talk. He was going to be pleasant and friendly, offering sagely advice, noticing they were trying to be responsible young men and get jobs. Responsibility was upon them now, more than ever before. Just like accountability. Youth would no longer shield them from that, just a reminder.

Imagine the looks on their faces as they inevitably went from unease, to false bravado, to knowing dread. They would …

What was he doing?

Quirin turned on his heels, and stood by the well. What by the bloody moon was he thinking? Was he seriously considering intimidating a trio of kids barely old enough to shave? What was wrong with him anymore?

So he did the next best thing. He roved the alleys and streets of Old Corona once again, until he ran into Rebecca, Castor’s mother, coming out of the pawn broker’s. He came down like a hurricane.

“You tell your son and his friends to keep away from Varian, or next time they look for a job, it will be from a prison cell!”

He turned from her before that look of shock and confusion on her face changed to anything else.

That was better.

Varian said, “Nice shovel, but I seriously hope that’s not another birthday present.”

“No, no,” Quirin replied. “I wouldn’t waste such a nice shovel on you.”

Varian laughed, claimed he was wounded forever, and disappeared into the lab. That boy was getting way too spoiled.

A few hours later, he made an appearance, coming into the sitting room where Quirin had been reading the newspaper and drinking coffee. He twirled a hammer around, grinned, and asked, “It’s still my birthday, right?”

“Oh dear suns, now what?”

“Can the King and Queen come?”

Quirin just about did a spit take. When he looked at Varian, Varian looked back as boldly as if he had merely asked if one of his school chums could come over for dinner. King and queens had become common to him.

Not so with Quirin. The Princess was one thing (he would never forget the time she had offered to darn his socks)—but the King was another story. Quirin had to peel his heart from the back of his throat before he could speak (with great articulation, by the way).

“Whazzah?”

Now here was the part where Varian became uncomfortable. His eyes drifted, fixing on a spot a meter above Quirin’s shoulder. “I’ve been working on a solution to their—their memory loss. I built something too big to move.”

“That’s what you’ve been corresponding with the Princess about these last few weeks?”

“Yeah, I’ve been mailing her different things to try. Mainly different chemical solutions. I tried all the memory tinctures in the books, and I even sent a little truth serum, to see if the spell is just a lie, but she said that didn’t work, either. But”—now the truth of the boy came out, with a glimmer of confidence—“I’ve got this new thing, and it’s going to work! It’s gonna work so hard. But they have to come here to try it.”

The answer was “no!” Every cell in Quirin’s body made sure he knew it. Every vesicle, every gyration, every beat, every pat-pat-pat.

But his mouth moved of its own accord: the corners lifted heavenward, the lips parted, and the words that blurbed out were, “Of course, they can come.”

Quirin was ready to bounce out of there—maybe go stuff his head in the river for a few hours, teach his mouth to obey him—but instead he and Varian discussed what day would be best for the visit, how they should make preparations, and so forth. He made some teasing joke about making sure the house didn’t look like Varian’s room, and Varian laughed sarcastically, opening his mouth wide so Quirin could count every one of his teeth, like counting two rows of gleaming quail’s eggs.

“Ouch, birthdays are rough. I’m going to write Rapunzel a letter.”

Quirin lifted the newspaper. This felt good, like things were back to normal.

Then Varian spoke again (Quirin hadn’t realized he was still in the room). “I didn’t … it wasn’t me, you know. I didn’t even know what they were doing to them.”

Quirin flipped the paper down, but Varian was tying Ruddiger around his neck and racing out. After a minute, Quirin followed him to the lab, but Varian was hammering out a piece of metal as if it was personal.

Three days later, came the royals. Instead of appearing with all the pomp that would have been regular—the guards upon guards, outfitted in their finest; the blowing horns; the prancing ponies; the gilding—they came by twilight, incognito in a layman’s carriage, attended by only two guards. Rapunzel never traveled with a guard, as far as Quirin had ever seen, and Varian explained she was fierce with magic hair. But tonight, the King and Queen came thusly, because, as the Princess had sent in a letter, the Captain of the Guards wanted to shield them from the populace.

“So, we’re coming sneaky!” she had written, and it wasn’t difficult to imagine her voice saying it.

Quirin stood at the door, ready to receive them as their hulking gray mass came out of the dark, with a gurgling in his stomach. This would be the first time he would see them since coming out of the amber, and he had spent three days thinking of an appropriate apology, somehow to be delivered without Varian knowing. He would explain what had happened then had been his failure, not Varian’s, and that he was grateful they weren’t holding it against his son. He would speak of Rapunzel’s grace, and—

Uoh, heaven help him. They were here.

Princess Rapunzel jumped out of the carriage first, not even waiting for the guard to open it for her, her own color-scheme rivaling the one in the twilight-dipped sky. She was upon them in an instant, crying out, “Oh my goodness, the crops are really coming along, aren’t they? Did I see a horse and donkey? They’re so cute. Varian! How are you?” Her hair flopped against her back as she twirled in the entryway, patting Varian on the shoulder, then Ruddiger on the head, before turning back to Quirin. (She didn’t pat him.) “Quirin, thank you so much!”

“Of course, Princess.” He was halfway into a bow, but she was already sweeping out the door, instead of receiving it as a princess does.

“Mom! Dad! You’re taking forever. Come on!”

While Rapunzel ran around the carriage like a squirrel around an oak, Quirin looked to see how Varian was handling it.

Varian was handling it. He was a mite pale, perhaps, and the speed at which he scratched his arm was nearing frantic, but he appeared calm for a boy who probably had a pardon for high treason shoved into his pocket.

The King and Queen descended the carriage, jostled against each other, and then followed Rapunzel to the doorway.

Rapunzel made the introductions, without any formality what-so-ever. “This is Quirin, Varian’s father. He’s an old friend of yours, Dad.”

King Frederic bowed and Queen Arianna curtsied, and together, they looked at him with identical expressions of airless vapidity and confusion. Those dull eyes told him all.

And then Arianna asked, “What’s that?” and that told him even more.

“That’s a shovel, Mom. You really forgot that?”

“It’s actually a spade,” Varian said.

Queen Arianna nodded in satisfaction. “See, I know what a shovel is, Rapunzel.”

In his confusion, Quirin almost forgot to bow. He did it now, wildly inept (he almost fell on his face), murmuring, “Your Majesties. If you would honor me.”

When he made it back upright, he held his hand out, intending it to be welcoming. But instead he was wrapping it around Varian’s shoulders and pulling him close at the flash of golden suns entering the hallway. Every muscle pulled itself taut, zinging with adrenaline. There will never—

The guards stopped on the threshold, staring. Then they bumped against each other, their elbows and knees knocking against the walls, while they said, “We’ll wait outside.”

“Yeah, outside!” they said again.

Quirin didn’t lose his grip until the door closed behind them.

Varian looked up into his face, eyebrow lowered in question. “It’s okay, Dad. It’s only Stan and Pete.”

Letting his arm around Varian loose, Quirin stayed in the hallway while Varian led the royal family into the parlor. What had happened to him? All he knew was, the second he saw those armored chests, his blood had beat high, as high as when Darwin assaulted Varian, and he had thought, There will never be another guard in my home again.

In the parlor, Varian was making nice. Greeted amicably by the King and Queen—they acted like he was an old friend—, Varian greeted them back just as friendly. It was amazing to think it was all a lie. Then Varian took them to the lab, with Rapunzel exclaiming, “Oooh, science!”

Against the rigidity in his heart, Quirin opened the door and invited the guards in.

“We don’t wish to intrude,” the mustachioed one said.

“I’ll make coffee,” Quirin answered, swinging the door opened wide. “I think we have some pie somewhere.”

They sat in the parlor, where the fire burned a hot spectrum of flecks and starlight off their armor. They held their helmets in their laps, the tops of their boots scrapping against the damask tablecloth. All that was left of the pie were sugary paw prints on the countertop, so Quirin brought out coffee and cookies. Good night, was it an awkward dinner party. Everyone seemed peculiarly interested in the pouring of coffee, and the cookies, apparently, were so tough it muffled all conversation, a testament to Quirin’s baking abilities.

Well, he was the host here. If Varian could operate with grace and skill, so could he, especially since his own struggle was nothing compared to his son’s. So, Quirin made nice. He made so nice. He asked absent questions about life in Corona, and they commented on the pictures on the walls.

“That’s a pretty one,” Stan said, pointing at the one of a proud, gnarly mountain top overlooking an insipid wisp of valley below. It was like most landscape paintings, lacking any conviction or interest whatsoever.

“I’ve always hated that one,” Quirin said.

Pete tipped his cup back, face tilted towards the ceiling, his Adam’s apple peeping up to hide back down as he drained the cup dry.

“It’s one of Ulla’s,” Quirin explained. “She was brilliant, but her taste in art was awful.”

Stan bit into the last cookie with a vigorous crunch. Quirin had never seen such hungry and thirsty people before. They continuously shoved food into their mouths.

Quirin already went back into the kitchen to find more things to eat. What was wrong with him? He felt full of needles, like the inside of a pin cushion. And the only way to relieve himself would be to turn those needles outward. But he focused on pulling out scones from the pantry, the ones Varian had made in case their royal company was peckish. He arranged them on a plate. He would be generous with the guards. And out he came, with a fresh batch of coffee, steam piping out of the kettle.

Pete perked when Quirin set the plate down. “I have a great recipe for strawberry scones.”

Quirin stared at him. “These are cherry.”

“Yum.”

Stan mumbled an agreement around a mouthful.

Quirin took a seat. “Varian is the cook here. I burn everything.”

“He learned from his mother?”

Remembering Pete had emptied his coffee cup, Quirin refilled it. Oops, a little high, just a few drops from overflowing. “No, she wasn’t exactly domestic. She tried, but her aspirations were beyond the … homely little home. She was more interested in teaching him alchemy than cooking, and was gone when he was still very young. I suppose he taught himself out of books. Maybe the tutor taught him. She’s quite the baker.”

“I love baking,” Pete said. He lifted the coffee cup to his mouth, and in so doing, the awaiting tidal wave went into action and overflowed the rim. Driblets of hot coffee sacrificed themselves on his fingers. Or maybe, his fingers were the sacrifice. His eyes strained at the corners, but he sipped politely and put the cup back into the saucer, his fingers turning red. His hand disappeared under the tablecloth discreetly.

“This baking-tutor, she’s an alchemist too?” Stan asked.

“Not at all. She claims Varian outpaced her in math and science by the time he was ten. He’s a total dunce when it comes to literature and poetry, though.”

“We all have our weaknesses,” Pete mused. At the look Quirin gave him, he took a big gulp of coffee. Having been made of iron with his fingers, Pete wasn’t strong against what must be a seared throat: he winced.

“He was done with schooling when he was twelve,” Quirin explained.

“That’s remarkable.”

After a minute of silence, Quirin went to harass the fire, rifling a poker through the fireplace. The embers fell beneath the grate, glowing neon orange and lightening. “It was helpful, actually. He stepped up and took care of the house, taking over the cooking and cleaning, with a diligence that isn’t normal for boys his age. He does some things better than myself. I’m able to attend to my duties without worrying about home.”

“You must have been busy as a burgomaster,” Stan said.

“Extremely. Besides the farm.”

“Amazing. For a boy. His age.”

When Quirin turned, he caught Stan and Pete signaling at each other, their hands flying to their helmets when they realized he was seeing them. “Yes, I rely on him too much, but he’s had to grow up more quickly than most children his age. He’s still so young, and has had burdens put on him, and it’s very difficult without a mother. We’ve had to rely strictly on each other, you see.”

Stan put down his scone and Pete his coffee, and they looked at him round-eyed. Stan cleared his throat.

“Sir,” he said, “we would both like to say—if you don’t mind—that is … we are both sorry for the part we played.”

What?

Quirin plinked more at the firewood. It wasn’t what he had expected. He didn’t know what he had expected, except their eventual “we had to do what we had to.” That would have given him the perfect impetus to feel sorry for himself and throw them out. Didn’t they know, they were supposed to understand that Varian was not a bad kid, while also revealing their cruelty? Why were they giving him an apology?

Before he could wrap his head around Stan’s words, an explosion shook the house, the coffee cups clattering in their saucers.

Stan and Pete jumped up. “What was that!?!”

Quirin turned back to the table and took a mouthful of coffee. Yikes, that was really hot. Poor Pete.

The guards, seeing his lack of excitement, waited.

Quirin didn’t keep them in suspense long. “Let’s go see the damage.”

When Quirin opened the lab door, with Stan and Pete vibrating behind his heels, Varian screamed, “Ah, Dad! Ha ha, Dad.”

The scene was … pink. Thick, amorphous pink coated every—thing. Pink on the walls, pink on the floors, pink on the windows, pink on the apparatus, pink on the furniture, pink on the people. The royal family was covered head to toe, otherwise none-the-worse for wear. Varian stood at the control box of his strange, pink-belching machine, spotless, but face turning red. Ruddiger feasted on whatever it was.

Behind him, Stan and Pete gave little shrieks, but didn’t rush past.

Varian stepped over a blob of slime. “Dad, ah, Dad.”

“I heard you the first time, son.”

“We’ve had a minor … well.”

Frederic cleared his throat. “Varian, I think you should have warned us to bring a change of clothing.”

Turning towards the guards, whose faces were oddly strangled between two emotions of contrast, Quirin said, “Follow me. We have towels.”

Then, leaning against the door jamb, and with another unconquerable urge in a long day of them, Quirin burst into laughter. Every bubble of frustration of the past few—ah, suns, ever since the amber—dissolved under the burn of that laugh. Quirin fizzed away like one of Varian’s experiments, until all was left was the effervescent remains of right and light. There was still much to do, but he could face it.

The pink whatever-it-was dissolved easily in plain water, but it had the unfortunate ability to get stuck into every nook and cranny. All of them. Into the furniture, into the apparatus. Into the ceiling, into the floors. Into the nooks’ nooks and the crannies’ crannies. Into nooks and crannies that Quirin didn’t know existed.

After two days of cleaning out the lab, Quirin started to think some things. Rooms and furniture and what-not all had nooks and crannies. But know what else also had nooks and crannies? Kings.

He was sitting in church when the revelation came down from heaven upon him, which threatened a laugh in the most inopportune of times. The priest was going hard on the sins that so easily beset us, listing them all out, one by one. By the time the man got to fornication, Quirin busted right up, spiraling into a bone-clattering laughter that he tried to cover with a cough.

“Did you need me to anoint you with oil for that cough?” Priest Eli asked afterwards. The look in his eye was either holy outrage or secular humor.

“No, no, just a temporary …” Quirin replied, piously lifting his eyes heavenwards. But he walked away, hacking up a lung.

Why the King’s mishap should be so humorous to him, he didn’t know. But let him be a sphinx or an inebriated oracle, not only to others but also to himself. In the past, it would have humiliated him that such an accident occurred under his own roof. But now, he only felt malicious glee.

It was a mystery to Varian too, who spent days staring, and then finally, on day three of swabbing the ceiling with a mop, he asked, “Dad, are you all right? It’s like you don’t even care.”

“I don’t.” Quirin felt that his smile was hedging too close to wicked, so he constrained it, slapping a rag against the wall. It was time to be serious. The scent of strawberries was permeating the entire house, even up to their bedrooms, to make them dream of spoiling strawberry shortcake all night. Quirin had actually awoken with a fork in hand.

“Ruddiger,” Varian said, in a stage-whisper, “Dad has lost his mind.” He smiled genuinely, the truest smile Quirin had seen on him in a long time. If this was all it had taken to ease the calamity between them, Quirin would have let him blow up the house ages ago.

Sitting on the bench to regain presence of mind, Quirin watched Varian poke the mop into the beams, his young back arching as he balanced on his tip-toes, stretching his arms above. He looked like an abandoned puppet about to flop over. Watching him was another source of Quirin's good mood: he was just so happy they were free and healthy. He had gotten a letter this morning that helped him gain perspective.

The letter was from Rapunzel, giving him the run-down of what happened the night they had fought off the Saporians. When the royals had visited, after Varian had ran off to the well with Stan to fetch water, Quirin had quietly asked Rapunzel for her version of the events, if she would indulge him. Of course she would tell him, she promised, and when she left in that plain carriage, with the stars shining above, she had already seemed like a little queen. Maybe not quite what he expected, but she would get there.

But she had misunderstood him. He had wanted to know for what reason guards would apologize to him, but instead she wrote him about the night the Saporians had been driven off. She made Varian all aglow with bravery. That bravery terrified Quirin, even as it filled him with amazed pride. She was delicate in areas, but her nondescript, hinting words gave his imagination scope to roam. Varian had said she had saved his life, and it must have been that night.

The most important thing was that he learned the story of the bomb. There had been some formula Varian was working on (she didn’t say what), and the Saporians intended to turn it against the populace. For that reason, Varian turned against them.

"Boy, you must have gotten some good news in that letter," Varian had murmured to him as he read that, sitting across the breakfast table. "Did you win the lottery?"

"In a manner of speaking."

But it only raised more questions, such as, why had Varian joined the Saporians in the first place? Obviously, he hadn’t been invested in whatever their goal had been. So what desperation had driven him to a group so ridiculous? The hopelessness of prison? A threat? Had they soothed him with lies and empty promises? Had they hurt him, so that, now, the simple brutality of bully boys seemed not even worth the effort to fight off?

Well, this line of questioning ruined Quirin's mood. He stood and rubbed a rag against the wall. Pink gloop melted away. If only their problems could melt away so easily.

“When I went into town the other day, I saw some boys with rather interesting scratches on them.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Rather strange marks, since they seemed nearly identical.”

Varian nodded academically. “Rather strange. Hmm, yes. Rather. Rather maybe they played with a feisty kitten?”

Quirin threw the rag at Varian, so that it went slop against his back. “Don’t play coy with me. Why do you think I brought home a fritter just for Ruddiger?”

“Because you love him?”

“You shouldn’t have to rely on vermin to protect you.”

Bending over Ruddiger, who bounced a bit of cloth off the wall, Varian cooed, “My killer raccoon.”

“Varian, I want to teach you to defend yourself.”

The look that got him could have chilled the blood of a yeti.

“With a pitchfork?” Varian asked, sweetly.

“Funny. You wanted to learn before.”

“And don’t you remember the last time someone tried to teach me?”

“I’m not Ward.”

Varian picked up the bucket, regarding Quirin with a face that was like a pair of needles embedded in a pin cushion. (Ouch, in other words.) “No, you probably know loads more about fighting than him!” Then mouth flashing open in equal parts laughing and being aghast at his own audacity, Varian skittered out the door.

“Brat.”

They hadn’t spoken about what was in the trunk. Quirin should have thrown those things out long ago, what he hadn’t vowed. Clinging to a dead past was his mistake.

Varian was still at the well, standing with legs splayed as he leaned back against the well shaft, his head tilted towards the sky. The bucket lay discarded at his feet. Droplets of water had dripped from the mop and onto his face; specks of light glistened all along his forehead, brightening the daydream in his eyes. Quirin leaned next to him.

“You know what will happen if you run into them again.”

“We will become the best of friends once they realize I’m just a diamond in the rough, and that the real goal wasn’t the destination, but the journey along the way.” The clouds played in Varian’s eyes as he said this.

“Since you respond so wisely, you must know what I’m going to say next.”

“I don’t want to fight, Dad.”

“I never said you had to.”

An eyebrow quirked up. “You got me there.” Then Varian dropped his chin to his chest. “I don’t want—”

“Enough. You need to learn how to defend yourself. You can’t just stand there and let them pummel you.”

“I didn’t just stand there and let them pummel me.” Varian spoke with great precision, every word carefully enunciated. “I cowered in the dirt like a worm.”

Bloody ha-ha, Quirin supposed.

A pale wind, flecked with white lint from cottonwood trees, blew against them, bringing the smell of moss, ferns, and spicy evergreen from the mountains. Varian shivered, although it was a warm wind.

“I thought we were supposed to use our words,” he sing-songed.

“Varian, since when do you listen to anything I told you from when you were four? And even then, you knew I didn’t mean when someone is actually knocking your teeth out.”

“Maybe if I had said the right thing instead of being sarcastic.”

Quirin crossed his arms. “It doesn’t matter what you said. You didn’t deserve it.”

Varian drew swirling dervishes in the dirt with the toe of his boot.

“Did they say why they attacked you?”

Varian's eyelids fluttered, and then he answered, “No. I don’t think even they knew. They were just trying to prove they were bigger and badder, so they won’t feel scared. They were just doing it for the same reason Darwin …” He turned away, leaning his hip against the well. “Do you really think I didn’t hit back because I don’t know how?”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because.”

A long moment passed. Because, because. Was that all he was going to say?

“Are you punishing yourself?” Quirin asked.

Varian jerked and shot his hand out, but he kept his back turned. “What? No! That’s … no! I had a knife, that’s what! So now what?”

The knife for cleaning the fish. Quirin considered that. That changed things, but it was a little too fortuitous in Varian’s mentioning it now.

At Quirin’s contemplative silence, Varian shot a look of amazement over his shoulder. “So what now, you want me to have pulled it?”

“Did you even remember you had it at the time?”

Varian had nothing but silence for him.

“Why didn’t you fight back?”

“Because, Dad!” He grabbed onto the post for the roof of the well, brimming with an energy that seemed to hover over the surface of his skin.

“Because isn’t an answer.”

“Because they punch me, and I punch back. They punch me harder, and I punch back harder. And on and on until someone punches too hard. It doesn’t end until someone punches too hard, that’s why.”

“Varian—”

“I could have really hurt them. I had the ability to hurt them way more than what they could have imagined. And their punches didn’t hurt, not really. What hurt was …” He scrubbed his neck from a piece of cottonwood fluff, his fingers leaving red marks behind. “I wish everyone could somehow forget what I’ve done. I wish I could forget what I’ve done.”

Stepping forward, Quirin wrapped an arm around Varian from behind. Varian stiffened, but did not move away. “I’m here to help you. We’ll get through this.”

“When the Saporians took over,” Varian babbled, lifting Quirin’s hand to his forehead, in that peculiar new way of his, “I was trying to make a solution to make everyone forget.”

“Oh.” That was the best Quirin could do. It was too ... everything. Too confusing, too surprising. Too heartbreaking. “Oh.”

“But it … it only exploded. So another failure.” Varian laughed, humorlessly. “It was pretty stupid and selfish, huh?”

“It’s okay, son. It's going to be okay.”

Varian pressed Quirin’s hand hard over his forehead. Breathing erratically, he rasped, “They held me down and spat in my face, Dad.”

One.

One, two.

One, two, three.

Quirin had never been the sort to count to ten to manage his anger before. But that old standby was becoming just the thing for him to do now.

Four, five, six.

It was very good he didn’t know this when he saw the boys the other day.

Ten.

Quirin whispered, “Come—come here.”

Varian turned, letting Quirin take him by the wrist. This time, unlike the last when he had hugged Varian, when Varian had been still, stiff, and unbelieving, in the moment of calamity, when Quirin had lost his mind—this time, Varian accepted the hug as the comfort it was meant to be, not desperately, but placidly, the way their hugs had been before the amber. He had been trying so hard to act grown-up lately, but the part that was a child was still there, unfolding itself. Varian pressed his face to Quirin’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” Quirin murmured. “They had no right to do that. It’s not your fault.”

Varian breathed quick but restrained gasps, and said something to shiver Quirin to pieces. “I’m so sad all the time.”

Quirin swallowed. Melancholy was the thing he feared the most. It had taken Ulla away, it had made Janice wear black, it had taken his father’s life, it had made him .... Had all Quirin’s striving since the amber been only to avoid the inevitable?

Varian went on. “I know I hurt you. Forgive me, please.”

“It was an accident, son.”

“And you’re sad and angry too. I’m sorry.”

Quirin couldn’t avoid it anymore. The excuse it was an accident weren’t the words Varian needed to hear or the words Quirin needed to say. He was hurt. They had been hurt in such a world-ending way, their foundation now only a quagmire of unease and torment. Quirin couldn’t brush it off anymore. He had to be honest.

“I wasn’t angry that day, Varian. I was scared. I had …” Quirin took a breath, on the cusp of saying he had read the trial record. But he couldn’t say that. It would hurt Varian too much. So he said, “I had been thinking about prison, and what could have happened there. I was scared.”

It wasn’t enough. Varian stiffened again in Quirin’s arms.

And in a moment of desperation, Quirin said, “I forgive you.”

Varian’s frame ignited, and like a fantastic bomb that has blown sky-high, his body trembled in an instant, shook and shivered into one second of pure energy, exploded, and then—then dissipated on the wind. He went still and silent. All was stillness. And for Quirin too, a lightness overcame him, a certain buoyancy he hadn’t felt in so long. When was the last time he felt this way? It gave him courage.

“You were trying to do a good thing.” As Quirin spoke, that vision of the amber erupting from the black rock, and the feeling of it on his body, what had haunted his mind forever now, dissolved away. “If I had been more honest with you back then, perhaps none of it would have happened. I’m sorry.”

Varian lifted his hands around Quirin’s neck. “You were only trying to protect me.”

That small measure of peace Quirin had been looking for seemed to settle over them. Even if he could not be content, he could at least be happy.

But, it was just a fragile young herb. Quirin clung to it, but it would wither the moment he let loose. He had to do something to secure Varian’s happiness, even if it meant sacrificing his own.

Chapter Text

The evening after his talk with Varian at the well, Quirin stayed up late writing letters. These were not letters that should have been difficult to write, but he struggled. After all, one can’t make business-like inquiries with such words: I’d much rather not, but in the interest of my son’s happiness and sanity …

In the end, he got them done, seven letters in total. Seven letters to break his heart.

The sun took his late night personally. Personally, it pummeled him the next morning, shooting a blister of light through the window at the most punishing time. Quirin shielded his bruised eyes under the blanket, but the sun was vicious, and set his blanket a fire. All right, all right. Quirin knew when he had lost against the most heavenly of bodies. He arose, got dressed, shaved, and plodded to the kitchen for coffee. Varian was already in the dining room, surrounded by a breakfast going cold. Even the daffodils in the vase, which Varian must have picked that morning, already hung their heads in weariness for the day.

“You never let me sleep in this late,” Varian said, batting Ruddiger’s paws off a piece of paper he was holding.

“Whaddya mean, your birth—wha!” The gurgling mumble from Quirin’s throat transformed into a panicked gasp. It wasn't just regular paper dipping into Varian's bacon-greased plate, but a letter. “Has Ambrose been here already?”

“The letter didn’t deliver itself. Hey, that gives me an idea …”

Whatever insane, new idea was bubbling in Varian’s brain would just have to bubble along by itself. Without even a beg-pardon, Quirin dashed out to grab the letters from his room, and then franticked himself outside. Luckily, Ambrose had gotten stopped only a bit down the road, accosted by Freya and her chickens. He stood wagging his head at Freya, trying to overstep the chickens that surrounded him. She gesticulated with wide swooping arms as if trying to cast a spell.

Quirin slowed to a walk, mainly to avoid Freya than to catch his breath (but also, not to look quite so mad). Once Ambrose broke Freya’s spell, extricating himself while she cried, “Sooki sooki” to bring her chickens home (whatever that meant), Quirin hustled to catch up.

“Ambrose!" he called out. "I need these to be sent out.”

Ambrose was a very, very good mailman. He took the stack, and when the barest sliver of an eyebrow quirked up at the addresses, he slammed it back down. He schooled his face into one of utmost professionalism—that is to say, he looked bored by his profession. It was exactly what a good mailman must be.

Quirin cuffed Ambrose’s shoulder in masculine camaraderie. “Good man. Also, please hold my mail for the next few weeks. I’ll come by the office to pick it up myself.”

He put the emphasis on “myself.” Ambrose’s eyes drifted towards those foreign addresses again, each of them to universities scattered across the Seven Kingdoms. Quirin tightened his lips. If Ambrose’s eyes did that again, he’d stick his fingers in them.

“All right, Quirin. I’ll be getting fat and lazy not delivering all the way out in the wilds here, but whatever the people want.”

“Thanks.” Quirin turned to go.

“How are you two doing?”

A dangerous question. Quirin smiled something sharp. Ambrose bent to mess with his shoe, maybe just to dodge the virtual dart being thrown his way.

“The crops are coming along well,” Quirin squeezed out.

“Sheesh, you know I know nothing about crops. I’m asking about your visitors.”

Oh, a safer question. It was just like Ambrose to know the latest news. He always seemed to.

“So that’s getting around, is it?” Quirin asked.

“The rumor mill is churning. People say there were guards.”

“You mixed your metaphors.”

Ambrose shot him a half-amused, half-scolding look. Satisfied with harassing his shoe, he stood, and laid out a non sequitur that took Quirin’s breath away for how stupid it was. “I caught my daughter climbing a ladder up to the roof the other day. She wanted to pour turpentine down the chimney. To clean it. Girl wants to become a chimney sweep.”

What in the blazes?

“Gretchen wanted to wring her neck, but I told her we have to meet the girl at her interests. I got her a brush and she’s been shoving it down every hole she can find. The poor gophers!” He laughed, put a finger to his hat, and was on his way.

Ambrose had been the first to discover Quirin wasn’t dead from the amber. Apparently, he still hadn’t gotten over the shock.

Like I want to hear about your daughter’s strange and uninteresting ambitions—Oof, no need to be nasty, you grump, Quirin told himself. It’s not Ambrose’s fault.

He had good reason to be grumpy, but it was impossible to remain so for long; Varian was bouncing around the house, in a good enough mood to launch them both skyward. The letter he got that morning was from Rapunzel, asking if he wanted to join her on a trip to Neserdnia.

“Please, please, please can I go? I can pick up a copper-plated alembic!” He jauntily danced from one foot to the next.

There was only one possible reply to a boy made so carefree. Quirin was powerless, and handed over a purse full of change, although they were getting hard-pressed in the financials. But it was his secret, and he sent Varian on his way a few days later, with an unclouded brow and a wish for Varian to find the most beautiful copper-plated ameblick—or whatever—of all. Not that he cared about them.

When Varian returned, it was not with a new alchemy tool, but with a tale of adventure that struck icepicks of terror into Quirin’s brain. Brigands on the road? This was a shadow of his past, not Varian’s. Albeit, this particular brigand of Varian’s sounded like an idiot, but what if they had ran into someone more murderous? Varian refused to learn common self-defense. How was he to defend himself?

Weeks passed with this question shaking up Quirin’s days, even as life became pleasant. The crops promised a good harvest, which would be nothing compared to the harvests of yesteryear, but at least there would be a profit. The matter of a cow and chickens was answered, as well as an abundance of free time Quirin had never known since launching his political career. This meant passing more pleasant hours with Varian. It also meant more worry. Worry about the letters he had sent, worry about Varian’s self-sufficiency, and being completely aghast at Varian’s pet project: the Demanitus Scroll.

The Scroll. The thing that made Quirin choke on the piece of licorice he was eating when Varian rolled it out across the coffee table one evening. Without even a warning. Quirin just about oozed into the sofa.

“Rapunzel asked me to translate it. Isn’t it so cool?” Varian landed on his knees so he could more easily investigate it. “It’s amazing. From Demanitus himself.”

Quirin gurgled, squeezing his neck muscles to dislodge the piece of licorice currently burrowing into his esophagus. It popped out to go splat against the back of his teeth. Maybe, it would have been better to let the licorice take him.

“Is it hot in here?” he asked.

“No, it’s not. Look, Dad!” Varian lifted the scroll, a hopeful, expecting expression on his face. “Complete!”

They stared at each other a long time. Then Quirin said, “That’s nice,” and went back to chewing on the candy of suicide.

Varian jerked the scroll away, his whole body a demonstration of disgust. “Dad, it’s very old! Don’t get spit on it!”

If the boy only knew that top corner piece had lived in Quirin’s back pocket through flood and field, and had gotten way worse than a little spit on it!

Varian never asked any questions, although he sent any number of sly looks Quirin’s direction whenever he worked on it. Which was, all the time. The boy practically slept with it: he arose before dawn with it, and kept it warm by night. He fell asleep at his desk, nose pressed against some cryptography book or Demanitus biography. But there was an unspoken agreement between them: Quirin would not investigate why lamps were blazing in Varian’s room at odd hours, and Varian would keep his poignant questions to himself.

What a weird life Quirin was living.

So Varian wished him to talk about his past. But what would he talk about? Nothing that would excite Varian, and all it was was a tale told of things lost. Of the Red Fountain and the circling spires of the Cathedral of the Crescent, now all but rubble. Of fishing on Orpan Lake, which had once schooled great silver sturgeon bigger than a man, but now was little more than a marsh made of rock. Of the nation of eccentrics and his friends, all blown away by the wind. And most of all, his parents. His mother, who shattered like spun sugar when he was fourteen, dissolving into the earth his father ground out. And his father, the sometimes harsh man who had given affection like a tyrant gives food to a hungry man, only enough to keep him from starving. Should Quirin also talk about the time he was sixteen, when he became a knight against his father’s wishes, and what things he had done to do it, and what awful things he had said?

Those were not good things to talk about, and Varian was not ready.

A bell peal awoke Quirin in his bed. It wasn’t a sound to hear by ear, but by heart. It had almost sounded like his father calling his name.

Quirin!

“No,” Quirin murmured, lying still, like a corpse. “Not again, no.”

He had felt like this before. Two years ago, he had also awoken in the middle of the night with a familiar warning. A warning from over twenty years ago, which pressed against him as if it were only yesterday. A feeling he had tried to forget.

Back then, he had gone into the mountains, his heart somehow knowing the way. When he privately informed the King what he had found, such a look had overtaken Frederic’s face that it had been like looking into a mirror. That same terror had overwhelmed Quirin when he had peeled back those bushes to see the truth: the black rocks had come, and they had come for the Sundrop.

Tonight, two years and a lifetime later, he would not look again.

“You have apple harvesting tomorrow,” he whispered into his pillow. “That will be enough. That is all you have to worry about. The apple harvest. Besides, it doesn’t feel the same.”

That old feeling really did feel different this time, and maybe this was all just a dream. He shut his eyes and the cloud of ancient voices that he’d been ignoring came crashing down on him.

Now that you’re a full-fledged knight, are you always going to be this bossy?

Dibs on the suicide missions!

I called you Beer Stein.

Knight, where are you going?

Quirin, where are you going?

At dawn, Quirin left the manor to start the day. He fed the animals, milked the cow, gathered the eggs. Varian must have gotten up before dawn to work on the scroll, because when Quirin checked on him, he had fallen asleep at his desk. After foregoing breakfast for a mere cup of coffee, Quirin pushed his wheelbarrow into the orchard, and plucked and pulled apples until his eyes filled with red. These apples, the work of his hands, felt cool and sustaining, rich with providence. It put him in a good mood, so that when Varian emerged from the manor, he said, “Good morning, son,” because it was a very good morning.

Varian ruined that feeling a few minutes later, screaming, “Dad, rocks!”

Quirin finished pushing the wheelbarrow of apples into the barn, and stood, waiting. He was still standing there when Varian ran in a minute later.

“Dad!”

Inhaling deeply, Quirin asked, “Yes, son?”

“Dad, there are rocks!”

Quirin, where are you going?

“Show me,” Quirin said.

Varian led him to the road, where there, so obvious Quirin wondered how he had missed them, stood four new rocks. But, they were a new thing: just as sharp and piercing as the black ones, but red this time. Glowing with an inner light, giving them a certain false transparency. Chills raised the hair on Quirin’s knuckles.

Varian circled around the cluster, scratching his chin. “Strange, strange. Have you ever seen these before?”

“No.”

“I wonder what makes them red.”

Quirin was so invested in the business of pinching himself, he didn’t immediately process Varian’s words. When he did, he grabbed Varian around the shoulder.

“Varian, you can’t be serious!”

Even Ruddiger, standing at their feet, quivered at Quirin’s tone.

Varian grasped his hands. “Dad, please, I have to do something. I won’t experiment on them, I promise. I’ll—I’ll just study them.”

“Absolutely not!” With that said, Quirin turned his back on the monstrosity. “I will go tell Porter about it, but you are to stay away from them.”

His point was clear. Varian replied, “Yes’sir.”

After walking away only a few feet, Quirin found his own feet slowing to an eventual stop. He had forbade it, and Varian would obey this time. He had more power here than he ever had.

But he turned around, and said, “Perhaps, I should wait to tell him once we know more. Just please be careful.”

Varian nodded, face pale, grasping his hands once more. “I will. I really will this time.”

Quirin could not watch. He went back to his apple harvesting, not that he got much work done. All he did was gaze into the distance, a myriad of frights and ghosts consuming his vision. Fearful visions of the future, and dreadful memories of the past.

“I think I’d better go to Corona,” Varian said a few hours later, his expression strained and haunted. His backpack was already hanging off his shoulder.

They stood in the barn, where Quirin had been hushing Nuthatch. She had been nipping and kicking up a fuss in the paddock all morning. He ran a brush over her flank, trying to soothe her to sleep. It was some day. Normally, it was all he could do to keep her awake.

“What have you found?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” A jangle came from Varian’s backpack as it slid around his shoulder. “They seem just like the black rocks, except there is a psychological reaction if you get too close. And it seems to be getting stronger. A sort of fear reaction.” Then, in almost a whisper, “Or a spell.”

With a few quick words, they made their plan.

“I have an idea, but I need to talk to Rapunzel. Can I take Nuthatch?”

“Prometheus is better.”

“Okay. I might not be back until late.”

“Don’t travel home in the dark. Stay in Corona for the night, if it gets late.”

“And stay away from the rocks.” Varian smiled at that, some secret joke known only to him.

Wishing he could tell Varian to do the same, Quirin replied, “I’ll tell Porter.”

They went their separate ways, Quirin crushing this persistent anxiety by heading towards town. The way was littered by a few red rocks, not as numerous as the black variety, but carrying a terror the black ones had not. They hadn’t reached town limits yet, but at this rate, it would happen very soon.

“God above,” he murmured, as Old Corona proper lay ahead of him in its little valley, with its rustic cottages and newly built storefronts. He couldn’t go through this again. Not for a third time.

Old Corona was eerie, a certain syrupy emptiness to the air. Even the insects seemed nonplussed: dragonflies hovered in place and flies rested on every fence post, rubbing their tendrils together nervously. There was no one about. No boys played pirates in the street, no girls ruined their pinafores in mud puddles. Was this what it had been before the evacuation? It felt like a remembered thing, the town going through the motions.

He got his answer as to where everyone was at: Porter’s house. Half the town was there. Scowling men stood clenching their fists, as though wishing to fill them with staff or ax, peasant’s weapons. The women had left their hair laying scattered and wild on their shoulders, when they otherwise would have rather died than to be seen thus in public.

“’Lo, Quirin.” Franklin held open the gate as Quirin let himself in. “Now you can see how Porter handles it, huh?”

Quirin slipped his way through the crowd, towards the porch where Porter stood. Janice leaned out from behind an open window, her elbows brushing the petunias in the window box, her mouth so thin and little it was just a suggestion above her chin. As for Porter, he was making a show, standing on the porch as though it were a stage, with polished shoes. But the corners of his eyes were tight instead of the open looseness that normally made them so lazy.

His tight eyes brightened when he saw Quirin. “You have news?”

“Varian has gone to Corona to speak to the Princess.”

“Isn’t that comforting?” Ward muttered.

Before Quirin had a chance to bite back, Porter did it for him.

“That’s loads better than the runner I sent. What did he say, Quirin?”

“It’s been reported that the Princess has a certain control over the rocks.” He did not say who had reported that to him. “She’s our best bet.”

Porter did burgomaster things then, asking for volunteers to survey the land and mark out areas where the red rocks were. He had others promise to go house-to-house to warn of the threat, if there was anybody who still didn’t know, and help anyone who needed it.

“Quirin’s right,” he finished. “Our best assistance will come from Corona.”

“Fat lot of good it did last time,” Ward growled.

Once the people dispersed, Porter beckoned Quirin close. Janice came out, her apron wrinkled where she had continually grabbed it.

“I can’t do this one again,” Porter said, his eyes a gloomy dark gray. “It killed me last time.”

“Varian has an idea. We’ll get through this.”

“Last I recall, you got through it by leaving me to deal with all the dirty work.”

“It’s why I kept such a lazy fellow like you around.”

Porter smirked. “Any advice you can give, I’ll take it, former-burgomaster.”

Whatever advice Quirin gave, it did little good. On and on the rocks came, shining around them like so many bloody knife points. More and more people were pushed in from the outskirts of town, squeezed into the center, where Janice showed her worth as the burgomaster’s sister. She directed the townsfolk into providing tables, benches, and food and drink with more authority than was rightfully hers, but the people listened. Porter gave more speeches urging calm than doing anything else, but he was a constant hub around which the people orbited, taking his direction to either go or stay, bring or take away. The few that argued with him received stunning sarcasm in return (“That’s a nice test, seeing if I bow to fools”), which had the strange effect of making them listen to him even more. The few royal guards that came to assist were treated with the same attitude. It was exactly the opposite of what Quirin would have done, and his tongue was raw from him biting it, but it worked. Porter was ordered chaos after all, somehow keeping all those plates spinning with a lazy flick of the wrist. Why should he lead any different?

As for Quirin, he felt a sham. This insecurity was new to him, but every person who still continued to look to him for comfort and leadership perplexed him. Didn’t they remember how he had failed them before, on this exact same issue? Quirin helped where he could and prayerfully looked towards Corona.

Disaster struck late afternoon. The red rocks, no longer content with stalking them as a lion, as had the darker versions, became a sudden hoard of wasps. That syrupy quality to the air was of a sudden gone, and it became light, light like the puff out of an alligator’s nostrils, sterile and warm. Quirin looked around, his hair standing on his arms. Then, like a grumble from that alligator’s mouth, came up the teeth, red rock teeth, springing up in the midst of their harbor. Cutting through the blankets spread out and the tables and chairs. The town was no town. It was a field of red.

The air, which was thick, then thin, became thick again with screams. People scattered, but it was mass confusion. They ran, into each other, into rocks. They tripped over blankets or chairs. They fell, and wailed. Some stood still, in their disorientation, choosing to do nothing at all.

Quirin all but shoved a woman and child in front of him, shouting, “Get out! Get out!”

Something was in his hand.

Something hadn’t been there before, but now he felt it.

He froze, like the ones he had tried to hurry. When he looked down, he saw a sheet of paper in his hand. A blanket of cool sweat rolled down the back of his neck as an overwhelming sense of terror overtook him. He looked for the source, casting his eyes around—whatever it was, it was all around him, but hidden. It was in the air and trees as a vapor.

He opened the letter and read. It was in Varian’s hand.

Dad,

I’m sorry, but I can’t keep going like this. The guilt is too great. You failed me, but I’m the one who got the brunt. Forgive me, and goodbye. I love you.

A shriek pulsed within the thickness in Quirin’s throat. He had no time to think.

Varian, Varian.

He forgot everything he had ever been taught about self-control and threw away what tiny remnant he had left. Quirin whirled, orbited by frenzy. “Varian! Varian!” he screamed. Where would Varian do it? He had to get there, before it was too late.

Home. The lab, with all those pretty poisons and beakers that made glass shards. The scene of Varian’s crime.

Heart bursting with prayer, he ran towards home. He put one foot forward and then the other, and he was praying out loud now, to please, please, don’t let it happen—

But he went nowhere. He was immobilized. He tried to lift his feet, but they would not budge, as if glued to the ground. He knew this feeling. The same feeling as before! Encasing his feet, wrapping up his legs in that warm prison of glass and light. Somehow, the amber had him again.

The crystal moved up his body faster than before. He clung to that letter, just like last time, as the amber closed over his head. Again, again. Again, when his son needed him, he could not go.

Quirin held his breath, and entered a second amber.

Chapter Text

—Stay here.

—Stay here.

—Stay here, the crystal whispered. There is no need to live.

That was all right with Quirin. Besides that, it was impossible to disobey. The amber encasing Quirin clutched him in shattered vestments, lurid and glassy, but warm, too. It was an almost soothing, delicate shush. Through eyes shut, he (somehow) observed rough terrain outside his orange-orange cell, an enormous mountain range on the same scale of the sky, it was so big. If he was capable of thought, he would realize it was the laboratory ceiling. Sunlight stretched shadows across that ceiling—ballooning shadows that plunged everything in black, until the rising of the sun made them small again—itsy-bitsy, hiding in the places were the sun can’t touch. Before they swelled big big bigbigbigbig again.

Quirin held out the letter to Varian, while life fled by the grasp of his outstretched hand. It wasn’t too difficult. Within the amber, he was a man at pause, with all the intelligence and emotion of a starfish in a tide pool. Blub, blub. Glug, glug. He was frozen, but not freezing; breathless, but not suffocating; thinking, but thoughtless.

—Rest here and be at peace.

Don’t mind if I do.

But what was this sound disrupting this tempting agony?

“Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll get to the bottom of this. I promise.”

A vision played out on the canvas of the ceiling, exactly like he was sitting mezzanine at the theater. This scene was fueled by Quirin’s sleeping imagination, while the amber funneled the dialogue to his receptive ears.

Varian lay at his feet—below Quirin’s feet—with wind-chapped cheeks, but alive. That was the important part. His alive, breathing, sweltering son survived the storm.

But Varian had brought the storm with him.

Such a storm! A crying, raging, fitting, crashing, burning storm. Utterly, completely, one-hundred-and-ten-percent unlike any Varian-storms of the past. Ruddiger bounced around the lab, chittering questions, while Varian threw everything he had at the amber. Hammers first, then cast-iron pots and other metal what-not from around the lab. He moved onto knives, then farm implements, gasping from the cold as he brought them in from outside. This boyish desperation gave way to more thoughtful attempts, where chemicals of all sorts were poured on. Nothing mattered, and through it all, Varian raged. A stunning rage, a terrific blooming flower of hate and grief.

How come the amber didn’t plug Quirin’s ears was a mystery (if Quirin was capable of theorizing), but perhaps, it simply could not interrupt the echo of his son within him, that ability, since the moment of Varian’s birth, for Quirin to hear him in some secret chamber.

“I don’t understand, Ruddiger!” Varian screamed. “She said she’d help! —Wait? Is someone coming?”

Townspeople, of course. Someone who would relieve Varian.

It was not townspeople. Quirin didn’t recognize the man’s voice that drifted through the front door. Then came more voices, tinny and small, shuffling out of the dark. Heavy booted feet stamped on the threshold.

“Is Rapunzel coming too?” Varian asked. “She said—”

“You don’t seem to realize the trouble you’re in, boy.”

“What?”

“You attacked a member of the royal family.”

Varian’s voice was a thin gasp. “No—”

“Where’s your father? We need to speak to him.”

“Here! Here, I’ll show you!”

Footsteps entered the house. Footsteps that stamped and tramped, grew and clambered after soft ones scurried. Another door creaked at its open. A gasp wrenched from someone’s throat, pulling all the breath out of that esophagus. In the moving canvas of Quirin’s imagination, Varian pointed, standing alongside two faceless shadows.

“What is this?” a shadow, darker than the dark moon, asked.

“It’s ‘cause of the black rocks. I was working—”

“You did this?”

Silence filled the room, but for a harsh, concussive breath.

“It—it was an accident! We were arguing, and I didn’t notice.”

“You killed him!” The shadow turned away, raising a hand to his featureless, empty mouth. “You killed him!”

Varian lost his mind.

“He’s not dead! He’s not dead!” He screamed. Not a moment later, he spoke again with tone measured and controlled, full of nervous tension, like the tick-tock of a clock, or the crouch of a spider over its own web. “The rocks and … Rapunzel and the rocks resonate.”

The shadows darted fierce eyes at him, but he seemed unaware of the scrutiny, placing a hand against the amber.

“That’s why I need her to come here! Look.” Varian ran over to the bench top. “See? My dad had this. There’s something here about the black rocks and the Sun Drop Flower. I can’t read it, but I know it’s what it’s saying. She and the black rocks … The Sun Drop is the key! She has to come here.”

The shadows murmured, rocking on their feet, as though unsure of what to do. Cloth rustled against metal as they headed out.

Varian blared out into the face of a howling wind, “Is help coming? Is help coming?”

The shadows gave no answer. As shadows do.

When it was silent (and it was always silent), the whole world came to a stop. An illusion suspended, until the illusionist sprung the wheel, once more—

Varian sobbed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Dad, I’m so sorry. I’ll figure this out, I promise. I should have been paying better attention. I should have listened to you. I should have. I should have. It’s all my …” The silence was burdensome as Varian seemed turned to stone. When the stone came to life, Varian growled, “Rapunzel said she’d help. She promised.

“I won’t forgive her.”

When it noised (and it was always noise), the whole world kaleidoscoped with sounds and impression, dancing in the dark, music pulling out of the air like dew. Visions, even of things happening outside the lab, played before Quirin’s shut eyes. He could see the whole world, if he tried hard enough.

Varian stood at the front door, his sleeves filthy. A Shadow loomed in the doorway, booming in a weak voice over-invested in authority, “By order of the King, we have come for the scroll piece!”

Suddenly, the shadow men put on golden metal and red flowing cloaks, and the sun was brought low, tangled on their chests.

Varian’s face went from fright, to wonder, to scowling. He leaned against the door jamb, anger destroying his fear. “So Rapunzel couldn’t even come herself? She’s just going to send some goons?”

“This is an order of the King’s. We are confiscating the document.”

“Why?”

“Because it is dangerous.”

Varian scoffed. “What’s so dangerous about it?”

The Shadow was silent. His face remained cloaked in mystery, Quirin’s imagination unable to pick one out. Maybe, it was something scrunched and raw, like the inside of a peeled raisin.

“Will you hand it over?” the Shadow asked.

“If Rapunzel wants to help now, after it’s too late—”

“Search the premises.”

Like a flood, the shadow guard moved in, rushing and bubbling throughout the house. Varian stood by helplessly, spitting fire, but their only answer to him was, “Give the scroll to us, and we’ll leave.”

“Bring Rapunzel here, and then we’ll talk.”

“We don’t negotiate with treasonous murderers, kid.”

Throughout the manor, the artifacts of their lives went topsy-turvy. Guards rifled through their drawers, flipped open their books, turned everything inside-out. Thump, clatter, and tinkle became the music of the house. Footsteps pounded as they scattered from room to room, up and down the stairs, stamping, tramping, beating the floor. Things upset, crashed, tossed aside.

Just a few feet from Quirin’s mausoleum, there was a chitter, the rustle of paper, and the small, quick scamper of tiny raccoon feet as guards came into the lab.

“What was that?”

“Just the pet.”

“Don’t go in—” Varian shouted.

“Stay here!” The Shadow of the weak-whistle voice grabbed him by the elbow. “Give it to us, and we’ll go. We won’t even arrest you.”

“It’s my dad’s! It’s mine!”

“Turn around. Hands against the wall.”

“You can’t—don’t touch me! Let go!”

Something happened.

Something happened between the pair of them, something there was no imagining because it was so incongruous to everything Quirin had ever known about Varian. But there was a scuffle, and the Shadow gruffed out in frustration. A sharp crack broke the air, what sounded like flesh against flesh. Varian gasped, before landing on the floor.

“Commander Bern!” another guard shouted. “That is not what the Captain—”

“I’m handling this, Larson! Now, boy, where is the paper?”

Silence.

“You are under house arrest for attacking a member of the royal family.”

Varian sprung to his feet, planting to the floor with as much weight as his body could carry. “I didn’t! I didn’t! Let me talk to Rapunzel. She owes me! Let me talk to her or … or else!”

“Don’t presume to threaten us. And don’t even think about going to Corona, or you’ll be arrested. Now, where is that paper?”

“ … I burnt it.”

Such sarcasm.

“I need to speak to him, old boy.” Porter’s voice was muffled. By all rights, Quirin shouldn’t have been able to hear him, with two doors, a hallway, a foot of crystal, and death between them, but the amber amplified every sound, until even the buzzing of a fly became an inexhaustible scream.

“He’s sick. He doesn’t want to be bothered. I already told Mr. Ambrose that.” Varian’s hand trembled on the door knob, but his voice was steady in the lie. 

“Still? Has Doctor Byron seen him?”

After a silent moment, Varian tenderly replied, “I don’t know what to—”

“Ahoy, there!” called out Ambrose, pattering up from the ether.

“What ails you? Practicing for the marathon?” Porter asked.

Ambrose breathed heavily. “Guards. They need to speak to you. Urgently.”

“Oh sure, just when our fearless leader is taken out by the common cold. I guess they got the worm, today.”

“They asked for you, specifically.”

“By Jove, but I’m pretty sure I paid my taxes.”

Ambrose clicked his tongue. “They said it was concerning the village.”

“Auugh, what the blazes are they pounding down my door for? Don’t they know Quirin is in charge of this racket? Or did you already tell them he was sick, Varian?”

“They—they know.”

“Will you get to it, already?” Ambrose snapped. “I didn’t run all the way here …”

Their voices faded as they walked away, and Varian rasped in a whisper, “Come back. Please, come back.”

His wish was answered.

Porter called, “Oh, hey, Varian—”

Varian slammed the door shut.

Porter, you lazy idiot. Are you really not going to see?

Old Corona packed it up and moved away. Quirin had an amber’s 40,000-foot view of it, as carts and luggage, animals and people passed the manor. They all look so angry, sad, and haunted, which matched how quiet they got as they went by, as if passing a graveyard. The news must have been broken to them, somehow.

Looking out the window, Varian watched the passing villagers, crying mournfully, “They’re all going?” He pressed his hands against the glass, and shrieked out of childish abundance, "Help! Help!"

No one came, and Varian left the window.

“Fine, just leave then! But I won’t abandon Dad!”

More guards came thereafter, different from the first set. One of them was another Commander, but much more dangerous than the first. He spoke with a voice down-soft and reasonable, his tone dipping in all the soothing places. His voice was a cup of warm soup on a winter’s day. He was accompanied by the Captain of the Guards, which Quirin knew so little of his imagination could only supply a mustache. The Captain spoke with practiced, blaring authority, none of the hysteria of the first Commander. His frustration grew as Varian insisted he had destroyed the scroll piece.

“Why would you do that?” the Captain growled.

“It’s called spite. You should try it some time.”

“Well, aren’t you a sweetheart?”

They played a strange game of cat-and-mouse. Varian was technically the mouse, but sometimes he was the cat, when the guards fumbled into some booby-trap he had set. It almost always gave him time to slip away into the underground tunnels, or at least, to get Ruddiger to escape with the scroll piece that was the prize. When Varian wasn’t able to get away, he had profound conversations.

“Have you finished translating the scroll?” the Captain asked.

“I told you. I burnt it.”

“We both know that’s a lie. This is an order by your King.”

Varian scoffed. “Some king.”

The comfort-Commander sat on the bench that creaked under him. Quirin should really buttress that thing when he could. “Varian, you need to obey. The King has already considered your age and been merciful. If you were anyone else, you would be in prison.”

“I haven’t even done anything wrong!”

“You attacked the Princess. That is treason. And you refuse to give us the scroll. That is called failure to comply, another crime. Since the order is from the King, it may even be treason as well.”

Varian tinkered at his workbench, knocking together beakers and pouring chemicals. There was some little joke in his voice as he continued, “Maybe I’ll go three-for-three on the treason thing.”

“This isn’t helping you,” the Captain replied.

“How about a trade? Rapunzel for the scroll. She’s going to need to come with something special, though.”

“That’s not going to happen. And you know better than to try seeing her.”

Varian hummed.

“Let me show you something.” The Commander dug around and unfurled paper. “Do you understand what this is?”

Quirin did not.

But Varian did. He harrumphed. “Didn’t get my nose right.”

“This is what happens if you break house arrest. But all this can go away.”

“You mean, if I give you the scroll, I can go to Corona?”

“I cannot make that promise. However, if you give us the scroll, you’ll no longer be under house arrest. You can move with the rest of the village.”

Varian smashed a beaker against the table. “This isn’t fair! And what do you want the scroll for anyway? Are you trying to free my dad?”

They never had an answer for that question.

“I never would have believed you if you said you were. And it doesn’t matter.” One by one, vials crashed to the floor, as though dropped by inconsiderate fingers. “I was trying to trick you about the trade. I burnt the thing, after all.”

The sun rose and fell, rose and fell, played that game since time immemorial. The shadows grew long, long, longer, black, and the cycle started all over. The cycle between Varian and the guards continued on, on and on and on. He mostly dodged them, but sometimes he stayed put, until Quirin suspected it was done out of loneliness. A boy with so little would take anything that comes his way.

Even a Commander who seemed so reasonable and soft.

“How do you get food?” that man asked one day, when the sun played with the shadows like a woman at her loom.

Varian scoffed. He sat at the lab bench, running a quill over paper. Ruddiger had disappeared with the paper everyone cared about, ages ago, so it couldn’t have been that. “You don’t care. Even if you did, I live on a farm. You’re a greater dummy than I realized.”

Commander Larson took the abuse heaped on his head with equanimity. “It can’t be easy.”

After a minute of bending his head over what he drew, Varian replied, more like himself than he had been, “It’s the animals. It’s getting harder to care for them. I ate the goose and now the chickens just so there’s less to feed. Dad won’t like if I eat his prize egg-layer.”

“We should probably confiscate them then.”

“So now you want to steal our animals on top of it?”

“Give us the scroll piece, evacuate with the others. Take the animals with you. It’s not good for you to stay here.”

“I’m not leaving my dad.”

“This is a tomb, Varian.”

“I’m not leaving my dad!” Varian screamed. Then with a tone of disgust, he murmured, “Now, look what you made me do! I just told you I ate the goose. Now you’re going to make me wreck my quills.”

“Here, I’ll make you another.” Commander Larson stood next to the bench, pulling a feather out from the vase Varian kept the spare ones in, and with a little knife, began to fashion a new quill. What Varian had been drawing was laid out before him, because he said, “You’ve got talent. I’ve seen the Princess’ own work, and I like your realism better. But you know, she’s not a good subject for you.”

“Hmph.”

“Draw your raccoon instead.”

“Is that an order from the Ki—” Varian gasped half a giggle, before choking it back. In a tone of open wonder, he asked, “Why’d you do that?”

“It was just something my dad used to do to me when he sharpened my quills. Here you go.”

“My dad, too.” Varian fixed his eyes on the amber, beaming a sunlit ray that shot straight to every one of Quirin’s suspended nerves. “Every time. He said the job wasn’t done until I sneezed.”

So, the Commander had rubbed the tip of the feather down Varian’s nose. That was a dangerous man.

After Larson left, Varian sobbed. “Why are they doing this to me? I hate them! She promised. Why did she break her promise?” A chitter broke through the door, and Ruddiger bounced in on scratchy paws. Varian’s sobbing became muffled, but the litany of agony went on. “Dad, please come back! Please, come back, come back. I’ll get you out. I’ll make you proud of me. Dad, please. Dad, please. Daddy, please, I’m sorry.”

There were no pet names between Quirin and Varian. No terms of endearment, other than Quirin’s occasional “son.” But hearing Varian, fourteen-years-old, at his most despondent, cry out, “Daddy!”—Quirin, at his most despondent, cried out in return, “Sweetheart!”

If there was only some way to warn Varian. To make him understand that, above all, Quirin just wanted him to be safe and happy. If it meant leaving Quirin to unmercy, fright, and disaster, then it was better that way. Because, in the end, Varian could never win this battle. Not against men who plied empathy like a hidden knife.

“Have you been sleeping, Varian?”

Have you been sleeping, Varian?

Commander Larson asked, “Have you been sleeping? You look awful.”

“Thanks! I’m going for a new look.”

“The sleep-deprived trend, huh?”

“I’ve been sleeping,” Varian snapped, all that sarcasm dead.

Larson’s own brand of sarcasm was alive and well: “I see how you’ve been sleeping. Why not your bed upstairs? It’d make you less grouchy.”

“Don’t take that!”

“Calm down, kiddo. I’m not taking your pillow.”

“Hey, where do you think you’re going?” the Captain barked.

Varian twirled in the doorway. “I’m only taking Commander Barfson’s advice. I’m taking a nap.”

Larson laughed, brilliantly at ease. “You gotta work on your nicknames.”

“Well, it’s not my fault you have such a dull, stupid name that there's only one option for a nickname.”

They let Varian leave, and it sounded like he was taking the steps two at a time, humming a little tune all the way up.

“I think I might go home and cry in my beer, Cap’.”

“Don’t antagonize the kid.” The Captain only said it half-interestedly, making sounds as though conducting a search. Drawers were pulled open and books messed with.

Larson started up his own search on the other side of the room, although it sounded like he was just playing with the magnifying glasses. “Ever get the feeling you’re going straight to the bad place when you die?”

“Oh, now what? Looking for a demotion already? Like Bern? I can’t seem to keep a commander now days.”

“Don’t be like that. I’ll do what I’m supposed to—”

“Good.”

“But you can’t tell me this sits right with you.”

“Orders are orders, Larson.”

Larson sighed. “Orders are orders.”

A drawer rammed shut. “This is getting us nowhere.”

“You know we’ll never find it like this. What do you want to do?”

Later, Varian called it “interesting fashion decisions.” That meant nothing to Quirin, but it didn’t matter. He knew the Shadow-guard would win in the end, no matter how they dressed.

With the sliding of cloth, the last ray of sunlight was lost to Quirin, and he resided in pitch-black, without even the terror of shadows.

Varian’s voice chiseled into the amber, into the walls and floor, into the sky, and even into the moon that hung scimitar.

“I’m sorry, Dad. I’m not forgetting about you. I just need to do some things.”

Without the shadows, Quirin had no hope of seeing the visions before him. But Varian rubbed some piece of glass, and as time went on, spoke a constant stream of slowly darkening talk, poison, and deceit. It sounded nothing like him at all.

“I’ll show them! I’ll show her. I’ll show the king and this entire kingdom. I’ll show them all, Ruddiger!”

What plans Varian made to show the whole world! How to capture the Princess’ attention, how to out-wit the Shadow-guard. He tinkered, meddled, and dabbled, just as Ulla had once done. It was her same music, clanging glassware and bubbling liquids, the gentle hum of a mind at work. Could this really be Varian?

Sometimes, he rolled on the floor with Ruddiger, giggling like he did when he was ten. He had never understood that Quirin was the master of tickle-fights, and would reign triumphant every time.

“I know it’s wrong,” Varian sang tunelessly, beating out sheets of metal, “but they wronged me first.”

It was a long, long breakneck slide into further madness and rage, plans within plans within backup plans. All of Varian’s plans, picked out so thoroughly, like picking the petals off a cornflower, fell into place. But everything impossible happened at once. The sheet was removed and scattered orange fire light hit the tiny-seed opening in Quirin’s vision, and in some manner beyond Quirin’s reckoning, but in a horrifying scream, Varian’s last hope was extinguished, and Quirin was left alone.

First came the guards. And what did those bully-brusque-shadow men say?

—Do you think, the night of the storm?

—The night of the storm, do you think?

—We threw him out, and made him go.

—We never should have made him go.

Then came the alchemists.

—What is this? What is this?

—Maybe, he left notes. Notes for us to read and learn.

They found notes. Paper unraveled, books opened, quills scribbled.

Let us try, they said.

Liquid sizzled, metal clinked, metal chinked. Saws and grinding tools failed, one by one.

—Maybe he left notes. Notes for us to learn and read.

Their fascination was a lamp, illuminating their phrases and scientific analogies. They argued as frustration replaced fascination. There were accusations of stupidity and laziness, appeals to humanity, insults to mothers, appeals, refusals, refusals, appeals.

—Maybe we need a wizard.

Somebody laughed, and that was the end.

When they gave up on Quirin, putting him under cover, they left him to the grave and silence. With nothing to hear and nothing to (un)think, his mind shot out. He was not built for emptiness. But he was not alone. Arbitrary images arose out of the darkness inside him, images that he scrabbled after, as a man who finds himself in quicksand and paws at the solid earth. There was nothing in the present, outside of this cage, and Quirin dove hard into his memory, casting wide the net on the currents of time and picture, picking out pieces to observe, extricate, disentangle.

From the depths, he pulled up his father.

Chapter Text

Terrifying was the only word to describe the day of Quirin’s knighting.

It was also fantastic, with all the stars and glam that came along with that word. He could barely sit still and maintain an air of dignity, but one simply did not giggle when the King was lowering a sword to ear.

For all his nervous excitement, Quirin did all the right things at his accolade. He shone, he shined. He stuck his brave chest out as Sir Abel girded his waist with a sword, and Prince Edmund hung around his neck the badge of the Order of the Bear. He knelt and accepted King Horace’s sword on his shoulders with all the solemnity and awestruck obeisance he was supposed to show (and no giggling!). All right, his smiles had probably been too wide as he paraded his horse through the gathered crowd, but he couldn’t not smile.

After he rode his horse into the stable and dismounted, he hid his face into the soft caparison at his horse’s neck, feeling sick.

Well, Dad, you old fuss budget, I’ve drawn the line in the sand.

“Stop huffing the horses, Sir Quirin!” Sir Abel’s voice boomed out, and there was a rat-a-tat-tat of knuckles on the back of Quirin’s cuirass. “Time to show some dignity!”

Quirin pulled away, smiling crookedly. There was one thing he couldn’t be bittersweet about: he’d been called “Sir.”

“I was dignified enough. Probably more than you were at your accolade.”

Abel laughed, pretending to rub a tear from his eye. “Clodhopper, I was the most distinguished knight you ever did see. I frowned, I glowered, I looked down my long nose at all the little people. I was superb in every way. Not like you, losing your gravitas at the end there.”

“Not really.”

“Really! You should have seen His Majesty himself roll those royal eyes at you for skipping out of there like a lamb in spring. Eh … But I gather it’ll be forgiven you. You are just a wee babe, after all.”

At eighteen, Quirin was hardly a babe. But most didn’t make knighthood until they were twenty-one, so he couldn’t argue with Abel too much.

In the armory, Abel helped him get out of his armor.

“Make sure you doll yourself up,” he said, face red from unbuckling the cuirass. He always got blazing fiery red with the least exertion, and together with his red hair, he made quiet the sight on the battlefield. “I don’t want you embarrassing me at the Drunken Lout tonight.”

“The Drunken Lout?” Quirin’s stomach knotted right up. He’d forgotten about that place. “I don’t think I’m old enough.”

Abel gushed laughter everywhere. “Clod, don’t be getting all puritanical on me now. You’ve looked to it with envy all these years.”

“Only because squires weren’t allowed.” Quirin turned to put the cuirass on the stand, and now his eye was twitching. Hadn’t he done enough rebellion for one day?

When he turned back, Sir Abel clasped him around the back of the neck, beard bulging up under waggling eyebrows. “Now you are a knight. And knights celebrate with debauchery at the Drunken Lout.”

Quirin washed out the butterflies invading his stomach with a hearty gulp of saliva. “At the first sign of vomit, I’m out of there.”

“Yours, or somebody else’s?” Abel bent to rid Quirin of the cuisses wrapped around his legs. “Make sure you write your father in the morning, if you haven’t already. He’s going to bust with pride.”

Oh yeah. Quirin had a letter from his father in his pocket.

Now free from his armor, he stood still in the breeze, feeling the cool rush of air on his woolen-stockinged legs.

When Quirin was fourteen years old, three weeks after the death of his mother, his father sat across from him at the breakfast table and said, “I’ve let you indulge in this silly notion of chivalry long enough.”

Quirin looked up from the letter he’d been reading, wiping off the corner that had dipped into his sour cream. The letter was from Sir Abel, telling him they were being sent away to patrol the North Shore, and would need to know in a week if Quirin was joining him.

“I don’t mean to rush you, dear boy,” Abel had written. “If you wish to stay beyond the mourning month, that can be arranged. But if not, I’ll wait for you.”

“What did you say?” Quirin asked.

“I said you’re done being a squire to Sir Abel, or anyone else, for that matter.”

A small thing stirred within Quirin, so small a speck he couldn’t name it. He hadn’t felt anything since Mom died, but the unknown thing stirred again, and looking at his father—yes, this tiny thing he felt was hope. Planted, of all things, at the funeral.

“Done being a squire?” he repeated, dumbly. “Why?”

His father’s lips wavered, as if he was about to say something real. Markus hadn’t said anything real since the funeral, when he had held onto Quirin so tight it had hurt. Still, Quirin’s calves tightened, ready to run to his father’s side at the first encouraging sign. But that barrier of dignity could not be penetrated, and Markus looked at his plate.

“I want your help around the farm.”

Quirin’s heart sank. Around their home lay two-thousand acres of crops, tended to by hundreds of employees. Each acre pressed down in him, layering on his shoulders in an impossible stratum. He wanted a life of adventure and service, not of digging in the dirt. Or telling other people how to dig in the dirt. He just plain ole didn’t want a life of dirt!

Raising his glass to his mouth, Quirin inhaled a mouthful of apple juice, swishing it around before answering. “But I like squiring with Sir Abel.”

“You’ve indulged in childish fantasies long enough. It’s time to grow up.”

“There’s nothing childish about being a knight.”

“You say that because you’re still a child. There’s nothing so silly as chivalry. Men running at each other with wooden poles—”

“They’re called lances.”

“—and ladies favors! Abandoning families and other trash.”

Quirin rolled his eyes. How could his dad be so astoundingly ignorant?

“No one’s done stuff like that in over one hundred years.”

Markus’ eyes twinkled like coins at the bottom of a well, as they always did when Quirin made a good argument against him. But he was by nature a hawk, and would soon spot prey a mile away, never to be missed. “What about armor? I’ve seen enough knights come through here wearing that clap trap. They still wear that, don’t they?”

“Some … times,” Quirin singsonged. It was the coolest part! “But the guards at other kingdoms wear armor too. It’s just a thing.”

“The other kingdoms have moved on from something as archaic as chivalry. Only we cling to it like a baby to its bottle. It may be fine for the meatheads, but I’m not raising you to be a meathead.”

“But you’ve allowed me all these years. It’s not fair!”

“I allowed it for you to get your energy out. But that’s over now.”

His father had allowed it because Mom had fought for it, that’s what Quirin remembered. Markus didn’t understand, because he was the least noble member of nobility that ever nobled. He didn’t understand that real noble families, unlike theirs, didn’t muck around in the dirt. But Mom had understood. She had been proper nobility, even though she hadn’t been high-born. Quirin had learned nobility was a state of mind, not the chances of birth.

Quirin brooded for a moment, before a start of frustration had him bursting to his feet, all aflame. He planted his palms onto the table. “Farm work is boring!”

“Is that so?” Markus smirked. “Keeping people alive is boring? It’s an honorable thing, whether you think it’s exciting or not. It’s what we do. We’ve been farmers and will always be farmers. Since ten generations ago, and ten more to come. It’s your heritage.”

“So I’ll be the first to do something different!”

“How are you going to be a knight anyway, with you sleepwalking again?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“The last thing I need is you wandering all over tarnation, even into an enemy camp. And the kingdom doesn’t want that either! No matter how funny Sir Abel thinks it is.”

“I’ll master it! What if I master it?”

Eyes glittering, Markus spread blackberry jam and sour cream onto a pancake. “I’d like to see that.”

“I will! I really will. And then I’ll go be a knight, and Jessup can help you with the farm.”

“He is a real help, isn’t he? Sometimes, I wish he were my son instead of just being my nephew-in-law.”

Quirin fled from the table. He heard Markus say, “Quirin, that wasn’t what I—” but he had heard enough.

In his bedroom, Quirin shrieked, “He’s driving me crazy!”

“Who’s driving you crazy?” a voice asked from just outside the open window.

Quirin glowered at his cousin Jessup, who swung out the window casement so he could lean in on the windowsill. Jessup was an all-right kid, a year younger than Quirin, who couldn’t have been anymore opposite—a silk blonde-headed, pale, scrawny lad with button nose and jokes at every turn. The girls thought he was a romantic and tragic figure, romantic because he was tragic—his parents had died mysteriously six months prior, which led to his coming to live with them. Quirin wasn’t sure what the story was (hence the mystery), although Markus had railed about people abandoning their families, which was the sin he seemed to hate the most. The worst thing about Jessup wasn’t that he teased Quirin mercilessly for being a “sad-sack,” or called Quirin “cuz”, or that Quirin hadn’t understood him until Quirin’s own mother died—the worst thing about Jessup was he was a ten-times better farmer than Quirin, even though he’d only been doing it for a few months. It made Quirin look bad.

“What do you want?” Quirin snapped.

“Touchy, cuz. I was just gonna say some of the blokes are after the kiddies, again.”

“Oh, hold on, then.”

Quirin wriggled into a pair of pants suitable for busting heads. He was always having to rescue the little kids from the local bullies, who were rather dim thugs, and never learned their lesson no matter how many times Quirin had shoved their faces in a pig trough.

Later, while Quirin swung bully-Davin around by the ankles, cheered on by Jessup and little Timmy of the black eye, he planned a plan to conquer his sleepwalking habit. His father was right about one thing: the kingdom would not have a sleepwalking knight. It was a miracle Sir Abel thought it a gag more than anything else. But Quirin would overcome it, and his father would see he wasn’t a child anymore.

His plan was simple. All he needed was a simple plan. All he needed to do was simply tie his wrist to the bed with a linen stocking! Pronto, problem solved.

Quirin washed his hands of Davin (in more ways than one) and ran towards home, barely able to wait for evening. He was so eager to start, and that night, when he tied himself to the bed, he whistled.

For nearly one week, it worked. One evening passed, and then two. Quirin slept soundly and awoke every morning with the stocking wrapped securely around his wrist. Same with evenings three and four. And five! If he could only get through a few more days, he’d be writing Sir Abel of his return.

Day six, Quirin laid in bed, and drifted right ooooooff—

“Wake up, Quirin!”

Quirin gasped, and with a confused shudder, found himself someplace else. The fuzz wafted out of his brain as he made sense of place and time. Markus stood before him, velveted bright eyes. Behind him was the parlor, where four men sat around a table with playing cards spread out before them. When Quirin looked at them, they turned their faces away.

Markus pressed Quirin’s hand, and said, quietly, “You missed the privy, son.”

So that’s what that warmth in his lap was.

A hand cupped the back of his neck.

“I’ll clean up. Go back to bed.”

A sleepy Jessup peeped out from behind his bedroom door and asked what was going on. Quirin passed by silently. In his bedroom, he dressed into fresh clothes, then threw himself on the bed and sobbed into his pillow.

In the morning, he wrote Sir Abel that he was needed here at home and would not be returning.

The Drunken Lout was one of those out-of-the-way places. It clung to the edge of the caldera, where most buildings were smart enough to hang back a little. Just a little earth tremble, and there goes the Drunken Lout. But, it had a nice view. The Dark Castle lay before it with all its mystery and inspiration, cocooned by the great cloaking Moonguard. Quirin had only been to the castle once, last year, for a ceremony celebrating the kingdom’s founding. As a lowly squire, it had been a miracle he was allowed in. Even as a full-blown knight, he wasn’t likely to be invited there but rarely. It was darkness and enigma, the sort of thing that would drive Quirin crazy, because he longed to know.

But for all the mystery of the castle, the Drunken Lout loomed ever more mysterious. It was a place only for knights, and Abel had told enough “cleaned-up” versions of the goings-on there to curl every one of Quirin’s nose hairs. Even the painting on the pub sign was of an old-fashioned knight bumbling off the cliff. The building itself seemed the stuff of nightmares—dreamy carnival colored gables, and cake-like dentils of all colors, as if it’d been wholly dipped in a rainbow. But if Quirin refused to go, then he’d have to read the letter in his pocket.

And so, onward to the hellscape Quirin goes! The hell one doesn’t know must be better than the hell one knows, right?

The porch creaked as he and Abel climbed the steps. It smelled like boiled eggs.

Oh, by the moon.

Sir Abel stopped him at the door. “Now, this is a secret only for us knights.”

“I know.”

“Don’t be telling your squire buddies what you see here.”

“You mean, like you told me?”

Abel grinned.

Quirin opened the door. A chair came flying through it.

Not only did that chair come through, but as Abel and Quirin stood frozen, staring at the chair now tumbling down the stairs, came out a stream of knights. Hasty, panting, white-eyed, terrified knights.

“Shut the door, fool!” the last of them shouted as he leapt out and went rolling down the steps.

What in the—

Sir Abel grabbed the knob from Quirin’s hand and slammed the door shut. Behind that door, came out horrible sounds. Crashing, clattering, battering, shattering. Screaming. Blood-thirsty screaming.

Abel laid a palm over his eyes. “Aye, it’s them again, is it?”

Something glass shattered inside.

This place was worse than Quirin had feared!

“I’m sorry, clodhopper, but we seem to be having a slight delay. If Jude’s in the back, he might risk getting us a mille-feuille.”

With an expression of defeat, a look Quirin had never seen on his face before (except when bowling), Sir Abel turned away.

“What do you mean?” Quirin followed him around the other side of the building. “Is it bears or dragons?”

“Worse. It’s knights!”

“Knights?” Quirin looked at all the men laying around in various stages of rumple, grumbling that their evening was ruined. “Dark Kingdom knights?”

“What else?”

“Because it’s …”

Because Dark Kingdom knights were supposed to be dignified and noble. But then, Abel had told enough Drunken Lout stories to know that even the noble got a little rowdy now and again.

But like this?

“Why doesn’t someone stop them?” Quirin demanded.

Abel halted to mop his brow. “It’s better not … you’re right, though. Augh, you’re right. Now that you’re a full-fledged knight, are you always going to be this bossy? You bossed the other squires around enough, I know.”

“You called it leadership qualities at the accolade this morning.”

“Did I? It’s different when you’re the one being bossed. Well, we’re trying to rescue your evening. Let’s see if the Marshal is around.”

Mystified, Quirin followed Abel as they wended through the refuse of knights, until Abel pointed out a gray-headed man sitting under an oak tree. The only marshal Quirin had ever heard of was the Marshal-of-the-Brotherhood, a man so mysterious that Quirin doubted he existed. And there was no way this was that man. No Brotherhood knight would sit idly by while hoodlums tore up a place. Even a seedy one.

“Sir Sebastian!” Abel cried.

This was the Marshal-of-the-Brotherhood, the legendary Sir Sebastian! He had retired ages ago, but had found it so dull, even at his advanced age, that he insisted on coming back. This was that man? Impossible!

Sir Sebastian looked up from noshing on his collection of cheese and olives. His eyes were old and deep-set, except for how his eyeballs stuck out, giving him a parched, starving look. There was nothing legendary about him, especially with such a dry look on his plain face.

“That’s quite the spread, Sir Sebastian,” Abel said, smiling. “I take it the darling lass brought—”

“Shove off that smarmy look, Lazy Abel, I know what you’re here about.” Sebastian sucked an olive between mummified lips. “Getting too old for this. Arthritis in my ankle.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. Which one?”

“Both!”

Abel cringed around a grin held fast.

“Say it already, Abe, so I can tell you off.”

Abel cleared his throat. “Allow me to introduce our latest chevalier—”

“Spare me the foreign words.”

“—Only knighted, today, Sir Quirin.”

Sebastian stopped in the middle of an impressive eye-roll to transform his face into a scrunch. “Sir Quirin? That name sounds familiar.”

Quirin thrilled. Sir Sebastian knew of him?

“You saved the prince’s life, didn’t you, boy?”

Humbly, Quirin replied, “I was only in the right place at the right—”

Abel smacked the back of his hand into Quirin’s chest. “Aye, this be the lad. My former squire. Been with me for years. Got a talent, but even I never imagined my little—”

“Large,” Sebastian drawled.

“Large cuddlebug—”

“Oh, by the moon,” Quirin moaned.

“Rescued the prince from an enemy most foul—”

Sebastian coughed. “I heard it was the princess’ ex—”

“Dash it, will you two let a man finish!” After this outburst, Abel adjusted his hat with the air of an aggrieved man.

“All right, all right.” Sebastian moved over on the soft patch of grass he sat, allowing Abel to sit at his side. “You were going to tell me the story.”

“Aye, yes! So, it is the dark of the night. We are bivouacked right near the Crevasse; the camp is spread out a mile around. The moon is only considering becoming quarter-full—”

“I heard the Acolytes were a bit late on their sacrifice this year.”

“—and all is at peace. The camp is asleep! Except for some useless watchman, as you will learn.”

Sir Sebastian kindly lifted the plate towards Quirin, who indulged on some olives, because this is the part of the story that made him sweat. Behind them, the storm still raged in the interior of the Drunken Lout. It sounded like someone smashed a dozen bricks through the window.

“So my goodly squire decides to take a midnight walk, as is his habit from time to time. He wanders aimlessly around the camp, breathing the night air, thinking … eh, who knows!” Abel fluttered his hand around his head, in demonstration of the airiness of Quirin’s sleep-clogged state. “Thinking of … dreams, let’s say.”

Cocking an eyebrow, Sebastian gave Quirin a questioning look. “Dreams, you say?”

“Let’s say,” Quirin replied, consuming Gruyère and wishing he was dead.

“Everyone’s got them. Doubtless, the dream is of becoming a knight,” Abel went on. “Eh, but let’s not get caught up in details. The point is, as he is walking back to our tent, he spies the most interesting shadow in the shadows! A shadow of a man’s form, lurking just outside the prince’s tent. Quirin wonders, ‘What is this? Am I asleep? What strange imagination is this?’ But then! Then, the shadow raises a crossbow. Aiming for the tent. Well, my clod knows what to do.”

“Scream for help?”

“No! Any ole squire would have done so, but no, not Quirin! A shout would have only hurried the assassin into firing a bolt into that tent, and then … eh, maybe no more heir. The kingdom would be chaos!”

“All those men. Vying for the princess’ hand, made a widow after only a few months, broken-hearted. Maybe, the ex easily wins her heart, seizes power.”

“There is no worrying about the ex anymore, because Quirin leaps and fights that dastardly assassin. They struggle. The assassin pulls a knife—”

“Now would have been a good time to scream for help.”

Quirin swallowed an olive pit.

Abel is caught in the thrust of the story, in the most dramatic part, and no interruption could bother him now. He raises his hand as though holding a knife, his eyes are bright and glistening, and his mouth is open in an expression of narrational ecstasy. “Sir Quirin grabs the knife, and with it, slays the man! Everyone comes running, rejoicing. The prince is moved. The king is grateful. Surely, the princess is pleased she won’t so soon become a widow. Voila, Quirin is a hero.”

Sebastian took a minute to consider the story, looking between Abel, who was smiling proudly while relaxing back against the tree trunk, and Quirin. Quirin didn’t feel as smug about the story as Abel, but he kept his expression in the model of knightly dignity, standing with all the gallantry he could muster. It sounded like a rhinoceros was rampaging through the tavern.

“I’ve never actually killed a man myself,” Sebastian said. “Too messy.”

Abel’s mouth dropped, which he pushed back up through a scratch through his beard. Then he stood, flinging an arm around Quirin’s neck. “I suppose it makes sense. We knights protect the kingdom from without, but you Brotherhood protect it from within. The Moonstone doesn’t send assassins, I suppose.”

“I’ve just always made sure to be a bit more careful where I stick my sword. Nowadays, I let my charges handle all the messy bits.”

And with that, Abel grinned big enough to swallow the ocean. “Speaking of your charges—”

“I didn’t choose them. They came with the job.” Sebastian glowered.

Abel was unflappable. “Even so. Are you not going to break them up? So that the Prince-saver can enjoy an evening at the Drunken Lout?”

Quirin thought things had been going well, but here was the part where the truth came out. Sebastian looked at Quirin with limpid gray eyes, before spitting an olive pit onto Abel’s shoe. And that was the end of that.

“Silly question,” Abel murmured, before leading Quirin away. “I’m sorry, clod. We’ll just have to wait until they’re done.”

With trembling voice (this was a most difficult day), Quirin asked, “You mean … the people causing all this trouble are Brotherhood knights?”

“And how! I don’t suppose you’ve ever met one? Other than Sir Sebastian, just now.”

“No.”

“That’s not surprising. They’re a bit skittish and moon-touched. You’ve seen Sebastian! But I tell you, this latest batch is like having squirrels loose in your trousers.”

What in the world was this? Quirin looked at the Drunken Lout, unbelieving. The first day of being a knight, and he was already disappointed. The legend of the Brotherhood loomed large over the country, those mysterious men of secrets and power, guarding the Moonstone. Who only went on secret missions, and were answerable only to the king. Those men of heritage, for only a descendant of a Brotherhood knight was permitted to join. And to find out, after a lifetime of wonder and idolization, that the Brotherhood was nothing more than a bunch of hoodlums and a tired, old man with arthritic ankles!

“So you don’t suggest we try breaking them up ourselves?” Quirin asked, dryly.

Abel gave the sort of laugh that is normally described as “chortle.” Quirin didn’t like the word “chortle,” but he got his answer.

While Abel went to give his compadres a hard time, those other knights who lounged about the wilderness with glum aspects while they waited, Quirin separated from the pack. He sat at the base of a black rose overlooking the canyon’s edge, and pulled the letter out from his pocket. There was no avoiding it anymore.

How beautiful was his father’s penmanship. He traced his finger over his name that had been written in the darkest ink, remembering how Markus had sat up late at nights, practicing calligraphy. Such a strange art for a man as rough as the dirt he ground out. Quirin had almost forgotten all about it; he hadn’t, after all, heard or seen one word from Markus in two years. Then, on the very morning of his accolade, came this letter.

Dear son,

So you’ve done something to get you noticed, and so you’ve been. But think carefully about what you are to do. I’ve been noticing too, and if you are smart, you will cry off and return home immediately.

No doubt you will do the wrong thing, so here is my promise to you: if, by your twenty-first birthday, you do not put off this foolish notion and return home, I will disown you. I would hate to thrust an inheritance upon you that disgusts you so, so come claim it if you want. If you don’t come, then I will know. Your cousin will be grateful to have it.

Consider wisely what this path you’ve chosen means.

First, Quirin held his breath. Then, he gnashed his teeth. Finally, he jerked his hands, ripping the letter to pieces, and threw it to the wind. The wind took each piece like so much flurrying snow. How dare his father! To try to force him like this! Why couldn’t Markus just let him make his own path? And fine! Let Jessup have the farm. Quirin didn’t care for it for a second.

The last piece of letter rolled along the dirt, through the clumps of grass and jagged pebbles that caught it, slowing down its path, until it finally reached the end and shot off the edge of the caldera. The wind played with it, before the form of the looming castle. Quirin stood and stared, his heart burning. He would not allow his father to ruin this. He had made knight three years ahead of time, and it was an honorable thing, no matter what anyone said of it. No matter what he had done.

And now the truth was out. At Mom’s funeral, what had Markus said to him? “At least I still have you.” What a lie.

A terrific screeching erupted from the innards of the tavern. Know what? Quirin wasn’t going to let them ruin this either! He had broken up fights before. He was good at it. Sir Abel called it bossiness, but if Quirin had learned one thing from working on an extensive farm, it was how to handle people.

And the Brotherhood were only people too, after all. Blasted idiots, albeit, but people that could be handled, all the same.

Abel came running over, clutching his hat to his head, just as Quirin was climbing the stairs to the porch. “What are you doing?”

“This is stupid. I’m going in.”

“Quirin, don’t be foolish. Just because you got that one guy doesn’t make you invincible!”

“Aren’t you being dramatic?”

Abel couldn’t hold it together anymore and cracked up. “Aye, yes. But also, no! But I’m not going to argue with you. I never knew you wanted debauchery that bad.” As Quirin turned away, he finished with, “They say there was a knight who died the very same day of his knighting before. Some kind of record. You’ll join him, whoever the idiot was.”

As if! Quirin stomped up the stairs and kicked the door in. He halted on the threshold, completely flummoxed.

This wasn’t a seedy joint at all! Quirin didn’t know what he had imagined, but it certainly hadn’t been leather armchairs, glass lamps, velvet furnishings, damask wallpaper, and landscape paintings enormous enough to walk into. It looked like Quirin couldn’t even afford to step into the place, much less sit down and do … whatever drunk people do.

Of course, it was a little (one might say) disarranged. Those leather armchairs and velvet lined furnishings were tipped over, the tables knocked back against the bar. In the middle of it were a man and woman, grappling over a fallen card table. They were the most barbaric people Quirin had ever seen, and he had seen berserkers!

The woman had the man in a fairly tight headlock (his face was almost as red as the half of hers), as she shouted, “Take it back, Hector!”

“Oh come on! Everyone knows you bleach. The eyebrows are a dead give away.”

“Not that. The other thing!”

“Never!” he screamed. “D-d-diversity hire!”

Adira squeezed.

The wind blew the door behind Quirin shut. He jumped; they jumped. Adira’s and Hector’s hair stuck out like haystacks after a thunderstorm. A glass chandelier swung a hundred glints of fairy light across their grappling form, making it more festive than was warranted.

“Are you lost?” Hector spat, rolling his head from side to side, for all the good it did him. Adira’s elbow was impenetrable.

“I just …” Quirin took a breath. This couldn’t be any worse than wrestling an assassin in the middle of the night, a knife flashing between them. “It just seems to me, if she’s only here for quota, what are you in for? You can’t even get out of her headlock.”

Adira dropped Hector, who went face planting into the carpet. Stepping over him, she approached Quirin with a smirk. “It’s nice to see some comment sense still exists. You must be new.”

“Er, yes. The name’s Quirin.”

“Oh, you were the one knighted today, right? Good luck to you.” She made to pass by, then stopped, looked him in the face, and said straight, “Don’t fall in love with me.”

Quirin was still wondering if he’d heard what he’d heard long after she had walked out.

Meanwhile, Hector rolled to his feet and stood brushing out the fur arranged around his neck. “I see, you’re one of the little people,” he hissed, turning his yellow eyes sharp. “Killing the princess’ ex-boyfriends. Pfft.”

After he walked out, the rest of the knights came rushing back in, they all stopping to slap Quirin on the back or shake his hand as they got back to their pinochle or chess, ordering blackberry-elderflower squash from the bar.

“Young buck, all we ever needed was someone as crazy as the starlings!”

“So you lived through it, Sir … Quirin, did you say?”

“Somebody stood up to the Schizo Twins? Good work, kid.”

“You don’t have Brotherhood in the family, don’t you?”

Sir Sebastian asked this last stunning question. In confusion, Quirin stuttered, “N-no. According to my father, we’ve always been farmers—”

Before he could finish gracefully, Sir Abel was jumping around his neck, whooing and wheeing. “Brilliant, clod! Apologies … Sir Quirin! You are a man now, not my little squire. How did you like my joke about this place?”

The building wasn’t half bad, but the occupants …

“It is crazy,” Quirin answered.

“Not my fault. It’s these wacky kids. Now, I will order for you the beef Wellington and paella, the blackberry squash, and the Cornish game hens are to die for!”

On the evening of his accolade, Quirin had fine dining at the Drunken Lout, easing his wounded heart with crème brûlèe and laughter over how easily he had handled the Brotherhood. After all, if his father had given him a nasty letter, it wasn’t as nasty as the one Quirin had left behind.

Years passed with very little for Quirin to regret. Becoming a full-fledged knight was everything he had hoped for, everything he had expected, and life was good. He performed feats that earned him a reputation, and those who had sneered that anyone could get promoted by just killing romantic rivals learned to shut their mouths. He had friends and mentors, and even a tiny squire that didn’t last long, but charmingly dropped everything for as long as the boy lasted. Quirin was told he had a gift for diplomacy, besides his knack with a sword, and was sent on more diplomatic missions than aggressive (although he was sent on plenty of those, too). He continued to be the butt of Sir Abel’s jokes, but he developed a wit to jab back, and they were equals. He was indispensable at the Drunken Lout for being able to quickly break up Hector-Adira fights, and was told time and time again by Sir Sebastian, “It’s too bad you don’t have Brotherhood in your background.” Yes, Quirin thought so too, because he could be more.

A few months before his twentieth birthday, Quirin received an invitation to come home. Cousin Jessup was getting married to a lively foreign girl named Flora, who appropriately wore flowers in her hair. It would be a tragedy for the local girls, who would lose their romantic dreamboat to a foreigner.

Home was home. No doors were slammed in his face, no nasty looks made over supper. No one made remarks about him slipping away in the night at sixteen years old, or the nasty letter he had left behind, and there was no breath of condemnation against Sir Abel, who had taken him back without questioning the suspicious circumstances. All looked just as he had left it, and it was hard to believe he had once hated it. The crops were alive with fruit and bloom, and the earth smelled rich, unlike the deadness of the capital caldera and even surrounding woods. His bedroom was exactly as it had been then, and he slept in his childhood bed, dreaming of playing amongst the black rocks in the western field, attending the town dances, feeding the goldfish in the water trough with his mother, or sitting up late at night, eating honey cake while his father taught farm management. Quirin sleepwalked the entire week he was there, roaming the house at night as if searching for something.

The wedding was simple and festive, as country weddings are, and the bride added her own spark by walking down the aisle with a horseshoe attached to her bouquet. The reception lasted two days, also like country weddings do, and by the time Quirin was ready to go, he was ready to go.

When he mounted his horse to leave, Markus stepped up and put a hand on his knee.

“You look good, Quirin.” His blue eyes were as turbulent as the sea. “You’ve filled out. A fine man. It’s been good for you.”

Quirin had no words and gripped his father’s hand.

“May I write you?”

“Of course, Dad. Always. Please …”

An expression crossed Markus’ face that made the words die in Quirin’s throat. His father slipped away, murmuring, “Remember what I wrote.”

Markus seemingly wrote letters designed to make Quirin homesick. He made Quirin remember he wasn’t all needles and spines, but also warm teases and friendly jabs, with a love for the fight. He told hilarious stories of Flora’s cultural oopsies (such as, throwing a chain letter away without forwarding it!) He wrote “Do you remember when your mother …?” And just a few months before Quirin’s twenty-first birthday, he sent a letter that said, “I’ve been reading the Enchiridion of Practical Chivalry.” That particular tome told all the business of being a knight, and it would have thrilled Quirin to think Markus was taking an interest, except he knew what Markus was getting at: that particular book had a section on resignation.

There was no question of giving up being a knight. Quirin loved it too much, and was much too good at it to abandon it. He must soon write his father back that he had no intentions of resigning, and dreaded the reaction. Glumly, he took himself to the Drunken Lout at nights, to soothe his anxiety with luxurious food.

“I’ll have the tagliolini with butter and herbs and a pear sabayon.”

“Maybe just the fondue tonight.”

“Bouillabaisse. Panna cotta for dessert.”

“How about the duck a l’orange?”

Every night, something else special. But tonight: clafoutis.

Jude smiled at that. He wasn’t one of those waiters who studiously wrote down your order without emotion, who wouldn’t have even quirked an eyebrow at a man ordering the fish on Monday. No, he memorized everything and remarked on it all. “Dessert for dinner?”

“Yeah, yeah. What are you, my mother?” Quirin answered, waving the menu under his nose.

Jude laughed, and after a few minutes, brought out the clafoutis with a flourish.

Quirin tucked in, not thinking about letters, wishing his friends were here to distract him from not-letters. Ten minutes later, he sort-of got his wish. Sir Sebastian seemed to appear out of nowhere, snapping his hands against the tabletop. Quirin hadn’t been seeing much of him lately.

“Oh! Er …”

Staring with a strange depth in his eyes, Sebastian lowered himself into the chair on the other side of the table, and made himself comfortable.

Wondering if the old man was lost, Quirin ordered another glass of lemon squash and—and, Sir Sebastian motioned towards the clafoutis. Quirin pushed it over, and Sebastian tucked right in—into that beautiful, pillowy clafoutis with cherries black as midnight and dusted with the snowiest sugar powder—without even so much as a “How do you do?”

Quirin remembered his manners, even if the old man didn’t. He plastered on a grin. “How are you, Sir? I haven’t see you in some time.”

“How am I, did you say? Terrible! Arthritis in my knees now!” Sebastian looked at Quirin sharply. “Those kids haven’t been around much either, that right?”

“No. Last time they came, Hector said I took all the fun out of it. They haven’t been back since.”

“Good. I never could work out how you handled them.”

“Quite simple. I insult Hector and flatter Adira.”

Sebastian nodded. “I should have thought of that. Split their allegiance.”

“I also read books while they broke chairs over each other’s backs.”

“Aha! Ignore them. That’s what I call handling,” Sebastian mumbled around a mouthful of cherries rich enough for rubies.

Jude saw Quirin’s difficulty and laid down a quiche Lorraine. Sebastian snatched that one up too.

“They’re both good kids,” he said, while Quirin watched every bite disappear into the wrong mouth—Sebastian’s. “Adira is eccentric, convinced all the boys want to fall in love with her. It’d be irritating, except she is always beating them off with sticks. Hector’s as loyal of a dog as you’ve ever seen. They got their bad parts too, don’t be naive. They made me come out of retirement because of them. Gave me a fancy title to soften the blow, fat lot of good it did.”

“So that’s why you say you didn’t choose them.”

“Course I didn’t. I’m not masochist. But, we can’t turn them away, no matter how dangerous Hector is. Adira too, for that matter, although not in the same way. They can’t help it though. Their upbringing wasn’t exactly what you would call normal. Nor was mine, actually. It can make us a bit … you know.”

“Yes,” Quirin muttered, feeling very strange. Why was Sir Sebastian telling him all this? He drank lemon squash to drown out his sorrow.

“What we need,” Sebastian smacked his lips, “is to recruit someone with a clear head who can handle people.”

The squash cooled Quirin’s throat as it rolled down in a painful swallow. Now, all this was beginning to make sense. This was only a dream.

“Sir Sebastian, if you’re saying what I think you’re saying—”

“I am.”

Quirin couldn’t feel worse. “It’s no use. I’m no descendant of a Brotherhood knight. Not even a run-of-the-mill one, for that matter.”

“Still sticking by that old chestnut? I wouldn’t be here unless I knew for sure. Beg pardon, but I’ve been doing some digging. It’s not that hard to find a great-grandfather, you know. Even one that died before he had a chance to make a name for himself.”

The polite smile Quirin had been hanging onto slipped away. “It’s a mistake.”

“Don’t argue. I triple-checked. Went through all the genealogies. I’ve gotten quite good at it, what with every Tom, Dick, and Harry claiming to be a descendant. But you are the real deal.” Sebastian waved over Jude for a refill, as if he hadn’t been saying anything to uproot Quirin’s whole world. “Too bad your grand-grand-dad died so early. Although, I suppose falling into the caldera the same day of his accolade made him a legend in his own right. Did you know, they changed the name of this place because of him? Before, it was called the The White Rock.” He laughed deep in his belly.

Numbly, Quirin ran a hand over his brow. This was too much. And a little too real. “My father told me we’ve always been farmers. Ten generations back and ten more to come. I never considered my mother’s side.”

Sebastian’s eyes goggled nearly out of his head. “Abel’s clod, I am talking about your father’s side! … Why do you look at me like that? It’s good news, isn’t it?”

Chapter Text

From the ages of fourteen to sixteen, now that his dream of knighthood was forbidden, Quirin worked the farm alongside his father without complaint. He grew and grew, working and working, perhaps the working leading to his growing. But what also grew: resentment. Silently and persistently, resentment twirled up ever spiraling, like a vine choking out an oak tree. Even with all the comforts that should have eased him.

Cousin Jessup really was an excellent farmer, having a zest for it Quirin lacked. Quirin hated him for that, even as he loved his cousin all the more, for the way he told jokes, or stumbled when playing croquet, or made absolutely delicious deviled eggs. Markus seemed friendlier, in his own stern way. He seemed glad for Quirin’s company, even though all they ever did was fight, and sometimes encouraged Quirin with a pat on the back, or even the rarer hug. Quirin lived for these touches: they made him feel seen. But he was not heard.

Knights often passed through their village, on the way to the Capitol, and it was Quirin’s secret habit to watch them go by, mounted gorgeously on their horses, and dream, dream, dream.

One day, when a whole host of knights was passing through, one of them cried out, “Eh, clodhopper, what they feed you out here?”

It was Sir Abel, attended to by a squire of dubious ability. Sir Abel looked astonished to see Quirin, at how much he had grown. What was Quirin doing growing radishes for a living?

"What'd they feed you out here?" Abel cried again, his eyes gleaming like a fish's.

Resentment, apparently, does a body good.

Abel's squire glowered and made glum faces, and dropped Abel's spurs.

When Sir Abel left at dawn for the capital, Quirin was with him. On his bed, he had left a letter behind with the cruel words, “I’m old enough now. I don’t need you anymore.”

It took an entire year of looking over his shoulder before Quirin realized his father wasn’t coming for him.

Two weeks before Quirin’s twenty-first birthday, when the moon was a new, burnished coin against the starry night, and the castle was lit with fireglow bouncing off the Moonguard, casting it all in flickering orange—and the ravens, forever circling around the castle, appeared black ants conducting a dance in the heavens ... when it was all poetry and silence, Adira stood with her hand poised to the door of the Drunken Lout, and said to him, with a look of death in her eyes, “Don't fall in love with me.”

Quirin’s mouth twisted into a smile—or, not a smile, but a pained grimace trying to be a smile. Exactly the same look that had been on the face of that royal assassin he had killed years ago. The knife had slid easily through the man, like going through a wineskin, and had been just as messy. That grimace had haunted Quirin’s nightmares for weeks, and it was manifesting itself on Quirin’s on face. Because he was not going to fall in love with Adira!

“Will you stop saying that? You’re not even my type,” he answered.

She cocked an eyebrow. “I’ve heard that one before.”

“I like”—Quirin racked his brain for the furthest thing from her, even if it was a lie—“frills.”

Her mouth dropped open. “You must be joking? Frills?” She laughed. “Thank the moon! I just had to make sure you weren’t getting any ideas since Hector didn’t come.”

Apparently, it was weighing on her mind, because now she flung open the door like a starlet and pranced in like an heiress.

Scratching where his hand itched under its bandage, Quirin followed her to a table while she prattled on about all the men she had curb-stomped over the years. She had “gone easy” on them for making declarations of love to her at one time or another.

“We’ve had a few different squires hoping to be inducted into the Brotherhood, but I had to set them all straight. They all vanished after that. Maybe I should just ignore it when it happens? I don’t know. At least I don’t have to worry about Hector.”

“Because he literally thinks of you as his sister?”

“Because he’s an antisocial sadist that hates humanity and wants to be disliked.”

That wasn’t hard to believe. Hector had outright laughed in their faces when they invited him to come, if he promised to be on his best behavior.

“I’m not going unless I get to liven the place up,” he had snarked, ramming a foot into a hay bale he was shoveling under his rhino's nose. “All those stiffs sitting around playing whist, sipping tea, and saying ‘Indubitably …’ Pfft! A stuffy place for a bunch of stiffs.” Hector rapped the back of his hand against Quirin’s chest. “No wonder it’s perfect for you.”

Adira found a table, and Quirin sat across from her in a huff, pretending Hector’s jab hadn’t jabbed him. Well, he wouldn’t let someone who sniffed the binturongs ruin his evening (no matter how they much they smelled of delicious buttered popcorn), so he ordered a chocolate ganache tart and apple cider.

“Bold choice, skipping straight to dessert,” the waiter said.

Quirin simpered. Was Jude always going to judge his dinner choices? “My twenty-first birthday is in two weeks. I’m getting the celebration started early.”

Jude chuckled, shaking his head. “You’re cute, Sir Quirin.”

After he disappeared with their orders (none too soon, since Quirin was considering garroting him), Adira leaned back in her seat, rubbing her chin with eyes narrow in contemplation. Her face was in shadow, and her eyes glowed nighttime catlike.

“What you said about Hector,” Quirin asked, “does that apply to you?”

“I don’t care what you think of me.”

“Yes, but are you a sadist as well?”

Oh blast it, she’d probably think that was an insult.

Before Quirin could recover gracefully (or flee from the establishment ungracefully), Adira brought her shoulder up against her neck in a shrug. “Eh …”

Jude brought them their dinner, and they ate and kept pleasant conversation. She was a good conversationalist, if only for the surprising things she said. It wasn’t long before he was engrossed in a story about the time she rappelled off the Cliffs of Oblivion with only a flying squirrel and a spool of twine. He didn’t notice anyone approaching until two shadows fell across the remnants of his tart.

“Here you are,” Sir Abel rumbled. “I should have known.”

Quirin dropped his fork. “What are you doing here?”

Abel laughed, uproariously. “What sort of greeting is that for your poor father, who’s come all this way?”

Markus seemed far less amused, staring with blue eyes like brass knuckles. Other than those eyes, he seemed strangely small, shoulders rounded and weak, even though he was a giant at home. Quirin jumped to his feet, never imagining his father would dare darken the Capitol like this, much less the Drunken Lout. Markus was more motivated than Quirin thought.

“What are you doing, son?” Markus asked. His tone was like petting a hissing cat.

Jerking his head to Adira, then Abel, then Dad, then Adira, Abel, Dad, Adira—he was making himself dizzy. Quirin mumbled, “I’m eating dessert.” He then remembered what he was feeling, and clamped his mouth shut.

Markus peered at Adira, and there was just no way. Quirin sprang up and grabbed his father by the elbow. He wasn’t going to sit by and let that disaster happen.

There was only one table left, a small one in the far corner. Well, that suited Quirin just fine. Just fine, indeed. Anything to get out of the crowd. Quirin sat with his back to the wall, which meant he had the full view of Adira and Abel staring at them. That was better than his father seeing them.

“It took you five years, but you finally got here,” he said, setting up a backgammon board he had snagged on the way over. They had played many games long into the evening, one of few companionable times between them. The checkers were warm in his hand.

“I was giving you time to get it out of your system.”

“A whim doesn’t take so long, Dad.”

Markus sat, twisting his body to look at the dining room. “You didn’t write me last month.”

“I’ve been busy.” Quirin waved at Jude to bring them something to drink. If his father had taken the time and spent the money to come out here, the least Quirin could do was his duty. He would feed his father’s face until the stuffing came out.

Markus’ scowl deepened. “Sir Abel said this is a popular hang out. Are all these people knights?”

“Yes.”

“All of them?”

Quirin knew what his father was thinking. Not all of them had long, greasy hair and smelled like beef jerky, or had chewed their teeth to nubs out on their shields. Frank and Lois were across the way with a chalkboard between them, arguing a new form of math. The Order of the Nightingale were setting up their music stands and tuning their instruments for the weekly concert. Knighthood belonged to the noble class, but Markus somehow believed knights had no class at all.

“Yes,” Quirin replied, firmly.

“It’s extravagant.”

“It’s what they’re used to.”

A tickle of a smile was on Markus’ lips. “You mean this whole time I’ve been imagining these are the brutes’ brutes, but it turns out you’re the one who’s riffraff?”

Quirin smiled over the backgammon board.

“I never knew,” Markus murmured, clanking together the dice in his palm. “You have aspirations.”

What was that supposed to mean? The old fuss budget seemed to know Quirin was going to ask, so he rolled a six, which meant he got to go first. When he rolled again, he got doubles. Blast it all, he was already beating Quirin square.

“Don’t make the biggest mistake of your life,” Markus said.

“I’m not changing my pieces, Dad.”

“I’m not talking about backgammon, and you know it.”

They played the game quickly, laying all their strategies bare, picking out their pathways. The bouncing of the dice between them was like the clatter of bones in a fortune teller’s tent.

“Can’t you just accept I don’t want to spend my life in the dirt?” Quirin asked.

“It’s not about dirt, Quirin. It’s about community and family. It’s about provision and sacrifice.”

Quirin rolled his eyes. He’d heard this lecture before. “So my way is about making sure you can do that. It’s hard to provide when the enemy is tearing through your crops.”

“Pah, what enemies does the Dark Kingdom have? Your way is just about personal glory.”

“Prince Edmund might disagree with that.”

Markus’ lips trembled, even as he moved his checkers decisively. “I heard. I suppose you’re proud over that.”

“Of course.”

“I’m not!”

Quirin dropped the dice he’d been going to roll, and they bounced across the table and onto the floor.

Markus retrieved them, tossing them into the corner of the board. Once he sat, he leaned forward, lowering his voice. “You killed that man, didn’t you?”

Quirin’s right knee was going all sorts of places under the table, and he had to grip it to make it stay put. There had been a small seed within him, a wish, really, that he would be able to speak to his father someday about the event that launched his career. But what also had given him nightmares. It wasn’t anything he could tell anyone else—everyone else just approved, happy he had saved their prince. So he had hoped that maybe, of all people, his own father …

“It was either him or me,” Quirin replied. “Would you have rather I let him take me out?”

“Of course not! I don’t know what I’d do if I lost—” Markus swallowed, before going on. “You never should have been in that situation in the first place. I raised you to handle your problems with talk, not fists. Not swords, not knives. That is what you’ve always been good at.”

In frustration, Quirin made a foolish move on the board, and he could only watch helplessly while the old fuss budget trounced him. Well, so what. It was just a game.

Then Dad went and said the thing that he always relied upon to win him the point: “We’ve always been farmers. Ten generations back, and ten more—”

“I know about great-grandfather.”

Markus stared, lips parted but unmoving.

Ha, Quirin had him now!

“You lied to me. And probably about others. So much for ten generations.”

Markus cupped both hands over the dice, hovered them over the board, and then flying apart his hands, let the dice fall to the board. And with that, the game was over. Markus began collecting his checkers.

“I will tell you about your great-grandfather. Your great-grandmother came from shoe cobblers, of all things, and knew next to nothing about farming.”

The same old story, told a thousand times. “I know, I know,” Quirin grumbled. “The reason we have all that land is because she was more cutthroat than the businessmen around her, dearest great-grandmother. We are grateful, family lifted up even more, so on and so on.”

“Haven’t you ever wondered how it was she who built the empire, and not your great-grandfather, whose farm it was?”

To tell the truth, Quirin had not.

“That man left when my father was four years old. Thought he was living below his privilege, sold off most of the land, and went chasing after glory. Tired of his responsibilities, tired of his wife, tired of his child. Left them behind with no help at all. They suffered, Quirin. Your great-grandmother learned well how to farm, and bought back the land, but they had many hungry winters before that happened. My father suffered a lifetime of illness and weakness because of his father’s selfishness.

“And dear old great-grandpa faded into obscurity. You know what hasn’t faded into obscurity? The farm that fed your knights when they lost the Battle of Mago and retreated to our homestead to regroup. The farm that crossbred and crossbred until there was a new potato, capable of withstanding drought. This is what your family is, Quirin. Not what that man was. I never told you about him because there was nothing admirable about him.”

Quirin laid his crossed arms on the tabletop, pressing his forehead into them. Markus put a hand on the back of his head.

“You’ve got to come back, Quirin. Please.”

Quirin gripped his father’s hand. His father felt so warm it could burn him, the warmest person alive.

“Please, Quirin, please.” Markus squeezed his hand. “For the sake of the farm.”

Quirin let go of the breath he had been holding, and his tangled up body, all his stiffness and expanding parts, his sharp bones and even sharper joints, relaxed, melted. He raised to his feet. After removing the white bandage from his left hand, he held it towards Markus, whose lips went ashen.

“Do you see where all your secret-keeping has gotten you?” Quirin asked. “The tattoo is reportedly laced with fine dust from black rocks. You see, it’s a lifetime commitment, Dad. As long as the Dark Kingdom stands, I can’t go back, even if I wanted to.”

Although Quirin’s joining the Brotherhood must have been a great disappointment to his father, Markus was not petulant (at least, not anymore). He continued to write Quirin, and begged for letters in return.

"Tell me all,” he wrote.

So Quirin told him (almost) all. He wrote of the opulence of Edmund’s coronation, and of the Moonstone, that strange opal upon which their country was founded. He said less of his missions, other than that they were exciting and difficult, and that he saw more of the world than he had ever hoped.

Mostly, he wrote about the Brotherhood. He wrote of Sebastian’s second retirement party, where Hector and Adira released a very frantic and greased-up pig. He did not write about Hector calling dibs on the suicide missions, but did write about Adira refusing to call Quirin the same thing more than a week in a row, unable to settle on a nickname. When he suggested she just call him by his name, she laughed.

He also wrote about when they discovered his sleepwalking habit. He had gone running out of their camp late one evening, straight into a (luckily) shallow river. While he dried off in front of the campfire, they spoke of dreams.

“I knew it,” Hector said, tossing burrs off his cape into the campfire. “You are only human.”

Adira, supplier of pistachios, dried apricots, Gouda, and everything ridiculous to have out in the wilderness, pulled out baklava from her bag. “It is interesting. Hector says he knows when he’s dreaming and does crazy things in his dreams. You, Cheekbones, do crazy things in real life because you don’t know when you’re dreaming. Are you two sure you aren’t escaped from the madhouse?”

“So much for Sebastian recruiting Cheekbones to be our babysitter.”

Quirin maneuvered his boots into a new angle by the fire, hoping they’d be dry by morning. There was nothing worse than walking in soggy boots.

“I suppose all your dreaming is normal, Adira?” he asked.

“I never dream.”

“Never?”

“I don’t have dreams. I never have.”

Quirin digested this a moment. “You mean figuratively or literally?”

“Both. I accept reality as it comes.” She tucked her arms around her knees in self-satisfaction. The hoop of her earring ran a line of gold down her neck. “I’m just too real. I’m too … intense.”

Quirin looked at Hector of the lucid dreams, and Hector looked back, his eyes going crossways until they seemed to meet in the middle, and Quirin could not help it anymore. He threw back his head and laughed.

Life wasn’t easy, and it was bitter, and it was sweet, and Quirin had no regrets.

“ Son, we’ve hit a snag in the planting schedule for the beets. The south field got flooded because rocks blocked the usual drainage. Jessup fell into the mud trying to clear the way. You should’ve seen Flora howl over him, like he’d killed himself. He likes her fussing, and I’ll have to tell him to get back to work.”

“Son, the wheat’s sprouting nicely. It’ll be a better crop this year, which we’ll really need after last year’s disaster. I had to charge more for the rye to make up some of the losses, and the cry from the wholesalers is enough to make your ears bleed. What am I to do? The refugees and their children trample my crops like no-nothing idiots, and we’re all to starve to death, apparently.”

“Son, I hope you are doing well. They let you take vacations, right? A rock went right through our dovecote. Pish-tish, that building was three hundred years old.”

“Son, do you remember the cabbage soup your mother used to make on cold days? Flora tried to make it, and nearly poisoned us. I had to swallow it down for politeness’ sake, but the silly girl put milk in it! I may never recover. Speaking of poison, we found hemlock growing on the perimeter of the barley field, so we’ll have to spend a day clearing it. The south field’s also completely unusable now because of rocks. ”

Quirin put these letters from his father into a small wooden box on his dresser, always feeling a sort of disquieted affection when he saw them all lined up in there. But lately, he’d been feeling more and more unadulterated disquiet. So the rocks were becoming such a problem even there, on the furthest edges of their kingdom. What was happening to them?

The rocks were a real danger now, instead of the well-loved irritation they’d been before. Houses ruined. Monuments wasted. People impaled in their beds. A horrific case of a family in the wilderness being entirely surrounded by black rocks, so that they could not escape and starved to death before anyone found them. Quirin was failing in his mission to protect his people. It was his job to guard and study the Moonstone, but it was turning on them.

There was a rumor that an alchemist in the far north had discovered a way to destroy the rocks.

“I’d like for you to find this man.”

King Edmund told him this one day. They were standing in the Moonstone Chamber, and Edmund stroked his palm down the strange case that enclosed the opal. Quirin wished he wouldn’t do that.

Sarcastically, Edmund went on, “Maybe we need a country alchemist, instead of our home-grown ones that just like to waste our time.”

Now, Quirin liked alchemists. He liked their intellectual prowess. But they were also total nincompoops.

“Are you sure about this rumor, Your Majesty?” he asked. “If this person really had discovered a way to get rid of them, why wouldn’t he bring the cure here, so we might distribute it to the entire country?”

Edmund stroked the Moonstone case again, almost as if he hadn’t heard Quirin.

“Perhaps Hector should come with me,” Quirin said, in a bow.

“I have him going on a mission to the Great Tree.”

“Is Adira going with him?”

“No, she’s staying here. I have some tasks for her.”

Yowch, Quirin almost bit his own tongue. Hector was spending more and more time on solitary missions, going to the Great Tree more often, that place of nightmares. As a consequence, Hector was becoming more unstable, more aggressive, in a way that wasn’t funny anymore. A few months ago, he had actually trashed the Drunken Lout, and was now banned there for life. There was no way this was just a coincidence, but Edmund was the king, and Quirin held his peace.

“Dad, so here I am, halfway on a trip to the North Shore. You won’t see this letter until after I get back, if I even decide to send it. I find it almost impossible to focus on my mission. Is that wrong of me? My distraction started when I passed by huge fields of blooming rapeseed. It seemed as though Vulcan himself had knocked over his crucible and spilled out molten light. You remember the myth: he forges it into the great golden lightening bolts of Zeus. Dad, I am bombarded of thoughts of home.”

Quirin’s trip took longer than expected. The alchemist proved elusive, and it was an entire month of exploring the North Shore before finding this person. And it was a waste and a regret, in the end, for all Quirin found was a madman running around in wizard’s robes, claiming he was a large species of owl.

“Kru-u-u-u! Kru-u-u-u!” the man said, sitting up a tree and flapping his arms. The way the sleeves on his robe billowed really did approximate wings.

“Is this what I should expect from all you alchemists?” Quirin asked, watching him from the bottom of the tree.

“Kru-u-u-u-u.”

The man didn’t speak until Quirin walked back to his horse to leave.

“Wait, Sir Knight! I have a cure! A solution! An answer for the danger!”

That did make Quirin stop. He turned, asking, “What was—” when he bumped into the man, who had appeared so suddenly on his heels that it was possible he had actually flown over.

“Oops!” the wizard/alchemist/owl cried.

A sudden warmth trickled down the back of Quirin’s legs.

The owl-wizard held up a beaker that held the remains of a bright-yellow liquid. “You made me spill it.”

“Kru-u-u-u,” Quirin replied.

The cure was only supposed to “keep the foxes away,” but what it really did was create a blistering rash along the back of Quirin’s thighs. It made the ride back home rather uncomfortable, and then seeing the rapeseed fields that had dazzled him before already faded and gone to seed made Quirin realize there were certain unavoidable things about life. And the number one thing was: it was such a letdown.

He still had the rash a week later when he finally took the gondola towards the castle. It was too late to ride Ester down the castle road, since one misstep in the dark would pitch both him and horse into the bottom of the caldera. But honestly, he was just thankful to be off the back of his legs.

Upon reaching the castle, he was ushered to King Edmund’s bedroom, although most of the staff had gone to bed. Edmund was all ready to tuck in for the night, dressed in a rather plush flannel robe, eating chocolate-covered peanuts in bed.

Quirin reported the facts of his failure, except for the matter of the fox-cure. (Only he and his doctor need know about that, thank you very much.)

Edmund frowned. “Well, science has failed, and so has magic. This is a head scratcher, for sure.”

“Perhaps, there is something to Adira’s theory that the Sundrop is real. The scroll piece, after all—”

“Oh, don’t talk to me about the Sundrop. You know I’ve sent Hector all over tarnation looking for it. He’s become certain it’s just a myth, and I’m just about ready to agree.” Edmund waved his hand and spilled peanuts all over the bedspread. He stood to his feet in all the majesty that befitted a king. “Now help me get these out of bed before I get in trouble!”

Quirin shook out the sheets while Edmund kicked the evidence under the furniture, before Quirin retired to his own bedroom before the Queen showed up. He was bone tired by the time he got dressed for bed, but he found mail on the desk, including a letter from his father, dated two weeks ago. After bundling himself all snug, Quirin sat delicately against the headboard and read the letter.

“Son,

“How are you? Havent’ been sleepwalking have you? We have aphds in the potatoes eating all the potatoes. It’s been some time since we had that problem. Do you still remember the remedy? I tore a hole in my fine trousers the other day and Flora patched it up. She’s quite the seamstress, if she’s a little bubbleheaded bt almost no one can be perfect I suppose. Do you think?

“I have decided

“A man came through the fields with a pack of hunting dogs, can you believe it? Trying to hunt rabbits in my oats! We packed him out of there.”

Quirin scratched his head. Had his father been half-asleep when writing this? Was this some sort of rough draft that mistakenly got sent off instead of the final? What an incoherent piece of flotsam!

But still, he read on.

“I made a crack eariler about Flora, but she is really the best wife. She and Jessup are the best and have got running this farm down to a science. They just tell me to sit back and relax all day. But I know Jessup has forgotten to tell the farmhands to and I’ll tell them now.

“I love you. ”

The heart in Quirin’s chest almost leapt into his throat. What was this? I love you. He couldn’t stop staring at it. As long back as he remembered, his father had never written that in a letter. And it was said almost just as rarely. His upbringing had been caught in a strange dichotomy: with his mother made of nothing but affection, and his father as cuddly as a pitchfork, which way was the best? But they had been happy together, so there must have been something practical about his mother and something soft in his father. And this was the proof of it: the man had written, “I love you.”

Quirin went to bed, so homesick he was sick of it.

Quirin awoke in the night, jerking into a full and sustained consciousness, such as what happens when an enemy strikes suddenly in a sneak attack. His heart—ah, he felt he’d been dangled off the moon! And it wasn’t nice.

But he was actually only sitting here at his desk, in no place to feel such terror, other than that he didn’t remember getting up. An inkwell and quill was at one hand, and at the other, the letter he had been writing to his father on his trip. The light from the fireplace wasn’t strong, but even he could even see a sloppy scrawl below what he had written before. He must have written that in his sleep. Amazing. Well, he was no fool, he knew what he wanted.

After lighting a candle, he sat shivering on legs that blistered, and continued a letter unlike what he had ever written before. If his father was opening the door, Quirin would burst through and make bare all his vulnerabilities. Such things he wrote. Such honest things. How homesick he was and even lonely, and although he had friends, it didn’t matter as long as things were like this between them. Perhaps Quirin could make a trip home for a week or two, and they could talk. They could talk about their mistakes and misunderstandings, about their dreams lost and fulfilled or delayed. They could be right again.

He read what he had written while in the trap of sleepwalking. It was surprisingly coherent. But the phrase “I wanted you to fight for me” stunned him. He had written this? It seemed they both were stretching themselves in letter form.

When Quirin went back to bed, dawn was breaking, and it felt his body was breaking too, lights of happiness bursting through all his seams. He wriggled in bed like a child on his birthday before finally passing out.

Bingo, that was the perfect time for Hector to come a-calling, apparently. Quirin awoke with that man’s shadow lurking over him, whose yellow eyes shone like someone had knocked Quirin’s lights out.

“What are you doing here?” Quirin groaned.

“So you think you can take the day off just because you came back late last night?” Hector hissed. “Well, I’ve been up for three days. I don’t feel sorry for you.”

“Hector, it’s too early for this.”

“Aw, does the poor baby want his blankie too?” Hector laid his hand against the top of Quirin’s head in a soft pat, before scrapping it down painfully.

Quirin knocked his hand off. “I can never tell if you’re actually threatening me or teasing me anymore.”

“I’ll let you in on a secret … it’s both.”

“Leave me alone!”

But Hector did not leave Quirin alone. Instead, he went to the foot of the bed, and took a hold of the footboard and shook it back and forth. The bed shifted and creaked.

Ignore him, ignore him, Quirin thought.

“Wake up, Princess, you have to get ready for the ball!”

“The Queen’s luncheon?” Yes, he’d forgotten, but King Edmund had told Quirin about it, last night. Quirin threw the blanket over his head. “Go away. It’s not for hours.”

“Two, to be exact.”

“It’s ten!?!” Quirin bolted up, eyes darting to the clock. Hector was right. But Quirin’s weary bones didn’t care about the time, and he flopped back down. “I’ll skip it.”

“You can’t. Someone has to make an appearance.”

“You.”

Hector laughed. “I don’t socialize with people. You know I prefer the company of animals.”

“So go marry a moose!” Quirin jabbed his foot into Hector’s knee.

Hector went down with a shout, but was leaping to his feet easily enough, saying he was going to find “Adiiiira.”

“Yes, fine. Pester her.”

“Hey, what’s this?”

With a supernatural sense, Quirin knew exactly what had caught Hector’s interest. He threw back the blanket. “Hector, don’t you dare!”

Which was a fatal mistake. He should have just acted like it was no big deal, but now Hector was pursing his lips in surprise, before sliding them into a wicked smirk.

“I wasn’t going to read it or anything,” he said, “but now …”

“Drop it.”

“You know, I’ve run out of material to tease you with. The sleepwalking thing only goes so far. There is almost nothing funny about you.”

“And I will continue to not be funny.” Quirin was trying to surreptitiously slip out of bed to tackle Hector, if need be. He needed to be artful, like approaching a wild animal, but his right ankle was getting caught up on the sheet.

Hector heaved a sigh and rolled his head, cracking his neck. “I will be a better brother to you. Since you’re not feeling well, I’ll put this in the mail for you.”

“Hector!”

Quirin scrambled out of the bed but that sheet around his ankle tightened like a python around a straitjacket. By the time he finagled his way out of it, Hector was standing at the open door, tapping the letter against his lips. He wouldn’t do it, of course. He was only teasing. This was his old form of teasing, back in full-force and—curse it! Hector shot out the door, cackling.

“I’ll tear off your nose and throw it down the cesspool!” Quirin screamed, which was strong language from him, but these were serious times. “You’ll smell that for the rest of your life! You’ll walk your daughters down the wedding aisle, and smell that! With your grotesque nose-less face!”

Curse it all a thousand times, Quirin barely caught himself after running out into the hallway in his nightshirt. He slammed the door shut upon a handmaid with huge white and staring eyes. Hopefully, she appreciated his sacrifice by taking the time to wriggle into pants and a cotton shirt. (More than that, hopefully, the poor girl hadn’t already caught sight of his bare legs.)

Once he was decent enough to be seen in public, he darted out and ran down the halls, going to he had no idea where. Movement outside of a window caught his eye, and he dashed back to it and looked out, where he saw Hector down below (Quirin was still on the fourth floor), standing near the loading dock for the gondolas, talking to the postal service.

“Hector!” Quirin shouted out the window.

Hector and postman both turned, and Quirin shoved his fist out the window and shook it. Hector only grinned and waved, and then waved again at the postman, who was boarding the gondola with a mailbag that looked almost full to bursting.

Quirin leaned against the wall, pressing his arm against the window ledge. There goes the gondola and a letter that would make him completely vulnerable to his father. Last night, it had seemed so reasonable to take Markus’ letter seriously, but now Quirin remembered that, in the light of day, Markus would be practical and closed off. That incoherent letter of his father’s was probably not an attempt to reach out but just the result of bad moussaka.

He was done for.

A throat being cleared brought Quirin around. It was the handmaid from earlier.

“Yes, Virginia?” he asked. “What’s this?”

She held out a small glass jar which seemed to contain lotion. “Medicine,” she whispered. “Sometimes, I get rashes too.”

Curse. It. All.

Now that the disaster had come, there was nothing for it but for Quirin to await his doom. He went back to his room to get dressed for the Queen’s luncheon. She liked to throw these parties to keep up morale, especially since King Edmund was becoming more and more insular seemingly by the passing day. The more the Moonstone misbehaved, the more Edmund wouldn’t allow people to come to the castle, which meant the more parties the Queen threw. And they were always luncheons, not lunches, which meant semi-formal wear. Semi-formal wear meant soft, flowing fabrics and not clunk-clunk-clunk armor, but still a ceremonial sword. Quirin kept this beauty in the armory.

When he walked into the armory, that room full of echoes, it was to find Adira batting Hector on the nose with a rolled-up parchment, saying, “No!”

Quirin slammed a fist into his palm. “Oh good. Here he is.”

“No, not ‘til I’m done with him! He was throwing my canapés out the window.”

“I was feeding the ravens,” Hector grumbled, rubbing his nose. He slumped into a chair, looking very sorry for himself.

“Is that why they’re always hanging around? They’re pests, Hector.”

“We should let them be. And you shouldn’t be eating canapés anyway. You’ll ruin your appetite for the party.”

Quirin tuned them out as he retrieved his sword from the case. Being a ceremonial piece, it was a pretty thing, gold gilding and emeralds galore on the hilt, but a complete impracticality, only meant to signal … he didn’t know what. There was nobody to impress, and he didn’t understand why these parties had to be so fancy.

He made the mistake of musing this out loud.

Adira heard it, and answered, with her mouth stuffed full of mushroom canapés, “The queen says she likes to see the men cut a fine figure every now and again.”

Quirin and Hector both froze and stared at each other.

Adira shrugged. “Married people are always trying to get other people married off. There’s a lot of pretty single girls in her retinue.”

Quirin had noticed. His face growing hot, he struggled to get the sword attached to his hip.

“Adira, sister,” Hector spoke with a strangled voice. “You know I’m often away.”

“Yes, Hector.”

“Please tell me that when our dear brother goes out into the practice yard to do his drills, he attracts a crowd.”

“Oh, in more ways than one.”

“Adira, you know that isn’t true!” Quirin roared, dropping the sword on his foot.

Leaning back comfortably on the trunk she was sitting on, Adira didn’t look threatened in the slightest. She shared a smirk with Hector.

“Don’t look at him like that!” Quirin snapped, smacking the sword belt around his waist. “You two are supposed to be fighting.”

Those two had no intention of fighting.

“You know, Hector …” Adira cooed.

“Yes, sister?”

“I think I’m going to start calling him Biceps.”

Quirin readied his biceps in preparation to strangle the pair of them, except their murder was interrupted by their eleven-year old page. The boy was about as innocent as a sparrow and just as cheerful. The sight of so much blood would ruin him.

“Her Majesty wants me to remind you guys that the party starts in ten,” he chirped, swinging himself around a support pillar, ducking under an axe blade as he did so. “She said you all were probably messing around instead of getting ready. Also, she wanted to talk to you, Lady Adira. Something about a plate of missing canapés from the kitchen.”

Adira looked at him with heavy eyelids. “You seem to think yourself very clever to get to say that to us.”

The boy kept spinning, his grin getting big enough to reflect the sun off it.

Adira stopped him, holding out a hand. “Have you been invited to the party?”

“No.”

“Good, because I have an entire wall full of swords that need careful oiling. Let me show you.”

The boy groaned but followed her out. As a page boy, oiling the swords wasn’t his responsibility, but Quirin wasn’t going to tell him that.

Hector threw the rest of Adira’s canapés out the window, smiling maliciously as the air became full of raucous cawing. Then he slapped Quirin on the shoulder.

“Now come, eye-candy, before we’re late to the party.”

“I just love the way everyone gets to brush off their formal wear every now and again, since we don’t get to entertain the way we used to,” the queen said, her bright eyes skipping up-and-down their fancy, silk-dripping table during the fish course. “Sir Quirin, doesn’t Virginia look pretty with pearls in her hair?”

Hector jabbed Quirin in the side with his elbow. Quirin jabbed back, which sent Hector teetering out of his chair.

Quirin patted his mouth with a napkin. “Yes, Ma’am.”

The queen grasped Edmund’s arm. “Oh, Edmund, don’t you think an impromptu ball would be in order? Just a few country dances.”

Edmund looked at his wife with an indulgent smile, which meant the “few” country dances was going to turn into a full-fledged ball that would last until dinner.

Oh, please someone put Quirin out of his misery! Besides Hector’s unrepentant teasing, he was half-dead from lack of sleep. Was there some way to get out of this? The chair, no matter how plush, was rough on his poor legs, tender as raw pork chops.

A tap on his shoulder from a courtier broke him from his dreams of bed.

“This came by courier, Sir,” the courtier said, handing over a note.

Dread soured Quirin’s belly. Nothing came by courier unless it was an emergency. He turned the note over, and saw it was from his cousin, Jessup. Quirin asked to be excused, and he stood in the hallway to read the note.

He had barely finished it before a wave of weakness washed over him. Rocking on his feet, he found a nearby chair and slid into it. The party went on. The people murmured, and there was a clatter of silverware as they ate, and someone—Edmund, he thought—laughed. A chair scrapped across the floor. It smelled like they were serving the roast course, a partridge maybe, peppery and garlicky and rosemary-fragrant. Quirin had to get back to the party, of course. He was missing it. He couldn’t not go back. He never should have wished to get out of it in the first place. That hadn’t been a demonstration of fealty, and he must go back and … and ….

“Biceps?”

Quirin folded the note, tucking it into his pocket before facing Adira. “I have to go home,” he said. “My father’s dead.”

He began walking towards his room to pack before she had time to ask how his father had died. It would be impossible to explain that the strongest, most impenetrable, most cowardly man he had ever known had killed himself.

Chapter Text

The vast, unruly fields of Quirin’s childhood home were silent and empty. A rich and shimmering morning light shone over them, but instead of filled with farmhands, they were filled with the wind and swallows, and fluttering piebald sparrows eating grain to their decadence. The last time this had happened, Quirin’s mother had died.

Ester, Quirin’s loyal bay destrier, had lost her enthusiasm three miles back, and now shuffled over the furrows in the road, hanging her head with fatigue. He should have ridden his palfrey, but Ester was more of a comfort. He would have to make it up for driving her so hard. Their only break had been stopping at an inn last night for a few hours for her sake, but no more than that. There was no relief other than in spurring her to go fast. He wanted the breeze to blast his overheated face, even as his knees ached from the pounding of her ribs between them.

How foolish and selfish of his father! This couldn’t be real.

And it really wasn’t real. His childhood home came up before them, and it was altered. Impossibly. It was impossible! The house was once so cheerful and comfortable, with cornices delicate as filigree; now, it was cold and as musty as ancient books in a library. Where had the warmth gone?

Quirin peeled himself from Ester, jumping down while grim-faced Katri, the groom, held the reins.

“You didn’t take your five days off?” Quirin asked.

“I wanted to at least take care of your beauty here,” Katri gargled, running her fingers over Ester’s nose. “It’s nice to see you, m’lord.”

She stumbled over that “m’lord,” but Quirin didn’t take the time to correct her. Soon enough, she’d find out it wasn’t he to inherit the title.

Jessup answered the door. When Quirin stepped in, he had barely time to drop his bag before Jessup’s wife, Flora, was landing on his shoulder (Quirin barely knew her), sobbing how sorry she was.

“I covered all the mirrors like Jess said to,” she said, wiping her tears. “I’m sorry if I didn’t do it right. It’s not my custom.”

He patted her shoulder before disentangling himself, and padded down the familiar hallways until he reached Markus’ bedroom, where—

They had placed a sheet.

A small brown bottle stood on the nightstand. It was shockingly light in his palm, carrying a false innocence, like a cuckoo’s egg. Maybe if he let it lay, it would hatch into a basilisk, placed in that room to alter their foundations in some peculiar, secretive way.

“Hemlock,” he muttered. The sun passing through the bottle landed a fingernail of brown light on his palm. “How dramatic.”

Jessup stood in the doorway, rubbing the back of his hand across his trembling mouth. “I’m sorry, Quirin. I thought the constable took it away.”

With this illusory, fragile, uncrushable bottle, Quirin went outside, down, down to the barley field, that wave of startling green. With all the strength left in him, he pitched the bottle. It flew over the field in a graceless arc, but it landed who-knows-where, which was all Quirin wanted. The land could take it back.

Jessup had followed him out, and stood, rubbing his arms.

“Did he leave a note?” Quirin asked.

“Just a reminder of the planting schedule.” Jessup’s hands flopped uselessly against his sides. “I’m sorry, Quirin. You know he’s always been melancholic.”

No, Quirin did not know that. His father had been impenetrable, unfazed by the vagaries and cruelties of life. Well, he had thought so.

For hours, long after Jessup returned back to the house, Quirin walked around the farm, circling the far-off and nearby crops, trying to reclaim a sense of the seen world. Maybe he was numb, or maybe just dumb, but he was certainly confused. Why had he left Markus’ letters back at the castle? There must have been some clue in them, something he had missed, long before that rambling letter. Quirin kicked at a clod of dirt. That last letter of his father’s was nothing less than a cry for help, and—

“I wasn’t there to answer!” Quirin shouted at the turnips. “That letter sat there for weeks!”

The funerary days flew by in an excruciating stasis, but Quirin did not weep. He had wept everyday for months after his mother had died, but there were no tears in this agony. Instead, he did his duty to prepare the body, washing it with a soft towel, letting his thumb drift over that blanched brow that would alight no more. Jessup and Flora stood by, and pressed a kiss before Quirin wrapped in white. Then he sat beside the bed for two days while townspeople paid their respects. Flora brought him food, but it was flavorless on his dull, thick tongue. At the burial ceremony, he felt frigid, and even colder still when he saw the funeral basket of white chrysanthemums the kingdom had sent, fit for a king. Meanwhile, the letter he had written Markus back at the castle, the one which Hector had mailed in a mean tease, had been delivered. This, Quirin threw into the grave to be covered by dirt.

Thereafter came the dreadful day, second only to the funeral: the day the lawyer brought copies of the will. It was without apprehension Quirin took a copy, knowing what it would say. Markus did not speak frivolously. At least, Jessup was not the sort to deny him mementos.

In the privacy of his childhood bedroom, still kept as it had been then, Quirin unfolded the will and read it. Afterwards, he pressed it against his face. Jessup, as much a victim of Markus’ notions as anybody, who had been looking so miserable, must have known what was coming. As expected, the farm and business when to Jessup, Jessup’s bittersweet portion.

But the house went to Quirin. Dad hadn’t entirely disinherited him.

Quirin spent the rest of the mourning month working in the fields, although it was his right not to do anything at all. He hadn’t done that sort of labor in years, but it came right back to him. He remembered what it was to be continuously covered in dirt, or to drink milk directly out of the cow. Found again was the despair of discovering rabbits in the lettuce, or the pleasure of pulling up a handful of leaves to find perfect, round, fat radishes nested in his palm, like ruby-red mice with their tails. His body ached and sweat in old ways. The more he worked, the less he thought, and the more tolerably passed the days. The farmhands joked lightly with him, until they discovered they could tease him like old times. He had missed the humility and honesty of people whose politics didn’t extend beyond their tiny sphere, and their cheerful jibes soothed him.

Then it was time to return to the castle.

The night before he left, long after Jessup and Flora had gone to bed, Quirin uncovered the mirror in his room. He was surprised by how long his beard had grown, admiring his reflection.

“My, my, what a beast,” he murmured. It was pleasing to run his hand through it, but it was without compunction he picked up a razor, no matter that shaving by candlelight guaranteed a hack job.

Would he really reappear at the castle looking like a beaver that had barely escaped an attack by alligator? Yes, he would.

Afterwards, Quirin went throughout the rest of the house, going from room to room, uncovering the mirrors. He left for last the one in his father’s bedroom. After pulling back the sheet from the mirror, he rolled it into a ball and sat on the bed. Shade creatures whisked along the walls from one corner to the next, thrown out by the flicker of candlelight. Such ghouls they seemed! How ghoulish.

But there! One of the ghouls dragged his eyes to the floor, where there was bright white flashing behind the nightstand. He reached down, his knee resisting the wooden floor, and sliding his fingers in that edge, and he tipped out a piece of folded up paper. Turning it over, he found his own name written on the front, in his father’s handwriting.

Look at that letter, with its sloppily creased edges. And look at how his name was written! Markus had had such excellent penmanship. See how the dark ink of his name rounded so thin until it fattened gracefully in the curve of the Q, as beautiful as a cat’s tail.

Shivering, Quirin put the letter in his pocket and lay on the bed. Then, pressing his face into the pillow, he finally wept. The agony within broke loose, and he muffled himself in the pillow. But he choked himself silent a few minutes later when hands landed on his shoulders, and Jessup spoke.

“Quirin, Quirin. Quirin, it wasn’t wrong to want your own way.”

Quirin held his breath, unbelieving. How could Jessup know so much?

“Your father cared for you. He wanted to make sure you could always call this house your home.”

How could Jessup know so little? Quirin was irredeemably greedy. He didn’t want just the house. He wanted the land, too. He wanted the buildings, the barns, the dovecote (even blasted by rocks as it was). He wanted the shovels and hoes, and the horses and chickens and cows, and even the people. He wanted everything his father had ever touched. He wanted everything his father had ever loved and breathed upon. He wanted his father.

Life went on.

Somehow, beyond all Quirin’s reckoning, beyond the reason of the universe and stars overhead, life went on. On and on it went. On and on, so on and so on, there it goes.

Speaking of the universe, Quirin had the weirdest vision when he traveled back to the castle: he was floating down the Milky Way, senseless in that current. Heading towards the end of the cosmos. Ester might as well have been an aether string, and he just a helpless wandering star caught in its folds.

The trip back was much longer than this first. He would not ride Ester hard and spent a full night at an inn. When they finally reached the edge of the caldera, the rueful castle had never before looked so like a chess piece dropped into a pool of milk. The Moonguard did not appear a shield anymore, but the swell of a typhoon. How long before it sank?

Just as he was angling Ester to head down Caldera Road, a voice called out to him. Adira came riding up from behind him, on her own nickering dun steed.

“Welcome back, Farm Boy. I always knew you’d come crawling back.”

A starburst awoke in Quirin, and he said, sharply, “I keep my oaths, Adira.”

The leather reins squeaked in her tightening fists as her smile dropped. “I was only joking.”

He urged Ester forward. Adira rode alongside him, and asked how he had been.

“I’m sore.” He told her about how he’d been living for the past month, working the crops daily. Now that his body was getting used to that type of work again, he’d be restarting knighthood.

“You lived like an animal,” Adira said. “Amazing.”

He laughed.

After they had reached the castle gates and dismounted in the courtyard, and their squire came running up to take their horses to the stable, Adira said, “I’ll go with you to report to King Edmund.”

Quirin slung his bag over his shoulder. “After I take my stuff to my room.”

“The porter will take it.”

He opened the castle door himself, passing the surprised porter without a word. The long trudge up the stairs was a new sort of pain, his legs no longer used to stairs, stairs, stairs, stairs. After getting into his room, he flopped on the bed for a few minutes to rest, before putting his luggage away. He took the last letter from Markus—the one he had found in the bedroom—and put it into the box on his dresser, where he kept all the others. He still hadn’t read it.

A passing servant told him King Edmund was in the Moonstone Chamber.

“Ah, Sir Quirin, I’m glad to see you made it back safely,” Edmund said, curiously lit up in that blue light. Hector stood by, his yellow eyes green as peridot. “Hector believes people have been trying to sneak into the kingdom, possibly to steal the Moonstone. Very foolish people. We have a lot of work to do. I have many ideas.”

Quirin bowed, and thought, If your stupid ideas hadn’t sent me away, my father might still be alive.

Life went on. On and on it went, so on and so on, there it goes.

How did they all continue to work? The Moonstone continued to chew them up and spit them out, as foolish, terrible, dazzling, and bright as the most despotic emperor. They continued to work under it, slaves to its whims.

Despite all their best efforts. Despite Adira’s insistence on tearing through the countryside, up and around and everywhere, within the kingdom and without, searching for what she would not say. Despite all the time Edmund spent in the Moonstone Chamber, trying to cajole, coddle, and coerce. Despite Hector roving the wilds, searching for enemies he was always hearing about but never finding. Despite all that, the rocks spread, the attacks coming more numerous and without warning.

As for Quirin, he wasn’t ashamed to say he barely put forth the effort. For everyone else’s sweat, it got them nowhere. Maybe his minimal effort was key. What had vowing fealty gotten him other than a disinheritance, a dead father, and being a tainted knight? There was nothing the Moonstone could take from him that wasn’t already lost.

A rumble shook the castle, more tremendous than the ones in the past. When Quirin went to his room, he found an enormous black rock that had torn through his bedroom. The desk had fallen over, and the box that had held Markus’ letters to him had tipped open. Most had already blown out the hole in the wall, lost to the wind. Including the letter he still hadn’t read.

Life went on. On and on it went. On and on, so on and so on, there it goes.

“It’s a fools errand, sister. I’ve spent years searching and haven’t found one clue it exists.”

“Hector, the scroll piece is a clue. If I could only find the others.”

“It’s a fraud. The Sun Drop is a myth.”

“If the scroll points to the Moonstone, and that’s real, then how is it a fraud? The Sun Drop must be real.”

“Tch. King Edmund agrees it must be a myth, too, so it would be pretty funny if he wanted you to go looking for it. Now, excuse me while I get back to work.”

“Did he send you out again?” Quirin asked. “Maybe Adira or I should go with you.”

“Why? Because you don’t trust me to do my job?”

“I’m not saying—”

“It’s why you’re always trying to keep me here, or go with me, isn’t that right? Because you don’t trust me.”

“That’s ridiculous. Wait, don’t walk away—”

“You are not my babysitter! I follow the king’s orders, no one else’s. Maybe you two should remember that doing anything less is treason!”

Life went on. On and on it went. So on and so on. There it goes.

Hector groaned and downed a glass of champagne in one swallow. “What are we doing here? This is for women.”

“Announcing an heir is a big deal,” Quirin replied, moving over on the bench to make room for Hector. The bench he sat on was one of those frilly, tiny ones, not exactly spacious. It wasn’t even comfortable. “I suppose you’d rather see the chaos of an heirless kingdom if, God forbid, the king and queen were to die.”

Hector grinned. The glitter from the festivities fell lights on his eggshell-like teeth. The chamber was filled with decadence and glory, sparkle and glam, the champagne pouring freely. Handmaidens squealed over tiny baby booties the queen had knitted in secret. In the middle of all this celebration, Edmund sat beside her, his smile secretive and indulgent.

“What’s so special about reproduction?”

Quirin almost spat his drink out at Hector’s question. Lovely. He managed to press his lips together, damming up that champagne before it overspilled his banks. Saving his shoes, the bench, and Hector besides.

“You mean besides the continuation of the species?” Quirin asked, after coughing. “People like babies.”

“Why? Have you ever actually seen one? All squished and unpleasant.”

“You’re thinking of newborns. They tend to improve with age.” Suddenly, Quirin felt soft, and missed his own parents. Any children he would have would never know them.

“You won’t ever see me having one of those things. I’d only screw it up, anyway.”

It took Quirin a hot minute to realize he should disagree with that statement. “Surely not.”

“A crap adult has got to make a crap child. And a crap child makes a crap grandchild.”

Quirin swirled his champagne, watching the bubbles ride the merry-go-round vortex. Dryly, he murmured, “Break the cycle, Hector. Break the cycle.”

“Something broken can’t make something whole.”

“You’re turning into a philosopher.”

Quirin knew Hector was only half joking. Half. Because he wouldn’t drop the subject.

Hector swung one leg irritably over the other. “A million babies have probably been born just today.”

“It’s what they represent.”

“Squalling and uncontrolled defecation?”

“New life. A continuing future. Prospects—”

“Blah blah blah. They looked like something I’d wipe off the bottom of my shoe.”

Sweat bloomed on Quirin’s forehead. “Hector, for the sake of your happiness, health, and very life, no matter what the baby looks like when it comes, the proper thing is to always say, ‘How cute.’”

Adira trudged over with sloping shoulders. They scooted to the far edges of the bench to make room, where she flopped between them, and downed a glass of champagne in one swallow.

“What are we doing here?” she asked. “This is for women.”

Hector smirked at Quirin over her head. “But aren’t you pleasantly surprised, sister? It’s not every day a future heir is announced.”

“Oh please. I knew this was coming.”

“You did?”

“Of course. She hasn’t drank even a single drop of wine in two months.”

Laughing at the quizzical look on Hector’s face, Quirin downed his champagne in one swallow, where tickles burst all along his esophagus, making him feel warm and cozy. Things would be all right, after all.

Now that his paternity had been awakened, Edmund became more impassioned, roaring at the world, his demands growing more demanding. He was mad at the Moonstone. And Quirin … Quirin was mad at Edmund. Hector was just plain ole mad, and Adira was madly in love with the Sun Drop.

“No, no, no, no, no,” Edmund told her, every time she brought it up. “Hector has wasted years on that thing. We have no more time.”

“The Moonstone seeks balance, Your Majesty. If it’s the only way—”

“I refuse to believe that! I refuse to believe this is the sort of world my child will be born into.”

“Maybe if we bring in outside experts. They say the Keeper of the Spire—”

“Absolutely not! I won’t hear another word of it!”

Adira left with a closed look on her face Quirin knew the meaning of, but would do nothing to stop her. What did he care if she spent all her time pouring over suspicious books in the library, no matter what Edmund said?

Hector wasn’t so tolerant.

“I would be very careful, sister,” he whispered to her. “You look more and more everyday like a treasonous rat trying to flee a sinking ship.”

It would be nice if he was whispering because it was the library, but then Hector always turned on Quirin, snarling, “Isn’t it your job to keep us in line, babysitter?”

“Your definition of treason is too broad.”

“Ha! You’re both playing with fire.”

Hector was the most loyal person Quirin had ever known, but even his face fell with Edmund ordered, for the first time ever, they were to allow outside (but not foreign) people access to the Moonstone.

“Is that safe?” Hector rasped, scratching his fingers through his goatee.

“What’s safer, Hector? Huh?” Edmund asked.

The Brotherhood shared a shrug as one, and Quirin went from that meeting, cursing it as the worst idea Edmund had ever had. If only Sir Abel was nearby to talk to, but the regular knights had been sent scouting and helping the populace. It didn’t matter. Even if Sir Abel had been here, he would have agreed Edmund’s idea was madness, but would have only said, “Eh … but what can you do?”

The answer was: nothing. Quirin was going to do nothing, and Quirin let Hector handle it. Even though Hector was the last person that should be doing that.

First came the alchemists. They came with scrolls and apparatus, and chemicals of all sorts. Hector threw them—and their scrolls, apparatus, and chemicals—out of the chamber, one by one.

“What did this one do?” Quirin asked, after the last of them had been chased out with a yellow glare.

“I didn’t like the clinical look in his eye.”

“Hmm.” Edmund rubbed his chin when they told him. “Perhaps where science has failed, magic will answer. Bring in the magicians.”

They brought in magicians of all sorts. They came with crystals, wands, and potions that didn’t look too far off from what the alchemists had brought. Hector chased them out, one by one. His shouting could have brought the cattle home.

“What happened?” Quirin asked, amused.

“Was going to put a potion on the opal.”

“Hmph,” Edmund said. “Then where science and magic has failed, maybe religion will answer. Bring in the priests.”

In came the priests, and out went the priests, with Hector’s boot to the backside.

“Now what?” Quirin asked, hiding a smirk as Edmund glowered.

“He was going to sprinkle holy water.”

Edmund rubbed his eyes. “I didn’t want to have to do this, but bring in the Acolytes.”

Now Quirin wanted to handle it. “But Your Majesty—”

“Just do it, Quirin. Don’t question me.”

The Moonstone Acolytes were as strange as any Dark Kingdomer could be. They worshiped the Moonstone, clinging to a dead, ancient mythology, and every year begged entry to the chamber so they might properly worship (which probably involved a pig sacrifice, Quirin assumed). It seemed this was to be the Acolytes lucky year, now that their god was trying to kill everyone.

“Only one is allowed,” Quirin insisted.

They sent their high priestess, a tiny, frail old woman who wore voluminous robes and a black opal necklace that hung to her knees. She gave Quirin a smile as soft as embroidery, but the look in her eye was as bright as peppermint candy. Her hand, laying against his arm as he led her, was flecked greenly, as if with ink. Could this be an artifact of her strange and devilish acts? She seemed so sweet.

“How are you, ma’am?”

“I got pep in my step and a twinkle in my eye!” Indeed, she clicked her heels together as she went past Hector into the chamber. It was too bad she was batty as all get-out: she was a doll, and, surely, not even Hector could get angry with her.

Hector slashed his cape as he followed her in.

It didn’t take long for the screaming to start.

When Quirin went running in, it wasn’t to Hector’s screams, but the priestess’. It was she who sang those blood-curdling shrieks, with bright red blood, illuminated by the Moonstone, running down her face, almost as bloody bright as those screams. Almost as bloody bright as her clawing at Hector’s forearms as he held her dangling over the pit.

Quirin jerked to a stop a few meters from them when Hector lifted the woman higher. “Hector! What are you doing?”

“Help me!” the priestess screamed. “Help me, help me!”

Hector laughed. “Why don’t you pray to your god, lady?”

“Let her down!” Quirin roared.

“She tried to touch it!”

“I don’t care. Let her down.”

Hector’s grip on the woman’s robes tightened, his fists trembling. He turned his face towards Quirin, and that neverending expression of internal conflict in his eyes morphed into a look of clarity.

He let go.

Quirin sprang forward, although—although he knew it would be too late for him, and that sound she made as she fell would forever haunt him.

A shape shot out of the darkness behind Hector. It was Adira, flying at the woman with outstretched hands. She caught the priestess with one hand, and scrabbled at the ledge with the other as she slid over the side. Perhaps she would have fallen, if Quirin hadn’t landed on his stomach and grabbed her by the legs. They all slammed to a stop, dangling but stopped.

Clap clap clap.

Hector stood above them, clapping his hands. Once. Twice. Thrice. His smirk was to the side, showing one white, smooth tooth. “I can always count on you two to make the catch, can’t I?”

He walked towards the exit.

Teeth straining, Quirin pulled Adira and the high priestess up, grabbing the back of Adira’s tunic and hefting up, one handful at a time.

“I’m going to kill that rat,” Adira hissed. She arched her back. “Ahh! I felt your fingers!”

“Now’s not the time,” Quirin grunted.

One sharp tug—what had Quirin’s poor muscles ever done to deserve this?—and both women slid onto the walkway. Even Adira seemed dazed. The priestess spat ear-tingling curses, almost the most shocking thing to have happened all day.

After making sure they were both all right, Quirin arose.

Adira stared at him from her hands and knees. “Don’t. Leave it to Edmund.”

This was already Edmund’s failure.

Quirin stalked down the walkway. When he reached the exit, he found Hector still in the outer chamber, meandering towards the door with the lazy aimlessness of a man at harmony with the universe. As if he hadn’t almost killed a defenseless old woman and Adira.

“Hector!” Quirin screamed.

Hector pivoted on his heels. Tilting his head to the side, like the uncanny gesture of a puppet on strings, he smiled loosely. “You should have seen the looks on your faces.”

Quirin smacked the floor so hard his feet felt like pins-and-needles. He stopped a few feet away. A bubble swelled inside him, pressing outward in a painful expansion. It felt like his head was going to blow off. “You’ve gone too far.”

“I knew Adira was there. You know how sneaky she is.”

“I don’t care if you hung that woman over a net.”

Hector closed the gap between them, until his fevered breath squalled all across Quirin’s face. “What are you going to do about it? You’re not my babysitter.”

“You need help.”

Hector’s lips went white.

A concussive blast blew out Quirin’s brain. The world flashed black and white, pressure exploded out the sides of his head, and he nearly fell, all because he hadn’t expected it. As the shock eased out, the pain in his mouth eased in. He spat. Blood spattered the floor.

Hector hadn’t moved, still only a foot away from where Quirin leaned. He pushed his foot forward, dipped the toe of his boot into the blood splatter, and pulled back. Red streaked across the floor. “Huh. You took that better than I expected.”

Quirin slowly raised himself upright.

Adira dashed between them, raising her hands up, her breath quick and tinny. “Boys, boys, don’t be foolish. Boys—”

Quirin grabbed her shoulder. She gasped, and he pushed her out of the way, only to meet Hector’s boot to the ribs. Except he was expecting it this time, and caught Hector’s leg around the thigh. He lifted and wrenched Hector’s leg around with a snap of his wrists. Hector spun and tried to land on his other leg, bounced off it once. Before he could land on both feet, Quirin grabbed his cloak and flung him around. There was no hope for Hector. He went flying and slammed against the floor, landing on his stomach.

“Now that’s enough!” Adira cried.

Hector pulled himself onto his hands and knees, sat back against his heels, threw his head back, and laughed as though the very Devil was in him. “I’ve really got you angry. Normally you’re so mild-mannered. It’s not hard to imagine you grew up picking pea pods like a dainty milkmaid.”

He sprang to his feet and turned around, a knife glinting hard light between his fingers.

Quirin raised his palm. There was no way Hector was this crazy. “Put it down.”

Hector was just that crazy.

Adira met him only feet from Quirin in a tackle that sent them both sprawling to the ground. The knife went skittering across the floor. Hector pressed his foot against Adira’s stomach and kicked her off him. They all three tracked where the knife flew, watching as it slid. It did not stop until it came to rest against King Edmund’s boot.

They froze, brought to their senses.

Edmund bent to pick up the knife, and stared at it, seemingly inspecting its blade, turning it this way and that, the firelight playing with its edges. When Edmund spoke, it was almost a whisper. In the silence of the room, he might as well have roared.

“I will see you all in my throne room in one hour.” His huge shape disappeared in the dark, before the door screeched shut.

Before they had time to pick themselves off the floor, a squeaking laugh from the Moonstone Chamber brought their attentions around.

The high priestess stood in the doorway, clutching her opal necklace, with a birthday-cake smile. “And they say I’m crazy!”

Humiliation wasn’t a weighty enough word to encompass what Quirin was feeling, but it was the only emotion he could name. Everything else was beyond his comprehension and so much worse.

They three assembled before King Edmund’s throne, like prisoners ready for the noose. Edmund paced from one end of the dais to the next, muttering and rubbing his fingers together. His face was as rigid as the statues gracing the halls.

The only grace seemed to be that Edmund was trying to keep it hush-hush. Edmund had made Adira show the priestess out, and told Hector and Quirin to make themselves decent. They had both slunked off to their rooms, and Hector came back a little too decent (his hair was never that orderly). But Quirin commiserated. They had never messed up this badly before.

Edmund began speaking, in the most restrained voice Quirin had ever heard from him. “I considered calling an assembly of every last person in the castle, from the butler to the stable boy, just so they would know what has become of the great Brotherhood. Centuries of tradition and honor, brawling like common drunkards in the very halls of the Moonstone. But then the queen would find out, and am I to worry her, in her condition?” The restraint in his voice shattered, and he raised it into a deafening shout. “If she knew how shamefully you have acted today!”

He paced back and forth. “Sir Hector, step forward.”

Hector went into a deep bow.

“Adira tells me you struck first. And that you threatened the life of the acolyte. Is this true?”

“Yes, Your Majesty. She was trying to touch—”

“I would think a man of your talents would be able to handle a ninety-year-old woman better than that.”

Hector’s hunched shoulders rose and fell.

“I have always tolerated your lack of professionalism, because you’re very good. But your behavior has been out of control lately. I blame myself.”

Quirin snapped up his eyes in hope. Did King Edmund finally realize what Hector needed?

Edmund continued, his eyes glowing with jealousy. “I have allowed you to get too close to the Moonstone, that’s what. You’ve become possessive over it. Your energy needs to be redirected. So you will leave.”

Quirin stared. It wasn’t possible that Edmund, their good king, could be so stupid and cruel.

The fur that lay across the back of Hector’s neck trembled.

“I’m not banishing you, but I’m sending you on patrol.” Edmund waved his hand. “Go. Find those enemies you claim are always sneaking in but have yet to produce. Go. Do your duty, as I know you will. Do not come back until I call for you. If you do, I will banish you. You are dismissed.”

Hector practically pressed his forehead against the floor, and left, his eyes distant and cheeks flushed. Quirin and Adira shared a look, before redirecting their attention back to Edmund.

“Sir Quirin.”

Inhaling deeply, Quirin stepped forward and bowed.

“That look on your face,” Edmund said. “Do you disapprove of my sending him away?”

“Your Majesty, I don’t think that is the answer.”

“Oh really? And is he your knight or mine?”

“You are free to do with him as you wish, of course—”

“But you don’t approve. You haven’t approved for a while. Did you think I wouldn’t notice?” Edmund came down from the dais to stand in front of Quirin. “If he hasn’t been up to snuff, you haven’t been doing anything about that.”

“I don’t have control over him. I never have.”

“Figure it out! I’ve been severely disappointed in your performance lately. You’ve haven’t been taking your responsibilities seriously, ever since you came back from your father’s funeral.”

Quirin clamped his teeth, defenseless.

“You think you’re the only person to have ever had your parents die on you? Half the people in this castle have had that happen, and it didn’t stop them from working.” Edmund went back to his throne. In the silence of the room, his footsteps echoed off the towering ceilings. “You’re dismissed.”

Numbly, Quirin bowed. He hadn’t been expecting that. He hadn’t been expecting that.

Keeping his eyes forward and blank, seeing through Adira, who stood with a curious sweep in her mouth, Quirin left the room. After the door shut behind him and he stood alone in the hallway, he wondered. What should he do now? (He hadn’t been expecting that.) There had to be some work to do. Edmund made it very clear he had to do more, that Quirin couldn’t stop working. That if he would only work harder, things would get better.

The strangest feeling washed over him, at first a bare trickle, but it grew louder and faster and longer until it flooded all through him. All his pieces and parts were washed away, pulled out of him in an agonizing drain. A strong, almost overwhelming urge to run. He had run away before, when he was sixteen, but that had been a choice, a matter of intellect and consideration. This was visceral.

In a brisk, almost uncontrolled pace, Quirin went further up the castle, winding round the winding staircases until he was nearing dizzy. Up and up he went, never to stop, the stairs disappearing under his bounding feet, until he ran out of staircases. He burst out onto the tallest balcony in the castle. The rush of cool air blasted him in the face. He could breathe freely. He sucked it in, easing his throbbing heart, and leaned into the balustrade. Curiously, he felt as if the balcony evaporated under his feet, and he was suspended on a higher plane, held aloft by some invisible cord that could unravel at any moment.

“Quirin, are you okay?”

Adira was breathless behind him. She must have ran to catch up.

Still somewhere between the moon and the mountain spires, Quirin said, “I have to apologize. I touched you.”

“You were trying to save—”

“I pushed you.”

She stepped beside him, planting her elbows into the banister. For a moment, she looked across the great plain beneath them. “It wasn’t like you.”

As a form of accepting his apology, even so wavering, it was a good one. But was it true? He had allowed frustration to grab a hold of him and wrench him around, like a furious pit bull to a rabbit. He had become the pit bull himself, and wrenched everyone else around, too.

The ravens that always flew over the castle, but never landed, circled above. Black spots streaked against the darker sky, like leaves fallen into a whirlpool. One separated from the rest and swooped down, landing on the banister a few feet from them. Its eyes glittered obsidian.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Adira asked.

What? She put her hand to his elbow. After how he had had been overlooking her, even tossing her to the side, why would she initiate contact with him? He did not respond to her touch.

She flapped her hand at the raven. The raven hopped backwards, but did not leave. “He was out of line.”

“I’ve been distracted. I haven’t been serious enough.”

“You make the statues look like a clown show.”

“If I told you the half that goes on in my head …” Then his ears knocked on his brain, saying Hey, what’d she call you?

She narrowed her eyes as he turned his head to smirk at her. “What?”

“You called me by my name.”

Making a face, she shooed the raven away. “No. I called you Beer Stein.”

“It sounded nothing like that.”

“Queer Gin, then.”

“If I was an alcoholic, maybe that would make sense.”

“It doesn’t have to.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter. Because that wasn’t what you called me.”

Adira puffed her cheeks, defeated.

The balustrade was more than earning its keep today. Quirin felt earthbound again, and he pushed his knee through the balusters, followed by the rest of his leg, so the whole hung over the expanse. What a curious weightlessness, just tissue paper on the wind. And underneath that crust of earth way, way down below, lay a field of lava. If something fell from this height, it must burst through the crust and incinerate in fire and ash. Quirin almost understood his father’s capacity for self-destruction.

Adira spoke again, but her voice was timid. More vulnerable than he had ever heard it before. “Something’s happening. Something bad. Something we’ve never dealt with before. I’m … I’m scared.”

He was scared to. But it was the last thing he could admit to. He’d been showing his feelings too much lately, and maybe that was why everything was falling apart. King Edmund must have known he was being arbitrarily blamed for Markus’ death, otherwise he wouldn’t have brought it up like that. And was it a wonder Hector couldn’t respect Quirin, when he had shown himself to be capricious and resenting? What was best was to remain calm. That’s what he’d been trained to do. Remaining calm, no matter what, is the best, after all.

Quirin pulled his leg back so he could lean over the balustrade, stretching himself closer to the view. Miles and miles of it, laying out there.

“It’s going to be okay, Adira. We won’t fail. We can’t fail.”

Just look at that view! The land went on and on, past the caldera black-stain, past the rocks surrounding them like attacking chess pieces, past the nameless edges of their kingdom. On and on, past the purple rolling mountains that hulked in the distance. Something lay out there. Past all the invisible towns and river threads and perhaps even vast oceans. Past all that, there lay a spot of sunlight. There was a place where the sun still shone.

He could almost see it.

Chapter Text

The ravens came to roost at the fall of their kingdom. Their kingdom which fell, over and over again, in a hundred different ways, in a hundred different moments.

It fell when Edmund did not recall Hector, leaving the man to the wild. Edmund was a good, kind king, who relied upon his knights and said they were his friends. But the kingdom fell as Hector walked away.

It fell when Edmund ordered Adira’s silence. Her dream was the Sun Drop, but he told her, over and again, they didn’t have the time to chase after dreams. Even Quirin lost his patience with her. He had toyed with disobedience and didn’t want her to reap the same rewards. But the kingdom died as Adira kept her silence.

It fell as Quirin worked harder than ever, standing alongside Edmund as he spent more and more time with the Moonstone, seemingly become madder and madder in return. There were many questions that ran through Quirin’s mind, but he did everything asked of him, no matter how wise or foolish it seemed. The kingdom died anyway, dying in Quirin’s obedience.

The Moonstone cared nothing for the attention and curses it gathered. It kept erratic, and the country bled its people. Even the regular knights were dismissed as all focus went towards survival; they trickled away. Even Sir Abel. There was birth and death, and then Edmund raised his hand against that which had once saved them. It was the last gasp of their kingdom. For the last time, the kingdom fell.

By the time the Brotherhood left the castle, the ravens came to roost on every balcony and rooftop, every balustrade and window ledge, their black hulking forms deep, silent, and watching. There was no one to chase them away anymore. Hector, Adira, and Quirin waved at the good, mad, lonely king, and turned towards their stark futures.

At the crossroads, they decided to each patrol the edges of the kingdom. Hector would go west, using the Great Tree as his base of operations. Adira would go east, although she had no particular tie to that direction. Quirin would go south, where the farmlands lay.

“We should keep it safe,” Adira said, removing the scroll piece from her pack.

“Burn it,” Hector growled. At the expression on Adira’s face, even he cowed. “It’s just a fraud anyway. I guess it won’t do any harm to keep it.”

“I’m entrusting this to you.” Adira pushed it into Quirin’s hands, and by that, he knew she had no intentions of sticking to the eastern patrol.

They spent one last companionable night gathered around the campfire, just like old times, their arguments forgotten. But their camaraderie could not be sustained in the face of this calamity, and they separated in the morning.

Quirin turned towards home. As he traveled, he marked his days by the black rocks. The whole country was infested with them, in numbers that had once been confined to the caldera. When Quirin crested that last hill to see his valley below, it was to look upon empty, shattered fields and an abandoned village.

Jessup had left a letter on the desk in Quirin’s bedroom. He was taking his small family to live with Flora’s parents, who farmed potatoes on a speck of an island half a world away.

“The climate will be different, but we will do,” he had written. “You are welcome to join us.”

All around the house stood, half destroyed by rocks, and yet Quirin knew he would never see his cousin again. He could never leave this land. At least, not yet. He must keep his feet to the same earth that embraced the bodies of his father and mother.

The farmlands had been ransacked by refugees, but there was still food a plenty for one man who knew where to look. He wandered the border but saw almost no one; the few he did see were always travelers at a distance, their fire bright sparks on the flint of the night. He kept away, and as time went on, those distant sparks fizzled out altogether, and there was nothing out there.

Probably a week went by before he realized he had crossed the border completely and was now wandering the foreign wilds. He had been roving further and further south, almost as if he was being pushed towards the places he didn’t know. Quirin tried to turn around, but somehow always found himself further away than ever, putting the border river further behind him instead of ahead. Finally, he recognized it as a repulsion. It was the black rocks. They pushed him away just like one north pole pushes another. He saw now: his homeland had rejected him.

But the hills of this unknown wild were kind. The stars were soft in the plum purple of night, and the brooks were warm to bathe in. Game was abundant, and the earth was rich and generous. The earth was Quirin’s friend. He knew how to live off it. When he came across a village, no matter how small, he skirted it. Even the lone cabins in the woods. His only companion was his horse, Ester.

Ester received all his attention. There never was a horse on the road so well-fed, filled with fruit from trees if even the grass didn’t seem tender enough for her cast-iron belly. There was no brier, no matter how tiny, that hitched a ride on her tail for long, and it was impossible for saddle-sore to exist. She was soothed with Quirin’s croons and warmed with even his blanket on cold nights. Once, she went to a town, but only for a farrier.

“She’s in good shape,” the farrier had said, and that was one source of pride for Quirin. He ran his hoof pick against her three times a day, removing the pebbliest of pebbles. He could at least do right by Ester.

One afternoon, he went digging through his pack for the hoof pick and found it missing. He tore that pack apart, but the thing must have slipped out along the road.

“What am I going to do, Ester?” he asked her, patting her on the nose. Ah, he had his knife. He took it out and looked, and yes, if he was careful, very careful, he could use this for now. The blade would dull, but there was no help for it.

Ever so carefully, Quirin held her hoof and dug out any dirt and stones. He was halfway through when an idea crept in on him. A thought that came without grandiosity or drama, as reasonable as deciding to have radishes for dinner. A thought, very logically, about the knife. Quirin had assumed such thoughts only came after tears and wrenching of the soul, not this unemotional, almost mathematical, consideration.

He put the knife away and sat on a log, waiting for nightfall.

They came to a place of thickets. It was one of those remarkable, rare places, like the Great Tree or the Forest of No Return. Hundreds of acres of angry bramble thickets, some taller than a man, and hardened into twists of countless sharps and needles without even the grace of fruit to soften them. All thick as a honeyed sea, only broken up by the occasional oak tree, wide as the eye could go. A muddy path sneaked narrowly in the midst of them. There was no telling what was on the other side, but there was nothing for Quirin on this end.

Ester refused to ride in, huffing and puffing her displeasure, sidestepping in tight circles, stamping no-no-no . Quirin had to get down and lead her in by the reins. She pressed her muzzle against the back of his neck, and blew her breath into his ears.

“Will you stop?” he grumbled. But this was her punishment for him.

He couldn’t exactly blame her. The thicket patch was a cage around them, a labyrinth that undoubtedly hid a monster in the middle. Yellowhammer buntings cheered from the thorns, little bits of dazzling and darting.

“See, it’s not so bad,” he cooed at Ester.

She flattened her ears, then perked them as the rush of water hit their ears. She nudged him in the back of the neck as they hurried along until the patch opened up into a wide place, where a stream cut through.

While Ester drank, Quirin knelt beside the stream and filled his canteen. The stream was swift, especially for one so small, rumbling over speckled rocks and gurgling in the eddies. It was attractively deep too, and broad enough to resist being crossed. If he followed it further along, hopefully it would lead to a proper river that had fish for eating. Tiny minnows were the only inhabitants of this stream, hardly longer than the length of his pinkie.

Quirin dreamed of fishing. His stomach said, “Grrrowralph! ” If he caught a proper fish, and found some herbs, and built a nice fire! Sear it on the outside and leave tender on the inside. Ah, it’d had been an age since he’d had a fish like that. If only he had butter! When was the last time he had butter anyway?

So caught up in his stomach-dreams, he didn’t realize people had come until they were almost upon him.

Quirin lurched to his feet and stood frozen as he heard laughter. There was the unmistakable sound of people tromping through mud, and the splash of wheels turning and wood creaking as wagons rose and fell into the road. Squish-squash of horse hooves in the mud, and mild chatter getting louder. They were just around the corner, probably about to come out of the path any second. A child shouted at another, and an old man groaned. Quirin’s heart thumped wildly. There was no where to go with brambles on every side, and a stream too deep to cross, which probably also hid some rock to make Ester fall if they tried it. Even if he went back down the path, they would only see him, they were that close.

“Just pass on,” he whispered, as the travelers crested the hill and stormed into his open place.

It was dozens of people, mostly on foot, leading horses that pulled carts full of supplies. The grizzled man who walked in front paused when he saw Quirin, his light blue eyes piercing. Quirin dropped his away. This couldn’t be any worse. Their clothes told their story, even caked in pounds of mud: they were citizens of the Dark Kingdom. Cast off from their homeland, like him, traveling for a place of rest.

But Dark Kingdomers were wise people, thank goodness. When they spotted him, they hushed. He kept his eyes adverted but could only imagine: their drawn faces and weathered cheeks—how those faces must have turned towards scowls. Hatred must fill them. But they understood, too. They passed on silently. As the number of feet applying divots to the mud lessened, he breathed easier.

Oh, Moonstone! A pair of black boots separated from the pack. They dragged closer and closer (Quirin didn’t dare raise his eyes), dragging in such a manner as if it were painful for the person to walk. But still, they persisted, and did not stop until they were in front of him, and then covered by a heavy linen skirt. She had tried to protect it from the road, but the bottom of the skirt was drenched in mud and detritus.

She spoke with the sandpaper voice of the elderly, but buttermilk gently. “Knight, where are you going?”

He did not answer.

Downy fingers slipped underneath his palm, her thumb landing over the tattoo he’d come to despise. His fingers spasmed once in return, then lay loose and still. Her hand felt as soft and loving as a turtledove.

“Come with us.”

She said he was traveling with them, and that they would take care of him. “We are going to Porthaven,” she said every morning, her eyes gentle like the lace of lilacs. “We are going all the way. All of us are going all the way.”

The road to Porthaven was a long, slow one, wriggling like a snake seeking a shadowed place from the sun. He would be with them many days. Even though these were his people, he kept himself apart, remaining to the shadows. Quirin considered just walking away one night, while they gathered around fires and talked of nothing of consequence (they did not talk of where they had come from nor where they were going). But he remembered what the old lilac-eyed woman told him every morning.

“We are going to Porthaven. We are going all the way. All of us are going all the way.”

She had arthritis in her knees and gout in her left foot, so he put her on Ester’s back before they traveled. She always seemed pleased when he lifted her up, clinging to his forearms and lifting her face to the sky like a child.

Every step he made repeated her mantra.

“ We. Are. Going. To. Porthaven ,” his feet oathed.

“ All. Of. Us. Are. Going. All. The. Way ,” Ester clip-clopped.

All of us. All the way.

He hunted rabbits and she foraged root vegetables, and they combined their offerings into meals that sustained them. There weren’t tents enough to shelter them all, so at night, he helped her to the large tent where the elderly and children slept, and retreated to the far end of the encampment with Ester, to bundle himself into a bedroll that was becoming less able to keep the cold away. One frost-bitten night, some brave soul came to where he lay and whispered he was welcome around the fire. Quirin lay quietly, as though asleep, until they went away.

The next day, they did it all over again.

“All of us are going all the way,” was the promise Lilac Lace-Eyes told him. But he didn’t think it was true.

Dawn was time for reflection. Quirin awoke before anyone else and waited in the gloom for the sun to rise up and enlighten the world. It was his farm boy habit he hadn’t been able to shake. Not even knighthood had taken it from him. So dawn was the time to think about the past, about what had happened yesterday, last week, last month, last year, last decade, last last last until there were no more lasts. When Quirin ran out of lasts, he thought he should start thinking about the nexts—but next never seemed to appear. There was only last.

Even the countryside seemed to be last, never changing no matter how many miles they put behind them. It was a humdrum place. It was ever-present mud, and the occasional rain showers. It was humdrum trees and humdrum hills that tiptoed by as they traveled this humdrum road, and there would only be humdrum hills to come. Porthaven was by the sea, and doubtless, it would be humdrum too.

Yesterday hadn’t been so humdrum though. The group came across a dead man lying near the road. It wasn’t clear what he had died from, but he had died recently and alone. Quirin helped to dig the grave, and as he had filled it in, tossing dirt over that form that would never move again, he realized he didn’t feel sorry for the man at all. Hopefully, the man’s death had been quick and painless. But for that soul that had found peace, Quirin could not be sorry.

Dawn burned away, and the rest of the travelers roused and began breaking camp. Supplies were wrapped and tied down, breakfasts cooked, and children sent to the nearby stream to fill water casks. Quirin packed his few little things and went for a walk down the stream himself. He followed the winding banks until the camp sounds were drowned out by water chugging and churning, bubbling. Last night, it’d been too dark to see how clean this stream was, but look at it now! Its surface was glass, invitingly clear, making the rocks and pebbles below a revelation, all of them clean like marbles. He knelt and laid his one good towel over his knee, and dipped his hand in to wash his face.

He discovered two things about the stream. One, it was deeper than it looked, falling suddenly under his fingers so that he submerged his entire forearm before he touched bottom. Two, the water was freezing. When he splashed it on his face, it was followed by a gasp, and the wind blowing over his frosty eyelashes was another gasp. It was painfully cold. But his blood stirred deep in the places it had stagnated. It was such a relief to feel life in him again, even if it hurt.

Dropping his other arm against the river bottom, Quirin leaned over and plunged his entire face in. The shock was tremendous—he almost pulled out straightaway, but he forced himself to stay. How delicious was the rush of water past his nose and bubbling in his ears—how deliciously, deliciously cold it was! His face froze and his lungs burned, but how relieving it was.

When he couldn’t hold his breath anymore, he came up gasping. Lilac Lace-Eyes stood next to him, the dirt-soaked fringe of her skirt brushing his knuckles as he leaned back. Her gnarled fingers clamped around his towel. He stared at her from his knees, and she cupped a hand around the back of his head while using the other to pat the towel against his face. Why did he let her? He didn’t know, except it felt like a memory.

“I don’t much like your method for washing your face,” she murmured.

“It’s not really your business—”

She laughed. “Tut, tut, you’re bad at playing rude, you know that?” Then she placed a palm against his cheek, soft as violet leaves.

It was as though he was under the water again. He couldn’t hold his breath anymore. He’d been holding it for months, but here was his breaking point, right now, where he must either breathe or perish. He breathed.

Gently, she brought his face against her legs as he sobbed into her skirt, crushing the stark, homely linen in his fists. Her fingers ran through his hair, grown unreasonably long in his neglect. It was the best comfort he’d had since his mother had died.

“Why are you doing this?” he gasped. “I don’t even know you.”

She sloughed the water off his hair in practiced, vigorous pats. “I had a son,” she said, quietly. “He did something stupid.”

He trembled, aching oldly. “My father.”

“Then you know not to do that. You know how it feels.”

“I don’t have anyone.”

She hummed in her throat. “Am I to really believe that?”

“I didn’t treat them right.”

“Oh?”

“I was angry at one for something he couldn’t control. I disregarded another. I fought another when he was weak and sick and needed my help, not my anger.”

“I see. It must have been difficult to have been surrounded by such paragons of virtue and wisdom.”

Caught off guard by that, he answered, “No.”

“My, my. So, you knights are only human?” Spreading the towel over the entirety of his head, she scrubbed. “It seems bad now, but there will be more to come. You will have so much. It’s written all over you.”

He felt like freshly pressed paper. He wasn’t so ignorant to think there couldn’t be a glimmer in tomorrow, but she didn’t understand.

“No one will want me,” he moaned. “When they find out how I failed—”

“No one failed.”

“I didn’t try hard enough.”

“I think you tried as hard as you could, no matter what you think of it. I think everyone tried as hard as they could. No one failed. It was just that our time in the sun came to an end.”

There was comfort in her story, but that’s all it was: a nice story. His failure couldn’t be erased so easily. It was a mark that would be carried on him, just like the one on his hand, forever.

But maybe if he found a place to land, he could carry it.

Lilac Lace-Eyes had said they would take care of him, and she gave it her best. Everyday he continued to get up, put her on Ester, and trudge forward on that muddy trail towards the sea. It was her encouragement that kept him going, but in the end, she only halfway kept her promise. Halfway to Porthaven, they met common highwaymen on the road, brandishing knives like scimitars. Quirin rose up, and it was he that took them the rest of the way.

They parted in Porthaven. Lilac Lace-Eyes was going to make her new start at an inn by the seaside. She’d been offered a job doing laundry.

“Are you sure?” Quirin asked. “I was certain you were going to take a ship to Corona.”

“To live with that granddaughter of mine? I don’t have it in me to take the trip. Besides, I couldn’t handle smelling all those peculiar things she cooks up in that strange kitchen of her. No, I’ll stay here.” She stood on the top step of the stoop, smiling around her at the humble inn on the rocks, and the sky dotted with sea gulls calling. “Being a laundress may be quaint work, but I can watch and smell the sea.”

To Quirin, it smelled more like fish than sea, but if this was where she wanted to stay, he’d leave her to it. For him, he knew nothing of the ocean, and could not stay here.

She put out her hand. When he laid his out, she pressed gold coins into his palm.

“I can’t—”

“It’s for your service.” Then she pressed her lips to his cheek, and said, “Some of the group want to go on to Tremisses and will need a protector. Go with God, Knight.”

If Quirin could serve his people one last time, by the small measure of strength granted to him, he would do it. So for months, that’s what he did: he traveled with various groups as they went on, brushing off his armor and riding tall, to chase off would-be thieves. But after several months, the trail of Dark Kingdom refugees needing protection dried up, having reached their destinations.

“Now what?” Quirin asked Ester.

Well, it was a way to make a living, so he turned it into a real job. He continued protecting travelers, making real money this time. Sometimes, he made even realer money from wealthy aristocrats. But that work become dull, and when an important judge from Equis said he knew of a bounty hunter that needed an associate, Quirin tried that. But he abandoned it quickly since the work lacked nobility.

“Now what?” he grumbled.

This was not the life for him. Ultimately, he was a man who needed roots, and the urge had been building for the need to settle. What was even worse: he noticed women more. Not in the same way as before, in the simple admiration of a pretty face, but in the longing for their company and gentleness. No matter how matronly or young the woman, how jolly or surly, how foolish or wise, how tender seemed her wrists. Uuugh, it was so embarrassing. (And something Hector must never know!) But if he had such a pair of wrists in his life, how fervently he would protect them! He felt strangely foreign in his masculinity. For the first time since the Dark Kingdom, he felt how alone he was.

The trip to the Great Tree was long, but even after all this time, Hector was still in the deep. The tree was creepier than ever, and Hector more anti-social than ever. He rejected any offer of comradeship, and when Quirin asked if he didn’t yearn for a home, Hector rolled his eyes.

“You’ve gotten so weird!” He swung his hair over his shoulder. “How does that help us keep the Moonstone secret?”

Sometime later, outside Vardaros, Quirin bumped into Adira. The fact they were both far, far away from the places they had promised to be went unspoken. She asked if he still had the scroll.

“I’m getting close to finding another piece, I know it,” she said.

“And what then?”

For a second, she looked non-plussed, before shrugging in that manner of hers. “I’ll figure it out. There’s probably more than two pieces to find. And the Sun Drop.”

They sat around her campfire, where she filled his stomach with a spread of olives, cheeses, and focaccia. Where did she get focaccia, as authentic as any he’d ever eaten in Italy?

“I saw Hector, not too long ago,” he said.

“How is our psychopath?”

“Smells more and more like a greased-up bear that fell into a fire pit.”

She grinned. “You mean like wood chips?”

“More like he just came out of a long hibernation and set himself on fire.”

Adira laughed. “Last time I saw him, he threw rocks at me. Like an infant. So, I beaned him with a walnut right in the middle of the forehead.” She dropped her voice into a whisper. “It’ll leave a maaarrrk.”

Quirin looked at her stuff, limited to a bedroll, a few weapons, and whatever she kept in that pack of hers. In other words, her stuff looked like his stuff. Barebones and without foundation. But she was thriving.

“Do you not tire of this kind of life?” he asked.

Shoving a bit of Brie on a stick to toast over the fire, she sighed. “It’s pure freedom.”

“I don’t know.” Quirin crossed his arms and settled back into the log he was leaning against. “Maybe I need more stimulation.”

“When was the last time you did something fun?”

Quirin threw an olive pit into the fire.

“You’ve always taken yourself too seriously. Do something fun. Go somewhere fun. Vardaros is fun.”

“Eeeh.”

“Then go ice-fishing in Galcrest. You like fishing.”

“Freezing my behind off is not fun, Adira.”

“So go somewhere warm. Corona’s king is returning from his honeymoon, and those people don’t look for excuses to party. There will be festivals for an entire week! And with all that ocean, think of the fish!”

Quirin had heard of Corona’s festivals but had never been to one. The people he had met were warm and friendly, if not a bit featherbrained, but he could handle that. Yeah, he needed some lightening up. A silly festival wouldn’t solve his issues, but it would surely lift his spirits. To Corona, he would go.

It took approximately fifteen minutes for Quirin to get into trouble after crossing the border into Corona. There he was, obliviously enjoying the smell of mossy heather on the breeze, when a scream shattered the peace. It was followed by shouts, clamorous male sounds like “Yah!”, and the shrieks of horses.

“Oh, by the moon, can’t I ever catch a break?” he muttered.

Ester needed no urging to break into a gallop, the eager warhorse she was, turning her head to look at Quirin with warm, smirking eyes.

“I thought you wanted to retire?” he said, but she only nickered and put on the speed.

They burst into a load of trouble at the bottom of a hill. A covered carriage—very fancy—was parked lopsided in the middle of the road, while a team of bandits ran around it, whooping and hollering. Other men fought them, dressed in gold armor with suns beaten on their chests. In the center of it all stood a woman swinging a sword with more zest than skill, while a large, purple-clothed man tried to protect her, shouting, “Honey! Honey, now, the guards, honey!”

Quirin really had no desire to fall back into his old job, but Ester was all for it, leaping into the fray as light-hearted as a springbok.

The Coronan Royal Guard needed more training, that was for sure. (Which, generally speaking, was the state of most countries’ guards.) They gestured their swords as though playing at knucklebones instead of stringing a needle. He would have to tell them a sword must be used as finely and precisely as an embroidery needle. But even so, he and they worked together and dispatched the bandits. It was a little too easy. The bandits wore eyepatches for some reason, so Quirin did the obvious thing and stuck his fist into an uncovered eye, or snuck around to the eyepatch side, where the bandit had no chance of seeing the boot coming his way. Ester did her work too, biting, kicking, and just being sassy. Down the bandits went. The Guard trussed them up so they sank in mud puddles up to their knees.

While the new queen attended to an injured guard, the king and another guard stepped forward. Quirin dismounted and bowed, digging through the archives in his brain. What was this guy’s name again? Frank? Fritz? Frederic.

“By the sun!” the guard said, rushing forward to pump Quirin’s hand. “The Land Pirates have been bothering us for months! It was a lucky break you were here.”

“You have my eternal gratitude,” King Frederic said.

“Let it not be spoken, Your Majesty.” Quirin stiffened as their eyes roved over him. The crest on his breastplate could not escape their notice.

“I see you’re not from around here,” Frederic went on, exchanging a glance with the guard, who was looking more excited by the second. “How can I repay you?”

“That is not necessary.”

“Of course it is, Sir Knight. If you are in need of work, I’m sure Captain Blankenship here will be more than happy to retain—”

“Pardon me for correcting you, but I am not a knight.”

Quirin was no less stunned than Frederic and the captain, but now that the words were loose, flowing out of the abundance within him … well, he wasn’t going to take them back. He was done protecting kingdoms.

Captain Blankenship’s gleeful face dissolved into an expression of suspicion. It probably wasn’t everyday he was told such an outrageous lie.

King Frederic was better at hiding his scrutiny, and only looked surprised. “I beg your pardon, my friend.” He ran his fingers through his beard. “But I must still repay you.”

Blankenship was far less concerned with good manners than his king. “If you aren’t a knight, then what are you?” he demanded.

What a question! Now that Quirin had thrown loose the identity of knight, what was he anymore? He had striven for many things, but nothing seemed to be true. He had fought, but he was not a fighter. He had wandered, but he was not a wanderer.

But memory came delivering to him an old, ramshackle package, which fell apart at the first touch. The binding burst loose at the seams, and within came out the smell of the ink and parchment of his childhood, the feel of dirt soft under his knees, the sight of barrels and barns full of the fruit of the land. Here, tucked in the corner of the gift, was the music of his father’s laughter and his mother’s songs.

This was his landing.

“I am a farmer.”

Chapter Text

“Quirin?”

Coming out of the amber felt different this time.

“Quirin.”

The first amber had melted without being hot nor cold, wet nor dry, almost without sensation. Yet, it had surely melted away, awakening him to the world again in a snowfall of feeling, breathing, and knowing, that attractive warmth dissipating into the cold of the lab. But the second amber disappeared without any hint of the gentleness of the first. It was freezing him one second and draining the next, as abrupt and rude as a smack to the solar plexus.

“Quirin!”

Before the second amber had caught him, he had found a suicide letter from Varian.

Quirin wrenched his eyes open, onto a moonlit, lapis blue sky and a scattershot of pinprick stars. Strong, firm hands held him, one against his chest, the other on his back. As the fuzz faded from his ears, so entered a cloud of a mumbling hundred. The hundred voices became dozen, and the dozen coalesced into one.

“It’s over now, Quirin. Wake up.”

Quirin gasped, his voice unhinging from his throat. “The amber! The amber—it—it caught—”

“It wasn’t real, Quirin. None of it was real.”

“It wasn’t real?”

“No, none of it.”

“But—” Quirin looked for the letter, and found his grasping hand empty. A quick scan of the ground--grass-speckled and mud-splashed, pebbles everywhere, but not a dropped suicide letter in sight. He blinked. Could he understand any of this? Any of what came before, and what came before before, and what comes now, and what will come?

“It wasn’t real?” he repeated.

“Look around you.”

Quirin focused and found Porter’s face, his pupils shrunken and gray irises as black as obsidian. Past him were the other villagers, throwing off terror and fright as the red rocks shrank back into the earth the way they had sprung up. Guards began a cautious clean-up, leading people away, some who even smiled in their relief, although others went weeping. Doubtless, the guards were just as shaken as the people, but they had a job to do. They must take off their fear as taking off a coat, maybe to wear again, but not now. Quirin didn’t have a job to do, not anymore. His hands shook.

Porter was talking, looking at the villagers with the assertive concern of a leader. He spoke—“ … whatever it is …”--not comprehending Quirin’s state.

Not until Quirin said, “But it was real.”

Porter’s yellow eyebrows dangled like worms pulled suddenly from the earth. He spoke to someone behind Quirin, “I’ll be right back. Keep helping the others …”

Quirin stepped forward, numbly. What he had seen had been real. Not the letter, but everything else. The lab and the guards, Varian and his little war. Was that … was that right?

Porter caught his elbow. “Come with me.”

Quirin let Porter lead him nearby, stepping into a garden and then up a stoop, not recognizing it was Porter’s own house until they entered his kitchen. Porter pressed him into a chair, then poured something into a glass. After patting Quirin on the back, in a manner meant to be bracing, he left. In a minute, his voice drifted through the open windows, tone raised as he directed people and soothed them.

Quirin was never so grateful to no longer be their leader. The wine glass—such a frippery thing, exactly like something Porter would give him—was cool and slick in his hands as he raised it to his mouth. Tartness danced on his tongue as he drank, but he barely tasted what it was. Such a dark, fearful thing he had seen. Where had it come from? What horrible place had it sprung from? To envision a letter like that from Varian?

He had seen other things. Things that happened while he had been trapped in the amber. Between Varian and the guards, right? Right, it came back to that. Had those things been true?

A crackle and a sudden bite of sharp pain in his palm brought him to himself.

By the bloody moon—

“Quirin!”

He almost laughed. Poor Janice, to walk into her kitchen and to find a madman sitting at her table, blood running down his wrist because he had senselessly crushed her glass goblet.

“I’m sorry, Janice, that was stupid.”

“Just hold still.”

She tossed down a basket of blankets and filled a bowl with water. He picked out shards of glass until she batted him away, sliding the bowl under his hand briskly.

“I said hold still!”

It was clear she kept order in her classroom like a deacon. It almost seemed as if her hands trembled as she cleansed his palm.

“Did you—” he murmured, before stopping himself, appalled at his own intrusiveness.

“Get caught?” she finished for him. Janice kept her gaze down, focused on his hand as a clinician, pressing a towel deep until his palm ached and the towel turned red. “No. I shot out of there too fast. All I needed was Hortense to present his essay once in real life—I wasn’t sticking around to envision that again.”

She looked up then, and their eyes met, with the same question, What did you see?

How would Quirin answer that? That he discovered he’d been under a grand delusion for months now?

He arose once she tightened a bandage and trimmed away the excess. “I should go help.”

“You should sit and rest.” Janice stood to toss out the bowl and wash her hands. “Almost everyone had gone home by the time I got here, anyway.”

“Porter sent you.”

“He said you were bad off.”

He couldn’t argue with her, could he? She had no idea what things he had discovered tonight.

“Are you hungry?”

Out of politeness’ sake, Quirin should refuse and—and do whatever he should do. Instead, he watched Janice fry up potatoes and sausage. She poured him lemonade, brought out coffee cake from the larder, and served him a helping from the skillet much too enormous, even for him. She overestimated his appetite, but he ate anyway. He ate all of it, even though he wasn’t hungry. The smooth domesticity of it soothed him, and the sharp knife of fear dulled into little more than a haunting memory.

But that memory would haunt him forever. Varian and the Guard—

“I imagine Porter won’t be home until late.” Janice reclined in a chair across from him, setting her chin in her fist. “It’s non-stop work for him, when—well, you know what I mean. Is it strange for you? Not having the responsibility anymore.”

“It’s better this way. I can focus on home.”

“Hmm. And how is home? How is Varian?”

“He’s …” Quirin hesitated to say the expected answer. Janice was specifically taking this line of reasoning to be easy on him, avoiding the subject of the red rocks. All he had to say was, “Varian’s fine,” and that would be the end of it.

But Varian and the Guard. Maybe, it was time for Quirin to fling himself off the cliff, just to see if he could fly.

“Varian thinks he deserves every nasty slight and insult from the villagers,” Quirin answered. “He speaks of sadness.”

“I thought things were going well with the princess.”

“She is remarkable. And unusual. She is not old men nor young boys who have known him since his birth.”

“It makes forgiveness a little harder, doesn’t it?”

“He’s never quite fit in with the village, just like Ulla. But … Some of the other boys beat him silly the other day, and he thought to hide it from me.”

He should get going before it got later, but she brought him a cup of tea. It smelled of rosehips and was a touch too hot.

Janice poured her own cup, running a spoon through it with a look of concentration. “Have you looked into the list of universities I gave you?”

“I inquired after them all.” Quirin shifted in his seat. What a moon-besotted fool he was, he should have left before they got on this line of questioning.

“And?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“What do you mean? Does he not want to go?” Now it was becoming a bit too domestic, Janice’s look the same as his mother’s when she had been upset with him. That cup of hers clinked in her saucer, a sound fit to recall every demon of Hell.

“I’m sure he would love to, but …”

“Didn’t you ask him?”

“It’s more a matter …” He rubbed his eyes.

“Yes, he’s young, but they will accept him. I told you—”

“I don’t have the money, Janice.”

When Janice got over her shock and spoke again, her tone was fully scolding, well-practiced from the classroom. “For heaven’s sake, haven’t you been saving? I’ve been telling you since he was twelve that, unless you’re forcing him to farm, you’d—”

“I have been saving. For years.” He had to put the tea cup down, or else he was going to shatter that one, too. He already had bits of glass in one hand—he didn’t need pansy-patterned china in the other. “Saporians happened.”

She lifted an eyebrow, until understanding washed over her, clearing both her brow and her face of color. Her mouth looked like thread. “You kept the money in the Bank of Corona.”

Quirin barked a laugh. “A special account set aside just for his future educational endeavors. The Bank of Corona was the safer option, of course. Better there in the capitol, surrounded by Royal Guard, than in our little ramshackle, out in the middle-of-nowhere Bank of Old Corona.”

“I thought the kingdom replaced the accounts.”

“The kingdom was kind enough to replace one-third of the accounts, not that that was even their responsibility. Hate to break it to you, Janice, but much of the kingdom’s coffers were drained, too. Corona is broke. So, if Varian would like one-third of a degree, I guess I have it covered.”

Now that he had bared his financial concerns to her, he stood and stacked his plates and silverware.

“Quirin, it’s not the end of the world. Surely there’s something—”

“I’m not getting his hopes up. I even had Ambrose keep from delivering my mail so Varian wouldn’t see … I cannot afford to send him now. No, I will have to get back on track and present the options to him in a few years. I’ll have the letters from the school for him to look at then.”

Her thread-like mouth twisted into a knot, and when she looked at him, it was with huge, glistening eyes, gray and blue mixed into some new color he didn’t know the name of. He thanked her for her hospitality, and she suggested he spend the night since it was already late, and Porter was sure to be back any minute.

“He will try to recreate his sleepovers from the past,” she said with an eye roll, “when he and his stupid friends would hide worms in my bed. I hope you’ve outgrown that sort of thing.”

He smiled. “I never had the luxury of a sister to torment—at least, not until I was too old for that. No, I have to pick up Varian from Corona.”

“Tonight?”

Was his answering smile grim? He couldn’t help it. It made no sense to rush to Corona tonight, especially since Varian had Prometheus to ride home on in the morning, but that wasn’t the point. Someone had to be there for Varian. Now that he knew for certain—a fact he had forgotten until the red rocks reminded him—that Varian was no villain, and the Kingdom of Corona no innocent.

It was impossible to sit still and wait. Light coursed through Quirin’s body, like the ray within the firefly, who shook and danced in the night out of the bounty caught within it. Janice lent him a lantern to rush home by, and once there, he packed for an overnight stay in Corona. By golly, he’d sleep even in an inn lobby if he must! After packing, he stood at the front door, preparing his nerves to awaken Nuthatch. She would kick him to death for disturbing her sleep, and he would withhold carrots from her as a punishment—but he didn’t need to do any of it after all. Guess who came bursting through the front door, nearly slamming the knob into Quirin’s belly?

“Dad! You’re still up?”

Quirin dropped his bag. “Varian!”

Varian flew at him. “We did it, Dad!”

And who was “we?” Why, Rapunzel, of course, bouncing in, whipping her lofty yellow head around like an excited cockatoo. Varian followed suit, and he fled away back to her so they might squawk at each other in a language that left Quirin speechless.

“Quirin, you should have seen Varian. He was amazing.”

“Ah, gee, Rapunzel, don’t embarrass me.”

“But it’s true!”

“But I wouldn’t have even known about the Demanitus Chamber if not for you!”

“But you’re the one who made the solution!”

“Without you, I would have fallen to my d—” Varian went silent, darting his eyes at his poor father. He smiled, rubbing the back of his head. “Oh, ha ha! Y-you know, I’m beat. Let’s talk about this later.”

“Gurgle,” was all Quirin said, because, clearly, the top of his head had been opened up and his brain replaced with pudding. Which might be a marginal improvement, but it did make it difficult to speak.

They seemed to understand his difficulty. Varian took him by one elbow, and Rapunzel the other, and they guided him down the hallway. He was so befuddled they could have been preparing to toss him into a pit full of snakes, and he would have let them. Luckily, they only took him to the sitting room, planting him on the sofa to sort-of ooze there. Then talking a million miles a minute, they sat on either side, where their excitable elbows rammed into his ribcage.

“Oh, sorry, Quirin!” Rapunzel cried, before squealing, “In the Demanitus Chamber—”

“Oh, it’s so cool!” Varian screamed. “I could live there!”

“That’s where Varian defeated the rocks. With alchemy!”

“Your hair—”

“Your solution!”

There was a moment of silence, where they both drew breath.

“By Jove,” Quirin murmured. And by Jove, they had him speaking like Porter now! But he was powerless in the face of this exuberance, both of them strung up like children at a birthday party.

He turned towards Varian, putting his hands on his boy’s shoulders. “But you’re all right?”

“I’m great!”

Quirin tried to run his hand through Varian’s hair, but Varian darted away to grab a Demanitus biography from the bookshelf. He sat on the sofa again, flipping the book open to the C-section in the index.

“Dad, the Chamber was amazing! I should take you—oh, wait. It’s a state secret, isn’t that right, Rapunzel?”

“Definitely.”

They both tittered, and Quirin wondered if someone had spiked the proverbial punch.

“Wait, wait, wait.” He rubbed his head. “But why are you here? Varian, didn’t I say stay in Corona if it got late?”

“Dad, the Demanitus Chamber isn’t anywhere near Corona. It’s closer to here, actually, so it was better to come home. Rapunzel’s going to stay the night!”

“If that’s all right with you, Quirin.”

What else could Quirin say but, “Of course.”

“But I need to go to Corona tomorrow anyway, Dad. I left both Ruddiger and Prometheus there.”

Rapunzel leapt up, gasping. The green thing on her shoulder clung to her hair for dear life. “I almost forgot! I need to send a letter to Eugene. I don’t want him to worry.”

Varian tossed the book into Quirin’s lap. “I’ll show you the post office—well, we’ll have to go to his house, this late. I hope Mr. Ambrose won’t be too annoyed—”

“Now, wait a minute!” Before Varian could scramble away, Quirin slapped his hands around Varian’s shoulders and yanked him close.

“Dad …”

Boy, if that wasn’t an embarrassed sound, nothing was.

Quirin’s voice was thick in his throat. “I’m just happy you’re okay.”

“Well, yeah, Dad. Everything’s okay.”

Quirin sat quietly while Rapunzel and Varian went squealing out of the house, while Rapunzel screamed (as though reverted to childhood), “I’ve never spent the night at a friend’s house before! This is going to be so fun!”

Varian said that everything was okay, and it was okay. But it also, most definitely, was not.

Quirin went to make ready the guest room, and discovered a family (a very large, unscare-able family) of squirrels had taken up residence in the rafters. Rapunzel slept on their sofa.

“I don’t mind at all,” she happily crooned from her place in the cushions. Wrapped up in a bundle of blankets, she appeared exactly like a Siberian reindeer princess. Her toes wriggled against a pillow. “It’s so cozy here.”

And it was a cozy thing for Quirin to walk by the next morning and find seventy feet of flaxen hair strewn about his sitting room. He rubbed his eyes in disbelief. There had never been a sight so ridiculous, even in his dreams. The girl must have a neck made of iron!

By the time he came back in from feeding the animals and gathering eggs, Rapunzel had trussed up that scramble of hair, and was in the kitchen, sweeping the floor. Her lizard rubbed a cloth on the table in the tiniest strokes.

It was to her credit for not being a lazy, entitled princess. But his teeth still felt strangely sharp on the backs of his lips when he saw her.

“Good morning, Quirin, how did you sleep?”

He set the basket of eggs on the counter and worked on starting a fire in the hearth. “I told you before, Princess. No need to do our chores.”

“Oh, I don’t mind at all. I never get to do it anymore, and it’s kinda calming, you know what?”

She sliced the bacon he had set out—much too thinly. Quirin jammed logs together in the hearth, telling himself to play nice. The girl couldn’t be expected to know how thick he liked his bacon.

“Your flowers!” Rapunzel cupped a hand around the irises sitting on the table, which were rather hang-dogged, for irises. “Should I pick some more?”

“Please. Pick whatever you want.” Quirin threw bacon into the pan, where it went pop-sizz-pop! “I’m sure you can scrounge up some narcissus somewhere,” he muttered as she walked out the door.

Now that she was gone, he gave himself a stern talking-to. Naughty, naughty, Quirin. The debacle with the guards and Varian two years ago was not her fault. Goodness knows, he knew better than anyone how ignorant she had been back then, when she had come looking for the scroll piece. She and her friends hadn’t had any idea what had been going on then. It was the king and the inept, gentle cruelties of the guards to be blamed. And what was more, Varian had hurt her with some machine of his.

Eggs were nestled alongside the bacon, and the clear whites slowly turned opaque. Quirin frowned at this usual style of eggs cooking.

Why had Varian been so angry with Rapunzel then? What had she done to receive his particular hatred, and what promise had she broken?

Rapunzel came back in, a festoon of blue cornflowers in her hands. Oh boy, the poor girl looked so cheerful, no notion at all of the resentment he was cultivating in his heart. Quirin’s eye twitched as she danced around the table.

“Hmm, that smells wonderful. And these flowers, too.” Rapunzel stuffed her nose in her bouquet, before exchanging it for the dying one in the vase. “Picking flowers is one of my favorite things to do. So many smells and colors.”

Slices of tomato went in the pan, bubbling around their edges.

“Who’s the old man who likes dragonflies? He’s so funny.”

Quirin drew a blank. It sounded like maybe she was talking about Darwin, but the man hadn’t an ounce of whimsy in his body. What would he want with dragonflies?

“He was chasing them all over, before his grumpy son came out to yell at him.” Rapunzel giggled, slicing bread onto a plate. “He was really worried his dad would fall in the river. It was kinda cute.”

That could be Darwin and Ward, but since when did Darwin take up a bug collection?

It was a mystery Quirin would happily leave unresolved, because breakfast was served. He dished out two plates, and Rapunzel followed him into the dining room, chattering away.

“I saw so many different types of flowers on my travels. On Terapi Island, there are these beautiful tiger-stripe orchids—oh, isn’t Varian having breakfast?” She noticed he had brought only two plates.

“He will probably sleep in until noon, if I let him. You guys had a late night.”

“He wanted to keep playing skittles because he kept winning so much. I never played before, but I’ll show him. I’m going home to prac-tice.”

He passed her jam, and they tucked in. “I imagine you’ve learned a lot these past few years.”

“Oh, so much! I never had any idea! I never knew fog felt so light and cool, like being surrounded by whipped cream, or that it makes everything sound muffly. Or that the sea is so noisy and smells like that. I’ve been to swamps and islands and—let’s see, what else? Caves, rivers, mountaintops, lakes, sleet—”

“Snow.”

“Oh, yes, snow! I like how it sits on mountains like a big ole pile of panna cotta. I hear there are places where it’s always snowy.”

“Well, Princess, you don’t have to go far to get snow, you know that.”

Her eyes flashed with confusion for a moment, before she quickly covered it with a strained smile, tucking her chin against her lizard. So, she had learned to hide her feelings. He hated to think where she had learned false cheerfulness at such a young age.

Quirin ended up scrapping the tines of his fork against his plate as he cut his eggs, making a horrific screech. “Of course, we don’t get snow all that often. And certainly not like a few years ago.”

“Yes. That’s true.” After an awkward moment of silence, Rapunzel said, “You know, I’ve always wondered about plan—”

“No, you’re going to tell me about that day. You’re going to tell me about the blizzard.”

He surprised himself with his own firmness. It surprised her too, but she pressed her lips together, and looked him straight in the face with a steady, brave look in her eye. Good girl. He needed her to explain, not run away.

“I would have come that day, but I couldn’t,” she said. “The kingdom needed me.”

“No, tell me as if I don’t know anything. Tell me as if this is the first time I’ve heard it.”

She swallowed so like a kid and had never seemed so young. “All right.”

Rapunzel told him succinctly, but well, guided by his questions. She spoke honestly, if her clarity and confidence could be trusted (and he did trust it). So, he understood she was the only member of the royal family there, the king and queen off on travel, and the blizzard had created chaos in the capitol. When Varian came begging for help, she wasn’t able to leave, and his boy was promptly thrown out.

Quirin listened attentively, while still keeping a second ear open for any hint of Varian’s awakening. “What is this accusation of Varian attacking you?”

She had taken a stem of cornflowers out from the vase to play with, and now flicked it against her lips in annoyance. “I never said he did that. He was just … just desperate.”

“I see. He didn’t fling himself at your feet.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“But it’s what other people meant.”

She looked away, and it was all quite clear. When he stood, she looked back at him gravely. “I’m so sorry, Quirin. If I could have come that day, I would—”

“Yes, thank you, Princess.” He stacked their plates. “I’m not judging you. I just wanted to know. It’s not my place to judge the actions of royalty anyway.”

He could coat his true meaning in servile language all he wanted, but it seemed she understood anyway, if her stroking her hair was anything to go by.

There was a knock on the door, which Quirin answered, expecting it was Ambrose. It was the wastrel-boyfriend instead.

The man’s smile was aggravatingly confident. “Hi. You don’t happen to have a mislaid princess ‘round these parts, do you?”

Quirin almost said, “Who do you think you’re trying to charm?” but was interrupted before the first word came out of his mouth.

“Eugene!” Rapunzel rushed past to throw her arms around Eugene’s shoulders as he stepped in. “What are you doing here?”

“Blondie, you’ve got to stop doing this. Me, coming to Old Corona to fetch you … it’s ruining my beauty sleep.” He pecked her on the lips. “I knew you could do it, Rapunzel.”

“It was Varian.”

“What a smart kid.”

All this sweetness must have been infecting Quirin, because, to his horror, he discovered himself offering breakfast to Eugene.

“Why, that’s very kind of you, dear sir. Maybe just something to drink.”

Rapunzel dashed to the sitting room (presumably, to tidy it), while Quirin took Eugene to the kitchen. They stood on the back stoop, slurping on lemonade and looking at Quirin’s garden, where the dew had settled on all the tomatoes and purple cabbage, and on the cauliflower like pillows, making everything to glisten as the sunlight bloomed over the top of Corona Wall sparkles.

“This is a nice place you’ve got here,” Eugene said. “Not anything like the Dark Kingdom, am I right?”

A fountain of fury broiled acidic through every one of Quirin’s veins, just about popping out his ears, nose, fingernails, and even teeth.

That smirk on Eugene’s face dropped. “Oh, is that …” he scrambled, stepping backwards towards the door. “That’s a sore subject, huh? I—” He jumped when Rapunzel stepped behind him.

“I’m ready, Eugene.”

“And none to soon!” Eugene shoved his glass into Quirin’s hand. “Thank you for housing an unhoused princess. We’ll be seeing you—”

“Oh wait!” Rapunzel cried. “Quirin, don’t you and Varian have to come to town too? Why don’t we all go together?”

She was much more forgiving than Quirin. Much.

Quirin held open the front door. “Varian is resting, and I won’t disturb his peace. I think he’s earned it.”

They must both think he was a madman, because they exited (or at least, Eugene) as though he was going to start chucking axes at any minute. They had already mounted the two horses Eugene had brought and were riding away when Varian came stumbling down the stairs. He stood yawning next to Quirin, watching them go.

“How old is she?” Quirin asked, rubbing the cut on his palm.

“She’s … uh … twenty. I think.”

Quirin grunted. Imagine being twenty-years-old and only just finding out what fog was.

Varian may have earned his peace, but there was none to be had for Quirin. He smiled by day, but dreamed of revenge by night. If his anger overflowed his bed, he paced his room on soft feet—anything to not disturb Varian—and either pounded his fists together or grabbed his hair, bubbling into the atmosphere. If his anger overflowed the floor, he knelt at the bed to pray that his anger would not consume him. If he was not careful, he would be destroyed. A man who faced a king angry was a man who faced the executioner’s axe. No judge would be more merciful to him than they had to Varian, and no king would give him mercy at all.

One thing he had learned, at least (at least!), was not to fester that hot rage against the princess. It started in Corona, when he and Varian went to fetch Ruddiger and Prometheus, and already, Rapunzel had spread the word of Varian’s accomplishment. Then the next morning, when Quirin went into town to buy another axe, there had stood a hoard of villagers around the village notice board. Porter stepped out of the group, whistling as he tossed a hammer from hand to hand.

“Hip hip hooray,” he said as he passed Quirin, winking. “I even broke out the hammer myself for this one.”

Quirin stepped behind the crowd, and saw these words on a piece of beautifully inked paper: Notice of Royal Gratitude.

A flower burst of joy tickled him as he read it. It was signed by the princess, thanking Varian for his “ … indisputable assistance in the destruction of a danger most foul ….” (Government language, though.)

Ward stood directly in front of Quirin, scratching his head. “By my grandmama’s pantaloons, the kid did it?”

He scowled when he turned and saw Quirin, pushing his meat-slab lips out before stomping off in a huff.

It was all nice, but then Quirin remembered the king and guard, and went home in a huff himself. He stopped near the graveyard to lay a chamomile flower on a little headstone marked “Creature”, which normally (and oddly) soothed him, but this time he only got in a huffier mood. So, he went home to chop wood. He’d been doing it for days.

Chop, chop, chop. Chop went the trees, chop went the axe, chop went Quirin’s heart. Outside of small bursts of genuine happiness, it was all he could do. Stand there in the forest, raising a dangerous tool above his head, muscles and ligaments burning at the strain, bone stretching against bone to hold that axe just right, hold it just right, don’t let it move even half-an-inch because it could mean the difference between striking the log or missing it entirely—hold it, hold it until his arms ached, back muscles pulled tight like catgut in a bow, and then finally, when his arms would give way to tremor, drive the axe down in controlled brutality, and CRAAACK! The log fell to pieces. After tossing the pieces to the side, Quirin did it all over again. For three days straight.

It just about killed his cut hand, but he wrapped it tight, shoved his glove over it, and suffered the stings without complaint. He felt righteous in that—the hair shirt of the self-aggrieved.

He finally understood himself. Was that ridiculous? But that’s what it was. So many things made sense now. Dreaming of disembodied voices. The fear when guards had come into the manor. Even his hostility when he had laughed and laughed at Frederic’s asinine accident with the pink ooze. He finally got it.

But he was also furious. Stupidly. He had half a mind to take his stuff and go, take Varian and go, leave Corona forever. He’d lost countries before. Starting over would be rough, especially considering how much they’d be leaving behind, and besides the fact that, financially, leaving now would leave them strapped. It would mean Varian giving up a lot too—no more expensive alchemy. Well, it was something to consider. Until Quirin decided, he would continue chopping wood.

At the end of the third day, as the smoke and burn of the day faded towards purple dusk, and the stars began to appear like flotsam on the sea, Varian came out.

“Dad, dinner’s nearly ready.” Varian’s eyes were particularly dark-blue this evening, as if God had cloaked them in twilight.

Winded, Quirin just nodded. He took his gloves off to inspect his hands. They were rubbed raw, with almost leprous-bright red splotches spreading across his uncut palm. His cut palm stung, even wrapped up. The bandage hadn’t stood a chance.

Varian licked his lips. “Is everything … you know, okay?”

“Sure, son.”

“You’ve chopped enough wood to last us three winters, so you—you should probably save some trees for the squirrels.”

“The squirrels invade my home, I destroy theirs.”

“Ah, scorched earth, huh?”

“I have nothing against it.” Quirin slung the axe across his shoulder and headed towards home.

Varian picked up the wood bag before following him. “Someone left us a pie on the front stoop!”

“Really? From whom?”

“There wasn’t a note. Maybe it’s poisoned!”

Quirin watched Varian’s face for hint of self-consciousness, and—yes, there it was. A subtle—the most subtle—light glowing almost from within. It was not lost on Varian for what reason the pie had been left.

Quirin slapped a hand against Varian’s shoulder. “I suppose we may know once we eat it.”

“If it’s Gretchen’s, I’ll know right away.”

This was exactly what Quirin wished for. Varian’s self-confidence was coming back. The royal pardon had appeared in Quirin’s stack of important papers again, so this time, he slipped it into his trunk of secrets. He would make sure Varian’s self-confidence would no longer be broken.

“I’ve been thinking about showing you self-defense.”

Varian groaned. “I can’t believe you’re still going on about that.”

Well, these protests weren’t unexpected. But, Quirin had prepared! He remembered Ambrose saying something about meeting the kids in their interests. Quirin wasn’t above a little psychology.

“You need to learn,” Quirin insisted. “Especially after what happened on your trip to Neserdnia. But I’ll make you a deal. I remember you making a stink bomb or two in your time. You let me show you a few moves—just enough to take and throw a punch—and you show me what you can do with your alchemy.”

Varian gasped. “Really?” Then he made noise, the speech of songbirds. It went: girbiribiirbi. Total rubbish. Total glee. When again capable of human speech, he crowed, “This is going to be great!”

Yulp. A thought kicked Quirin in between the eyes with hob-nailed boots. He murmured, weakly, “We better not do it close to the house.”

“Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. You’re certainly right about that.” Varian’s eyebrows fell madly, and his eyes glittered with scheming. If he hadn’t been holding the wood bag, he so would have rubbed his hands together.

Varian’s grin was just too toothy for Quirin’s liking.

“You’re not going to throw a stink bomb at me, are you?” he asked.

“Maybe. Just don’t hit my knuckles.”

Well, Quirin had something of a plan, for now. Life could not continue as it had been. Justice had been wrought for the kingdom, but where was the justice for Varian?

But, for now, Varian first.

After all, there was always another day to pound heads.

Chapter Text

Come one, come all!

֍WORLD EXHIBITION֍

At the Corona Fairgrounds

See …

Fascinating cultural delights from distant lands!

The latest scientific advancements!

Exotic delicacies!

Fun and games galore!

Only for three days … don’t miss out!

Quirin stared at this flier even though it gave him a headache. There were other, less headache-inducing fliers on the wall he could choose to stare at. Besides the average number of Help Wanted notices, here was a poster from Susanna, who had lost her cat and captured her distress in the text alone: “Lost precious kitten!!! HUGE reward!” Stan was selling his mother's old spinning wheel. Julia was offering harpsichord lessons. Samantha started a knife sharpening business, which would give Claude a little competition. Anthony requested harpsichord lessons. Ulrich was looking for beans.

No matter how irritating or not these other posters were (Ulrich just, in general, asking for beans …), none of them were as irritating as the blaring, blazing, blasting World Exhibition one. It was impossible to look away. And why? Because it was still less irritating than the letter in his hand.

“Dear Sir,

Thank you for your inquiry regarding our admissions process. I have enclosed an Admissions Request Form and Questionnaire, as well as Tuition and Fee Schedule, per your request. If you wish to proceed with admissions, please complete the forms and return to the below address for consideration. A letter informing you of the University’s decision will follow, with further instructions if admission is accepted.

—Office of Admissions, University of Ingvarr—”

It wasn’t the letter that made the liquid in Quirin’s eyes go squish-squash, but it was the Tuition and Fee Schedule.

“How can it be so expensive?” Quirin muttered, peering closer at it. This couldn’t be right. “Do they pave the quad with gold?”

Maybe there was a clearance-university somewhere.

“Did you say something, Quirin?”

Quirin crushed the letter between his hands and turned to smile at Ambrose. It wasn’t a good idea to stand here in the middle of the post office bemoaning bad news. Not if he wanted to keep these inquiries secret. Now was not the time for Varian to find out any educational hopes were out of his father’s reach.

Quirin slipped the letter into his pocket. He’d tuck it with the other letters hidden in his trunk at home, showing it to Varian in a few years when he had hopefully scrounged up the money again. Unless (perchance!), one of the three remaining letters he was waiting on produced a miracle.

“I’m sorry, Ambrose, did you ask me something?”

Ambrose’s eyebrow went up at getting a question to a question (difficult to say for certain, since those pristine white eyebrows disappeared on a pristine white face). But he resorted to yet another question: “Would you and Varian like to come for dinner tonight? I’ve got this new way of making coffee.”

Quirin was in the grumpiest of moods. Would it be safe for him to play the pleasant guest? Maybe not, but maybe, more than anything else, he needed the distraction. “Okay, Ambrose, I’d like that.”

He went home to tell Varian, but the house was empty. Not filled with even so much as a raccoon squeak. It could mean only one thing: Varian was down at the river. Lately, any moment Varian didn’t spend at the house was spent there, his boy becoming more and more aquatic as he built his latest contraption.

It was supposed to be a new way of catching fish, but whenever Quirin looked at it, it seemed more like a method of catching mermaids, it was so crazy looking. It seemed the merging of a raft and a half-sunk windmill, but Varian was cuckoo over it. Today, he was running up and down its planks, scratching his head before bringing down a hammer on some joint that didn’t please him.

At least, the thing floated. That was all Quirin could say about it.

He fought a tremendous battle through the sedges. Varian heard him coming, bounced up, and ran across a plank to land in the squishing black mud.

“Hey, Dad.”

“You, uh … you keep an oar on that thing, don’t you?”

Putting his hands on his hips, Varian looked at his monstrosity. It looked a stranded carcass of a whale, ribs bones sticking helter-skelter into the sky, a floating macabre island on the seashore. “It’s not going to get away from me,” Varian said, all assurance. “Besides, I got it tied real good to the shore.”

For all his confidence, his words inspired no confidence in Quirin, much less the pathetic length of thin rope tied one end to the raft, and the other end to a beached log lying along the bank.

Quirin cleared his throat. “Ambrose invited us to dinner tonight. Six o’clock. Come in soon and wash up.”

“Really? That’s the third time in two weeks. Why’s he got so chummy?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the red rocks …”

Quirin stopped talking because there was movement amongst the cattails. In a moment, Darwin appeared, brushing those brown sausage-like spikes aside, scanning the river with a look of frustrated concentration. His blue linen cap sat askew on his head, which he hung on a particularly sturdy cattail so he might rub his brow.

“What’s he doing over here?” Varian wondered.

The cut on Quirin’s still healing palm was suddenly itchy. He scratched around it, not liking this arrival of Darwin one bit. Darwin didn’t seem the sort to resort to sabotage for revenge, but then again, he hadn’t also seemed the sort to spit in a young boy’s face. All it would take was untying a poorly tied knot while Varian was running around on that thing, and then … who knows?

“Stay here,” Quirin grunted. “I’ll see—”

They were to be inundated with the neighbors, because Ward appeared on the road above, shouting, “Dad! Dad, where are you? Dad, confound it!”

Darwin composed a tune on a grass whistle, completely uninterested in his son’s anguish above him. But the whistle gave him away, and Ward was twisting on his feet to slide down the hill at such a speed that Quirin feared (not hoped!) he was going to fall on his face.

“Dad! What are you doing out here again? Can’t you stay out of the bulrushes? Come here!”

Dropping the whistle, Darwin looked around vaguely, before putting his hat back on. A dragonfly darted out from the sedges as Ward shot through them, which Darwin snatched at with an air of childlike dreaminess. He let Ward pull him out of the river.

“Look at your boots!” Ward howled. “They’re soaking.”

Darwin jerked. “I was just looking for—”

“It’s time to come home. Come on.”

“But I was looking for something. It was … uh—Gus!”

“Gus? Gus! Never mind that, let’s go.”

They made a pathetic pair tramping back up the slope, Darwin hobbling and Ward trying to drag him up with both hands since it was so steep. Quirin got ready to help if Darwin fell, but they managed to gain the flat earth and disappeared back from where they came.

“Who’s Gus?” Varian asked, nose scrunched.

“Got into the mushrooms, did they?” Quirin muttered.

“Huh? What you’d say?”

Quirin put his arm around Varian’s shoulders. “Never mind. Let’s get home. You smell like fish.”

Varian asked if Ruddiger could come too, and Quirin answered, “Why not?”

If Ruddiger could only speak, surely he would say, “I’ll tell you why not! Small humans! Rough hands, pull on whiskers, stomp on tail!”

Of course, this monologue was all in Quirin’s imagination.

What Ruddiger really said upon their reaching Ambrose’s house—when he stopped and stared in horror once he came to the realization and looked unbelieving at them in betrayal—what Ruddiger really said was, “!!!Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch!!!” He took his unpulled whiskers and high-tailed it out of there, tiny paws kicking out towards home, stopping once only to turn and shake a minuscule fist at them.

Quirin was eaten alive with jealousy.

Not that he had whiskers or a tail to worry about. It was just, he was not in the mood. Coming to town anymore made him want to do things: forge mountain passes, find dragon’s eggs, hatch them and domesticate the offspring, train them in the way they should go, and then unleash them on the unsuspecting populace. (It was an elaborate fantasy, he’ll admit, but his feelings were elaborate.) Ever since the second amber, the villagers were transformed. Before the red rocks, they had been his neighbors, friends, nearly his kinsfolk. They had been people who interested him and relied on him. But now, they were cruel and selfish, and even their laughter drove him up the wall. Rebecca always went: tee-hee-ahem! when she laughed; so tiny, so delicate, so annoying. Franklin went hee-haw! Mason said, haw-de-ha-ha-ha-ha-HAW! How can a man be expected to stand that?

How could a man stand people who hadn’t been there when his son needed help? Why hadn’t Porter done more? Why had he allowed himself to be chased away by lame excuses? “My dad is sick,” indeed. Indeed, Porter, what a dummy! Why hadn’t Janice done something? She was so fond of getting in his business. And Ambrose, the gossip-king, who always knew what was going on—

They had reached their destination, and Quirin had better quash that particular line of thought. Polite society didn’t smack a man in the kisser when society had been invited over for dinner.

All the bits of Quirin’s politeness dribbled out of a charming, smiling mouth when Ambrose opened the door. He even managed to drool it all over the walls and floorboards as they walked in, before it all evaporated away entirely when they walked into the parlor where—curses!—Porter and Janice were doing the obligatory pre-dinner party hobnobbing. He hadn’t known they were invited, too. Porter checked his watch, looking fashionably bored. Sitting on a settee, Janice instructed Ambrose’s daughter, Rachel, on the fan language; they flopped and wafted fans made of cedar and lace, Janice with elegance, Rachel with sloppy wrists. They both significantly held their fans wide open in their left hands when he walked in, Rachel giggling away.

Quirin walked over. “What are you teaching the girl?” he asked.

Janice’s eyes sparkled. “Nothing profane. Come, did you never learn what it all means?”

“No. It doesn’t make even sense to me. If everyone has learned it, everyone will know what is being said anyway. Might as well just say it out loud. Silly affectation.”

Raising her eyebrows, Janice looked pointedly at the six-year-old at her elbow, who was luckily too busy whipping her fan open and closed to pay attention to him.

Janice leaned forward, flipping her closed fan over so the head rested against her lips. “Quirin, I don’t believe you have a romantic bone in your body.”

“Oh, what’s that one mean?” Rachel chirped, emulating Janice, setting her fan against her lips in the same manner. Even with it upside-side down and closed tight, it completely hid her tiny raspberry mouth. “What’s this?”

“Nothing, dear. I was just trying to get a reaction.”

Whatever the reaction Janice was hoping for, surely it was not for Quirin to smile politely and stroll away. But that’s what she got.

No, no, Quirin, play the part! And Quirin played it. Smooth, smooth, be calm, be pleasant, be smooth, he told himself.

Smoothly, he swallowed down his meatloaf when they sat for dinner. Curses, again. The meatloaf was just as bad as Ambrose had complained.

“Thank you, Gretchen,” Quirin said, chasing that meatloaf with a hearty gulp of fingerling potatoes swallowed whole. “It’s quite delicious.”

“Quite, quite,” Varian spewed, in the spirit of a dinner party.

The triumphant eyebrow Gretchen shot at her husband made Ambrose carefully blank his expression. Smoothly, Quirin pretended not to have noticed.

“Indeed,” Porter cooed, raising his rosé so it flashed pink pearl in his glass. “I’ve never such a meatloaf in my life.”

Why that—! Porter just thought he was so smooth, didn’t he?

Quirin’s cheek ached from the smile painted across his face (put there by some lousy, second-rate artist, no doubt). By the dark side of the moon, it was going to be a repeat of the Greasy Spittoon if he wasn’t careful.

Luckily, he maintained the façade. The dinner conversation was brilliant and sparkling, even though Ambrose’s sons stuffed green beans up their noses. After dinner, Janice declared she had brought a telescope, and Varian cried, “Oh, we should’ve brought ours, too!”

That was all the encouragement that was needed, and the group migrated to the garden to gaze at the stars and moon, or whatever target Varian angled the scope towards, whether it was star or planet-in-hiding, some of them big, some petite, or some wearing flashy belts around their rotund figures. Tiny hands or foreheads would inevitably bump the eyepiece, which meant a constant telescope realignment. Thankfully, after half an hour or so, Ambrose detected Quirin’s impatience and Porter’s boredom, and invited them in for this new-fangled coffee.

This new way was French, made by some contraption that dripped and filtered the brewing coffee down from one pot into another below. This Ambrose kept in his parlor, where they sat scattered about on his sofas, making faces at each other while they waited. (Well, Quirin sat on the same sofa as Porter, so as to avoid looking at him.)

“My girl is going to kill me,” Ambrose said after he had distributed each of them a gentle cup. He leaned back on the opposing sofa, putting his feet on the coffee table. “I already told you about the roof climbing thing and the brushes, right? Well, while she’s been shoving brushes down gopher holes, she developed a fondness for the critters. What if I told you, we heard scurrying in the night?”

“Ah!” quoth Porter.

“The sun-stroked girl smuggled three of those things into her room! Porter, what do I do with her?”

Porter looked alarmed, all wide-staring eyes, the first time tonight he didn’t seem sophisticated. “How should I know?”

“Your house is crawling with ‘em!”

“Kids or gophers?”

“Hah-hah.”

“By Jove, I make sure I’m halfway to Ingvarr whenever the school bell chimes. I’m exactly sure I was never one of those things.” Porter tucked a slim ankle over the other, collapsing elegantly against the sofa armrest. He looked like a painting of one of those dissipated aristos he wished he was. “Quirin?”

“What?”

“Were you one?”

“One what?”

“Haven’t you been listening to a word?”

“No. I’ve been thinking you’ve had too much wine.”

“Touché.” Porter lifted his coffee cup at Quirin in a mock toast, the answer to his tipsy. “But what about my question? A child! Were you ever a child?”

“What sort of question is that!”

Porter thought it was funny. “What a hebetudinous oaf you are tonight! There, I used a big, big word to prove my point.”

“And what is that?”

“That you were probably a nerd in school. Am I right?”

Quirin smiled sharply. “No, Porter. I beat up the local bullies.”

“Really? A peacemaker even then, huh? A warrior for justice.”

“Precisely.”

“As a child, I was always getting in trouble for playing hooky. One could say, Quirin fought for integrity, while I fought for lethargy.”

Ambrose sipped his coffee, the steam clouding his nose. “I thought you said you weren’t a child.”

“Did I? That’s right. I never was one. It’s why I never know what to do with the wretches. … No offense.”

Quirin swirled his coffee round and round, watching that black vortex threaten to overspill in this merry-go-round of his own making.

“Is that why you ignored Varian after the blizzard?” he asked. “Because you don’t know what to do with the wretches.”

And there goes the pleasant evening. Ambrose and Porter deflated, those friendly smirks and bright eyes becoming heavy and dull. What glum faces! And for Porter, Quirin had discovered the world’s fastest sobering method.

Well, down the hatchet the coffee goes, a toasty toast to Quirin’s own throat. After all, it wouldn’t do to entirely ruin the party atmosphere.

As always, Porter played the game only he was ever playing, keeping his expression bored and body loose, fondling his pocket watch lazily. “Quirin, old boy—”

“Don’t.”

Never before had Quirin realized how annoyingly calm Porter was capable of being, because he was that way, at all times. “Quirin, none of us knew what was going on. The Guard evacuated us so quickly—”

“Ah, so you never thought, what to do about Varian?”

“They said he was a ward-of-the-state.”

“Is that what they called it?” Quirin chewed the inside of his mouth. No, that explanation wasn’t good enough. He nearly kicked the coffee table. “You came to the house, Porter! You came to the house and did nothing.”

“He said you were sick and slammed the door in my face.”

“And that’s normal?”

“What should I have done? Force my way in?”

“You always were such a lazy milksop!” Quirin didn’t care about the party atmosphere anymore. He shot to his feet and paced between the window and fireplace. The coffee cup, cradled in his palm, was warm, warm, warm—hot. “Couldn’t be bothered—”

“Stop it, will you? So what, even if I had forced my way in. I only would have seen that and—” A heavy swallow quivered the underside of Porter’s jaw. He threw his elbow over his eyes and leaned his head back against the sofa, as if he was settling in for a nap. “What should have I done? The Guard said something happened to you, Varian was responsible, and they were handling it. Should I have fought them so I could whisk your kid off to who-knows-where? And then what?”

“Bullocks!” Quirin glugged the rest of his coffee, then held the empty cup at Ambrose. “It’s good.”

Ambrose had been looking more and more sluggish by the minute, slipping down the sofa until he lay almost supine, chewing on biscotti with unnatural concentration (even for eating biscotti). Sighting Quirin’s empty cup, he crept up to make more. Silence like a two-ton rhino sat on the room.

Ambrose cleared his throat. “I should have chosen a life of hermitage.”

“I’m sorry, Ambrose.” Quirin rubbed between his eyes.

“You shouldn’t call Porter lazy. After we were evacuated, he could have gone to live with his brother in Corona. Him and Janice both. It would have been more comfortable for them. But they didn’t. He took on the responsibility, Quirin. Even after we had been sent away everywhere else, he tracked us down to let us know when it was safe to come back. When they were rebuilding us.”

Quirin took back his cup, now steaming like a tiny factory in his palm. “Do you really think that makes me feel better?”

He stood by the window and peered at the stars, each blinking out as billowing clouds rolled over them. Echoes reverberated throughout the house: the slam of the back door on the windowpanes, children giggling, and Varian laughing after an astonished, “Oops!”

“We’re sorry, Quirin,” Ambrose said, helplessly. “We believed the Guard.”

Draining his coffee once more, not because he wanted it but because he asked for it, Quirin placed the cup on the coffee table. “I seem to keep ruining your get-togethers. I’ve become a grump.”

Before he left, he stood over Porter, who was still lounging on the sofa with his narrow elbow over his eyes. “Porter, I want you to know something.”

Taking away his elbow, Porter stared up with agate gray eyes in shadow. “Yes, Quirin?”

“The whole time I was getting stuck in that thing, I thought, ‘It’s going to be okay. Porter will take care of everything.’”

Porter’s face turned ashen and grim.

Quirin swept out to find Varian. The boy stood aloft in the kitchen, cheeks flushed with the tangible electricity flinging through the atmosphere. A storm was brewing, dripping down in an unrelenting percolation, like Ambrose’s French coffee. It was time to go home.

It was good they left when they did. A thick, smothering rain deluged about ten minutes after they got in, choking the air with thunder-fragrance and cloud-scramble. The wind played havoc with the shutters, ratcheting their peace with rat-a-chonk-chonk-chonk. Shivering with the chills of thunder and thrash, Quirin and Varian sat in the sitting room, sinking into the sofa with Ruddiger sleeping between them, comfy as a sparrow chick.

It was impossible for Quirin to focus on the agricultural report he was reading, his attention either dwelling on tonight’s argument or slipping away to the other end of the sofa, where Varian flipped through the fossilized pages of an astronomy book.

“Did you see much before the clouds rolled in?” Quirin asked.

“Just a planet or two. The boys got into the tool shed, so we had to wrestle away a couple of hacksaws. What a handful!”

Quirin chuckled. “I remember having to do the same with you.”

“Dad, I got into the hacksaws to do alchemy. They wanted to saw their sister in half!”

Rain pummeled the rooftop and ran in noisy rivulets in the gutters and out the gargoyles, while the noisome wind puffed as though howling through the pipes of a church organ. Mercy, hopefully the crops wouldn’t be flooded out entirely tomorrow.

The lamp shuddered as Quirin threw the report on the side table. He’d been too aggressive with Porter, borne out of frustration from not being able to go after the people he really wanted to. And maybe because Porter’s very existence was a scold; the flamboyant dummy man was flamboyantly dummy right. It was time Quirin stopped running and started asking questions.

Quirin would start off in a safer spot. Appeal to the kid’s interests, right?

“Varian, I won’t torture you with learning self-defense, if you really don’t want to.”

Popping his head up, Varian’s eyes threw wonder around the room like a kaleidoscope. “Really? That’s great—oh, wait. Is this you trying to get out of me showing you alchemy?”

“No. I really mean it, it’s up to you.”

Grinning, Varian scrambled onto his knees and leaned over, astronomy book clutched to his lap. Ruddiger awoke and glowered at the intrusion.

“What are you doing?” Quirin asked, with a laugh as Varian darted a hand towards his forehead.

“Just checking you ain’t dying! The delusional ranting of a delirious mind.”

“Oh shut up.” Quirin grabbed Varian’s hand, and when Varian tried to pull away, Quirin held on. “I wanted to talk to you.”

All that happiness in Varian’s eyes changed into something akin to terror. “Uh-oh.”

“Not uh-oh. You’re not in trouble. I just need to know some things.”

At first, Varian looked mystified, until he understood Quirin’s meaning. It seemed his knuckles tried to jump out of Quirin’s palm, even as they became slick. “But you already know everything.”

“Maybe so. But I need to know why.”

With hand slipping out of Quirin’s, Varian retreated back to the other end of the sofa, leaning against the arm rest and propping the book up on his lap, shielding his torso. He looked at its pages, as if what was more engrossing were star charts, moon charts, astrological signs, sun spots, and coronas. “Okay,” he chirped, falsely light. “But its not like you don’t already know.”

“I don’t?”

“Yeah, Dad. It starts with an ‘A’, and ends with an ‘R’.”

“Very funny. I have questions, Varian. And we haven’t even discussed prison—” He stopped when a fizzling vibration shook Varian, his fingers pressed into the book until the tips turned white. This was not the reaction Quirin had been hoping for, although he knew it would be difficult—but this reaction, over just the word ‘prison,’ was disturbing. The tight knot of tension in his belly wound ever tighter. He forced his way through it.

“What about prison?” he asked.

“What about it?”

“You … I mean …”

Varian raised his face and looked with an expression of clear innocence and confused expectation. So he was not going to make this easy on his father.

Quirin laid it down flat. “You don’t want to talk about prison.”

“Who said I didn’t want to talk about prison?” Varian shrugged, his tone much breezier than the wind currently battering the house, that was certain. “We can talk about prison. It was just … it was just so boring.”

“Really?”

“Completely. I didn’t have much to do, except I had to help prepare fruits and vegetables for the kitchen. Mainly fruit, which was nice, because they let me have some of it. They let me keep Ruddiger, did you know that? Yep. I guess he already had the prison stripes.”

Fascinated, Quirin settled in and listened to Varian ramble on.

“I had pencil and paper and books they would bring, but that was basically it. It was really boring. They said I had to go outside everyday because of the doctors. I don’t know the doctor’s name. I never really bothered to learn anybody’s name, you know. I made up nicknames for all of them. Sometimes just ‘cause of what they looked like, or sometimes just random. It was just mainly boring. Uhm … oh, we couldn’t take actual baths, of course. Just sponge baths. Ruddiger got a bath, too! But yeah, that’s my exciting tale of prison. I don’t recommend it, because it was so boring.”

Blinking, Quirin asked, “What is it you’re afraid to tell me?”

The logs in the fireplace crackled three times as they incinerated before Varian made a movement. The glaze dissolved from his eyes, and he said, “It’s noth—” His nose quivered before he clamped a hand over his mouth, a flush swelling over his brown cheeks.

“It’s okay—”

“No, no! No, it’s fine. It’s just … it’s just …” Varian swallowed. “It’s just I … well, Dad. Truthfully, I—chased Ruddiger off. I told him I didn’t want him anymore. Here he came to prison with me, and I wasn’t a good friend to him. Even before that.”

There was making sense of things, and then there was trying. Quirin was very much in the latter category. “That’s what you were afraid to say?”

Up came the astronomy book over a glum face. “Forget about it.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Quirin looked at Ruddiger, who had curled himself up against Varian’s thigh, and tail—yes—looking exactly like a comma in prison stripes. “You did the right thing. Prison is no place for an animal. And look at Ruddiger. I’m sure you’re forgiven.”

A tremble traveled through Varian’s core, but he remained interested in only his book. There was more here, but Quirin would drop the subject for now.

Trying to lighten the mood, trying to unwind that tension in probably both their bellies, Quirin tore out a piece of paper from the agricultural report. (Who cared about uninspiring broccoli anyway?) He began to fashion a paper dart. Now this was something. He hadn’t done it since childhood, and folding the paper here and there, and maybe there—nope. Not a paper dart.

“Tell me what happened during the blizzard,” he said, glancing up to see how Varian would take it.

Varian didn’t seem to hate it. His toes wriggled in his socks, but he folded an ankle over the other and told his story, loosely, from beginning to end. How he raced through the blizzard all the way to Corona, but upon reaching the castle, was denied entry, no matter how he begged. So he waited for an opportunity to dart in and ran the halls, chased by guards, until he found Rapunzel. He was turned away, and raced back home. “There’s not much to say,” he said. But he had no idea all the silent places between his words told so much.

“And the guards who threw you out into the storm were …?”

Detecting Quirin’s tone, Varian wriggled uncomfortably, just like his toes from before. “What? You mean who—”

“Yes, their names.”

“S-stan and Pete.”

“Ah.” Quirin squashed his failed dart, and ripped out another piece of paper, hopefully not to be mangled this time. The sound of a book landing on the coffee table made him look up, and then here was Varian, sliding over until they were elbow to elbow.

Varian pulled Ruddiger into his lap, who slept on. His freckles seemed especially lively, with the occasional clatter and glow of lightning falling on them—they seemed they would dance right off his cheeks tonight. “Dad, they told me to go to the shelter. So you shouldn’t be too mad at them. They were just …” He let the words die as he looked into Quirin’s face.

“Following orders?” Quirin finished. An ache squeezed the back of his throat, which he tried to swallow away, but it remained, stubbornly. Now he understood why Stan and Pete had apologized when they visited with the Queen and King. Now he knew for certain: when he had been trapped in the amber, it was their voices he had heard regretting the night of the storm. We never should have made him go, they had said then. “We’re sorry for our part,” they had said at his parlor table.

“Rapunzel …” Varian brushed his hands over Ruddiger’s tail. “Rapunzel couldn’t help. She couldn’t do anything then. It was a bad situation all around. She was stuck, too.”

My, how grown-up he sounded. Who was the parent here?

Quirin ruined another dart. Another sheet torn from the agricultural report. He would try and try again until he got it right.

“Okay,” he said. “What happened after?”

Varian’s silence could be weighed. His hands drifted over Ruddiger’s rump as he stared into the dancing fire across the way. Then he pressed his face against Quirin’s shoulder and out came the whole grisly story. He kept himself strangely detached, just like when he had first told Quirin about the things he had done, although this time it was about what others had done. What the guards had done. How they had come into the house and made demands and accusations, and wouldn’t let him leave—or rather, forbid him from going to Corona. He stated it all clinically, with the dispassion that comes with time, but Quirin could not be clinical about it. He had only just miraculously seen for himself, by means he would never understand and in a way Varian must never know. But he could feel it peculiarly, because he had experienced it, peculiarly.

Abandoning his paper folding for the failure it was, Quirin pressed Varian against him, and whispered, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry they did that.”

“I don’t—I don’t have to be angry about it,” Varian said into Quirin’s chest, trembling.

“You don’t have to.”

“And I did those things.”

“That has nothing to do with it.”

“And she didn’t—I mean, couldn’t …”

And now, Quirin felt his own control slip, as he hissed into that head of black-blue against his chin, “She should have ordered them to let you stay. She should have kept you at the castle—”

“I wouldn’t have stayed, Dad. I would have only run off anyway.”

“Then why are you angry with her?”

Tenderly, like pressing on a bruise, Varian breathed, “She didn’t come.”

“What do you mean?”

“Before everything started, we found out the black rocks reacted to her. She said she’d help. But when I needed it, she never came. She promised she’d help, and she never came. I asked for help, and she never came. She couldn’t have come then, but why didn’t she come later?”

Quirin pressed his hand to the back of Varian’s neck.

Varian huffed away his mounting hysteria, holding his breath before letting it out. He pivoted out of Quirin’s arms, just so he was leaning instead of clasping, and even smiled at Ruddiger, who stood on his knee waving his paws in worry. Then he said, delicately, yet earthly, “She didn’t come until I made her.”

Unable to sit still, not with all this energy swelling through him, no matter how Varian was eased his own self—Quirin could not. He went to his feet to stir the fire and to check the shutters were still tied down, although the wind had died and was likely to stir the shutters no more. When he felt able to be calm, he sat back down, where Varian leaned against him again, but this time in ease and comfort, and not the clasp of grieving anger before.

“Did she apologize?” Quirin asked.

“I don’t want to be angry anymore.”

“You don’t have to be,” Quirin replied, even as he called himself hypocrite. Fine then. Let him be cloaked in hypocrisy. Let him be condemned as history’s greatest phony, if it would only mean Varian’s happiness. He would swallow this anger, if it would free Varian. “You don’t have to be angry at her. Even if she never apologizes.”

Varian threw his feet up on the coffee table, although he knew it drove Quirin crazy. “You’re not angry at her, are you?”

“I’m the last person in the world to blame a girl who was locked in a tower most of her life.”

“Oh. You sound angry, you know.”

Quirin leaned back, throwing his own heels on the forbidden table. In the end, Varian was right. There were far more people to blame. “I think she’s been alone, and only had herself to think of most of her life. I think blind optimism has been her survival technique.”

“I guess I never thought of it like that.”

Quirin hadn’t thought of it either, until just now. And he reached for that speck of truth, and led himself to the greater one, the one in which he could extend her forgiveness. If only for their own sake. “She’s just a girl. A tiny girl. A toddling girl, learning to walk.”

“I think …” Varian sat up, straightening his shoulders while shivering in the night-rain cold. “I forgive her.” His voice cracked. He looked at Quirin with a self-aware smile, and tried again. “I forgive her! Even if she never says sorry, I forgive her.”

He fell back against Quirin as if that one statement had exhausted him. Quirin felt it the same. The thunderstorm had become a rainstorm, with raindrops dribbling down their roof with pleasing rhythm, the sort to ease a person into a restful sleep.

“Hey, Dad, look!” Varian cried suddenly, amazed. “Ruddiger folded one!”

Ruddiger chirped anxiously, and with an expression of eager worry, making sure they were watching, launched a paper dart. It drifted through the currents in their little world, twelve-foot-by-fifteen, coasting until it caught the updraft of heated air from the fireplace, and arose. The warm rush could not last long (and besides, it was only a paper dart, not a bird), and it sputtered and fell. But it landed softly on the credenza, where it again could maybe, someday, be lifted again.

Chapter Text

The storm could have been more disastrous than what it was, but it was still three days of work to repair the crops from the damage. Quirin drove Varian hard, who whined, groaned, and flopped like he’d been asked to eviscerate himself, but actually just worked as hard as he could. The reward came on the fourth day, when Quirin kept his promise. They set out to see these alchemical devices of Varian. It was decided to travel a few miles out of town, lest they raise up a ruckus.

“I know the perfect spot! It’s a place with no one around,” Varian declared, standing triumphantly in the kitchen as he stuffed his backpack full of colors—orbs and vials, things that flashed or drizzled, going slomp-slomp in their vessels.

Quirin packed lunch (and secretly, a first-aid kit). Somebody had to be pragmatic.

An hour later, they reached the meadow of their choice, dotted with white and pink clover buds that had no idea what it was in for. And it was in for it. Varian’s blasts were less explosive than Quirin remembered, but they all were mostly stink or stick, glitter or glow, sparkle or bubble, flash or bang, and one that was just itch. It was a grand time, and although it took a few minutes of him wrangling his nervousness, Quirin had way more fun than he was expecting. (Even if he wished he had, like Ruddiger, brought earplugs.) Ulla had always made alchemy seem for the intellectuals. No doubt, Varian dived into the esoteric, but he liked the simple bang of it, too. He really was all boy!

They went towards home happy, Varian grinning like a magpie with a shiny coin, swinging his empty backpack around, with such little concern for its flightpath that Ruddiger took refuge to the top of Quirin’s shoulder. But the day had also been exhausting, and Quirin was never so happy to pass by the ash trees of Miller’s Pond and to hear the deep dunking splashes as water flipped head-over-heels in the waterwheel. It was good to be home.

“An easy dinner tonight,” Quirin said, as they worked further into the little woods that abutted their manor.

“I think we have some leftover—wait?” Varian stopped and scowled. “Do you hear that? It sounds like crying.”

They paused to listen. Ruddiger leapt off Quirin’s shoulder and took off towards Corona Wall. They chased after him into a clearing, where the sound coalesced, definitely, into boo-hoo-hoo. Two girls sat hunched over on a fallen tree trunk. One buried her face in her knees, while the other patted her on the shoulder.

“The Trixes!” Varian said.

“Trixie Arabella,” Quirin called. “Beatrix.”

The girls jolted up, Beatrix more alarmed than distraught, but Trixie Arabella bringing up the reddest, most pathetic face, with puffed goose-down eyes, and pigtails scattering freakishly about her head. Her freckles stood at attention on her nose, as if she’d been victim to a surprise mosquito ambush. Trixie Arabella was not a beautiful crier. How old were these girls now? Eleven or twelve?

“What’s wrong?” Quirin asked as he and Varian came into the clearing.

“Oh, hello, Mr. Ex-burgomaster, sir,” Beatrix said.

“Just Quirin is fine.” Quirin ignored the suspicious twinkle in Varian’s left eye. “Are you hurt, Trixie?”

“My ankle …” Trixie seemed to have just caught sight of Varian, staring as though bewitched. Then, with an expression of great emptiness and vapid stupidity, she lifted a corner of the cloth that was bundled in her lap. One eye got rubbed, and she was halfway through rubbing the other, before she suddenly turned green and startled, looking at the cloth with horror. “I’m only making it worse!” she howled.

“She tripped,” Beatrix said, wringing her chubby, brown hands.

Quirin took the thick, voluminous cloth away from Trixie (she looked as if she’d vomit on it at any moment) and stuffed it in Varian’s paws, then bent to assess Trixie’s ankle. Her knobby ankle felt firm between his palms, and her tenderness was only in the soft parts. It was only a sprain. Besides, first she sniffed, then hiccupped, then giggled as she ran her hand down Ruddiger’s curious nose. It couldn’t have been that serious.

“I may not be Doctor Byron,” Quirin said, “but I think you’ll live.”

“No, I won’t! I’m dead!” Trixie screeched, thrusting that ankle straight at Quirin’s solar plexus in unthinking frustration. He barely dodged it in time.

Beatrix ran her hand soothingly over Trixie’s unsightly hair, murmuring, “She can’t possibly be strong enough to break your neck.”

“Who’s breaking whose neck now?” Quirin demanded from the forest floor.

Beatrix sighed. “Mr. Quirin, sir, every year—”

“Bea, what are you doing?” Trixie cried.

Holding up a finger, Beatrix shot her friend a fierce glare, which shut the other girl right up. Beatrix blew that fierceness at Quirin, her brown eyes like a pair of burned eggs in a skillet. “What I’m trying to say is, people call you Peacemaker, right?”

“Oh well …”

“Mom said people call him that just to butter him up!” Trixie declared.

“Oh … well,” grumbled Quirin.

Varian bit his lips.

Beatrix turned on her friend again. “It’s because he’s really good at being a mediator. That’s what my dad said.”

“Well, my dad said Burgomaster Porter is the best thing to happen to Old Corona in years! Years!”

Varian wheezed. At Quirin’s look, he disappeared behind a tree, red-faced and flopping a hand, coughing violently.

“Besides,” continued Trixie, with a saucy shake of her head, “my dad said he’s been acting a right fool lately.”

“Girls, maybe we can continue this conversation—”

Beatrix stamped her foot, which made Trixie go pale. “This isn’t only about you, Trix! It’s about me too, ‘cause if Nona breaks your neck, she breaks mine too, and even if it’s not Nona, it’ll be my mom! So, I say we tell Quirin, Ex-burgomaster, Peacemaker-to-butter-him-up, and maybe he can keep both our necks from being broken!”

Trixie found it impossible to refute this speech, because she only wailed, “All right!” before throwing her face back into her hands to weep anew.

“You see, the problem is …” Beatrix shot a look at Varian as he re-entered the fray. “You had better sit down, the both of you. This is going to take a while.”

Lips quivering, Quirin and Varian both sat on another felled log, awaiting Beatrix’s story. This was becoming a very odd day.

Pacing in front of them, kicking up arrows of ash leaves around her ankles as she walked, she looked as business-like as a president. “Nona is Trixie Arabella’s older sister. Do you know who that is, sir?”

“Er … yes.”

She looked sharply at Quirin. “Sorry, I don’t want to assume you don’t have amnesia.”

Quirin was incapable of speech after this gesture. Varian was not.

“Why would he have amnesia?” he demanded.

“Well, how should I know? I’ve never known anybody to come back from the dead before.” Beatrix’s heel pummeled the ground again.

By the good sun above, she was just like her mother!

“You see, we were only looking at Nona’s wedding dress.”

“Wait, Nona’s married?” Varian asked.

“No. She is getting married. Next week.”

“I see.”

Quirin did not see.

“But who is she getting married to?” Varian asked.

“She is getting married to Reggie.”

“Reggie? Pfft. I mean, okay.”

No, not okay. Reggie and Nona, getting married? But Reggie was barely old enough to shave! Quirin scratched his head.

Beatrix pranced back and forth, tucking her hands behind her back. “So, we were only looking at the dress—”

“Which we were forbidden to do!” Trixie moaned.

“Which we were forbidden to do, but, you know, it’s such a pretty dress, and we wanted to see it.”

“How old is Nona again?” Quirin asked.

“Seventeen.”

Impossible! No wonder Quirin couldn’t see it. Nona was only one year older than Varian. Quirin looked at Varian and imagined him getting married in only a year and—nope! His brain sputtered and said, “Nope!”

“May I continue?” Beatrix asked, her voice very low, but the look in her eye very loud. “As I was saying, we were only looking at the dress, but we might have accidentally—”

“Very accidentally,” groaned Trixie.

“Very accidentally spilled ink on it.”

Quirin nodded. He understood. These girls were done for.

“We tried to wash the dress in the river, but it only made it worse.”

“But why would you wash it in the river?” Varian asked.

“We couldn’t let anyone know!” Beatrix screamed, scandalized at the thought of washing it anywhere else. “And now look! It’s right there!” With tones of utmost terror, the same tones as if she was pointing out a ghoul hanging over his shoulder, Beatrix waved her hand at the cloth bundled in Varian’s lap.

Varian stood and unfurled the dress, and not only was there an enormous splotch of the blackest, thickest, inkiest ink splashed all over the bodice, but the washing had only made the ink smear, besides the grass and mud stains.

Naturally, Quirin did not say that Nona was, indeed, going to kill these girls. Instead, he asked, “But what are you doing out here with the dress?”

“Well …” Beatrix cleared her throat, primly. “We decided it was a lost cause and do what everyone does with lost causes. We were going to hide the evidence by throwing it over the Wall and blame it on thieves.” Then she and Trixie Arabella both dissolved into giggles.

Quirin told them they were ridiculous.

“Well, that’s true,” Trixie replied, undoing her pigtails to do them up right again. How quickly she flipped her hair around into that intricate braid without even looking, all done by feel, was fascinating. “I couldn’t make out how the thieves would steal her dress but not my little pearl necklace. It only has the tiniest pearl on it, but don’t you think thieves would want that too, Mr. Quirin, sir?”

“Yes. Yes. The answer is rarely blaming thieves.” Quirin suddenly had a coughing fit, not at all triggered by the look on Varian’s face. “The only thing to do is confess. The sooner, the better, as it will give your sister time to make a new dress.”

“But Nona’s going to kill us!” the Trixes screamed.

“Take it from an old farmer, it takes many more pounds per square inch to snap a neck than Nona is capable of.”

With these words of comfort, Quirin lifted Trixie of the sprained ankle into his arms, and overall, they made for a dejected party back to the manor, no matter the sort of Ruddiger-antics that sent the girls into giggle fits. Inevitably, those smiles turned wan and sour.

But then Varian said, “I can totally get these stains out.”

Trixie wriggled in Quirin’s arms. “Are you serious?”

Varian smiled. “Yeah. With alchemy, it’ll be—ahem!—per-fec-tion.”

The girls shrieked (R.I.P., Quirin’s right ear drum), and the last half of the trip home was more jubilant than the first. It wasn’t long before Quirin installed Trixie on his sofa, while Varian took the offending fabric to the lab. Beatrix sat next to Trixie, playing with the ribbon wrapped around her stocking. As Quirin walked out to fetch them a drink, he heard Trixie’s obnoxiously loud whisper: “He’s got awful big, blue eyes.”

Nope!

Quirin shot them one last look. He needed to guess again at their ages. Clearly, his math was off. What had happened to the children while he was in that amber?

In a state of shock, he hitched the carriage to Nuthatch. When he re-entered the manor, it was to squeals as Beatrix danced around his sitting room, waving the dress in victory. Varian stood nearby, vial in hand, and a self-satisfied smirk on his face.

Quirin should make some stodgy speech about learning their lesson about being truthful and so forth, but thought better of it before they made some astute observation: if they hadn’t tried to toss the dress over the Wall, they never would have run into Varian and his stain-blaster. So, he took them all home instead, everyone rather crushed in his two-seater.

Trixie very shyly said, “Thank you, Varian,” before Quirin whisked her away up the path to her parents, who stood at their door, besides themselves.

They thanked Quirin effusively, until Beatrix said, “You should thank Varian. He’s the one that saved the dress.”

Quirin made his hasty exit as Nona screamed, “Is that my dress!?”

Not so many days passed before the tale of Varian’s cleaning exploits reached the ears of the neighbors. Namely, the neighbor next door, Freya, that chicken-loving foreigner, who danced on the roof of her house at times. She came pounding down the door one morning, looking as plucky as ever with the peculiar brightness in her dark eyes, or maybe it was because one of her eyebrows was always a tad askew.

“The cow isn’t in the onion patch again, is it?” Quirin asked when he opened to door to her.

She blinked and smoothed her hand over her almond-shaped head. “No, boss. Your boy-o here?”

Quirin put her in the parlor while they awaited Varian, who was in the middle of feeding chickens. While they waited, he offered her speculaas, which she turned her nose at for being the wrong time of year.

Casting abroad for a subject to break their awkwardness (one could only stuff so many cookies as an excuse to remain silent), Quirin asked, “Do you call Porter ‘boss’ too, now he’s the burgomaster?”

Freya spread wide her legs, so the embroidery of her skirt stretched out to show a cornucopia full to bursting. She wrapped a ball of lace around her fists. “I call him ‘Your Lordship.’”

Varian came in before Quirin could ask if she was joking.

“Beatrix been telling stories about you,” Freya told Varian.

“Oh?” cried Varian and Quirin both (but probably thinking two different worries).

“Aye. Yes. She says you saved the one’s wedding—the strumpe—”

“Oh, ma’am!” Quirin yelped before Varian, looking mystified, could ask what “strumpe—” meant. “You mean Nona.”

“Yes. She makes the bread things for me.”

“Ah! The crumpets.” Quirin laughed. “Yes, Nona, the one who makes the crumpe—”

“I didn’t come to the accursed house to talk crumpets!”

Quirin shot Varian a warning look, whose face was appearing more and more like a squashed beet. “What can I do you for, ma’am?”

She thrust out the lace. “My folks is coming. I’m trying to get the place cleaned up, afore they complain I’m doing no good and make me go back. This is looking yellow.”

Varian took the lace, said, “I see, please wait here,” and left the parlor.

“Off to his lair, then,” Freya murmured, with a definitive head nod.

Quirin rubbed his neck. “It’s more of a lab, really.”

They waited, eating cookies even before breakfast. Even Freya couldn’t resist speculaas, after all, even if it was out of season. After a tale told full of incorrect or even made-up words, Quirin understood Freya was getting her house ready for her parents’ visit. She wanted to make a good impression, else they would force her back to her country to marry her betrothed, an arrangement made when she was only five and quite unwanted by her.

“I’m not seen him in two-ten … twenty years! You want to know something?”

“What’s that, ma’am?”

“When I seen him last time, he wanted a mustache. It was the mostest tiny, mostest dry-up looking, like a damselfly got stuck under his nose and died!” Freya made a strange motion with her mouth, which was alarming for how much it resembled a mouth about to spit in disgust. With a jerk, she smoothed it into a smile. “You wouldn’t marry a man like that, would you?”

“Well, no.”

“Course not! You appreciate a man who can grow facial hair, don’t you? I bet you shave three times a day!” Narrowing her eyes, she peered at his face, and Quirin felt like a fish on ice at the market. “Yes, I’d say you’d grow a proper beard. It’s too bad about everything else.”

Quirin could say nothing to that and bit into a cookie. He’d been having hard days, lately. The female of the species had discovered some weakness in him and was now closing in for the kill.

“Maybe the fiancé has married someone else by now,” he mumbled.

Freya’s eyes hardened as she stared at him, her mouth shrinking into a hard little pebble.

Thank goodness. Varian came back at that moment, carrying stark egret-white in his hands where there had once been yellow. “Just a bit of pitcher plant essence, cornflower nectar, and lemon juice!”

Freya bounced and inspected the lace. “Glories!”

“Was there anything else I can help you with?”

“Hmm … I don’t allow witchy-works in my home but bring your potion and do some other things.”

Varian promised to be by later in the evening. After they walked her to the door and watched her go, where she went skipping down the lane while swinging the lace around like a war banner, Varian turned to Quirin and asked, “What does ‘strumpy’ mean?”

“It’s not a word. She meant crumpy, of course.”

“That’s a word?”

“It means to crumble easily.”

“But how does Nona crumble?”

Quirin cursed the day Freya had ever come to Corona. “Maybe she meant stumpy then.”

“But Nona’s not short.”

Quirin slammed the door.

Varian never did figure out the mystery of “strumpe.” When he went to Freya’s that evening, he asked her what she had meant. She had only laughed, and replied, “Oh, hee ha! I seen it in the dictionary just now. Don’t tease me, young wizard! Now, you got something afore the floors?”

When Varian got home, he tried to look it up in their dictionary, but strangely, the STRO- to STUA- page (the page on which the word would have lived) was missing. He almost suspected Dad of tearing it out to fold one of his paper darts that he’d lately been obsessed with. But surely not!

The next day, Varian went down to the river to puzzle it out while he worked on his fishing wheel. He’d been spending so much time on it, that he could only hope he’d get the kinks out before he became fully aquatic.

Today, it was a matter of moving the blasted thing. It needed to be in a deeper part of the river. The flow wasn’t right to catch the optimal number of fish with the least amount of turns. But it was going to be such a pain-in-the-neck! The darn thing was cumbersome and heavy, and the only safe way of moving it was to disassemble it, drag it to location by pieces, and put it together all over again. What a slog. But science was hard work, and he’d better get used to hanging out with the loons. He was half loon, anyway.

So, he quickly got steps one and two done (disassembly and move to the other side of the bridge), but the long part was putting it all together again. He got the platform in the river soon enough, and was standing on it, scratching his head over some piece he didn’t even recognize, much less know where it belonged, when a voice called out to him from above. Janice waved at him from the bridge from atop a horse. Waving back, that vortex of bashfulness swirled all inside Varian, even though it’d been four years now since she’s been his teacher.

Janice was hard. She was super kind—like, she’d baked him that birthday cake—but she always had that schoolmarmish aspect. It always felt like she was about to come down on him for some infarction, and then he’d be banished to her garden to pick weeds or spread fertilizer around as punishment.

She’s not in charge of you, no more!

Ha. Telling himself that did not work.

Although she didn’t look schoolmarmish today. She was decked out in riding habit and a beaver hat that was marginally better than the big, round one Dad pretended to hate. Varian didn’t realize she was coming down until she hopped from her horse and was already halfway down the embankment. He raced up to help her down.

“Oh dear,” she said, looking at the pieces of his fish wheel scattered around. “I came to see this automatic fishing apparatus I’ve heard about, and here it lies. Did something happen to it?”

“I’m just moving it. I’ll have it put back together in a jiffy.”

She watched as he worked, and although she claimed to be more artistically minded than mechanically (after all, she’d taught him to draw), she asked astute questions and made suggestions for improvement. Blah blah, and she was right about them too! It made him feel like a balloon was getting big in his chest, making him feel all tight and tingly, and it was with pride he put his fishing wheel together and pulled the pin that held the arms still. After dashing across the plank to dry (muddy) land, he stood on the bank beside her to watch it work.

It worked quite simply. It was a wheel spoke of arms with baskets attached, just as a waterwheel, turned by the current. Whoa, Varian felt even prouder still when a fish was caught in a basket before their very eyes. The back of the basket had a chute, into which dropped a wriggling flash of silver that slid into a bigger basket to be gathered later.

“Well done!” Janice cried. “With a larger one installed on a faster river, you could make a real industry.”

“Ha! Yeah, maybe I should make one big enough to span this whole river!”

“The fishermen downstream will bless you for that.”

Janice, instead of patting him on the head like she used to, pressed her hand against his shoulder. She kept it there longer than expected, so Varian stood unmoving while they watched the wheel turn and turn. Maybe he didn’t seem like such a little kid to her, anymore.

When she removed her hand, her face was pensive. “Have you selected a school yet? I think if you were to tell any of them about this, and your other inventions, you could go to any school you wanted.” Smiling, she looked at him archly.

Hmm, this was interesting. It’d been a long time since there’d been talk of him attending university. Dad said a couple years ago that there’d be money to pay for it, when the time was right. “You really think University of Corona will care about a fishing wheel?”

“Of course, not them! Corona doesn’t have an alchemy program. That’s why I didn’t put it on the list.”

Varian felt his eyebrows become tight. “List?”

“Yes, the list of schools I gave your father. Any of those schools would be wonderful, although the one in Ingvarr is my favorite.”

“Oh,” Varian murmured. It felt as if a water boiler had exploded under his feet. He halfway expected a crater to open up under him. “I didn’t know.”

Janice’s changeable eyes stared intensely. “For goodness’ sake, hasn’t he shown it to you yet? You’re running out of time to get in before next semester. Varian”—her hand came to his shoulder again—“you’re guaranteed admission no matter where you choose to go, I know it. Sometimes, schools will even help with the tuition for exceptional students.”

Another fish was caught. It flopped helplessly in the wheel basket, flicking silver beads of water and light as the arm revolved and dropped it into the chute, where it eventually landed in the holding basket with a final plop.

Janice patted her hands together in a gentle applause. “I think your father’s concerns about you getting in are quite silly, indeed.”

Taking her by the hand, Varian helped her back up the hill.

“My goodness, Varian, your hand is damp. It’s freezing—absolutely frigid!” she said, climbing back onto her horse. “Go home to warm up.” Then tapping the beaver hat to the crown of her head, she kicked her horse into a canter down the dusty road.

Varian slid back down the hill and stood sinking into the mud, while Ruddiger came out from the sedges to wrap around his ankles. With feet that seemed to move of themselves, he crossed over to the wheel again, slammed the peg to stop the rotation, and emptied the captured fish back into the river. Then, he ran back to shore and took off. Where are you going? he asked himself, but had no answer. He ran up and down in the shallow streams, splashing white, his eyes with such a heat in them.

Dad wouldn’t do that. What Dad wouldn’t do … who could say? Not him. But Dad wouldn’t!

Things were better between them now. Better than ever! Dad had shown an interest in Varian’s alchemy. Actually shown an interest! (No, no, he would squash any creeping suspicions that it was to tell some school about his inventions.) They were so long past that time when Dad had put his anger and grief on full display, an exhibition of his glittering viscera. That was done. That was done done done done. He was forgiven.

And if there was one piece of earthly evidence of Varian’s worst act—he wouldn’t think about it. Because the Royal Guard didn’t show that sort of thing to just anybody, surely. (Oh, why hadn’t he destroyed it?)

Varian kicked at the water so it flew all ahead of him. He would not run home to dig that pardon out! It was not his security blanket anymore. And he had no reason to get it anyway, because Dad wouldn’t!

Some hidden, loose rock shifted under him, and Varian went face first into the stream. Ruddiger, who had been running along the bank, struggling to keep up, leapt into the water and clambered onto his back. Varian picked himself up, completely soaked, spitting river pebbles. He sat for a minute, catching his breath. The rocks had rubbed his hands raw where he had caught himself. And Ruddiger was wet too, and what was worse, smelling like wet raccoon.

“Let’s go home, Ruddiger.”

There, Dad put him in front of a raging fire to warm him without, and made hot cocoa to warm him within. As Varian sank into that homey comfort, he knew that even if there had ever been a list, it was now gone. Because, quite simply, Dad wouldn’t.

Come one, come all!

֍WORLD EXHIBITION֍

At the Corona fairgrounds

The accursed poster hadn’t gotten any less obnoxious. Quirin stood in the post office, staring at it, finding it still—even with its ever increasingly annoying features—to be less annoying than the letter in his hand.

It was the final letter from the final university.

Yeah, his goose was cooked. Any option of sending Varian off to university, whether it was to find peace or just a fancy piece of paper at the end of it, was a no-go. Either, they must learn to make-do in Corona, or pack up hearth and home and learn to make do somewhere else. Where they would go was a baffling prospect. And the idea of starting all over again at his age, leaving so much behind, just when Varian was on the cusp of adulthood, and moving would certainly mean delaying university even more … Yeah, his goose was cooked.

Shaking his head, Quirin put the letter in his pocket. He looked over at Ambrose, who stood behind the counter doing postman things, and swallowed down a nervous flutter. Ambrose had been acting completely normal since the dinner-party, as if Quirin had been nothing but peaches-and-cream during it. But it was still awkward. Especially since Porter was certainly doing everything he could to avoid Quirin: Quirin hadn’t so much as smelled the faintest hint of a perfumed handkerchief since that evening.

“You can—” Quirin coughed over an aborted start. “Sorry, Ambrose.”

Ambrose looked up, unquestionably questioning.

“You can start delivering my mail again, as normal. If that’s fine.”

Ambrose scratched a pen over bureaucracy, flickering his eyebrow. He was a master at feigned professional disinterest. “Right-o, Quirin. No problem at all.”

Now that was done, Quirin stepped outside and meandered in town, condensing his disappointment into a glistening shard to secret away behind his heart. Like hiding a diamond in reverse, not to display it loud and proud. But maybe the future wouldn’t be so bad. After all, man-eating dragons were still a thing, and they might find him a tasty morsel.

“Quirin!” a trio of female voices called out, bringing his attention up to the second-story balcony of the inn, where Louise, Patina, and Claudia poked their laundry baskets over the balustrade. Their smiling faces shone down, and Louise shouted, “Tell Varian he’s saved our skins!”

“I take naps instead of do the laundry anymore!”

“Hush, Claudia!”

Laughing, Quirin threw a dismissive hand at them, but boy, had that shifted the mood. He felt light enough to go home. After all, he didn’t have to make hasty decisions. Things were suddenly improving.

It was Varian’s stain blaster, that was what. He’d become an overnight sensation thanks to Freya and a pair of twitter-pated girls (who were always on their property now, crying, “Oh, gee, Mr. Quirin, we were only chasing after the cutest bunny—hi, Varian!”). They’d spread the word, and the village was alive to the skills of their homegrown alchemist. Rather, it was the women, once they discovered the boy in the manor had a detergent that obliterated grass stains. A knock from some housewife had become the routine, and with an exchange of a few coins (the women insisted) for a few vials of Sparkling Wonder, Varian suddenly found himself running a little cottage industry. It didn’t pay much, but it kept Varian busy.

Quirin stopped to pick up pfeffernüsse for dessert, muttering to himself, “I really ought to make sure he’s saving out money for taxes.”

And that plummeted his mood all over again. Thought of King and Country—or actually, King and Guard. Here Varian was, trapped in a country that had such people ruling it. Such people that were the powers-that-be.

“Excuse me, Mr. Quirin, sir.” Another female voice broke him out of his unpleasant reverie again, a youthful one though. This time, Quirin looked down, where the Trixes stood gazing up at him. Both their heads were full of lilacs, making them look like a pair of walking bushes.

Quirin scratched his own head. “Yes?”

“We were wondering …” Trixie Arabella began.

“Is Varian going to show his stuff?” Beatrix finished.

“His stuff?”

“Yeah.” Beatrix pulled out one of those blasted World Exhibition posters. “See, it says here—”

She pointed her finger, and Trixie read it aloud: “The latest scientific advancements!”

“Is he gonna be there and show his stuff?” Beatrix demanded. “It’s scientific advancement, right? The cleaning stuff.”

“I suppose—”

Trixie gasped, clasping her hands together. “Because Nona said she would take us! But only if we really want to go. We wouldn’t normally want to go because we have this secret thing going on right now—”

“Don’t tell him, Trix!” Beatrix screamed.

“I’m not. I’m only saying it is a secret.” Turning her face back towards Quirin, Trixie went on again, “The secret is we’re trying to raise bunnies for the next Day of Hearts.”

“Oh, Trix-trix!”

Oh Trix-trix ignored her friend. “Don’t you think it would be the cutest thing if a little bunny came hopping up to you and on its neck was a heart-shaped card that said, ‘Forever Yours?’”

Dryly, Quirin answered, “Sure.”

“Trix, stop telling him about that.” Shaking her head forlornly, Beatrix put a hand over her eyes. “We were asking about the exhibition.”

“I know! So, Mr. Quirin, sir, we wanted to go to the Exhibition, but only if Varian was going to exhibit, because we heard he showed something at a science show a few years ago and it was really exciting. But we have to really, really want to go because Nona doesn’t want to take us otherwise because she’s married now and still mad about the dress besides.”

What should Quirin do? They were too old to pat on the head, and too young to call hussies and send on their way.

Quirin mildly replied, “I don’t believe he’s exhibiting, no.”

Crest-fallen, they turned away, but didn’t make it ten steps before they were reeling around again, Trixie asking, “Mr. Quirin, sir?”

Taking a deep breath, Quirin smiled. “Yes, dear?”

“Does Varian like bunnies?”

That was an easy question to answer. “No!”

The girls tottered off, and left behind a tumble of lilacs on the cobblestone. Quirin picked one up and bunched it under his nose, smelling it for all it was worth. He didn’t know if lilacs worked as smelling salts, but after the year he was having, he was sure going to try.

But the girls’ question brought up a good point. Varian hadn’t mentioned it, but the Exhibition might just be the thing to do. Quirin needed to go to Corona to talk pumpkins with a grocer, and surely, Varian would enjoy the fair. Besides, if Quirin was going to fail as a father, at least he could provide dumb entertainment on his race to the bottom.

Gazing at the lilac, Quirin suddenly felt like visiting the graveyard.

The graveyard was hardly Quirin’s favorite place to be, but he found himself visiting it more and more often lately, far more often than the typical anniversary visits of the past. He never stepped foot in the actual graveyard, leaving those moss-covered, crooked headstones of the ancient Coronan ancestors to their solitude, but instead toured the little plot of land that hung off the outer rim of the wall. It was technically outside of the sexton’s purview, but he kept the hedges trimmed neatly anyway. This land was full of cheap tiny headstones marked “Creature”. What unbaptized child laid under which headstone was known only to its parents.

Quirin stepped through the contorted path, over and past and through the headstones that seemed to have been placed at random, cock-eyed and shifted every which way, until he chose one near the corner that looked like it hadn’t been touched in a century or so. He brushed his fingers over the “C” in Creature, and stepped back, trying to imagine. What child lay here? Who were its parents, and if it had grown, what would it have been?

This was Quirin’s most private act. He never came if someone else was nearby, because it was his secret that he never lay the anniversary lily in the same place twice. It didn’t matter which headstone got his tribute, because not one of these belonged to him.

Maybe, that was why he kept coming here lately: this place was the only evidence he had done one right thing as a father. An unmarked grave lay secretly on the other side of the wall, in the shadow of a gnarly oak tree on sanctified ground, where no unchristened child could be. Only he and Porter knew about it. They had dug it in the absolute darkness of the night, even pointing it in the right direction. Porter had sealed their friendship that night, by the seat of mud-ruined trousers. It was their secret, and theirs alone.

Not even Ulla had known. She’d been too unwell to go to the burial, but even thereafter, refused to see the spot. “I don’t want to know,” she had said, tipping one beaker into another, pink into blue, which swirled into a squid-ink black concoction. “It makes no sense to be sentimental. These things happen all the time. All the time.”

But it didn’t happen to them all the time.

It had been the beginning of the breach between them. She had claimed no sentimentality while tattooing her devastation on her skin. Her refusal to join him in his defiance had hurt.

Quirin tossed the lilac cluster and watched long the wind sway that oak tree with the gnarled trunk. He would never forget it. The painting at home was still in his wardrobe, streak of red hair piercing him every time he got dressed in the mornings. More and more, it looked as though those dark, yearning figures were going to remain in the hidden away.

He was done playing nice. Quirin had once stood firm against the dictates of the powers-that-be for the sake of a child. It was time he started again.

Chapter Text

All right, you miserable old miser. Are you really so sour against the world?

This is what Quirin asked himself as he wandered the streets of Corona. And the correct was, of course: yes.

But, he could at least pretend.

Let’s pretend, if you will, that coming to Corona during a World Exhibition wasn’t the most terrible, awful, horriblest, cursed idea known to mankind. No, it was a wonderful idea, because it only meant the streets being pleasantly over-filled with patrons of all sorts, tourists of all kinds, and citizens of every branch. Hordes and hordes of people, bursting out the city gates and pouring into the boulevards. And what was this feeling that came exploding out of from behind Quirin’s right eye socket (not at all like a headache!) but this: good will towards all!

(Here, he acknowledged the guilt of sarcasm.)

“Pretend to be fifteen,” he muttered to himself, as three school-aged children scampered across his toes. As he and Varian made their way through swamped Coronan streets to find breakfast, Quirin discovered, from a nearby notice board, they had actually closed the schools to help celebrate. He hadn’t known about that factoid, especially since it was the sort of thing Janice the harsh schoolmistress would never allow. “Fifteen. Pretending I’m fifteen. Excitable fifteen.”

“What did you say?” Varian asked.

“What?”

Varian perceived he’d better drop the subject.

Yes, be fifteen again! At fifteen, Quirin had been as silly as any boy, entranced by a world he could only imagine. There had been new discoveries potentially around every corner: a unicorn in a knoll, pirates on the lake, a nymph behind the door, a sphinx in the garden. Yeah, he could be as empty-headed and full of fantasy as he used to be.

But it was really hard to be fifteen when he’d been up half the night by people checking into the inn at all hours. Varian had slept through it beautifully. Quirin could not. He was accustomed to the silent nights of Old Corona, all only nightingale melodies or cricket serenades. But here in Corona, on the eve of a spree, it was swinging doors, stomping up and down stairs, and an innkeeper gruffer and louder than usual for being so sleepy. Quirin hadn’t drifted off until (he was sure) just before sunup, and when he creaked open his eyes again, right after sunup, how they did creak!

(Eyelids weren’t supposed to make that sound.)

Varian had already been up and dressed, pulling open the curtain at the window between their beds.

“I’m starved!” he cried. “Let’s get breakfast!”

Quirin threw the blanket over his eyes.

The only answer was coffee. After getting dressed and stumbling downstairs, they started the day by following the fatherly nose. Quirin navigated them through the streets, sniffing out who must have not just coffee, but coffee! A coffee that was rare for being so strong, the sort that slides down a man’s throat like honey, but instead of being sweet, was bitter. Not just any bitter either, but was bitter like tears and failure—because there was no other sort of coffee that had such an injection of caffeine. In other words, Quirin was looking for bad coffee .

“There!” Quirin pointed out a café across the way that defined "gree-zee" , as Sir Abel used to say, a new low that blew "greasy" away like pirate grapeshot across a galleon quarterdeck. The only patrons at this establishment were disappointed looking foreigners.

“There?” Varian’s nose scrunched.

“There!”

But before they could fight their way There, through the crowds, a voice managed to make it over the din: “Make way! Clear the road!”

A voice like that was meant to be obeyed. The waters parted, as it were, and Quirin and Varian pushed themselves against a storefront (Mister Chester’s Fine Porcelains) as the crowd got out of the road. Sunlight glinted off gold, and here came the click of horse hooves, the slide and stretch of leather lines over horsey bodies, and the roll of wagon wheels over cobblestone. Quirin peered over the myriad heads to see what it was. Maybe Frederic out for a daily ride?

Surprising as much as it was disappointing. It was only a prisoner transport wagon coming down the way, even on a day like today. Two guards sat on the driver’s bench, while another hung off the back of the cage, which was filled with half a dozen prisoners. This was a common enough sight in Corona: prisoners were shuttled back-and-forth in the early mornings and evenings to labor. One just got out of the way and waited for the wagons to pass.

Of course, on a day like today, there would be a delay. Just as the wagon was about to pass them, a pair of dogs darted out into the street, fighting over a rope. The driver shouted, “Whoa!”, the horses pressed their ears forward, and the wagon jerked to a stop. One of the guards jumped down to chase the dogs away, who paid him no attention at all.

Varian chirped, “I wonder if they’ve got—”

The prisoners in the wagon shifted.

Varian squeaked and gasped, and whirled around, planting his face into the storefront window behind him.

Quirin stepped close. “Varian?”

“Ju-just it’s fine. It’s nothing. It’s fine.”

“What is it?”

“Oh, someone I know.” Varian swallowed.

Quirin scanned the faces of the guards, but none of them looked familiar. Did that mean, Varian was talking about the—prisoners?

“Who?” Quirin murmured.

“Andrew.”

A piece of ember broke away from the heat in Quirin’s heart and made his whole frame ignite. “Which one?”

With his shoulders high on his neck, Varian cast a quick glance before whirling around again. “Hair,” he said, strangled.

It was enough of an explanation. There were four prisoners in the cart, but only one with “hair.”

“Looks pretty smug for a guy in a cage,” Quirin grunted.

A single “ha” rushed between Varian’s lips. “That’s his look.” His tone was light, but his reflection in the glass told the truth.

“Stay here.”

“Where—where are you going?”

“I’ll be back in a minute.”

The dogs were successfully chased away, so Quirin had to step out behind the wagon and follow it a few steps as it started on its way again. Up until the guard hanging on the back gave him a steady, questioning stare. He went back to Varian, whose stormy brow cleared in relief, and they crossed the road to the café to eat al fresco a decadent and unhealthy breakfast, shockingly delicious. Besides the usual trappings, Quirin ordered warming hot chocolate and pastries which they never had at home. Varian was a wreck. He played with the silverware and polished a spoon with the tablecloth, until the waitress gave him the stink-eye. The Danish seemed to make him nauseated, and with the air of a gravedigger about to start a grim but necessary job, he began to eat.

A quagmire of a thousand questions flooded Quirin’s mind, but he made himself sit unperturbed, sipping coffee and commenting on the quality of the bread, slipping a knife delicately through a sausage before dipping it in mustard.

Varian cleared his throat and asked, “You’re gonna ask questions, aren’t you?”

This was a long way from the boy of earlier months, who had rather run than talk.

Quirin answered slowly, “Tonight. We’ll talk tonight.”

Poor Varian’s Danish. He knocked the tines of his fork over and over into its top. Quirin slid his hand over until it rested over Varian’s vibrating wrist. Varian slipped it away.

The sight of Andrew the Saporian was more mind-boggling than any spectacle to be found at the World Exhibition. It didn’t matter what oddities there were to amaze; all Quirin thought was, Andrew, Andrew, Andrew. If he thought about Andrew at a distance, more theoretically and less realistically, he was able to remain calm.

Andrew, Andrew, Andrew. The man was a manticore, a dragon, a beast to terrorize as it fascinated. This was no fantasy of childhood, but the real monster to feed, to crush, to strangle. It had taken Quirin only a moment to memorize the silly fastidiousness of the monster: the hair placed carefully in a bun, and the beard, overgrown now, but showing the remnants of the neatly trimmed shape it had once been. Those exalted cheekbones, the small forehead, the overall countenance of a man who wasn’t the tiniest bit remorseful—perhaps even a man who was incapable of feeling remorse at all. There was nothing downtrodden about him: he carried an air of tranquility, even while sitting inside a prison cart.

Andrew the Saporian, Andrew the Thief, Andrew the Usurper, Andrew the … perhaps, the worst of the worst.

Oh Varian, why did you join him?

They walked the exhibition promenades, and the morning passed by in a whirlwind. Before they knew it, it was time for lunch, and they sat at a picnic table eating sandwiches.

Quirin opened his mouth to say, What did you think of —

Oops. What came out was, “How did you come to know him?”

Varian opened his sandwich to redistribute a runaway tomato. “He was my cell mate.”

“You were in the same cell as that man? ”

Varian shot his head up, but Quirin schooled his face into passivity, even if it was already too late for his tone of voice. His lips trembled, and he shoved the last of his sandwich in his mouth to give those lips something else to do.

“We all had cell mates,” Varian replied, so naively.

Quirin stood, making a decision he didn’t know he was considering. Rage. The rage was bestial, scrabbling against his self-control. It swelled until he could barely breathe.

“I have to meet the grocer now. Enjoy yourself. This may take some time. The guy always talks my ear off.” Quirin pressed a hand against his belly. “Let’s meet at the hotel tonight if we don’t find each other first. Dusk.”

Varian nodded, his eyes wide and large, with dewdrops shimmering and all a-shine.

Keeping his promise, although Quirin was feeling like a truce-breaker by now, he met the grocer at a tavern by one o’clock. Normally, he would have taken the time to be affable, especially since this particular grocer enjoyed the sound of his own voice—but not today. Today, they rushed. Why, Quirin didn’t even think their seats had had time to get warm before he was shaking the other man’s hand and dodging out. And then it was down to the Office of the Royal Guard next (stopping to twist his mouth at the Court Recorder’s along the way), where he planted his feet in front of the reception desk, followed by his palms to the desk top. This caught everyone’s attention in the tiny room—from the actual receptionist, to the two guards standing near a back doorway, to the glossy pet starling settled in the garden window.

“We got a tough customer!” said the starling.

Quirin decided to ignore the remarks of a literal pest.

“I want to speak to the Captain!” he barked.

The receptionist, a man who remarkably resembled the starling, raised bland blue eyes from a book he held in ink-flecked hands. A flicker ravaged the corner of his eye as he observed Quirin’s invasion of his space. So, this little pest had some bite.

“Are you here to report a crime?” he asked.

Yes.

But not by this man’s reckoning. Quirin repeated his demand.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No.”

Mr. Receptionist scratched his nose and pulled out a piece of paper. “Sir, the Captain is a busy man. There are lackeys that can handle whatever it is you want. Fill out this form—”

Quirin took up the sheet and tore it in two. “I will not fill out a form. You tell your captain my name is Quirin, Varian’s father, and I will speak to him. Now!”

The weak eyes became steel, and the long mouth shrapnel. “You—”

“Excuse me, Frank, I can take care of this,” a voice said, something about it raising alarm bells in Quirin’s nervous system. One of the guards from the doorway in the back stepped forward, laying his hand on Frank’s shoulder.

Frank deflated, waving a hand dismissively.

“Follow me, sir,” the guard said, and now Quirin knew without a doubt. He recognized that voice. This was Commander Larson. The man who tried so hard to terrorize Varian into giving up the scroll piece by kind, manipulative gestures.

Larson led him further back into the building, out into a courtyard, then past the armory and barracks until they entered another building, which held a large room of guards running to and fro, armaments along the wall, and a desk in the center.

“It’ll be some time. He’s in a meeting, but I’ll let him know.” Larson pulled out a chair for Quirin to sit in. “If you need something, Lieutenant Bern can help you.”

Bern sat across the way at another desk, running through some checklist, although he looked at Quirin with piercing eyes. He jerked his gaze away when Quirin looked back.

How did Quirin manage to sit there calmly when he was internally the exact opposite? How did he not fly across the room to give to Bern, that high-cheeked stupid man—a man who hit children—a taste of his own medicine? Somehow, Quirin managed, even as the scratching of Bern’s quill was enough to send him to the moon.

Larson came back and took him to a smaller room off this main one, to wait in the Captain’s personal office for a few minutes more. Pacing as he waited, Quirin’s fingers ached with the clench and unclench thereof, the rhythmic spread of fingers before fisting them together again.

He took particular notice of the room, to get an idea of what sort of man the Captain was.

The outer room was where he conducted his business, but this was the room he retreated to for privacy. The room was chaos. The bookcase shelves were crowded with books—Quirin had an impulse to mangle them and throw them about, as the guards had done to his own—and dust trails ran where the books had been slid in and out. Sunlight leaked sluggishly through windows coated in a chalky film of more dust, and the sills were filled with graveyards of freckled black flies. The desk was a total mess: discarded books, used coffee mugs, a dry inkwell. Well, well. Quirin would have expected the Captain of the Guards to have more order, but this was the room of an utterly, utterly useless man.

The door opened. Quirin turned to meet who came through. Ah, he had seen this man before but had never paid him much attention. Tall, chest stuck out, clothed in the proud sun-stamped armor of all the guards. Blunt nose, and a sturdy jaw. Perfect.

Once the door closed, Quirin’s hand found the side of that sturdy jaw. The clap was like thunder, and the Captain’s head was thrust to the side.

“That’s for putting my son in the same cell as a grown man!”

The smack landing against the man’s mouth didn’t feel right, but it felt good.

The Captain knew how to take a hit. He breathed in and out just once, his cheek ablaze. When he turned his head to look at Quirin, the anger in his eyes was restrained. “I’m only going to let you do that once,” he said.

“Fine. Then let’s talk like civilized people.” Quirin took a seat in front of the desk, flicking a dead fly off the chair.

The Captain apologized for the state of the room, which was interesting. “I’ve just got back from an extended trip.” He sat on the other side of the desk, putting down a slim red volume, and they assessed each other, professionally. His shoulders seemed overly broad, with a sense of false inflation in them, unusually stiff and expanding. Like a cat raising its fur before getting in a fight. “What do you want?”

“This is awkward.” Quirin crossed his hands and lay them on the desk. “Lately, I’ve been forced to question the competence of the men in positions of authority in this kingdom. From the top. To the bottom.”

Two spots of color beaded under the Captain’s eyes, which hadn’t even appeared with the earlier assault. “Do you want me to explain or to just sit here and let you insult me?”

“I think you can do both.”

The Captain, having his answer, rubbed a finger underneath his mustache.

Quirin went on. “I could start by telling you how disgusted I am by how my son was treated before he had done anything wrong.”

“We thought you were killed.”

“Being killed and being murdered are two different things. I would have thought someone in your position would have learned that. Or maybe it was just orders. Orders are orders, isn’t that right?”

“If you are looking for me to condemn the king—”

“I wouldn’t want you to do anything to make yourself uncomfortable.”

Lips pulling shoestring across his teeth, the Captain replied, “It’s not like we enjoyed it. We’re not monsters.”

“They why was Varian put into the same cell as that monster?”

The Captain had the decency to look away. “That was a mistake.”

“Just this time, or do you regularly house children with adult criminals?”

“Corona doesn’t exactly have a plethora of underage trai—prisoners to choose from. It was either put him with somebody or keep him alone. Do you know what solitary confinement does to a person?”

That hurt. Viscerally. Varian’s solitude had started months before he went to prison.

Quirin leaned back to add distance. It wouldn’t do to succumb to his urges for violence again. “Enlighten me.”

The Captain’s mustache titled like a ship floundering at sea. “We kept him in his own cell at first. We hoped, with his pet, he would be fine.”

The fingers of Quirin’s right hand jerked before he stilled them. He had forgotten they had allowed Varian to keep Ruddiger.

“But he wouldn’t engage with anybody. With the guards, some, but not with the other prisoners at all. They shout things at each other across the cells, have discussions, tell jokes, and so on. But as far as we could tell, he wouldn’t speak a word and just wrapped himself up in his own little world. Him and that raccoon. For two months.”

“And so what? Am I to believe you worried he was lonely?”

“He hurt himself.”

Quirin pressed fingers into the place between his eyebrows to give him some sense of control. “What do you mean?” he choked.

“Nothing serious. But it happened. So, we thought we’d force him to engage, and put him with what we thought was the mildest guy in there.”

“You should have done something else.”

“Like what?” The man’s brown eyes were as hard as the amber that had trapped Quirin. “He was too dangerous.”

Quirin felt trapped by that too, and snapped, “And who was it that made him so?”

The Captain looked away.

Reaching for some measure of control, Quirin kept his tone tight when he spoke again. “I have been thrust into a tight place I cannot seem to maneuver out of. On one hand, I have been told my son voluntarily allied himself with a violent man who took over the kingdom. On the other hand, I am told he was forced into the man’s harmless company, for his own good. Do you see how difficult this is for me?”

“You want to see his file?”

Quirin had no notion such a thing existed, and for some reason, his mouth went dry.

The Captain took Quirin’s silence as assent and slid the red book he had brought in across the desk. “The man in charge of that cell block kept extensive notes. We kept a close eye on him.”

Biting back any retorts to that, Quirin accepted the book grimly. It was battered, the corners dented, and someone had drawn silly little sketches of raccoons on the inside cover. Hardly professional. After the Captain excused himself, Quirin flipped to the first page. He was not going to overreact. He was going to maintain his self-control, no matter what was in here. By a miracle, he had already gotten by with one attack against an officer of the law, but there was no way he would get by with another. There was nothing he would do to get himself arrested.

“Heaven help me,” he muttered when he looked. It was just the first page, and nothing he hadn’t seen before in the court documents: Varian’s profile. The rough sketch of his son. The artist had missed the spark, the light that lived within those eyes, the aurora manifested in a boy. The eyes here were drawn dull and average, even paltry. And they made the trifling details of Varian’s life seem so important, not the other things—not his joys and despairs and his castles in the air, but instead his age, his birthplace, his height, his hair color.

There was an initial assessment of Varian’s medical condition when he was arrested, the doctor noting it as “—good. Regular quarterly examinations recommended.” But then the sickening next: “Patient presents with moderate abrasions to arms. Self-inflicted. Otherwise good health condition. Wounds treated. Increase examinations to monthly.” Thereafter that was always the doctor’s assessment of Varian’s overall health condition: “good” or sometimes “very good.” There was an illness later on, which the doctor called a general lethargy and melancholia, perhaps the beginning of nutritional deficiency. Exercise and a change in diet were prescribed. Another illness in the last entry, which someone had written in large letters at the bottom: “Probable Malingering .”

There were no reports of punishment. It seemed Varian wasn’t an ambitious prisoner and did what he was told. The only listed “incident” was: “Escaped. Suspected co-conspirator of mass prison break. Pardon issued by ruling authority. No arrests permitted for alleged but unprosecuted crimes committed before pardon issued.” Other than that doozy, Varian had been a good prisoner.

His temperament, on the other hand, they claimed to have been bad: “Petulant and irritable. Antisocial.” And there it was: “disturbing self-soothing behavior observed,” followed by the eventual, “Harmed himself. Recommend: remove from solitary.”

Quirin pressed his finger into his eyes. “It’s just like the trial record,” he rasped. “It’s fine. You know it turned out fine. It’s okay. He’s okay.”

It was either read on or tear the place apart. And since the last thing he wanted to do was send a message to Varian tonight that he got a personal, up-close tour of Varian’s old digs, Quirin read on.

Enter Andrew. It turned out “Andrew” was just an alias, but seeing even that fake name spelled out had the blood pressing through his veins, even more so when someone (just who was so stupid?) had written: “Recommend house with Hubert (Andrew), who is mild-mannered and quiet, an obedient and model prisoner .”

The next notes remarked on Varian’s “hostility” towards his new cellmate, of his “refusing offers of friendship.” But then, a sudden change. One note remarked on Varian’s continuing apathy and Andrew’s patience, but then the next note, dated two weeks later: “companionable, responsive. Accepts comfort from cellmate.”

That word.

What by the blasted moon did that word mean?

Comfort.

That word bothered him.

He drubbed his fingers on the desktop, scrutinizing the notes, checking and checking again they were only dated two weeks apart. What could have caused this extraordinary and sudden change? There was something of significance in these notes; it tickled the back of his mind. But whatever it was, it remained out of reach.

He scanned through the rest. Every note thereafter kept the trend: their relationship was “companionable and comfortable .” There couldn’t have been a better phrase to magnify Varian’s loneliness.

Quirin was incensed.

He had some time to wrap his wrath into a manageable bundle before the Captain came back in with a quick rap on the door. He stared without blinking, and apparently decided it was safe enough, and closed the door behind him. Quirin threw the book on the other side of the desk.

“The incompetence in this kingdom is staggering,” he said. “Didn’t it seem strange to you? Or are all your prisoners so cuddly towards each other?”

The Captain came around and picked up the book. “We thought—we hoped Andrew was man enough. We should have realized there was something sinister about his sincerity.”

“You stuck him with a manipulator!” Quirin jumped to his feet as the Captain sat. He could not sit at the same table as that man. “Why Andrew?”

“It was either him or the guy who strangled his business partner. Andrew’s crimes were politically motivated.”

“How refreshing.”

“My point is he’s not just some common thug. He wasn’t blindly violent, and he never fought. He kept his nose clean. He spent half his day sitting in funny poses and the other half writing poetry. He fed the pigeons at the window.”

“He manipulated you.”

“Yes.”

Quirin stood by the window. The view looked out over the horse stables. There was something pithy and biting he could say about that. “Andrew. What he’s in for now. Anything to do with Varian?”

“No.”

Pressing his forehead against the cool, hard corner of the windowsill, Quirin discovered—he didn’t know how he felt about that. What did he think about it? So the Captain was saying Andrew didn’t do anything to Varian enough to deserve jail? It seemed unjust, exactly as much as it was relieving.

“If Varian had been convicted of crimes related to the prison break and after,” the Captain continued, “we could have charged Andrew with incitement.”

“Incitement.” The word tasted metallic. It was a charge that could be leveled against everyone, wasn’t it? Quirin asked, “How do you think Andrew incited Varian?”

“I don’t have particulars, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Then what do you know?”

“What we’ve been talking about. Manipulation.” Something about his tone made it obvious he was holding back.

Turning around, Quirin watched the Captain sit at the desk, moving paperwork around, stacking the empty coffee cups. Trying to look busy, make some order. To avoid Quirin’s stare—certainly. Was it possible even he felt blameworthy for the errors? That even the Captain of the Guards was capable of self-incrimination? There was hesitation and timidity in his manner, as if he was new at it.

“All you talk about is manipulation,” Quirin said. “Andrew manipulated. Andrew manipulated Varian. Andrew manipulated you. Are you sure that’s all?”

Some little motion in the Captain’s shoulders, certainly to say “Who knows?” What he did say, with his mouth, was, “Andrew wasn’t hurting him, we know that. The doctors would have seen it.”

“As if threats can be seen.”

“No, those two were thick as thieves. Andrew would have been too smart to use threats in prison. Afterwards? Maybe yes, maybe no.” He flicked his eyes up. “The Saporians were quick to blame Andrew for everything, especially when I threatened them with incitement of a minor. But even for their blame-game, they never told the same story regarding physical violence. I don’t think it happened.”

Quirin pressed his palms behind him, into the stonework, until his thumbs stung with the struggle of rock and mortar. “The word of thieves.”

“Maybe you should ask your son.”

“It’s not exactly pleasant dinner conversation.” Quirin was trying to be sarcastic, but he heard the self-rebuke in his voice. He had been afraid to ask Varian for answers. Now, he couldn’t avoid it anymore.

The Captain stood to take the books scattered across his desk to the bookcase. “I know it’s not much comfort, but we’re transporting Andrew. He’s being shipped out in two days.”

“A prison barge on the Lost Sea?” Quirin muttered. Could he be satisfied with that? For the man to just disappear into the mists and breezes of the sea? Was it wrong to wish for a hurricane?

The books slid neatly into the case. The Captain stared at them, long after they were put away, keeping his back towards Quirin. He never did turn around again. “Look, I’m a father too, and—” He struggled, before speaking again. “I’ve always seen in purely black-and-white principles. But lately, I’ve been forced to reevaluate that philosophy. The pardon … the pardon was a good thing.”

Quirin jangled the change in his pocket. There was nothing more for him to say. He couldn’t make a sarcastic comment about how to treat minors in prisoner. He couldn’t say thank you or even sorry for the smack to the face (what he had intended to be as insulting as possible). All he could do was leave the Captain to his regrets.

But he thought of one thing before he left. At the door, he said, “There was a commander who hit Varian, out of frustration.”

“I know. He was dealt with.” At Quirin’s look, the Captain went on, his tone unapologetic, “He was demoted.”

Quirin clicked his tongue with how distastefully unjust it seemed, even as he felt somewhat pacified. A demotion wasn’t satisfactory, but it was something. And the look on the Captain’s face was clear: a demotion was enough and all he could expect. Quirin would have to be satisfied.

It was annoying, though. He had come looking for a hundred villains but had found only one.

Commander Larson met him as he opened the door. “I’ll show you out.”

“The room is a disaster,” Quirin said, unable to help himself. One last childish sling at the Captain.

Larson only laughed, as he led Quirin back where they had come. “You should have seen it before. The Saporians trashed the place. We found so much stuff strewn everywhere—even in the castle.”

Quirin faltered for half a second. Had Varian been a part of that? Now that was an entertaining thought!

“Well,” he muttered, “I guess you won’t have to worry about them for much longer.”

“Oh, you heard about the ship?” Larson’s eyes lit up strangely.

They didn’t speak to each other again, until the door leading to the exit appeared down the darkened hallway. Before Quirin walked through it and then out into the street, Larson put a hand on his shoulder.

“We take them down to pier three early morning,” he said, an upward twist in the corner of his mouth. “Before anyone’s out. Right around dawn.”

Quirin turned around. Was he really hearing this? A suspicion, a realization, a confusion, a disbelief all grew together in the garden of his mind.

Larson grinned at him, as if he hadn’t said anything more innocuous than the state of the weather. “Keep your nose clean, eh?”

And with that, he was gone.

Quirin was caught in a dream, that was the only explanation. He was seeing this world as through a mirror—or maybe a sheet of amber.

He didn’t take three steps into the street before knowing this: he had to get away from these pullulating crowds. The town was swarmed with people, and he could go back to the room at the inn, but what if Varian was already there? It was still another hour or two until dusk, but maybe Varian got tired of the exhibition and already went back. He couldn’t—he needed more time. If he was going to be reasonable, he needed more time. And being around people wasn’t going to help.

Wandering the streets, Quirin turned from the city center towards the quiet quarters, where the wind moved through the trees and raised goosebumps on his arms, where the tang of the salt sea was carried on that breeze and not the cloying, stinking scent of restaurants and bakeries. There was a bit of grass where children played ring toss, screaming effervescently, their eyes vivacious and strong. Quirin watched them until the hole in his chest was too wide for him.

He went to the silent quarters, the battered places he had warned Varian about. It was quieter here, with almost no one about. The few that remained moved either hastily or at the indifferent trawl of the idle. There was a dilapidated bench at the base of an old post-and-plank house with broken windowpanes. A woman’s voice drifted out as she sang to a crying infant. He sat, putting his head in his hands. After a few minutes, a touch on his shoulder jerked him to his feet. He wasn’t easily snuck up on.

It was just a man and woman, worn people, the sort of people he had been when he had been between kingdoms. The woman yanked her hand back.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her brown eyes were deep and warm. “Are you well?”

“Yes, yes,” he murmured. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, but—”

He turned away and went on, the looks in their eyes chasing him.

Down at the docks, staring at the sea from pier 3, leaning against a pile of crates, Quirin finally started to feel like himself. Here, he could think. There were many people around, with the boats in the sea either gathering like a brood of chicks or spreading out like a litter of kittens. The fishermen sang from their ship bows, their voices counterpoint to the water lap against the wooden pillars of the pier. It was all a-noise, but here, he could think.

What did he think about? The sea. Simply, the sea. How it rolled out, undulating like an unraveling scroll. How it must teem and boil with the creatures of the deep, those strange things that flashed phosphorescent once before fading into the abyss—mysteries upon mysteries, who knew what the sea was hiding.

And soon, it would hide Andrew. But the damage was done, the wake behind Andrew rippling still. What poison had he poured into Varian’s ear? When he had cocooned Varian in comfort, where had he hidden the thorns? The guards couldn’t have seen everything. Who knew what insidious—

The clock tower struck the hour. He only had a little longer before dusk. He needed to use his time wisely. Consider how to proceed, how to conduct himself, how to show his solicitude while keeping his emotions in check. He had to ask Varian questions tonight, no matter how Varian seemed to hate it.

It was his grim job tonight.

Chapter Text

AuuuuughGHH!

This was Varian’s day, in a nutshell.

EEeeeugggah!

This was Varian’s year, in another nutshell.

BWWAAAAHHHHH!

And that was Varian’s life, in the biggest nutshell of them all.

It was supposed to have been a fun day. A day where they ran around and saw strange, wondrous sights, and then Dad went to work for a little while, and then they had more fun afterwards and made themselves sick on restaurant food and fell asleep in uncomfortable hotel beds and went back home the next day, happy but exhausted.

And instead, it was—Bwweeeeeeee!!!

Why had he looked at that wagon, again?

Oh right. Pure stupid curiosity. Then again, maybe it had been something else. Something almost like blasphemy. (Like when he was just a kid and Dad told him not to do something and it just made him want to do it even more.)

Varian had actually had once been jealous of that prison cart! Prison had been so boring that he had envied the other prisoners for getting sent off to work detail because they got to see something other than the same walls, the same people, and the same bars. Once, he had even asked Lieutenant Bern if he could go on a chain-gang or something, and Bern had laughed and said the doctors would have his head.

“Sawbones says you’re too fragile.”

“But not too fragile to keep in pokey,” Varian slyly answered.

Larson had laughed, too. “You’re picking up the lingo, kiddo.”

Because of the prison doctors, Varian’s prison-life had orbited around the prison maelstrom, Andrew.

And Varian just had to look at the wagon, because he had forgotten that although a person seemed to have stopped existing once they were in prison, they most certainly had not! The same thing had happened to Varian—people had forgotten about him too, until he had reasserted his existence with pizazz. And Andrew would do something like suddenly re-exist in, of all places, a prison cart.

Dad was going to ask questions.

Varian shuddered.

The day was ruined. The decade was ruined. His entire life was ruined!

Breakfast was ruined, too. Dad ordered hot chocolate, saying, “Don’t get your hopes up.”

It came out smelling pretty good, but when Varian tasted it—yeech. He pronounced his judgment: “Sludge.”

Dad took a sip. His judgment: “Delicious!”

Varian tried it again—nope! Still like licking a dustpan.

The food tasted like the dustpan too, although Dad seemed to enjoy it. Varian ate anyway, because Dad paid. Besides, Dad was so calm, in a way Varian was learning meant the exact opposite. That contrary feeling was precisely what was going on with him too, but Varian knew when to play along. It was all about pretending today.

Also, lest he forget: exhibition, ruined. They walked the alleys, aisles, and byways, meandered past the booths made out of curtains and flags, and the jingle-jangle of bells that screamed for attention. “See the Wonders Of the World!!!” said a banner, in uncertain capitalization. More like, “Throw Up on the Wonders of the World!” If Varian did upchuck, he couldn’t promise where it might land. An regurgitating boy could not be expected to aim properly, and all those hucksters begging his attention had no idea what they were asking for.

The hucksters cried:

Come see my five-pound goldfish! Grown enormous by feasting on a certain weed that grows in the most hidden mountain streams of Koto!

Here you have it, ladies and gents! The bones of a great land creature, big enough to eat a man whole! They say these died out eons ago—but have they? Here you have it, here you have it!

Meat pies! Beaver tail meat pies! You ain’t never tasted like it!

That was assuredly true, but nothing mattered. The vendors might as well have been chattering squirrels, saying ch-ch-ch-ch-ch, for all the sense they made. All that was in Varian’s brain were memories, half-baked explanations, and outright lies. Ignoring the memories, and discarding the explanations, the lies were starting to stick. If Dad asked such-and-such, Varian would answer, “Lies, Dad.” If Dad said he’d been wondering, Varian would say, “Excuses, excuses.” And if Dad asked, “Why?”

Why, forget about it!

It wouldn’t be right to lie. Varian had told a couple of whoppers in his day and got by with it, but he couldn’t lie to Dad. It wouldn’t be riiight.

They watched a man strip off a green brocade jacket and silk shirt to lie on a bed of nails. The crowd oohed and ahhed, and Varian thought, Uh-huh, uh-huh, know how you feel, buddy. Physics was all the same: his weight, equally distributed across the nails, would not hurt him. But the anticipation!

Lunchtime rolled around, and Dad said he had to go meet his business deal. Oh right, talking pumpkins, the real reason why they had come.

“Let’s meet at the hotel tonight if we don’t find each other first,” Dad said. His tone was like being wrapped in a toasty blanket. “Dusk.”

Dusk, ruined.

Byeeee, Dad. Have a nice life.

Poor guy. He walked away with no clue that Varian was heading to the docks to stowaway on one of the ships headed out to sea. There was at least one there, its mast sticking up from the shoreline, like a great, big ole “T.” T for target. Varian would find some pirates. He could get along with pirates. He’d bring alchemical flamboyance and be the terror of the seas.

Varian skipped the exhibition for the rest of the day and headed back towards the island to evaporate.

“Why didn’t we bring Ruddiger along?” he muttered to himself as he went along the hill-rise and hill-fall of Corona bridge. “’Cause the hotel wouldn’t like it? Snort. All right, fine, Dad. Be all law-abiding and not, you know, committing treason.”

Not that sneaking a raccoon into a hotel would be treason, I think …

And just like that, the sight of the prison cart walloped Varian between the eyes again. He’d taken a shortcut, skirting the backsides of the square to where all the industrial places lived, just along the shore line, when the prison cart was suddenly there, being all like, “Howdy there!”

Wait, did that mean that this place was …?

Varian shivered, and ducked into a nearby alleyway, crammed full of wine barrels. Rubbing his arms, he stared at the building. Yeah, it looked like an old warehouse, small little windows along a long, nondescript building, everything needing a shine. And with the empty prison cart parked alongside it, and the guard standing at the entrance, he could be sure. This was where the prisoners made ropes.

He rubbed his arms harder, itching now. It was so tempting to go take a peek. Just a tiny peek. Just sneak around to the side and look through one of the windows, to see the place where Andre—the prisoners spent so much of their time. Just for science, you know.

The toes on his right foot moved first, slipping out from his place amongst the wine barrels. It was followed by his heel, and then his ankle. But before his knee could take the plunge, horse-hooves pounding on the pavement sent him retreating back. Cassandra’s dad came riding up, throwing himself off his horse once they stopped, acting like he was seriously having a bad day. (More than usual.)

The guard at the door said, “Whoa, what happened to your face, Cap’?”

“Mind your own business,” the Captain grumbled.

The two of them stepped into the warehouse, and that was the end of Varian’s little adventure. Aborted before he had barely got going.

The wine barrels made a cozy enough hidey-hole, and with an overturned milk crate (which wasn’t cozy at all), Varian leaned back and killed time. There was danger in running around: he could get eaten by wild Rapunzels. He just didn’t have it within him to play and would much rather gaze at the sea, even if it couldn’t be bothered to be infested with pirates. The sun dipped down, traitorously, until it teased that boring old sea. It was time.

Doom-time, that was.

The room at the inn was blessedly empty when he got in (actually, after the trembling way he had opened the door, it was sort of a let-down). Varian sat on the bed and waited like a good boy. The lines in his palms seemed extra deep today. If he had let the palm-reader at the exhibition have at them, would she have foretold imminent peril? Or just fed him lies about a long life-line?

Varian froze.

Heavy footsteps moved on the stairs. Heavier than what normally went on an in inn, but very normal to his own ears. Bom-bom, they went with familiarity. He snatched at a puzzle-box he had bought, just to look like he had enjoyed himself today. See, Dad, it was great! But all he ended up doing was sliding the same three pieces backwards and forwards, which probably wasn’t right.

The door creaked open, and Varian’s stomach became an iron ball. Then the door opened entirely, and—egads! It was just the worst!

“Hey, Dad,” Varian chirped, just a little too happy. His voice broke, and he swallowed the pieces away.

Dad closed the door, grumbling about pumpkins. Wearily, he took off his gloves and his vest, threw them at the foot of his bed. He complained about the crowds, and asked if Varian had dinner. In other words, he did everything to play it normal. But Dad just couldn’t help himself. His eyes roved sharply all over Varian, from the tippiest-toppiest hair on Varian’s scruffy blue head down to the toe fungus hiding under his socks. Dad’s gaze lingered, his eyes scrutinized—not angrily or suspiciously, but just … curiously. Over every last square inch of Varian, as though he making sure everything was still where he had last put it. As if he was asking, Are you okay?

Of course, Varian was okay. He had a puzzle box, after all!

Dad sat at the foot of Varian’s bed. The bed dipped down under his weight, so that Varian had to slide a leg up to keep from slipping forward. Dad leaned over to untie his shoes, grunting at the compression to his torso. Ha! Did he really think Varian was going to be fooled by that? He could have untied his shoes from his own bed.

“Varian.”

What a fascinating puzzle box!

“Varian.”

But, alas, time for the puzzle box to cool off on the side table. Sorry, box, it was nice knowing you. May you never be solved.

Varian forced himself to look Dad in the face, lips and cheeks tingling until he knew they were melting off.

“Are you sure you’re not hungry?” Dad asked.

“I had a big lunch, you know.”

“The sandwich?”

Oh, right. Varian had picked that thing to pieces, and they both knew the birds had gotten most of it.

“I had exhibition food,” Varian smoothly lied. “Ate myself sick.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

Dad stared with expectation, as if he couldn’t wait to hear all about it.

“I had … cookies!” Varian imagined what they might taste like: maybe, bland. “Foreign cookies. Yeah. You—uh, you break them apart and there’s … there’s a prize inside.”

“I’m glad you enjoyed yourself.”

“It was really fun. Thanks for bringing me.”

Varian looked out the window, and the sun was tucking the horizon over itself like a blanket. It had gotten dark in the room. He could probably use the excuse of lighting a lamp to delay this torture longer—oh! But Dad had the same idea, and got up to light it himself. When he sat back down, it was on Varian’s bed again, making that iron ball of Varian’s stomach into something harder and heavier, like lead.

Dad asked, “Are you up to talk?”

Nope.

“Sure,” Varian answered.

“Are you?” Dad smiled, the crimped corners of his eyes crimping more. “You look like you’re on your way to an execution. What are you so afraid of?”

Varian gaped, paralyzed. Did Dad expect him to speak the fear? The fear that was still upon him, no matter how many times Dad had proved himself? A certain question that was so familiar by now, chasing him ever since the accident? That question?

He couldn’t speak the fear aloud. The last time someone had, he had lost his mind.

Dad rubbed his hands together. “This Andrew, he didn’t—”

Varian rolled his hands behind his head. “Dad, if you’re going to ask if anybody hurt me in prison, I’m going to go nuts. How many times do I have to tell you?”

“I’ve heard prison can be violent. Don’t they have shanks?”

“Shanks? I don’t know what prisons you’ve been hanging out in, but in ours …” Varian couldn’t keep a straight face anymore. He busted up, slamming the pillow over his face, howling.

Dad pulled the pillow away. “Son, I’m trying to be serious with you.”

“I know, I know, just—” It was the miracle of the ages: Varian was able to come to control himself. But not until after he guffawed, chortled, tittered, and finally, giggled. “Okay, no! No! No one was shanking each other.”

“What about threats?”

“Threats?” Here, Varian could be so, so honest. “Nah, not even threats. Fighting gets you more labor in prison. And Andrew did everything he could to get out of labor.”

“And after prison?”

The puzzle box ended up in Varian’s hand again. “Dad, he spent his whole time bending his body like an uncooked pretzel or mooning about saving the whales. Even after prison. He said you catch more flies with sugar, you know the saying. I don’t know. Love will save the world. Blah blah.”

“But didn’t he try to bomb Corona?”

“Oh y-yeah! But I mean …” The knuckles on Dad’s hand went from peaks to valleys from pressing it into the bedspread, and it was just so interesting. Varian looked and looked at that. “After prison, he was more bloodthirsty. But not towards us!”

“Us?”

“His allies.”

Whew! Dad changed the subject back to just prison generally. That was easy to talk about. Varian stuck to the facts. Facts about having his own prison cell at first, how bad the food was, how it was too hot in summer and too cold in winter, and his exercise was sitting on his behind, and that the guards had behaved themselves.

“What were the Saporians like?”

A vivid blood-blister of nervousness plunked itself onto the back of Varian’s skull. Okay, okay, he could handle this part too. Just paint them in their most ridiculous light, all silly ideals, romantic but murderous notions, easily discarded morals. They had even dared to lecture Varian on living close to the land—him, a farm boy!

“Amazing they were able to take over the country,” Dad murmured.

Gulping, Varian looked away. “It was a group effort. Mercenaries and mass prison break, you know.”

Dad laid back on the bed, cupping the back of his head in his palms. His stomach looked strangely hollowed. “Mercenaries. You mean, paid?”

And for the time time, Varian understood what Castor had meant about the Saporians robbing the bank. Andrew hadn’t said anything to him about doing that, but now it was clear, it must be true.

“I guess so,” Varian muttered, miserable. “They didn’t involve me in the financials.”

With brow furrowed and eyes just two little slivers, Dad stared at the ceiling as if he was in pain. Oh, please don’t continue this line of questioning!

Luckily, Dad didn’t seem interested in the topic. “Let me get this straight. Mercenaries and a mass prison break. Andrew made the prisoners join him.”

“No. He didn’t like the idea of the prisoners hanging around. It was just to create anarchy.”

“Then you joined him because …?”

Strange, the puzzle box felt like it fell all to pieces, but when Varian looked at it, it was still intact, shut up tight, its mysteries to remain.

“Varian—”

“I wish I hadn’t, you know.”

“I’m sure—”

“It’s not like I cared about his stupid motives. I don’t care about New Saporia!”

Quietly, Dad stared for a long time, and quietly, Varian wished he was dead. The puzzle box triumphed: Varian was defeated. Defeated by a few tricky pieces of wood, cleverly placed.

And again, quietly, with the ticking of the clock a maddening theme and the nightingales outside singing at the stars, Dad sat up and said, “Come here.”

Quivering, but trying his mightiest to hide it, Varian put away the triumphant puzzle box and sat next to his father. Dad put an arm around his shoulders, but there was no way Varian was relaxing into that. His body was stiff and stingy, his spine a stripped-off, limbs-off, dead-white tree.

“You can tell me,” Dad said. “Whatever it was.”

A bubble of acidic resentment burst in Varian. Why did he have to explain himself, when Dad was the master of secrets? Why couldn’t he just keep some things to himself?

When he had seen Andrew today, he had legitimately turned away in fright. Their last interaction had been Andrew threatening to throw Varian to his death, after all. But what was worse than that simple fright, was the thing that had driven Varian’s fascination at the rope warehouse today. It was the most frightening thing of all, because the very, very first thing Varian had felt, before the fear, lasting only a split-second but still rippling through him—the first thing Varian had felt had been … longing.

How could he look Dad in the face and explain that?

(So Varian told a different story.)

Chapter Text

Somewhere between Old Corona and Corona Island, on that old familiar road made unfamiliar in this prison cart …

Yeah, it was a prison cart Varian was riding in! A dirty old prison cart, which crreeeaaked over every pebble and stone in the road, no matter how tiny, like it was designed to shiver Varian to pieces. And that smell! It was a mixture of ancient wood, sweaty horses, and something ghastly of unknown origin—but it had probably been secreted by a hundred different prisoners before him, in a hundred different ways. Under these circumstances, was it any wonder Varian lost his marbles?

The night had started out so well too. At one point, he had even steepled his fingers together like one of those arch-villains in a Flynn Rider novel, pretending he was a master of chessmasters. Oh, he had felt so clever! But then Rapunzel came, and she ruined the whole night. Undeniably, with magic.

But was Varian going to give up? Was he just going to feel sorry for himself and languish away? No way. No matter how crazy he got!

All things considered, Varian and insanity weren’t exactly strangers. The other kids used to call him crazy. “Crazy Va-boom Varian!” In return, Varian thought them stupid, because they said things like “Va-boom” and struggled with algebra and Cartesian coordinates in school. But it turned out, just like they figured out iambic pentameter way sooner than he did, they had been right about his mental state. He was Va-boom Varian, completely lost his grip.

But not for everything. Just in some things.

For example: when they got to Corona, the guard drove him into the prison courtyard, and opened the door and told him to get out. And did Varian get out? No, he did not. That was sanity.

After they dragged him out and wrested Ruddiger (snarling and scratching) from off his shoulders, what happened next was sanity too—well, Varian didn’t actually know what happened. But he found himself kneeling in the cobblestone with his face dipping into the dew, his throat killing him. Why did his throat hurt? But no matter, because Ruddiger was back, pressing a nose into his forehead. Varian sat up and tucked Ruddiger under his chin.

“Let him keep it,” Cass’ dad said. He leaned heavily against a doorway, sweat trickling a bead of sun down the side of his jaw.

See, whatever Varian had done had been sanity, because it got Ruddiger back.

“Come with me,” the guard said, lifting Varian up by the elbow.

What did Varian do? He stood up, and with Ruddiger clutched to his chest, he followed the guard into the prison.

Now that was insanity!

“What is that smell?” Varian shrieked, the second the cell door closed behind him.

The guard thought it was hilarious. He rubbed a finger against his blobby nose, smiling a one-sided grin that showed off a gold tooth. “Welcome to the drunk tank, kid. Normally, our new prisoners don’t get such nice accommodations. I hope you appreciate it.”

What a joke. The cell was cramped, and completely pathetic, just a nick in the wall of a larger room with a set of iron bars and the barest suggestion of a window far up. The larger room had one other cell just like, and a table that the guard sat at, so it was without privacy on top of it. Ruddiger made some sad noises.

“I do not appreciate this!” Varian snarled, slamming his arms across his chest.

But it was special, just for him! Said the guard. Normally, his type of prisoner got sent to “The Hole.” But just for Varian, they wanted a guard in the same room at all times.

“Because you’re a crackpot! Now shut your yammer and get some sleep.”

Sleep? Varian didn’t need sleep anymore. He had gone into battle without sleep. Why, he hadn’t slept in days. When a person is working on rescue and revenge, sleep becomes unnecessary.

Varian sat on the “bed” (really, just a wooden plank attached to the wall with a lumpy, thin mattress on it), and looked at the window, where the sky made bluish squares on the other side of the bars.

“I can’t sleep! The sun’s up!” he hissed, just to be disagreeable.

“I ain’t tucking you in.”

Grumbling, Varian lay down, and discovered that the smell was definitely coming from the mattress. Somehow, under these horrid and inhumane conditions, he fell asleep. Certainly, only because he was really bored and for no other reason. He slept pretty good. Even without Dad’s pillow.

“Someone sure is lucky,” the guard said later, waking Varian up by rattling his baton over the bars. That was when Varian decided to call him Rattle the Guard, for lack of a name, and ‘cause the guy was definitely a snake. “You’ve already lawyered up! Your folks kept him in standby just for this, huh?”

“Lawyered up?”

“He wants to talk to you.”

“Buzz off!”

Rattle laughed, so Varian asked him if he was any relation to famous fruit-offering serpents. That only made Rattle laugh harder, and crow, “I wish I could be a fly on the wall for this one!” He shackled Varian’s arms together like he had won the lottery.

He led Varian and Ruddiger down a dingy hallway that seemed mostly doors, until they reached the end, and a little door on the right with the number “14.” Rattle knocked politely, before walking into a tiny office, where Varian got his first look at his lawyer.

Varian didn’t know if he had ever seen a lawyer before, so he wasn’t sure what to think. Said lawyer was a studious looking man, sitting at a desk with a bevy of paperwork piled in front of him. He hardly looked older than Varian himself, his bottom lip full and youthful; but his slim figure was pinched and stiff, as if he’d spent a lifetime studying from books with too tiny print. He was dressed without too much flair in stylish practicality—but that hair! Varian thought lawyers were supposed to wear powdered wigs, but this guy wore his hair au naturel. No, not naturel, but instead, a pompadour! A yuck, in-your-face, show-off pompadour! Hardly the stuff of intellectuals.

When the lawyer saw Varian, he stood up, and took off his spectacles to give them a polish with a little cloth from his pocket. “Hello, Varian,” he murmured, softly. “My name is Coulson Noble, Esquire. I’ve been appointed to help you.”

Bristling, Varian spat, “No one helps me!”

Turning green, Noble ran his hands down his waistcoat. Even his hair seemed to deflate. “I am here to help you. Please, sit down. Officer, if you will excuse yourse—wait!” The pompadour jiggled, stupid coxcomb. “What is that?”

Rattle stared stupidly. “What’s what?”

“The creature, of course. The creature.”

“The brat’s pet.”

Noble polished his spectacles again, priggishly. “Please refrain from using such language to reference the defendant. The Guard may be humbled after what happened last night, but let’s maintain our professionalism.”

Rattle’s lips bunched up. Varian felt his mouth drop, alongside Ruddiger’s.

Then Noble blasted away any hope Varian had that he was a friend. “I’m afraid the animal will have to wait outside.”

A growl worked its way out of Ruddiger’s throat—or was it Varian’s? Honestly, it was probably from both.

No one seemed to hear it.

Rattle grinned at Noble, his tooth flashing. “Are you sure about that?”

“I am allergic.”

“Well then, alley-oop!”

It happened again. Only Varian didn’t actually know what happened. Rattle took Ruddiger away, and the next thing Varian knew, he was on the floor, his throat like he had gargled spirit of vitriol.

“Dash it, I’ll suffer the sneezes!” Noble shrieked.

“You’re the one—”

“You knew this would happen! Bring it back!”

Tiny feet landed on the floor, and then Ruddiger pawed Varian’s hair, cooing and growling, hissing and spitting, then cooing again, full of too many jostling, disparate emotions for him to decide which to say first. Varian understood that. Maybe that was what was happening to him, in the skirmish of emotions, when he was on the floor.

Varian sat with Ruddiger in the chair by the casement window. The window was barred, but it was open, and he had a mostly uninterrupted view of a small courtyard beyond. The tiny puff of breeze felt nice on his face. He checked his throat in the reflection off the window panes, but all seemed well. Why did it hurt then?

Noble sat behind the desk, wafting a cloth in front of his nose. He looked like he was regretting his life’s choices. “We’ll work on that,” he said, although he didn’t say what “that” was. “They won’t allow animals into the courtroom, and we can’t be having you … ahem! Varian, as I mentioned before, I have been appointed to be an advocate for you. Blah blah blah blah blah.”

He didn’t actually say “blah blah blah” of course, although that would have been a laugh. But he said some stuff that was meant to turn Varian’s brain to mush. As if the whole intent of the legal system, all the way back to its Sumerian foundations, was for this moment: to make Varian want to jump off a cliff. There weren’t any cliffs nearby, so Varian chose the next best thing: he ignored his lawyer.

The courtyard outside was just a bit of dewy lawn with a chestnut tree, nothing remarkable, under which huddled a flock of pigeons picking at the grass. They moved with head-twitches over chubby, iridescent necks, stupidly pleased in the way only pigeons could be. Varian put his chin on the windowsill to watch them, soothed.

Meanwhile, Noble blathered on. “—much about the legal system? With the recent reforms, motivated in part by the circumstances surrounding the Princess’ return—”

Blah blah blah blah.

People hated pigeons, for some reason Varian hadn’t been able to work out. Even Dad—wait, no, it was ravens Dad hated. Hated. Dad spent hours every week lining up scarecrows in their crops, like so many soldiers on the march—and the ravens were the enemy. Once, Dad had even flicked pebbles at a raven to chase it away. Varian understood disliking ravens. They were fascinatingly smart, but they also screeched and looked at people as if contemplating how delish their eyes or tongue would be, if they’d only hurry up and die. Hating ravens: okay, sure. But pigeons, who only cooed gently and ate crumbs?

Dad would one day set up those scarecrow-soldiers again.

“—charges haven’t been finalized yet, but I understand they are to be serious. Very serious, with very great penalties. It won’t be easy to defend—”

Blah blah blah .

The peace of the pigeons was suddenly disturbed by a shadow of black bolting down from the sky, a crack of precision and grace. The pigeons exploded in a dizzying flurry of wings. Flash, flash, flash! Purple and green and gray! Startled cooing, running through the courtyard, flowing into the office, through Varian, around Varian, in Varian—flooding over the tops of the walls, topsy-turvy floodwaters. And then, piercing Varian even worse, a scream. Chin frozen to the windowsill, he felt sweat bloom on his palms. It sounded like something from last night.

The blooming black thing from above, coming as violent and sudden as a trebuchet missile—it was a sparrow hawk. Brown and mottled, it was no bigger than its prey. But it was fierce. It grappled with a pigeon against the ground, where they rolled together, beating their wings. The hawk pinned the pigeon under its talons, and then, with scimitar beak clacking, pulled mouthfuls of feathers out of the pigeon’s neck. Downy pearls wafted across the grass. The screeching pigeon was helpless.

“It’s very important you are honest with me. I can only do something for you if—”

The lungs in Varian’s body hardened, his heart became a stone. The pigeon’s screeches—! They were so familiar. Like something from last night. Something … Like, maybe, the noises the Queen and Cass had made when—

A hand on his shoulder ripped him away from that vision. The Pompadour stared down with brown eyes narrowing.

“Are you listening to me, child? This is very important.”

Varian turned his face back to the window.

“What are you looking at?” Noble shoved the back of his pomaded head in the way. Would he see what Varian had seen? Would he hear those screams as well? The birds had gone silent.

A puff of breeze blew his scent into Varian’s face: he dripped with the smell of leather, clary sage, bergamot, and black pepper. It was like Porter, who (Dad said) wore enough cologne to drown in. Porter had once dribbled some of that cologne on Dad’s head because they were doing something special at Court for government, and it was “time to be a dandy, Quirin. Don’t embarrass me.” Varian missed that cologne of Porter’s.

Noble snapped the linen curtains together. “Do not look at that.” Then he leaned over the back of Varian’s chair, grabbed the seat on either side, and lifted it, Varian and all.

Varian remained sitting as Noble carried him, if just because the smell was making him homesick. Once Noble set him down before the desk, he sat on the other side, and business-like, straightened a quill and paper as if he hadn’t performed a feat. When he looked up, his eyes seemed uncertain and myopic, until he steadied them.

There was such a hollowness inside of Varian that he squashed Ruddiger against him, in the hopes of filling it.

He didn’t look towards the window again. What happened with the birds didn’t matter. Varian knew how it would end.

For three whole weeks, Varian had to put up with Noble. He came every day, except on the weekends, to blather on about legal whatevers that made little sense to a fourteen-year-old boy who had no interest. It drove Varian so mad (and he was already plenty mad, remember?) that he even started calling Noble “Pompadour” to his face.

“Pompadour, you’re so boring!”

“Pompadour, you look so dumb!”

“Pompadour, get out of my face!”

“You haven’t answered my questions, Varian. How am I to present a good defense if you do not cooperate?” Noble was little bothered by these insults from Varian. It seemed like he was little bothered by anything, and would just scribble-scrabble away, a quill on paper. It was his favorite, most boring thing to do. That, or polish his glasses, or rub a hand over his right knee. “There is a principle called animus mundi. It means—”

“Blah blah blah!” Varian cried.

Noble was so surprised, he scratched his quill accidentally down the length of his page, leaving a scathing black line at cross purposes to everything else. He pursed his lips, rubbed his knee. “Animus means ‘mind,’ and nocendi means ‘to harm’—”

To shut him up, Varian did his own blah-blahs, standing on top of his chair, and quoting out loud, very loud, from alchemy texts he had memorized:

“Now pour your troubled water and earth in that state of putrefaction into a large Glass Body, which place in an earthenware pot, fixed into a charcoal distilling furnace, apply a large alembic and receiver and light your fire—”

“Mens rea,” quoth Noble. “An important concept: actus reus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea—”

“Take one part of salt and three parts of powder of bricks or tiles, mix them together …”

“I will be bringing a doctor to examine you.”

“Place your luted globe glass or glasses—what?” Varian had been doing a sort of pirouette on the chair, but now stood at attention, staring at his counsel. “I’ve already seen a doctor. He said I had enough spitfire to choke a dragon.” He was very proud of that.

“This is a different sort of doctor, who will only ask some questions. Make sure you answer truthfully.” Noble narrowed his eyes, then huffed with annoyance. “I want to establish your status as non-compos mentis. Normally, it wouldn’t matter for high treason, but with your age—”

“Take mineral Cinnabar and prepare it in the following manner …”

It was their private war, the weapons their respective fields of study. The battlefield was the desk, naturally. Who could out-blather the other? That would decide the victor, and Varian knew he could out-blather anyone. Hadn’t Janice called him a blabbermouth too many times for him to not be confident in that?

It seemed Noble was admitting his skills weren’t up to par either. One day, he jumped up, slammed his palms to the desk, and leaned over until his face hovered only a foot from Varian’s.

“Listen to me,” he snarled. “You do not understand the severity of your crimes. This isn’t a game, you little twat!”

Whoa, Noble had lost his composure. But Varian hadn’t been cowed by the King himself, and he sure wasn’t going to be cowed by some pretentious, foppish nerd. So know what he did? He glared right back. He glared back so hard until he noticed something funny about Noble’s spectacles. They were full of light, with a strange, ineffable quality about them. It was as if they would float right off the man’s face.

Varian wrenched them off Noble’s nose, and with two snippity-snappity hops, was on the other side of the room, stuffing his fingers through the rims.

“They don’t have lenses!” he screamed, before being overcome by giggles. This was his greatest laugh in months! Even Ruddiger laughed, rolling his rump across Varian’s ankles.

He held up the empty rims to his own eyes, watching Noble come stomping up, view undistorted by glass or lens, until Noble snatched them back, looking like he wished lawyers spanked their clients.

“What sort of fake are you?” Varian demanded.

The useless spectacles went right back on Noble’s stuffy nose, and he stood with his fist on his hip, as unembarrassed as if Varian had discovered he had won science trophies as a kid. That is to say, not embarrassed at all. Only a little miffed.

“Appearances are everything in the courtroom, Varian. A trial is a show, and a reputation is nothing more than a performance. I may be up to my eyeballs in debt and spend all my nights in gambling dens, but in the courtroom, I am a respectable, up-and-coming lawyer. That is how I win cases. And that is how I am going to win yours.”

Tipping back on his heels, Varian turned about, running his fingers on the wall as he thought about that. “You mean my case is just a scheme to get some clout for you?”

Boy, that clammed Noble’s face right up! He got all rigid and red, like a purple carrot, his shoulders kissing his ears. But, he didn’t let irritation ravage him for long: he smoothed his hands over his hair, and sat back at the desk. Leaning his cheek into his fist, he stared at Varian with exhausted, debt-drowned eyeballs. “Do you want to lose?”

“Huh?”

Noble dropped his fine-boned wrist to the desk. “How are you going to help your father if you lose this case?”

Varian had no answer, because he had no ideas. Honestly, right now it was just a waiting game. For what? An opportunity, but what opportunity, he had no clue. He could only stay silent.

But also, allow a sudden, terrific rage to puff him all out, like an overstuffed sausage. Varian bit back with the greatest truth he knew about Noble. “You know what, Pompadour? I think you weren’t appointed at all. I think you volunteered.”

Noble twisted his quill against his lips, dead-eyed.

Varian lifted Ruddiger into his arms, and ran to the window to see if the pigeons were back in the yard. The hawk might be out there, too. But maybe, the hawk was actually in here with him.

Okay, Noble was a doofus, but Varian thought about the things the man had said. He had a lot of time to think about it, because whenever he wasn’t actually with Noble, he was stuck in a cage. Twenty-three hours a day to think about it.

“Maybe, I outta cooperate better,” Varian whispered to Ruddiger in bed one night. He looked across the way, where there was some drunk guy snoring away in the other cell, and the night-guard, snoring away at his desk. Varian laughed. “I mean, who wants to stay here forever, right?”

Ruddiger nodded.

“But I’m not going to like him,” Varian whispered, before his thoughts trended towards darker subjects. Subjects of Dad and amber, and kings and queens, automations, music boxes, screeches and screams, until you endure the same pain and agony I have!—Dad and amber, amber and Dad, his father reaching out—NO!

No! No, no, no, no, no, put those away.

He pushed his ravening mouth against his pillow, stifling the gasps, somehow hearing fractured birdsong. He would ignore it in favor of Ruddiger pounding little circles on his stomach, purring like a box of kittens.

Put those thoughts away! Put them into a box, tie the box soundly, throw it into the bottom of the sea. Think simply, live simply.

Coulson Noble, Esquire. He would think about Coulson Noble, doofus of lawyers, a man who carried a certain fragility that Varian couldn’t put his finger on. But yet, Noble was right: if Varian refused to cooperate, how was he going to help Dad?

Live simply, think simply. Wait for his opportunity.

Varian felt different in the morning. Like he really embodied living and thinking simply.

“I know how to put on a show, too,” he told Noble, in their regular meeting spot.

Noble smirked. “Do you, now?”

Varian told him all about it.

“You stole the Flower?” Whiteness lay on Noble’s lips like he had been kissed by a clown. But he pressed them together until they got pink again, and scoffed. “Such stories. Knock it off.”

“I really did steal it.” Varian said this calmly, without his usual vitriol, because Noble had brought him a cherry croissant. Varian was not above being bought, especially when the prison gruel was the color of ripened corpses (he assumed). “I tricked Rapunzel into helping me. All I had to do was give her a sob-story about saving the kingdom. She’s not good at knowing when people are lying to her.”

Noble chuckled, swinging one leg over the other while smoothing back into his chair. “I know when people are lying to me.”

“I’m not lying.”

“You have not been charged with theft.”

“And I,” Varian sing-songed, patting Ruddiger on the rump with each punctuated word, “wonder why that is.”

The quill at Noble’s fingertips was unremarkable, just another goose feather, the favored weapon of a lawyer. But he played with it until it was remarkable, the vanes beautifully set, like the cotton threads on a bit of lace. “It would have been treason for even the princess to help you steal the Flower.”

“Yeah, she said that. But Rapunzel will do anything for the kingdom.”

“The next time I come,” Noble said, screwing the quill around as he scrolled it around on his paper, “I will bring the doctor.”

Varian was doomed, of course, but it didn’t upset him. After all, Dad ….

It made no sense to Varian that Noble wanted him to see a doctor, but hey, there it was. Maybe because the prison doctor was no good?

Varian knew about the prison doctor. After he had been “booked” into prison, but before they took him to his cell, Rattle dragged him to medical ward. Medical ward was all familiar chemically smells and cots lining the wall, but the doctor wasn’t a very good listener.

“I’m fine,” Varian told him. “But I hit my thumb with a hammer.”

The doctor didn’t even flicker a gray eyelash at it, but told Varian to unbutton his shirt! When Varian objected, Rattle threatened to take Ruddiger away.

So when Noble’s doctor walked into their little office, and it was a woman …!

Dead. Call the morgue, ‘cause Varian was dead-o.

“Don’t worry, Varian. I’m only going to ask some questions,” the doctor said in tones of authoritative sugar-sugar, motherly and doctorly, all at once. “I hope you will be honest with me.”

Varian … lived. Maybe. “It depends on the questions,” he answered.

“Be a good boy, and you’ll have a croissant waiting for you,” Noble teased.

The doctor frowned. “Coulson …”

Noble pulled out a cherry and chocolate croissant from under his sleeve, and flashed that thing around, no matter Dear Doctor’s frowns. As for Varian? Why, he settled back into his seat, beatifically. Ruddiger salivated.

“You may call me Doctor Priscilla,” the doctor said, smiling.

“That’s an awfully princessy name for a doctor, isn’t it?”

Noble held up a fist, but Doctor-Princess Priscilla wasn’t phased, taking out a notepad such as a scholar, even with a pink peony in her hat.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Hungry.”

“Do you know what day it is?”

“What sort of stupid—” Varian changed his course real quick when Noble mimed taking a bite out of the croissant. “It’s Thursday. Is this some sort of intelligence test? I could do some algebra, if you want.”

Doctor-Princess did not want. Instead, she kept asking a bunch of other questions, and boy, was she nosy! She asked about what he’d been doing for the past few days, the past few months, the past few years, even as far back as he remembered. Why should she care about stuff like that? But he laid it all out for her. The truth serum, the automatons, the men in the masks. Noble winked his eye at Varian over Doctor-Princess’ head. What was that supposed to mean?

Priscilla really like hearing about the masked men. Her face stayed impassive, her fingers rested easily on her gingham skirt—but her eyes! They were blue, almost purple, and danced like asters in the wind. “Do you continue to see these masked men?” she asked.

“You know, I’ve been seeing them quite frequently, lately.”

Noble winked like there was a plank in his eye.

“When you think about the things you’ve done,” Priscilla asked, “how does it make you feel?”

“Hmm … proud, I guess.”

There must have been an entire lumber mill’s worth in Noble’s eye, ‘cause did he wink!

“Proud. Interesting.” The quill said sqritch-skratch as the doctor ran it over her ledger. “Those seem like good things you did.”

“This really is an intelligence test, right?” Doctor Priscilla didn’t say anything, remaining uncomfortably silent, until Varian answered, just to fill the space: “No.”

Now it was poor Noble who was dead, slamming his hand against his forehead.

As for Doctor-Princess, her eyebrow notched up, ever so slightly. “Are you saying the things you did were bad?”

Bwah, Varian had had enough now, and let loose all the honesty they wanted him to show. “They deserved it! I did what I had to. If they want to cry about it now, they should have thought of that before they tried to silence me.”

That was the end of her questions. She sat stiffly, scribbling away. Glory be, at least it was over. Varian played with Ruddiger in his lap, swinging his legs. Briefly, a vision of two women’s faces twisting in pain flashed before his eyes, but he remembered: live simply, think simply. When was he going to get the croissant?

Doctor Priscilla and Noble stood near the door, carrying on a conversation in half-whispers. Noble seemed desperate and grimacing, but she was stone-faced. Some of what they said drifted over in bits and pieces.

“A very sick boy …” she said. “ … Not criminally insane … understands his actions.”

Noble said something like, “found responsible” and “please.”

The last thing she said, quite loudly, was, “I’m sorry, Coulson.”

Noble held the door open for her, and then stood with his back turned, rubbing a handkerchief over his face. His allergies were doing antics on him, apparently.

When he turned around, his lips trembled. “Do you want to lose this case?”

Varian stuck his hand out for the croissant. “You told me to be honest.”

“You do not understand the severity of your actions.”

“I did what you told me.” Varian stretched his fingers.

Even an irresponsible man could keep his promises: the croissant flew across the room in a loose arc, landing on the desk. Ruddiger chirped in delight, reaching for it.

“How can you be so brilliant, yet so stupid?” With fingers fighting against the cravat at his neck, Noble’s face turned red. “Manipulative, if you’re to be believed, except where it counts! I thought this was some act of yours.”

Varian frowned. “You mean, an act of defiance?”

“No, not that. You can’t really be this young.”

They were at an impasse. Silence fell across the room as Noble flopped into his chair, looking at Varian with a face that was caught in an expression of world-weary earnestness, like the marble busts that lined the castle hallways. “The trial begins next week.”

A bee of sorts stung Varian in the rib cage, making his spine positively sing. “Am I supposed to dress up for court or something?”

Noble shook his head. “You are not going.”

Varian’s bottom lip pushed out, revealing the hot-pink inside, before getting sucked under his teeth. He felt … brother, he didn’t know. Outraged that Noble would keep him away, but also relieved. Why would Noble stop him from going?

“Are you trying to lose this case?” Varian said, slyly. “You said I had to be there. That it was better if I was.”

“They won’t allow your pet.”

Stopping his croissant-feasting to jam his paws against his hips, Ruddiger scowled, put-out. But Noble had a point. A courtroom couldn’t be good for a raccoon.

“I won’t …” Varian muttered, “I won’t do the thing.” He shivered to let it go. Acting like a big kid hadn’t gotten him what he had wanted, so his last act of defiance had been to act like a little kid. Screeching and throwing himself on the ground, fitting like a kid half his age, was all he had left. But if he was ever going to help Dad, he had to go to court. “I’ll behave.”

“No.” For the first time, Coulson Noble, Esquire, seemed adult. Like an actual full-grown adult, knowledgeable and capable, who was trying to help. “The worst could happen to you, Varian. I won’t let you self-sabotage.”

Finally, Varian got Noble. That was the thing, wasn’t it? Varian was finally getting that Noble didn't get it. The worst had already happened to Varian. There was nothing more anyone could do to him.

Once the trial began, Varian was no longer subjected to daily trips to the little office, to stare out the window at pigeons living and thinking simply, or play silly mind-games with his lawyer. Noble came directly to the cell in the evenings now, just for a few minutes to update Varian on the day’s events, or sometimes to ask clarifying questions. It lifted Varian’s heart to see him—so weird! Noble didn’t think of him more than the way Dad looked at his spade and shovel, as just tools of his craft … but it was all Varian had.

Noble eased out. He was jovial. Varian could only imagine how he must have pranced and preened in the courtroom, his natural habitat, twisting on his dressy, bow-ribboned leather shoes. He made choice observations about the prosecution and judges.

“Let me tell you about the people who sit in judgment over you, Varian. Judge Punch is a sour old bitty with a temper that’ll sucker-punch a lion. She enjoys a certain amount of celebrity in spite of it. Judge Mayson is respectable, and wider than he is tall. Judge Coster seems like a sweet old woman, but she takes unusual interest in murder cases. Some sort of innocent devil!”

“Judge the Sour, Judge the Fat, Judge the Devil,” Varian said, a tingle going through him. It was exactly the sort of thing that would have gotten him grounded ‘til kingdom-come, but Noble laughed.

Noble laid a couple of kickers. One of them was: “I got them to drop the patricide charge.”

A sort of sinkhole sprang out of nowhere under Varian’s feet, and he had to keep hold of the cell bars, just until his feet found the earth again. They tried to accuse him of that?

“But I told them he’s alive!”

“Trust me, Varian, the prosecution just haphazardly scattershots any accusation they can, hoping something sticks. But we’ll get them.” Noble smirked wickedly, like a genius mastermind, but the smudges under his eyes gave him away: he’d probably been up half the night, partying away.

Was Varian going to hold onto hope? Yeah, right.

Which was the correct thing, after all. As the trial went on, Noble became less amused with himself. His frustration and disappointment was measured in the number of croissants he brought. One croissant meant he was frustrated, professionally. Two croissants meant he was taking it personally. And Varian didn’t want to know what three croissants meant, even as they kept coming and coming.

“It’s getting too sticky in this cell!” Rattle grumbled.

Then Noble didn’t come one night at all. The next morning, Rattle led Varian back to office 14, where Noble paced in front of the window. He fidgeted until Rattle closed the door, and said, “Varian, I’ve …” He cleared his throat. “Let’s sit down.”

They didn’t sit across the desk from each other, as before, but he brought his chair around so they could sit side-by-side. His cravat was loose, and he reached up, fiddling with it, before he spoke.

“The trial ended yesterday.”

Ruddiger squeaked in Varian’s lap, until Varian rubbed a hand down his tail.

“I’m afraid it didn’t go in our favor. I’m afraid we lost.”

His tone of voice was so shattered, so dejected, so quiet and serious, so gentle, so fragile, so everything—Varian stared, in disbelief. Had Noble actually been hoping?

“Pompadour, you can’t tell me you were expecting any different.”

Noble remained silent, unraveling his cravat entirely and stuffing the lace into his pocket.

“You win some, you lose some, am I right? Is that what lawyers say? Probably.” The balloon like sensation that had been in Varian’s chest this whole time, although he hadn’t known it had been there, was easing. He felt … yeah, relaxed. “What’s the sentence?”

Swallowing hard, Noble shut his eyes, and answered, “It’s in the King’s hands now. I’ll tell you once he signs the order.”

Standing up, Varian put Ruddiger around the back of his neck. “Where’s my croissant?”

“I’m sorry, Varian, I guess I forgot it.”

After walking across the room, Varian rapped on the door, the sign he was ready to leave. The knob jerked as Rattle messed with the lock. “Maybe you’ll take your job seriously now.”

Noble turned his face away.

Once Rattle opened the door, Varian rubbed his chin against Ruddiger’s. “Well, Ruddiger, I guess we’ll find out if we got our sea legs!”

As he walked back to his cell, he knew one thing, that’s for sure. Noble was no hawk. A hawk was much more capable than that.

But his hawk was still out there. He would not let it eat him.

Chapter Text

All things considered, prison could have been worse. A whole lot worse. That was the conclusion Varian came too.

For one, the other prisoners of Cell Block D could have been screaming, ginormous, creepifying monsters. Instead, they were straggle-toothed, profane, ill-tempered, violent, stupid wretches, always fighting with their cell mates. But, they had some—scratch that. One. They had one good trait. They left Varian alone. Even when they tried to engage him, he was able to ignore them as if they weren’t there. He was locked away in his cell and they were locked away in theirs, and that was all that mattered.

Number two: the guards could have been unrepentant sadists. But Skinny and Blinky were just normal guys, doing the mundane, everyday stuff, and while they might have breathed threats in order to keep … well, order, they didn’t beat the prisoners up or torture him or anything. They even tolerated his snark. So, apparently, the relationship between prison guards and prisoners didn’t have to be completely inhumane … only a little.

And number three: he could have been alone, but instead, Ruddiger was his cell mate.

Oh Ruddiger, Ruddiger! He was the bestest cell mate ever! Varian’s mind was already lost, he knew that. But with Ruddiger, it was just a bit lost, maybe getting dusty under the bed, within easy reach if he just looked. But without Ruddiger, he might as well punt his sanity out the window and watch it fly off in a trajectory that would end in a stable orbit around the moon. That’s how important Ruddiger was.

He and Rud were buddies! They took care of each other. Varian shared his gruel (as awful as it was), whispered sweet nothings, layered kisses on paws and scratchy whiskers, offered his lap as a napping spot, and helped Ruddiger out the window to play Outside at night. When they got their weekly dish of soapy water and rag, Varian washed Ruddiger, too. And what did Ruddiger do for Varian? He kept Varian’s mind occupied.

Mainly, he did it by bringing loads of gifts from the Outside. Beautiful trinkets, mostly, things to remind Varian the world hadn’t really collapsed to just this jail cell, 8 x 8. There were all sorts of things: cowslip flowers that smelled like apricots, wrinkly sycamore leaves, discarded pencils, bits of cloth, pigeon eggs, a head scarf, and once even an emerald ring. (Naturally, Varian had panicked and flicked it out the window, but he appreciated the sentiment.) Varian showed off Ruddiger’s treasures to the guards, like a proud parent show-and-telling their children’s artwork to their dinner guests, no matter how insipid or talentless it was.

“Zounds, kid,” Skinny the Guard would grumble. “It’s just a bird feather.”

“No, it’s a feather from the migratory golden oriole. This is an important ingredient when making bleach alternative.”

“That would be nice.” Skinny gave over a pencil and piece of paper for Varian to write out the recipe.

Fiddlesticks! Varian couldn’t remember it right, and he worked until his head felt like a ping-pong ball was bouncing all inside. He scrunched up the paper and threw it out of the cell.

Oops. Blinky the Guard was standing there, and it bounced off his foot. He shouted, “It’s bad enough you’re a slob! Don’t throw your junk out here!” Blinky was the grumpy one.

Skinny brought a broom and made Varian stand in the corner while he swept out the cell. “You know, kid, yours is the only cell we have to clean like this.”

“Making a mess is the only way I can get you to clean the place!” Varian chirped.

“La-dee-dah, Mr. Spic-and-Span. We all can’t be as fastidious as you.” Skinny looked into the water pitcher sitting on the floor. “You need to drink more water.”

Once Skinny left the cell, Varian kicked the pitcher over. Water splashed over his bare feet. “There, now it’s been mopped, too!”

Skinny shook his head and went out grumbling about “treasonous little brats.”

After a few minutes, here came Lieutenant Bern. Usually, when Blinky and Skinny tattletaled on the prisoners, Bern and Commander Barfson came to apply some bureaucratic pressure, although it never seemed to do any good. Bern’s leather boots creaked wherever he walked, like there were a swarm of crickets under his feet. He probably creaked to all these places: the breakfast nook, the lunch diner, the baker’s and the candlestick-maker’s, the loo, the zoo, and straight on ‘til morn. Sqweak-sqwack, sqwack-sqweak, sqweakie-sqweak SQWACK!

With all this chorus, he made darn sure Varian knew of his coming. He only stopped squeaking when he stopped in front of Varian’s cell. Varian glanced up lazily, but boldly, because Bern never looked him in the eye. Not even once.

“Hello, ex-Commander.” Varian tucked himself onto the bed. It was sure convenient he knew Bern’s name, since it saved him the time of coming up with a nickname. But it wasn’t hard to forget a man who’d once smacked you, right in your own home, even if it was months ago.

It would be nice if Bern had gotten demoted because of that strike—but Varian doubted it.

Bern guttered out, “You eat all your food and all your water. You drink everything we give you.”

Silently, Varian wrapped a piece of string around his pointer finger, watching as the tip bloated with blood. “It’s just too much, Bernie.”

“It’s doctor’s orders.”

“Kid’s on a drink strike. Demands his demands are met!” the prisoner in cell eight wheezed. “Drinkers of the world, unite!”

The other prisoners took up the theme, and repeated all around, voices from every cell, “Drinkers of the world, unite!”

A rowdy chorus went up and down the cell block, everyone shouting Varian’s imaginative demands.

“He demands a bubble bath!”

“With rubber duckie!”

“A lollipop!”

“His blankie!”

“His mommy!”

“Wait, we already said he’s a drinker. He wants a real drink!”

“Rum?”

“Rum!”

Varian shivered and rubbed his forearms, wishing Ruddiger hadn’t gone out for the night. —No, Ruddiger deserved his freedom. But it got so cold in this cell sometimes.

“Shut it, all of you!” Bern screamed, his sideburns frizzling like caterpillars invading his face. “Next one of you to speak gets shot drill tomorrow.”

Everyone shut up.

“What he wants—” said the quiet prisoner in the corner cell.

“Shot drill!” Bern roared.

“I’m sorry,” the prisoner continued, voice unruffled. “He’s probably just uncomfortable. Do something about the latrine situation—give him more privacy—and the food and drink problem will resolve itself.”

Humiliated, Varian glowered between his feet, where the chamber pot was hidden under the bed (—that's right, right alongside his mind).

Bern lowered his voice. “We’re all dudes here. No one’s looking.”

Of course, no one was looking! Everyone got their privacy best they could by hiding in the front corners of the cells, where the bars going into the brick left a shielded space to … to conduct one’s business. But it didn’t muffle the noise none. Just that fact alone made Varian rub his arms.

Bern refilled Varian’s pitcher. When Varian kicked that one over too, Bern just gave a gloomy look that Varian couldn’t interpret, whether angry or sad, aggravated or anxious.

After Bern left and there were no more guards, the man in the corner cell spoke again. “Look, buddy, you don’t want them to force feed you. It’s unpleasant.”

“Yeah, they hold you down and shove a tube down your throat,” Gary the Executioner said. “Then they just pour.”

Varian kicked the pitcher once more—which was really stupid! Not only did it hurt his bare toes, but it also ricocheted off the bars and bounced off his shin. “Like any of you care!” he howled. Sitting trembly on the bed, he grasped his abused toes.

The gentle prisoner still talked on. (Couldn’t he just shut up?) “Friend, whether or not you eat and drink voluntarily, the end will be the same. You will use the chamber pot.”

Would they really force Varian like that? Why not? They’d already done a bunch of other mean things—like take his goggles, gloves, and even shoelaces! The quiet prisoner’s logic was sound.

Thereafter, Varian ate and drink dutifully, kept his lost mind close by under the bed, and suffered unmitigated humiliation.

What was he doing, thinking this place could have been worse? It was the worst ever!

“Hello, Prisoner X195,” the doctor said, coming into the little office. When he looked at his patient, his mouth dropped. “But wait! You’re just a child!”

“I am, sir,” Varian replied.

“Doctor Jumbo never told me about this! This is an outrage! What should a child be doing in prison, no matter what he’s done?” Red-faced, the doctor slammed his medical chart on the table. “Ridiculous! Injustice! In my medical opinion—which overrides everyone else’s, including judge, king, or even other doctors’—you are to be immediately set free!”

—This was the scenario Varian was hoping for, the day the guards told them it was time for the quarterly medical inspection.

“Time for sawbones to get a gander, huh? Perverts.” Gary squealed, his tiny eyes seeming to buzz right off his face. Varian wasn’t sure what was so funny about the situation.

But! Maybe, just maybe, this would be Varian’s opportunity. He just needed someone to take pity on him, and then he’d be free to free Dad.

The doctors didn’t come to the prison cells to make the inspection, so they were required to go to sick ward. This didn’t sound so bad (even if he had to leave Ruddiger in the cell), except the guards, instead of taking each prisoner one by one, took them in groups in a chain-gang. Varian had never been in a chain-gang before, since he hadn’t left this cell since they put him in it, but he’d seen it done when other prisoners went on work detail. The prisoners got put together in a line, attached one-by-one by their shackles, and a guard stood at each end as they went on their merry way. Completely absurd. A caterpillar of humanity. Varian did not want to be that close to anybody.

He got stuck smack-dab in the middle of five other prisoners, with two hairy guys lurking over him on either side. Shuddering, he kept his eyes down.

The path through the prison lead them directly through other cell blocks. It was awful. The prisoners in the other cell blocks thought it was a spectacle. They shouted, hooted, hollered, and screamed, “Give the doc my regards!” And they had plenty of time to do it because Skinny had to unlock and relock every door they passed through, which meant a lot of time being yelled at by bored prisoners.

Varian kept his head down, with shoulders shoved up to his ears.

One of the cell block’s door was really stuck or something, because Skinny messed and messed at the lock, grumbling “zounds”, and shaking the key ring. When he kicked the door, Blinky left the back of the chain-gang to help him. Together, they poured over the door like scientists discovering an usual species of fungus.

Varian retreated into his favored day-dream.

“Hello, Prisoner X195 … But wait! You’re just a child!”

“I am, sir.”

“Doctor Jumbo never told me about this! This is an outra—

A hand clamped onto Varian’s elbow, jerking him towards the cell to the right. A tattooed face pressed against the bars and screeched through yellow teeth, “Hey, kid, why don’t you come over here?”

Varian froze, sheer terror blitzing his brain.

“Let go of him!”

The prisoner behind Varian slammed his cuffs on Tattoo’s wrists. Tattoo’s grasp was shattered, and to hear him scream, his wrist, too.

“What’s going on? What’s going on?”

Skinny and Blinky tornadoed in, and the room filled rattle-skattle with vocal debris, yelling from all corners. Skinny screamed at Tattoo, Tattoo howled about his wrist, and the prisoner behind Varian shouted at Blinky, “Keep your eye on him! He’s just a kid!”

Blinky took it with more quiet dignity than what was common.

Varian spared a quick glance for his savior, but turned away before he caught more than a pair of green eyes and high cheekbones.

The whole thing was a waste of time: even though it wasn’t Doctor Jumbo that Varian saw, this other doctor didn’t care about Varian’s youth, and just told him, “Say ‘ah.’”

What wasn’t a waste was the lesson Varian learned that day: every other person in this prison was a hawk.

Being housed in the middle of the block got so wearying, Varian decided. Cell five out of ten was a sham. How wonderful it would have been to be in cell one or two? That way, any new prisoner would see Varian and find out right away, instead of Varian’s existence being a surprise later. It was always a learning process for the guys in cells one through four, and then it was just so rude.

It went something like this:

New prisoner (NP): Curse curse curse XXX-language!

Old Prisoner/Guard: Hey, there’s kids!

NP: Indeed? I am surprised. Do beg your pardon.

It was typically more colorful than that, but Varian just got so tired being the topic of conversation. It made him feel cold, and he’d scratch his arms to feel better.

Sometimes, finding out there was a kid in the block made the prisoner shut his trap. But other times, it only made things worse.

Bill, the new prisoner in cell one, was one of those sort. He cussed out his cell mate only after his second day, and Blinky, who was walking out, shouted, “Watch your mouth, scumbag! There’s kids in here.”

“This is the no-profanity block,” Steve (cell six) explained.

Silently, Bill waited for Blinky to leave, and then let loose. “Kid? Kid! You think I care? Hey, kid! Let me see you.”

There was no way for Bill to actually see Varian, unless he stuffed his hand through the bars, and maybe Bill could see a finger or two. This was how most prisoners knew each other, until they got put on a chain-gang together.

But Varian was putting no arms through no bars! He was too cold anyway, and scratched.

“Brat!” Bill spat, his voice like a tidal pool full of Russian bears. “How old is he?”

Steven’s cell was the one across from Varian’s, so he peered across the way. “I dunno. Thirteen? Fourteen?”

Varian scratched his arms. He wished he hadn’t put Ruddiger Outside yet. Everything bad happened when Ruddiger wasn’t around.

“That’s not a kid!” Bill spewed. “I was on my own since I was eleven. Thirteen is no kid.”

Somebody laughed. “What you mean is, your old man kicked you out.”

“Yeah, so what? My old man was hard as tacks.”

“Oh please. Your blood’s gonna curdle when I tell you about my old man.”

They all took their turns, telling the most horrific stories about their fathers—the half that even had fathers at all. The ones that had stuck around had been drunken, abusive louts. It chilled Varian to the bone, and no matter how he scratched, he couldn’t get warm.

“Hey, cell ten!” Steven eventually shouted, once the stories died down. “What about yours, Dandy?”

“I don’t answer to that,” the man in the corner cell replied calmly.

“So just answer the question! Your old man must’ve been something.”

The quiet prisoner cleared his throat so heavily, it made everyone go quiet right along with him. The call for the start of the show had gone out.

“My father,” he said, voice smooth as milk, “is a remarkable man. He does not drink or brawl. He believes in family, treated us gently, has worked hard everyday of his life, and loves my mother.”

Steve scoffed. “Should’ve known your pop was perfection itself.”

“The last time I tried going home, he slammed the door in my face. His error is unforgiveness.”

Varian trembled. There was a wriggling under his skin, under his nails, in his ears and eyes, until he tickled incessantly all over, as if something was burrowing into him. He checked to make sure it wasn’t a fleet of lice or an army of ants. Something was embroidering onto his very bones. He could feel it!

No! These were bad men, and he was nothing like them. He wasn’t anything like them at all. If he was a good person, the sort God could listen to, he would pray and pray to never have a cell mate—but he wasn’t a good person. Hope was his only hope.

“Hey! Kid, what are you doing to yourself?” Steven shouted, jerking Varian from his world of tingling. “Stop!”

Only then did Varian feel the pain. Look at his arms! The tingling he had felt was from his own fingernails, scratching until he was bleeding. Red streaks ran helter-skelter down his forearms. Blood was smeared on his hands. The strange thing was, the sight of it didn’t make him feel faint. Not for a single second.

No one listened to him, of course. With Steve screaming his head off for the guard, Bern and Commander Larson himself came bursting in, and they both turned death’s-head moth in their faces. They were deaf to Varian’s, “I didn’t mean to! It was an accident.”

They ran him off to sick ward, not even putting shackles on him, and two things happened.

Doctor Jumbo checked him over, and said, “I’ll be seeing more of you, I think.”

The second thing was they put him in the same cell as the quiet prisoner.

Varian didn’t see the value of scratching out each of his days by putting a line on the walls, the way the other prisoners did. They scrabbled at the walls like hungry rats in a maze! Everyday was just a reminder of his failure, so why should he remind himself? It was fine to be sitting in a prison cell when Dad was sitting in a cell of Varian’s own—

—in a cell of amber.

But when Blinky came to move him to the quiet prisoner’s cell, Varian wished he had been keeping track of his days after all. That way, he could with certainty say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on a minute! I’ve already been here for twenty-five years, see? My sentence is over!”

But did he get to do that? Had he brushed his mind off long enough to have thought ahead like that?

Hah-hah, no!

Lamely, all he could say was, “Why?”

“Because I’m coming in, that’s why,” Blinky answered, while Skinny fiddled with the lock. “Get against the wall.”

“Why?” Varian asked.

“Because I’m putting these shackles on you. Arms together.”

“Why?”

Even Skinny sighed, and gave the answers. “Because you’ve lived in the lap of luxury long enough. You’ve got to share like the others.”

“No sucker gets more than the other,” Steve observed, balancing a spoon on his upper lip while he watched the proceedings.

“Right-o, Steve. We believe in equality around here.”

Varian frowned. “You don’t have to be sarcastic.”

Skinny laughed, then gently set Ruddiger on Varian’s shoulders. “All set?”

“Wait. There’s a window, right?”

“Yes, yes. Your animal can drive Andrew crazy with junk, too,” Blinky grumbled.

Varian trembled as Blinky lead him at a pace he couldn’t tolerate. So, Andrew was the quiet prisoner’s name.

When cell ten appeared, at the end of the block, up against a doorless wall, Varian tried to whirl around. “I almost forgot—!” He was going to say his mind under the bed, but Blinky’s hand on his shoulder kept him face forward, and taking one step after the next.

“Don’t worry, kid. It’ll be nice. You’ll like it.”

After they stuffed him into the cell and locked the door, Varian knew—he did not like it! Andrew was seated on the floor like a common animal. His eyelids fit snugly over his closed eyes like peach skins; his knees bent in impossible angles until the tops of the feet rested on his kneecaps. His kneecaps! Unlike the other prisoners, who let their long, raggedy hair go free, he gathered his into a bun. Who was this womanly, pretzel-like man?

No, no, no way! Varian wanted none of it. He pressed against the bars, watching as the guards walked away, Blinky running his baton over the bars of the cells just to drive everyone nuts. Unbelievable! The guards were petty tyrants in their own way, but—but this was so depraved, it’d make the history books. It was probably Bern’s idea, wasn’t it?

Andrew opened his eyes!

Those eyes twinkled like dewy green apples; his smile was a cozy fire on a cold, blustery evening; and when he spoke, it was a down filled blanket. “Hello. I’m Andrew. Welcome.”

Yeeaoch!

“You may have that bunk,” Andrew went on, indicating the one on the right. “If it’s all right.”

Keeping to the corners and edges, Varian sidled until he couldn’t sidle no more. Like a squirrel, he hopped onto the bunk and then slid down on it, holding Ruddiger against him. Stroking Ruddiger’s rich fur did nothing to make this better.

“That,” Andrew said, “is a beautiful animal—”

Varian turned around to face the wall, and buried his face in Ruddiger’s back.

“That’s okay,” Andrew murmured.

There was only one—well, two ways to survive this place. Numero Uno was the wait for the opportunity and know he wouldn’t be here forever. Number Two was to become as savage as the place itself. Varian collected all the fear within him, sweeping up every corner, and even inhaling the fear floating in the atmosphere, bundle it all into a ball, and made himself not just fierce, but Fierce! He dove into that wellspring that had been hiding until the amber, fished out the atrocity, the vile, contemptible hatred, and spewed it everywhere. It was kinda gross, if he thought about it. A verbal food-poisoning, spewing from sun-up to lights-out. There was no end!

“If you get cold,” Andrew told him, second night, “you can have my blanket.”

“I don’t want your filthy blanket!” Varian howled, sitting with his face against the wall, until he couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Uh-oh, poor Gregory has a cold. He should drink a soothing lemon-and-honey herbal tea,” Andrew said later.

It took Varian a whole minute to understand Andrew was talking about Blinky the Guard. “He probably got it from you!” Varian spat.

Andrew remained unflappable. What was with this guy? He took everything in good stride. Was he laughing at Varian? Didn’t seem like it …

Even Ruddiger was warming up to him. Andrew cooed at Ruddiger until Ruddiger curled up in his lap, purring like any housecat. Varian was astonished. But he also understood. He hadn’t been paying Ruddiger attention like normal, afraid that if Andrew knew how precious he was, Andrew would do something out of pointless cruelty. But maybe, Varian was wrong.

“Animals are so much purer than people, don’t you agree?” Andrew asked.

“That’s—that’s the only thing you’ve ever said that wasn’t total hogwash!” Varian snarled, but feeling like a total lame-o in saying it.

Andrew pet Ruddiger behind the ears, just the way Ruddiger loved. Maybe, if Ruddiger didn’t mind Andrew, it meant he was okay.

Varian wrapped the blanket around himself, furious and lonelier than ever. He would remain resolute. He wasn’t a giver-upper. He would hate Andrew until the day he died.

The first time they got real fresh fruit—not the lemon juice they were forced to drink, but beautiful and fragrant oranges—Andrew threw his into Varian’s lap. Varian had already devoured his and was licking his sticky fingers from every spilled drop. The orange landed between his crossed legs softly, nestling into the shell of his knee like a fantastical pearl. A thrill played Varian’s vertebrae like a piano. The orange was so smooth and waxy. He already knew what it would be to dig his fingernails pleasingly into the rind, how the firm crust would break, and his fingers would dive into a creamy velvet pith.

Varian threw the orange against the wall. It went splat! two feet from Andrew’s head. Stunned at his own behavior, Varian sat silent, watching as Andrew picked up the broken orange. He cradled it. And … did he chuck it back at Varian? Did he attempt to wring Varian’s neck?

No. He merely opened it further for eating. “You’ve nothing to fear from me.”

“I … I don’t want anything you’ve touched.” Varian tried to say it fiercely, but his voice trembled.

“We’re going to be here a long time. We could at least be friendly.”

“I want nothing to do with you.”

The bad thing about prison was, since there wasn’t anything to do, everyone was everyone else’s comedy. Clarence laughed from the opposite cell, standing at the bars like he was next in line for the carousel. “What a tough guy.”

Varian crushed his orange peel between his fists.

“All we have is each other,” Andrew mused. “I don’t want to worry about being smothered in the night.”

Smirking, Varian replied, “Now, there’s a thought.”

Clarence winked at Varian. “Maybe you ought not scrap with your cellie. You ain’t never known what he’s done.”

“He doesn’t know what I’ve done.”

“Yeah? What’s that? Had to be something special.”

“Treason.” Varian said it deliciously, although, truthfully, it didn’t make him feel anything. There was no thrill or pain in it; it just was.

Andrew looked at him sharply, but Clarence snorted. “Sure,” he replied, dryly. “Don’t make yourself big and bad down here. You snapped, right? Anger issues. It’s all over you. But you’re smart, so it would have been a smart crime. Poisoned the well, did ya?”

“Nah! It was just cold, simple murder, right?” Steve asked, voice drifting from two cells away.

Varian narrowed his eyes. “I thought the only lies we tell here are how innocent we are.”

Clarence whistled. “I could believe you, but then you should be hanging at the end of a noose. Not hanging out here with us fancies. They were gonna finish that one guy just for stealing the crown.”

“They’re waiting for him to get older,” Steve said. “No one wants to see a kid dangle. Not even Bill.”

“Hey!” Bill yelped.

Andrew pressed his palms together demurely, like he always did before he said that weird word (nah-mah-stay?). But instead of quoting goofy, made-up phrases, he asked quite reasonably, “What treason did you do?”

“I kidnapped the Queen and tried to crush her with a machine I built.”

Andrew got that ironic expression when a person knows they’re being served a whopper, so Varian told on. All about it. About fooling Rapunzel, stealing an important Kingdom artifact, building an army of automatons, capturing Princess and King his royal self. It would be bad news if the other prisoners underestimated Varian, so he hid none of it. It was a bewitching story, apparently, because the prisoners listened without interrupting.

“Check with the guards if you think I’m lying. I dare you. I double-dare you!” Varian spat, at the end of his tale.

Clarence’s teeth flashed like drops of curdled milk. “There’s no use asking if you double-dared us.”

Varian bristled. Was he being mocked? But maybe not, because Clarence asked why he had done it. Varian sucked on his orange peel. It was bitter, but tasted real. Almost, he felt real, too.

“You have guts.” Andrew laid across his bunk since it was getting close to lights-out. His foot wobbled as he pressed his heel against the mattress. His green, staring eyes were lit as if from within. “It’s a shame you weren’t successful reaching your goal.”

What the double-Dutch did he mean? Varian hadn’t said a single thing about his goal. Nothing about Dad at all.

Apparently, Varian’s one-sided hostility was like blowing soap bubbles in a room full of toddlers! Andrew didn’t care. At. All. He continued to meditate in their apportioned sliver of sunlight, saying “ohm” and being at a peace that passes all understanding. No one cared about Varian’s spit and spats, in fact. The other prisoners thought it was hilarious, and when even he poured venom on the guards, they just told him to wash better behind his ears and brush his teeth before going to bed. What was the point anymore?

“Actually, what’s the point of anything, anymore?” he asked himself one night. “Where do I go? What do I do?”

The answer was: nowhere and nothing. At least, the other prisoners got to leave for work detail, going to a warehouse by the sea to make ropes, or got sent to the mines for a week or two at a time, while Varian … Varian just had to sit. Why should he brush and wash? All he did was laze around in the same four-by-four feet of cell before going back to bed at night. Why should he even get out of bed at all?

So Varian didn’t. He laid in bed until his bones ached. He slept until his eyes were raw with sleeping. Ruddiger rubbed his nose against Varian’s neck, which didn’t make him laugh anymore. It seemed he was no longer ticklish.

Andrew took advantage of Varian’s ennui to read him poetry. Not just any poetry, but Andrew’s poetry. He fancied himself a poet, and nothing could convince him of the heresy it was. It was awful.

“the tarmegan is a sickly bird,

singing a voice no one has heard.”

Varian handed the paper back to Andrew. “You misspelled ptarmigan.”

“Is that all you have to say about it?”

Rolling over, Varian went back to sleep.

Andrew didn’t get the memo that he was to leave Varian alone. Instead, for a week, he put his oranges in Varian’s bed. Varian ate them without feeling. If Andrew wanted to get scurvy, what was that to him?

One day, Skinny stood at the door, and said, “You lucked out, kid. The doctor says he’s coming here for your monthly exam. You don’t even have to go there yourself!”

Oh, goody. Varian almost didn’t believe it until the portentous shape of Doctor Jumbo appeared alongside Lieutenant Bern.

Boy, oh, boy, did it create hubbub. Of a sudden, the entire cell block was overcome with coughs and sneezes from every quarter, and everybody was dying. Doctor Jumbo ignored it. After Skinny shuffled Andrew off, since Jumbo refused to be in a cell with more than an ill prisoner, he primly checked Varian for fever; inspected the color of tongue, gum, and even inside eyelids; and asked if Varian was eating all his foods and oranges. He declared Varian non-infectious.

“The boy is extraordinarily pale. Is he getting exercise?”

Blinky and Bern shared a look, like dingbats. Bern took up the fight, arguing with the doctor. He spoke in a low tone, but he accidentally said, loud enough for Varian to hear, “particularly dangerous, attacked the Royal Family.”

“Regardless, he must have sun and fresh air.” Jumbo gathered his tools into his bag, jostling around little vials of medicine.

Varian huffed and puffed, rubbing his eyes. He missed alchemy so much!

After Jumbo left, Skinny brought Andrew back, saying, “Doc says you’re getting more beans and less gruel. How’s that, kid?”

“Leave me alone,” Varian moaned. How could they do this to him? So what if he died of rickets or anemia? Why should they care? Why should they try so hard to keep the same people alive they had determined must live miserably?

Regardless of their motives, the guards took him everyday to a small, enclosed yard where Varian discovered what the punitive labor, shot drill, was. What a cruel and insidious chore! It involved carrying a cannonball from one pile to the next, with no goal or purpose save to carry cannonballs from one pile to the next.

“Do I have to do that?” Varian asked Blinky, the first time he saw it demonstrated by some poor sap from Cell Block F.

“You couldn’t even pick one of them up.”

Instead of running cannonballs around, Varian was made to sit on a stool set in the sun. Surely, this wasn’t what Doctor Jumbo met by exercise. But at least it got him outside for a bit, to take a break from his mind under the bed.

The other prisoners complained it was cruel and unusual punishment to do shot drills while being made a phenomenon to some bratty brat. For the first time, Varian was given labor: he was to help with kitchen prep. Not prison-kitchen prep, but royal-kitchen prep: preparing fruit, as long as it didn’t require a knife. So while the other prisoners went “ugh-ugh-ugh”, Varian cored apples or pitted cherries.

“This is even crueller and unusualler!” the prisoners cried. “We gotta lug cannonballs around while looking at all that fresh fruit—when we don’t even get any!”

Varian agreed. The fruit set before him were like jewels out of a mine—dewy black cherries like obsidian opals, and garnet apples smelling like spring! He couldn’t help but lick up the juices that ran down his fingers. Every time his tongue ran smooth over his wrists, he was transported back to Old Corona, running through Dad’s crops, full of vim and vigor.

The Captain of the Guard put a stop to it. He declared it “Absolutely unhygienic! The chef will have our heads!”

“What do you expect from me?” Varian ravaged at Commander Larson.

“If you promise not to lick your fingers,” Larson replied, “you may have a few pieces of fruit when you’ve finished.”

“It’ll make Doctor von Linne happy anyway,” Bern muttered.

“Doctor Jumbo’s not a man to tangle with, huh?” Varian said, on top of the world.

What fruity morsels that came to Varian—bliss! He picked out what was best, putting it to the side in a little napkin that Ruddiger kept guard over. If he found something better, he exchanged it. One apple and three cherries was his allotment. Half the apple and a cherry went to Ruddiger, of course.

Honestly, for all this “exercise”, Ruddiger was the only one getting it. He ran around on the small patch of grass that hadn’t been trampled down, either chasing pigeons or gathering chestnuts from the tree. He carried the chestnuts to Skinny or Blinky, who smashed them open with the ends of their batons.

The doc said Varian would feel better by getting some sun, but now that Varian was getting plenty, life was still … BORING!

It was full of inertia, both in body and spirit. Nothing changed. They had books and paper. Varian read books, Andrew wrote couplets. Andrew meditated, Varian slept. When Andrew got packed off to work in the warehouse or mines, Varian was eaten alive with jealousy. All he saw were these same mundane walls, same patch of grass, same chestnut tree. He wanted to see the change of seasons! He wanted to see the sea crash on the rocks on some days, and lazily lap at the edges on others. He wanted people to laugh and dance, cry and eat and live. Prisoners did not do those things, their humanity pressed out of them by every moment of freedom taken.

Varian’s humanity was being pressed out of him, ounce by ounce. One ounce was lost every time he prepared fruit, and Andrew did yoga. Another ounce was lost when Andrew fed hard tack to the pigeons at the window. Another was lost when Varian fed Ruddiger gruel or tasteless beans. Sometimes, a glimmer of old humanity winked at him, when he remembered he was supposed to be waiting for his opportunity. Then he remembered he was keeping his mind under the bed, and felt another ounce slip away.

One day, Varian woke up and felt that last shred of humanity escape him. He grabbed for it, but it was too quick, slithering away into whatever void humanity hid. All day, he felt weird. Something was wrong, but he didn’t know what.

“Someone sure is grumpy today!” Andrew grumbled at lunch, when Varian threw his bowl against the wall, so sick of eating beans and gruel, gruel and beans.

Blinky made him clean it up. Varian shuddered as he ran the mop around. Why did he feel so uneasy?

He went to bed early to escape the feeling, and dreamed he was standing at the edge of an empty cistern, leaning on his elbows to look into the abyss below. Shockingly, there was life inside. Colonies of emerald moss grew a patchwork along the walls; the bottom was coated in a slick, black slime. Myriad snails climbed the walls, their fragile shells whorled ever so neatly, twisting iridescently and delicately. Their whole lives were on their backs. As they neared the top, Varian snatched them up and flung them back into the cistern. When they hit bottom, they cracked open like chestnuts.

Varian awoke.

Rat-a-pat-a-tat-tat-tat!

His heart thumped. Was this how Dad felt in one of his dreams, the man who couldn’t keep still for dreaming? The man who was now stillstillstillstill?

Voices of the real world tip-toed into Varian’s addled senses. He turned his focus on that, sharpening his ears. Blinky and Skinny chatted as they snuffed out the lanterns for lights-out. They only ever spoke humdrum things, but they spoke of the outside world. Uncle Monty had premiered a new chocolate praline. A ship had ran against pier four, turning it into tooth sticks. Taxes were due tomorrow.

“The worst day of the year,” Skinny said, ominously.

Varian sat up.

Roberto hee-hawed from cell two. “That’s one good thing about being prisoner. We slugs don’t worry about taxes, that’s for sure.”

“Aw, come on, Bobby, we know you never worried about taxes in the first place!” Blinky replied.

“True ‘nuff.”

The lights died out, like stars going out in a reverse dawn. The last one puffed away, and the cell block had nothing running through it but moonlight shuffling through their pitiful little windows. The guards left, and the door to the block was barred shut.

With goose-pimples honking all over his arms, Varian slipped out of bed and stood in front of the cell door.

“Hey, bud, what’s going on?” Andrew yawned.

“Did you hear the date?” Varian grasped his hair with both fists.

“Don’t tell me you’re worried about tax season.”

In all this time, Varian hadn’t heard the date—or at least, hadn’t concerned himself with it. He had made himself not worry about. But now he knew exactly how many months he’d been imprisoned. And tomorrow … tomorrow was Dad’s birthday, because Dad said it was a downer his birthday was always on Tax Day.

Varian flung himself against the bars.

“Friend?”

“Let me out!” Varian screamed. Already, his voice box strained and hurt. He shook the door. “Let me out! Let me out! I have to help my dad!”

Andrew sat up, throwing his blanket to the side. “You’re going to wake the whole cell block!”

“Let me out! Please! I need to—”

“Shut up!” Another prisoner—someone nameless, new guy—shouted.

“I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry. Let me out!” Varian stopped for breath. How could he be out of breath already? He was already so weak?

Panting, he dropped to his knees.

Andrew spoke soothingly, like all the understanding in the world rested between his thick, white vocal folds. “There’s no point in shouting. The guards won’t listen.”

“No! I have to—I have to help my dad.” Varian scrabbled against the lock, fingering the keyhole, the sides, the face plate, the back plate. Ouch! The keyhole was sharp. But there had to be some way—some weakness. There had to be a trick. Something! This, right now, was his opportunity.

“Don’t do that,” Andrew hissed, wriggling out of bed to stand behind him. “You’ll get your fingers smashed.”

The guards had warned stray fingers were rewarded a baton. Andrew thought Varian cared about that? So stupid!

Andrew crouched, speaking low and quickly. “Someone’s coming. Stop that.”

Varian worked and worked, pressing his nails into the keyhole—

“Stop!”

Standing behind Varian, Andrew reached through the bars, grabbed Varian’s wrists, and wrenched back. Their hands came back into the cell. Varian tried to pull away, but Andrew held firm. He pulled Varian’s hands against his chest.

“No! Let go—”

Andrew did. Stepped away. Just as Blinky materialized out of the moody dark, lantern throwing light and shadow around the block.

“What’s going on?” he barked.

Varian stared up at Blinky. Surely, couldn’t he see right away none of this was right? If they didn’t let him go, Dad would be trapped forever. Dad would miss his birthday.

“Rough night,” Andrew answered, shuffling back.

“Let me go!” Varian screamed.

Blinky lived up to his namesake, and blinked like an enormous-eyed owl.

“Kid’s freaking out,” Clarence sleepily murmured.

Raising the lantern so more light fell into the cell, Blinky stared with hard, unreadable eyes. Varian shivered and thought of something he hadn’t before. Had Blinky been at the battle at Old Corona?

“Quiet down, or you’ll get in trouble,” Blinky muttered. At Andrew, he snarked, “Keep him quiet, or you’ll do shot drill for a week.”

“Let me out!”

Blinky didn’t even look back.

“No!” Varian reached for the lock again. Andrew caught his hands, cursing. When the door to the block opened and shut, Varian felt more betrayed than ever.

“Let’s get back to bed, buddy.”

“Get off me!” Snarling, Varian wrenched his hands out of Andrew’s grasp and back for the door again, then pressed his face in the space between two bars. Oh. The sharp, biting cold soothed his heated face. He pushed harder, until it seemed his skull creaked. If I’m hurt, he thought, they’ll take me to sick ward. Doctor Jumbo cares! He’ll tell them to let me go!

Pressing harder, pain phantomed and flashed across his vision.

“Hey! Don’t hurt yourself!” Andrew grabbed his shoulder.

Varian pressed harder. Andrew pulled back on his shoulders, but Varian pushed forward on his knees. Andrew took his wrists; Varian entwined his fingers around the bars.

Clarence lurched up from his bunk to watch them, little plum moonlight reflecting off his forearms.

It was really hurting now, opulent and relieving. Just keep pushing. A scramble of Andrew’s breath wafted thickly in Varian’s ear. He arched his back when Andrew dropped to his knees and wrapped an arm around his chest, pulled back—jerked Varian’s forehead away. Just enough. Varian rammed his forehead forward into Andrew’s hand, and slammed both into the bars, his landing blunted with Andrew’s hand in the way. He pressed. How hot was Andrew’s palm!

“Stopstopstopstopstop!” Varian’s voice strained.

If he pressed hard enough, Andrew would get angry. Maybe mad enough to box Varian’s ears. That could get him to sick ward, too.

Varian pressed harder, until it seemed Andrew’s palm glued to his forehead. Where was it? The groan, the rage? The hiss and shout? He pressed. He pressed. He pressed and … nothing happened.

Slowly, his fog faded. His mind under the bed wriggled out, and then rolled across the floor, to bounce up and wriggle into his ear.

Andrew’s voice was a low, continual hum. “Don’t hurt yourself, sweetie.”

The moment Varian’s mind landed back in his head and registered those words, all the fight rushed out of him. He fell slack, the tension released.

“That’s right,” Andrew hummed. “No one’s going to hurt you.”

Varian’s head fell back—no, Andrew pushed his head back gently, pressing it to his shoulder. Another rumbly murmur from Andrew—probably something about going to bed again. But Varian felt the hand start to leave, and he slammed his hands over that hand again, fingers trembling. Somehow, it was important Andrew not leave.

It was a lightening bolt. Andrew’s palm was cotton soft and his knuckles were smooth marbles. It had been months and months since Varian had felt a kind hand. A large, kind hand … like Dad’s.

Varian burst into keening, soft tears. Ever since he’d been arrested, he hadn’t cried even once. First, he’d been too angry. Then too numb. But his mind was back now, and so were tears.

“Oh, kiddo,” Andrew sighed, letting Varian despair and weep. “It’s going to be okay. You’ll see.”

When Varian opened his eyes again, Clarence was still standing at his bars. When his eyes met Varian’s, he grinned, and twirled a finger pointed at his temple, as if the whole world had gone mad.

Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.

Why couldn’t the world just burn? Why couldn’t a falling star land right on this prison?

Immolation and being squashed like a pill bug … yeah, it was way better than embarrassment.

Varian couldn’t even bear to look at himself in the reflection in the water pitcher. What a stupid baby he was! Thank goodness Ruddiger hadn’t seen him like that. Talk about losing respect for himself.

He moaned and groaned to think about his behavior the night before. How could he have taken comfort from a stranger?

And yet, Varian sat all day on his bunk, legs teepee’d before him, watching Andrew. Was Andrew a good guy, actually? It was too hard to say. Varian had to watch, to decide.

Ruddiger huffed from the other end of the mattress, annoyed for being ignored.

Andrew didn’t seem like a bad guy. He tried to keep clean, didn’t fight with the guards, put his food bowl neatly in the corner when he was done eating. He smiled, and spoke gently. Sure, his habits seemed goofy … but that wasn’t a crime, was it? (Was it? What was he in here for anyway?)

For all Varian’s humiliation, he’d slept last night better than he had ever since the blizzard. Dreams of Dad chased him all night—Dad’s feel, strong, male, safe. Dad’s smell: clean, carrying notes of field and orchard, apple blossoms, grass, wet dirt, horse feed. All day today, Varian felt a phantom rumble across his cheek, just like how Dad’s voice had once rumbled there when Varian would fall asleep against his chest, many years ago on some late, star-decked winter evening.

Varian had accepted comfort from a strange man, on the eve of Dad’s birthday. And today, Dad’s actual birthday, all he thought about was Andrew.

Varian was an infernal son.

After Ruddiger went out for the evening, Andrew sat on the bed next to Varian, smiling.

“Hey, bud, some advice for you. A trick of mine. Next time you’re feeling a little”—Andrew wobbled his flattened hand in an “iffy” gesture—“here’s the trick. If you press your third eye point here …” He pressed a finger gently between Varian’s eyebrows. “This point calms the mind—oh!”

Varian pressed Andrew’s palm flat against his forehead and held it. Andrew was so nice. Andrew was so kind. Andrew wrapped an arm around his shoulders. Varian shivered. He had the answer now. Andrew was a good guy. He was so warm.

Andrew always knew. They went through their days, boredom chasing them, but Andrew always knew. And because Varian was dying for his father, he accepted his cell mate as a substitute. He didn’t even mind when Andrew’s arms would tighten, tighten, tighten—sometimes so tight, he could hardly breathe.

Chapter Text

“oh consider the lowly pigeon,

not as aquatic as the penguin

but a nobler bird, it is true

bringing down kingdoms, with a coo.”

Varian scrambled underneath his blanket, shrieking, “Oh, it’s so bad!”

Andrew stopped his poetry recitation. Ponderously, he stood in the middle of the cell, legs outspread and his form a proud plumb line (an architect could have built cities with that spine of Andrew’s). But his eyes were stunned, pupils shriveled in astonishment. “Friend, what are you saying?”

Shoving his mouth into the fur of Ruddiger’s back, Varian shook his head, muted. Whoopsie, he hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

Andrew sat on his bunk, then lifted a leg until an ankle went behind his ears in an ludicrous stretch. “A carrier pigeon is a fine bird.”

Weeeell, sure. Sure, sure. Varian wasn’t going to argue the point. After all, a carrier pigeon was going to break them out of this jail cell.

History wasn’t one of Varian’s better subjects, but Andrew’s plan for Coronan domination seemed special. Uhhmm, unusual. Well … completely nuts. But maybe, the weakness in Varian’s earlier plan of Coronan domination was that it hadn’t been nutso enough.

All along, Andrew had been planning his eventual escape by feeding the pigeons at the window. One of those cooing, empty-brained avians was a traitor, carrying notes between Andrew and his allies. The pastoral poems Andrew wrote were actually code. The codes the pigeon brought back were written in odes. Andrew discarded these faux-poems into the trash pile of Ruddiger’s treasures, to be swept away by the guards weekly. If any guard decided to read the “poems”—well, he wouldn’t, because they were absolute rubbish!

“such is the kingdom

made up of children

guard he the green one

as bright as the sun.”

“o to be where the free trees are

to be streaming out the bar

stars above like rockets below

let us go where the seeds sow.”

Varian kept his opinions to himself about Andrew’s nonsense poetry, because things were good between them. He didn’t want to ruin that. In the long, cold nights, they bemoaned their cruel lots together. Andrew revealed he just wanted relics of his homeland again. “Thrown into this prison … because I wanted a book!”

“They were trying to keep a book from you?” Varian whispered, feeling deeply an ache that would be never forgotten. “I know what that’s like.” He told about why he had fought Corona, how they had wanted to take something from him, and how they abandoned Dad.

Andrew murmured, “It’s just not fair. It’s just not fair.”

“Rapunzel even helped me steal the flower, but only I got in trouble for it.” Varian drew a word-story about his and Rapunzel’s mutual theft, utilizing the underground tunnels of Herz der Sonne. “It’s how we got into the vault. It’s not even guarded!”

“Fascinating!” Andrew pat Varian on the head like a good son. “Say, do you think there could be tunnels under our very feet?”

Varian looked at the stonework below, where a shadow spread out like a midnight rug. “Well, I think there’s another floor under us. But then, yes, tunnels!”

Andrew clasped Varian to him, as if the Tooth Fairy had left a treasure trove under his pillow. That was when he revealed there was a family out there, wishing to free Corona from its tyrannical overlords and establish a new country of freedom, justice, and kindness. Technically, he wasn’t actually related to these people, but all of Saporia was a family, no matter what you looked like or the things you’d done.

That sounded wonderful.

Now with Varian’s support, things happened quickly. They planned and schemed and made promises to each other, and Andrew said Varian was so extraordinarily useful he couldn’t even believe it. It made Varian wriggle in delight. Together, they chuckled over their cleverness.

At midnight one evening, when the moon blanketed itself in clouds like it had the flu, Varian stood on his bed, feet planted self-righteously, dreaming of the justice to come on the King. (The snores around him ruined the affect, but whatever—he persisted anyway.) Why, he was going to make Freddie core apples and pit cherries! He was going to take everyone’s shoelaces! He was going to make Rapunzel swing cannonballs in her hair while reciting all the capitals of the world. In alphabetical order!

For some reason, that last thought put him in a bad mood, so he went straight to bed. Even in the morning, the mood stuck with him, so that when Andrew lightly suggested Ruddiger could be useful, Varian denied him.

“I thought you didn’t approve of animal exploitation.” He sneered.

Andrew pouted—whoa, was that gaze on his face sharp! Not at all matching the simple innocence of a pout. Varian realized something: Andrew was in prison for a reason.

A few days later, the guards packed Andrew off to the mines. Did Varian miss him this time? No. He was too full. Too full of Ruddiger.

“Please stay in tonight,” Varian asked, tucking Ruddiger against his chest.

Ruddiger put his velveteen paws on Varian’s cheeks and stared, questioning. How his eyes were just like diamonds studded in coal! Hiding his tears, Varian lay back. He loved Ruddiger and Ruddiger loved him, and because of that, he couldn’t let Ruddiger get involved. Not like he’d done before.

The next day, Skinny took Varian to the courtyard to prepare fruit, as always. The other prisoners had been obedient, or sent on work detail, so it was just Ruddiger and Varian. Skinny leaned against the gate, in a full on doze.

The work was coring pear halves with a spoon today, swiveling it through white flesh, scooping out the seeds like freckles. Varian set out a pear half for himself and Ruddiger each, and got to work, while Ruddiger ran off to harass a squirrel.

“Oh brother! Oh fiddlesticks! Oh come on!” Varian grumbled, slipping the spoon and jabbing the fruit in all the wrong places. It wasn’t like him to make mistakes like that. If he said so himself, he wasn’t just an expert at fruit prep, but was THE expert. Yep, he could plop out cherry seeds without bruising the fruit, and skim long red strings of apple skins that could have let spies down the walls of Jericho. It wasn’t a long list of skills, but still, it was skills. It used to take him hours, but he’d gotten so good that he often had time to roll around in the little spot of grass or take a nap before he hit his required one-hour “suntime.”

But today: what skills? The spoon slipped like digging into opals. His fingers squeezed too hard, leaving bruises and finger marks behind. Looking at a basket full of mangled pears, Varian knew: his head was going to get knocked off by some prep cook, if they could find him.

He swallowed, wiped his eyes, and … and, you know, that would be better than what was to come. But now was the time to bite the bullet. He was down to the last few pears.

He called for Ruddiger, who came sliding down the trunk of the tree, looking a little worse for wear. The squirrel had given Ruddiger a hard time, tying knots in Ruddiger’s whiskers.

Varian cleared his throat, keeping his eyes on his pears. “It’s time for you to go,” he said.

Ruddiger had been at the moment of reaching for his pear half, but changed trajectory, landing his paw on Varian’s knee. He made a sound like, skiwiip, but Varian knew what he meant.

“You need to go.”

Ruddiger trembled.

“I—I have Andrew now. That’s enough.”

Ruddiger stamped his foot. “Absurd!” he seemed to be saying. Ruddiger wasn’t just some raccoon: he was Varian’s raccoon, and he couldn’t be so easily fooled. But, Varian couldn’t explain. He’d been selfish for long enough.

Ruddiger stretched out his paws, grasping. His ears came down when Varian put a pear in them.

“It’s enough, buddy. You’ve done enough.”

Why was Ruddiger Varian’s raccoon and not just a raccoon? Because it could be simple. Because Ruddiger always understood. There didn’t need to be an agonizing, long drawn-out argument, or pleading, or fake anger or coldness. All it took was to say, “It’s enough,” and Ruddiger understood.

Varian kept his face turned as Ruddiger climbed up the wall, his claws scratching against stone, surprising a trio of pigeons sitting on the wall, who cried, Whoo-whoo-whoo-whoo as they flew off. When Varian allowed himself to look up, a pair of bright eyes beamed over the top of the wall, before beaming away, followed by a cork-screwing striped tail that slipped. And was gone.

Varian let out a long sigh, feeling Ruddiger’s pear, uneaten, rock against his knee.

When Andrew came back the following day and found out Ruddiger had “ran away,” he was furious. He meditated all day, breathing short, heavy huffs, like an asthmatic horse.

“I thought you wanted to help your father,” he whispered over their lunch gruel. “Are you abandoning him?”

Varian gripped his spoon, almost flinging his bowl in Andrew’s face. “You take that back!”

“Then help me.”

Even more furious than he’d been at the Battle of Old Corona, Varian sat with his back turned, frowning at the bit of blue sky and lacy cloud in the window. It was just too much. But all he had anymore was Andrew.

A pigeon landed on the sill. Andrew read the little note the pigeon had brought, eyes glittering.

Varian pretended to have a terrible stomachache. Groaning, he rolled around on his bunk, but not too much (Andrew had said not to oversell it). Alternatively, he puffed his cheeks or held his breath. Skinny took him to the infirmary, where he snuck a few choice medicine vials when the doctor’s back was turned looking for a chamber pot. The vials slipped right into Varian’s shoes. Hopefully, if the guards thought his walk was funny, they would attribute it to his general indisposition. It was a success, but he was furious when he got back to the cell.

“Doctor Jumbo gave me ipecac!” he hissed.

Andrew patted him on the back. “You’re a good boy.” He sent a poem with the dinner pigeons.

Just before lights-out, Varian propped open a book up on his knees as a shield, and mixed the vials together that night. Sleep was only a fabrication, as far as Varian was concerned. The vial under his pillow was a pea under a princess. It seemed Andrew had trouble sleeping, too, although for other reasons. Every time Varian looked across the cell, Andrew’s eyes were open wide, black as a raven’s. Varian shivered. Was Andrew the hawk after all?

When the bell tower struck, so did the Saporians. The clock tower struck five, and five explosions ripped the dawn. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop! Calm was torn, the rest was ripped. The bell rang five times—The fall of Corona comes!

This exact moment repeated to Varian—The fall of Corona comes!

It cleaved him from the doze he had fallen into—The fall of Corona comes!

Varian fell out of bed, gasping for an atmosphere that was too thin. It slipped through his lungs like vapor through a sieve. The prison rumbled with explosions. Dust shook from the rafters. He threw his hands over his head, looking to Andrew for that smooth comfort he’d found in this torture chamber.

Andrew lay in bed, eyes glowing and blown open, with his blanket stuffed in his mouth. Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. Ants seemed to crawl over the back of Varian’s neck. Andrew, stuffing his mouth, chuckled maniacally in his chest. Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.

This is the end, Varian, the bells rang.

Bells, bells, bells, bells, bells. Bells from everywhere—smaller than the bell tower, but more clamorous, demanding. Clanging furiously. It sounded as if the entire guard amassed under their window, barking incomprehensible and frantic orders at each other. One, two, three! More pops! A streak of red whizzed past the window, screaming, before ending in a magnificent blast. Something somewhere somehow exploded.

The cell block roused, shouting. Every prisoner at their doors, shaking them, screaming.

“Now, Varian!” Andrew cried, springing up.

Knees trembling, Varian arose and ran to the door. Palms sweating, he uncorked the vial of solution he’d made.

“Do it, do it, do it!” Andrew shouted.

“I’m doing it, I’m doing it!” Varian screamed back, throwing half his solution into the keyhole. A bit of smoke, colored pink in the rising dawn light, meandered from the keyhole. The door sizzled, hissed, and then—clunk. The door didn’t budge.

Andrew put his hand on Varian’s shoulder and squeezed until tears darted in Varian’s eyes. “If this didn’t work—” he hissed.

Varian shoved his hands against the door, and with a shriek, it swung open.

There was no time for words. They ran to the door at the end of the block, spurred on by Clarence shouting, “Yeah, let’s go!” With more alchemical pizazz, the last of Varian’s solution, the door to the cell block clunked open too, the lock burned out.

“Hey!” a voice shouted when Andrew opened the door. It sounded like Bern, in the other block.

“Stay here!” Andrew barked, pulling out another vial Varian had made from his bun. He shook it, pulled the cork, and threw it into the next cell block. White gas filled the other room, seeped through the door he had mostly shut. Prisoners in cell block C shouted, “Fire! Fire!” Andrew disappeared into that thick vapor.

Varian wrung his hands, ignoring Bill shout, “Hey, kid! Hey, kid!” What should he do? Andrew said to wait, but would he need help? Would he go too far? Would he forget his promise?

Bern screamed, then grunted in desperate struggle. It was impossible to see into the cell block—it was dark and smoke-swamped. Finally, Varian couldn’t take the sounds of that horrible beating anymore. He ran into the mist, coughing although it was harmless. With a shout, he stumbled over Bern. Bern was splayed out against a jail cell, helmet gone, black blood pouring beneath his nose. The prisoners in the cell behind him held him by the shoulders. He struggled lamely against them, simultaneously holding up his hands. Andrew stood above him, raising Bern’s stolen baton high.

“Stop! You promised!” Varian wrapped his hands around Andrew’s upraised bicep.

“Geez, kid, even the guy who hit you?”

“Yes!”

Varian was no less surprised than Bern or Andrew, but he meant it. He really did!

Cursing, Andrew took Bern by the ankles—who was too dazed to do anything more than feebly kick—and dragged him into an empty cell. Once he divested Bern of the keys hanging around his belt and ran out, Varian slammed the door shut.

“Varian, don’t,” Bern groaned, but Andrew unlocked the doors to the cells, and their prison break began in earnest.

It was helter-skelter, an easy chaos converging brilliant and shining. Its kineticism was insurmountable. It was dynamism, it was compulsion, it was violence, it was terror. It was everything all at once, it was its own feedback loop. Each cell block liberated added to their numbers. The Guard had no chance. There were hardly any guards at all. The few that stood collapsed under the tidal onslaught of the enraged and desperate. Varian and Andrew dragged the guards, whether conscious or not, into cells to be locked away, before moving on to the next block, following the whoops of their compatriots.

Eventually, they ran into no opposition at all, and they ran from cell block to cell block, up the stairs and down the stairs, freeing every prisoner in that place, almost at their leisure.

Out of breath, Varian heaved for air as Andrew took him along. “I think the guards have fallen back.” His hand was sweaty in Andrew’s grip.

Grinning, Andrew replied, “They have bigger fish to fry.”

How could that be? What if—what if this was just a bigger plan of theirs? Fall back only to regroup and mount a huge offensive the moment any prisoner stepped foot out of the prison proper? All any prisoner had were a few meager batons—nothing that could hold up against swords, staves, and cannons.

He was wrong. When they broke out, running out into the courtyard between the prison and the rest of the castle complex, there wasn’t a guard to meet them. Off in the distance, warfare cracks and light clashes! Crack! A flower of purple and orange blew up high over the rising sun. No wonder the Guard had fallen back. They did have bigger fish to fry!

The prisoners did freely, unmolested. Some climbed the walls for town and freedom, others rushed the gates. Others rushed into the castle itself.

“When you said a small army …” Varian gasped while rockets burst over peaked castle roofs.

“It wasn’t cheap.” Andrew laughed, swishing a sword he had earlier pulled off a guard. He offered Varian a knife, but Varian refused it. “That alchemy of yours worked pretty good. Think you can make more?”

“Sure.”

“Where?”

“Get me to the kitchens.”

Working as a co-lady-in-waiting last year was paying off. Varian led Andrew through the castle corridors, (mostly) confident of where he was going. There were a few close calls running into guards, but they hung back to the shadows whenever they heard footsteps and weren’t spotted. The halls were eerily empty, especially for seven o’clock in the morning, with a strange, oppressive silence that was characteristic of not just a silent building but an abandoned building. Some klepto prisoners ran the halls, arms jangling with palace treasures as they went cackling by. A few servants materialized in the dark corridors, but they were already running scared, and disappeared as soon as they saw Andrew’s sword.

After a moment of confusion, Varian remembered rightly where the kitchen was—down this hall, around that corner, past the unicorn tapestry, and three doors down. When he and Andrew crashed in through the double doors, Andrew cheered, “Maisie!”

Standing in front the ovens, a spindly, bearded man whirled around, before relaxing with a flick against the brim of his hat and a twist of his mouth. “Hey, Andrew. Long time no see.”

Andrew held out his arms. “What are you doing here? Weren’t you supposed to meet me at the prison?”

Maisie grimaced. “I was coming, until I found this symbol of female oppression!” He whirled around, and for the first time, Varian noticed the trio of pretty scullery maids pressed against the ovens.

Andrew groaned. “Maisie, not—”

“All women, I see,” Maisie hissed at the girls. “So you savage Coronans think the kitchen is the woman’s place.”

“You leave us alone!” one of them shouted.

“I knew it!”

The shouting maid stomped her foot, whereas the other two cowered with frightened eyes. “No! The boys just have the day off to go to the chef’s stag party!”

“Oh, I see! So, the men have all the top spots? Nice glass ceiling you got there!”

“The executive chef and sous chef are both women. Our bosses!”

“So when a woman is in charge, she’s ‘bossy.’ But when a man is in charge, he’s a ‘good leader.’ You primitive—”

“Maisie!” Andrew shouted. “Now is not the time or place!”

“It is always the time and place!”

Varian watched this exchange with a mixture of growing horror and confusion. Wait, wait, wait … this couldn’t be right, could it?

“Guys, maybe we should …” he murmured, but Andrew and Maisie just kept going at it. When they moved on to a new topic (how to educate the unwashed masses), Varian jerked his head at the maids towards the door. Their eyes were bold and terrible as they slipped out. But now, Varian had plenty of room to work.

It had been such a long time. Oh, it had been such a long time! He hummed while he put together a little bit of this, a little bit of that, searching the spice rack for just the right thing.

He’d already finished some number of alchemical weapons by the time Maisie and Andrew reached a conclusion to their argument: it was always time to educate the feeble and oppressed, but not in the middle of overthrowing a kingdom.

“Who’s the whelp?” Maisie snarled.

“Come on, this is Varian. Remember, the ‘Young Lily in Winter.’”

They had got to be kidding him!

Varian scowled, making bags out of parchment squares and butcher’s twine. “That was your codename for me? Ugh.”

“It’s lovely!” Maisie said, leaning back against the ovens comfortably (Varian wished he’d fall in). “My codename is ‘Skylark on the Moon.’”

“Old Turkey at the Dump” would be more apt, but Varian left this unvoiced. He was trying to make friends, all right?

“I’m ready to go,” he said, slinging a bag around his shoulders.

“Perfect.” Andrew inspected a little parchment paper bag Varian had made. “How do we use these?”

“Throw them. Hard. It’s itchy. Friction force drives the reaction …” Varian cleared his throat at the look on both Saporians’ faces. “Anyway, it’s … uh, not my best work, so be precise.”

“Itch? Is that all?”

“Without glass globes? Yeah, that’s it!”

Andrew grumbled, but he tossed a few itch bombs at Maisie, who slipped them delicately into his pockets. “We’re still meeting up in the audience chamber, right?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Varian, you know where that is?”

“Of course, I do.”

“Let’s go.”

Varian led them. The closer to the front of the castle they got, the more they ran into stray guards, and even an overly brave steward, but these ambitious persons all got faces of itch powder for their trouble. Quickly enough—ulp! Too quickly. The proud side-doors to the throne room loomed ahead. Well, actually, these side-doors weren’t particularly tall, but still, they loomed! Thump-thump screamed Varian’s heart, and his hands got sweaty. Not the best when holding an itch bomb. But when Andrew cracked open the door, peering through the sliver of opening, what came through was not the sounds of warfare, but … a high-pitched whine?

“The mercenaries said if they don’t get paid by Tuesday, they’ll break my legs!” said the whine.

“Jodi said that?” a female responded. “Huh! He doesn’t seem the sort.”

Grinning sunbeams all over the place, Andrew threw open both doors, stood with hands and legs outstretched, and crowed, “Friends!”

“Andrew!” the voices crowed back.

Varian stood in the doorway, confusion making him shy. See, he had been expecting a throne room full of scholars and gentleman, heroic brows and prophetic eyes, but all he saw were a trio of … well, Dad would call them riffraff. And only three? Yes, that’s right, three. A short, squat woman with the expression of an aggrieved pit bull; a tall, thin woman with the expression of an aggrieved pit bull pup; and an enormous man that looked like he ate pit bulls for breakfast. Sort of like Goldilocks, except not as funny. Coupled with Maisie, these people hardly seemed the stuff of freedom fighters, standing around with a general air of “lounge.” The large man in particular wrung his hands. The life-light of hope dimmed within Varian’s breast.

The large man trembled at Andrew. “Jodi said he’d break my legs—”

“Kai, Kai, no one’s legs are getting broken.” Andrew patted the man’s elbow.

“But if we don’t have the money by Tuesday—”

“Kai, I’ll get the money. You’ll have the money by Tuesday, I promise. Now, tell me how it goes.”

The woman named Clementine gave the short version, speaking in a tone too low for Varian to hear but its viciousness piercing his eardrums like asp fangs. Whatever she said pleased Andrew well enough, his smile stretching his cheeks.

“Well done, well done.” Andrew made a beckoning gesture at Varian. “I want you all to meet a friend of mine. My cell mate.”

The Saporians looked just as impressed by Varian as Varian was impressed by them. Varian stepped in anyway, since these were apparently his allies now, when he heard a whisper that blew his head off.

“Traitor!” Frederic stood on the dais at his throne, face red enough to strike terror into Varian’s heart. “After the mercy I showed you, you treasonous—”

“Mercy?” Andrew hollered, running up the stairs to the dais alongside Juniper, swishing his sword. “Sit down and shut up, tyrant! Or else I might do something to you!”

It was said in vicious tones Varian had never heard from Andrew’s mouth before. Frederic sat, cheeks like a pair of corpses. He was … he was helpless.

A flint edge lighted the flame within Varian as he finally realized, after all this time. This was the architect of his misery. This was the hawk in his life. Varian’s vision swam—it was all new again, happening again. He laid at the feet of the amber, at the feet of his father, threatened by King and Country, told he had to stay in darkness, misery, and silence. They called him murderer, hounded and chased him, tore up his home. He couldn’t even find sanctuary in the place they said he couldn’t leave. Not once did they offer help, but only threats. His cheek even still stung from where Bern had hit him. It had been nearly a year, and he could still feel it!

Ow. His hand ached. He gripped an itch powder bag so hard, his knuckles jutted until they should tear through his skin. Would he … would he throw—

A pounding on the main doors shattered the space around him. There was more to this world than Dad trapped in brick-like amber, and the King who had left him there.

Kai answered the door, shouting politely through it, as though the neighbor had come for tea, “Who is it?”

“Who do you think!?” screamed a male’s voice in answer. “Let me in, doll!”

“Excuse me, but that doesn’t answer my question.”

Some muffled grumbling, and then the answer, “It’s Jodi.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think that’s quite right.”

And now a sigh, forceful enough to come through thick, oak doors. “The Sprightly Ptarmigan.”

Nodding at Andrew, Kai opened the door, and in strode The Sprightly Ptar—Jodi the mercenary, ember eyeballs roving over a five o’clock shadow that gave just the right sort of roughish air. He dragged Queen Arianna through the door and tossed her to the floor.

“Brutes! Brutes!” Frederic cried, running to scoop his wife into his arms.

She pressed her hand against his face, murmuring, “I’m okay.”

Varian jerked his face from that sight, watching Andrew frown at Jodi.

“You’re late!” he spat. “Can’t you do anything on time?”

Jodi flicked his hair off his forehead with a finger. “Who’s this guy?”

“He’s your client,” Clementine explained.

“Oho, the illustrious Andrew!” Jodi pranced forward. “I got my own bone to pick with you. You never explained the tunnels were booby-trapped. You know how hard it is to mobilize an army when you’ve got entire floors falling under your feet? Besides, lovey, you shouldn’t be complaining.” Smacking his hands together, Jodi preened like any bird-of-paradise at a bird bath. “I’ve applied a little threatening motivation to the Queen for the benefit of the masses. The Guard has kindly agreed to fall back.”

Andrew spun to stomp at Frederic and Arianna, who retreated back up the dais in horror. “You hear that, Freddie? You’ve lost. Corona is ours!”

A whistle blew through Varian’s brain—he was barely conscious of some rejoicing on the Saporians’ part, and the outrage on the part of the Queen and King.

“If you think I will do anything to cooperate!” Frederic shouted, ignoring the sword Juniper waved in his face. “If you think my guards have really given up!”

“Stuff it, Fred.”

As one, the Saporians surrounded King and Queen.

Frederic persisted, clasping Arianna to him. “The people of Corona are loyal and strong! They will not submit to you!”

A wicked laugh bubbled out of Andrew as he stepped closer, pulling Clementine alongside him. He and she made a strange mirror to Frederic and Arianna. “I believe that. I completely believe that. They won’t submit to me.”

At his elbow, Clementine slipped her hand into her sleeve, and everyone stepped just a little closer.

The grin on Andrew’s face was rictus, his eyes ballooning. “I don’t expect them to submit to me at all. But, I expect they will submit to you.”

For her sleeve, Clementine pulled out a long, thin stick, embedded with a pink gemstone.

As Varian watched the King and Queen become ever more terrified, quailing under the gap closing in, he remembered more what once had happened. He remembered kidnapping the Queen, throwing her a face full of sleep powder, when she had been unexpecting. He remembered how she had cowered in his lab, chained and helpless, and yet had only spoken kind words to him. And he had silenced her, threatened her, wished to crush her when he hadn’t gotten what he wanted.

As the last spark of intelligence faded from their eyes, Varian knew: he was the hawk.

Chapter Text

Varian was the world’s luckiest boy.

Okay, sure, sure. Most boys hadn’t been denied basic liberties for nearly an entire year, that was true. But that wasn’t the lucky part. The lucky part was what came after.

What came after? Free reign. Free delicious reign to live in frenzied self-indulgence with nobody to stop him! (Boy, if Dad had been here, he’d flip his lid.)

Behold Varian’s vices!

Sleep twelve hours a day in the plush, comfy, goose-down filled beds of a king! Run the halls of his own wing! Gorge himself sick eating decadent palace food! Stay up until the crack of dawn reading in the library. And the best part: nobody cared! Varian was without authority.

Whoop-ee.

But one night someone broke into the castle, and wrote this on the kitchen walls in vivid red paint:

“BeTter wATch youRself littlE ALchemist.”

Varian’s luck had ran out.

For Varian’s safety, he must say toodle-oo to having an entire wing to himself. That’s what Andrew advised. He would sleep in the room between Andrew’s and Maisie’s.

“We need better traps for the windows, pronto. That’s got to be how they got in.” Andrew paced in front of the sofa Varian was sitting on. If Andrew wore glasses, surely he’d studiously balance them on his nose while he stared at the notebook he carried. Every now and again, he’d scrawl something across its pages.

Seeing Andrew’s serious concern for his safety made Varian feel a little better. Huddling under a blanket helped too. Andrew would keep him safe.

“You need to finish setting up your lab.” A flicker of Andrew’s green eye carried disapproval in it, like a worm eating an apple. “No more doing alchemy in the kitchen. Mary distracts you, anyway.”

Well, Varian was done with the kitchen. That bloody message meant he wasn’t going back, that’s for sure.

“What about Mary?” Varian asked. “She sleeps in there. Do you think she’ll be safe?”

Andrew cast out a sphinx-like stare, before tightly answering, “I think Mary will be perfectly fine.”

Mary was the sous-chef, who volunteered to come back to cook at the castle. She said they would poison the King and Queen with substandard cooking. It was kinda mean, but still, it would be awful if something happened to her. Varian would give her some freezing orbs or something.

“Why should you worry about Mary anyway?” Andrew asked. “Aren’t you the one who says one-to-fifty she’ll sprinkle arsenic in our mac and cheese one day?”

It was true. But Mary gave Varian rides up the dumb waiter, where he could close his eyes and pretend for a minute that there wasn’t a world beyond him and that quiet corridor. It was his and Mary’s secret. But Andrew was right. Whoever broke in wanted Varian.

It was from afar, and usually through a window, that Varian observed the mercenaries. They seemed an interesting, if not dangerous, assortment of characters.

“It’s your interestingness that means you stay out,” Andrew told the mercenary leader, Jodi. “I don’t want you or anybody else roaming the halls.”

Jodi smirked and replied, “I don’t care what you want, as long as you pay for it.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

This sort of conversation was always going on because Jodi was always “roaming the halls.” It ticked off Andrew so bad, but Jodi didn’t care.

“I’m just interested in knowing what you’re doing.” Jodi looked around the hallway everyone had gathered in, grinning like he was a spectator at a circus. Everyone had been hard at work at their various windows, until Jodi walked in to disrupt them.

“We’re hanging traps to keep the rabble out,” Juniper answered, dragging her hands through her hair. Varian wondered if she liked (liked) Jodi. “People keep breaking in.”

“Yeah, I heard about that.”

“If you bums had been doing your job,” Andrew snarled, “we wouldn’t be doing this. What are we paying you for?”

What did Jodi do in response to that? He flicked a finger through his hair and ho-hummed around the hallway, at ease with himself and Andrew’s ire. “You’re barely paying us at all, sweetie. We’ve more than delivered anyway. There was no way anyone got past us that night.”

“Ha!”

Strolling around, Jodi gave everyone pointers on how to hang the traps at each window, ignoring Andrew gnash his teeth at every word that bubbled out of Jodi’s mouth. Kai whimpered and clamped his legs together whenever the man wandered in his direction, as if Jodi could cleave off his legs just by sight alone.

Varian pretended to be arranging his glass orbs of pink sloshing in a crate, but he was really watching Jodi. Truth was (truthfully), Jodi was so cool! He pranced instead of walked, and no matter how much Andrew railed at him, his smirk didn’t fade. He always seemed to be halfway between a laugh and an adventure. There was just something so Flynn Rider-ly about him (the real fictional Flynn Rider, not that charlatan Eugene). Varian had never been around anyone so fun before.

Dad would hate him.

After doing his bit to annoy or terrify (or in Juniper’s case, attract), Jodi meandered to the pile of orbs Varian was playing with. He grabbed one without asking, tossing it up and catching it one handed. “So you’re the genius that made these?”

“Y-yes, sir.”

“Don’t ‘sir’ me. Jodi will do.”

Andrew rolled his eyes so far into the back of his head it sounded like pool balls falling into a corner pocket. “Leave him alone, Jodi.”

Jodi did not leave Varian alone. Varian did not want Jodi to leave Varian alone. Jodi grinned loosely. “I heard about the kitchen.”

“Oh.” Varian scowled, mainly to look less scared than what he was.

“I was thinking about it. Kid, don’t mind me, but I ain’t never seen a ragamuffin like you before. Check out your duds!”

Varian took a glance. Was this why he had been targeted? He did look a sight. His clothes were a random assortment he’d grabbed from various closets—a silk shirt that hung to his knees, and a pair of pants with the cuffs rolled up for being much too long. Hardly the stuff of a fashion plate.

“I was going for the just-escaped-from-prison look.”

Jodi laughed. “Yeah, see, sprout—”

“Don’t call me that.”

“See, young lily—”

“Ugh! Just call me sprout.”

“See, sprout, I like you. I like any kid with a brain in his noggin.” Jodi put an arm around Varian’s shoulders.

Andrew roared from his window, “Don’t listen to him, Varian!” The curtain he hung on fell right off the wall, sending him to the floor.

“Nice, ‘Drew. There goes our privacy,” Maisie spat.

Jodi walked his fingers up Varian’s shirt buttons. “I betcha the reason they singled you out is ‘cause you don’t exactly scream tough. You want people to take you seriously, don’t you?”

“I’ve had to do some crazy stuff to get people to take me seriously.”

“That sounds about right. You’ve got this cute thing going on.”

“I do?” Varian was astounded.

“To the max, bean sprout.”

“Don’t call me that!”

“I can’t help it. You’re too cute.”

Andrew bit the wall while trying to string the curtain back up. “Blast it, Jodi, get out of here!”

“Do you think I have any trouble with people not taking me seriously?” Jodi asked.

Varian looked at Jodi for all his glory: shiny black boots, blue-and-red striped stockings, checkered scarf tied like a belt, a Delftware patterned waistcoat, and a fluffy-fluffy overly intricate cravat. He looked like Porter, if Porter had gotten dressed in the dark. There was no way anyone took him seriously.

Then again, there were a half dozen knives in a bandolier around his shoulder, and a fat old ruby ring on his pointer finger, which Jodi said hid enough poison to teach a pit full of cobras a thing or two.

“Come with me,” Jodi pulled Varian against his fashionable side. “I’ll get you fixed up.”

“Varian, stay here!” Andrew said. In a tone.

Varian hesitated. He should probably listen to Andrew … but then again, only yesterday Andrew had once again refused to take him to Old Corona to check on Dad, saying it wasn’t safe yet.

Out the door with Jodi, Varian went. After all, where did Andrew get off using that tone (so like Dad’s) on him?

The HiredSword mercenary group had taken over the Royal Guard HQ for their headquarters. There was a clear line of delineation between the mercenaries and the Saporians: the castle proper was the territory of the Saporians, and the Guard HQ was for the mercenaries. They didn’t invade each other’s spaces (except for Jodi, of course). Varian had been to the prison only once since the coup, checking the cells for captured guards from the prison break, so there could be a prisoner exchange.

To say the mercenary HQ was a hotbed of criminality? Sure thing! Half the furniture from the offices had been used to make blockades at the gatehouses, and weapons left behind by the guards had been plunked … oh, just about everywhere. In all the spots Varian looked, there were swords, staffs, crossbows, regular bows, halberds, and maces leaning against the walls, in the doorways, piled on tabletops, tucked into alcoves.

And what of the mercenaries themselves? Buffed out and carrying knives between their teeth.

“Doesn’t seem safe,” Varian said.

Jodi shrugged. “It’s just a stupid game they like to play, to see who is dumb enough to carry a knife between their teeth. Now, this room once belonged to the Captain of the Guards. It’s mine, now. There’s some personal effects of his over there, if you’d like something.”

Varian looked through a pile of stuff in a corner, out of interest alone, but it was mostly junk: small scissors, a comb, an empty medicine bottle, a straight razor. The dusty little-kid drawings marked “for daddy” put a lump in his throat, even though he knew who had drawn them.

“Come here. There’s gotta be something in this loot of ours.” Jodi kicked open the lid of a trunk, and held up various articles of clothing to Varian’s body to see if they fit. The trunk was full to the brim with clothes, shoes, pocket watches, umbrellas, coin purses, belts, gloves, and even an enormous knot of probably a hundred shoelaces.

“What’s all this stuff?” Varian asked.

“What the guards had in storage. Stuff they confiscate when somebody gets incarcerated. Hey—whoa!”

Varian threw himself at the trunk and plowed through the clothes, tossing out rejects. His breath felt too thin, like the way a stingy baker glazes donuts.

“You looking for something, sprout?”

“Yeah, I—got it!” He felt something hard and saw a glimpse of reflecting light, and sure enough, it was his goggles! Grinning, he slapped them right where they should go. Boy, had he missed that feeling of a strap fitting snug behind his ears. He couldn’t even be sarcastic about it.

“These are mine,” Varian said. “These really are mine. All that other stuff is just theft, but these really are mine!”

“Don’t be naive, kid. The whole world’s nothing but thieves, and you gotta get what you can. Unless you like looking like an ad for Baby’s Finest.”

Varian was too happy to be upset by being compared to an advertisement for diaper rash ointment. “I had gloves, too.”

They were at the bottom of the trunk, utterly destroyed. Mayhap from having boots tossed over them, although that didn’t explain why they dripped with oil.

“Some fellow spilled a gallon of sword oil on them, I bet. You should file a complaint,” Jodi cooed. “What else is in here?”

In the end, they found a pair of pants, new boots, some other alchemy gloves very similar (Varian wondered who they could have belonged to), and a shirt that fit almost properly. After Varian was dressed, Jodi tied a bandanna around his neck for a little “flair.”

Cocking his head this way and that, Jodi declared, “Still too cute. But I know just what you need.” He shouted out the door into the bigger room beyond: “Bee-Bee-Pee! Bee-Bee! Bee-Bee, baby o’ mine!”

“Oh la! What do you want now, Jodi?” a woman’s voice screamed.

“Bee-Bee, baby o’ mine, come here for a minute. And cover up yourself, girl! The boy’s been in prison, hasn’t seen a girlie since forever. He’s gonna go crazy how pretty you are.”

A feminine hand shot through the doorway and landed on Jodi’s nose, pushing him away. “La, Jodi, you so crass!”

Laughing, Jodi caught her hand and pulled her in. Varian thought she’d look more dragon than human or … or something, but she was only dressed like any other woman, skirt down to her ankles, and neckerchief primly tucked into her bodice. She didn’t resemble Cassandra in her fighting gear at all, and was pretty skinny, to boot. Varian thought a female mercenary would look more Amazonian and less laundress. The only thing with “flair” on her was a long leather coat, which added to her air of “have at you!”

“What do you want?” Bee-bee asked, plunking her fists to her hips.

“Give the kid your coat.”

“What?”

“Come on, girl, do your hubbie a favor, why don’cha? Don’t you have any maternal instinct? Look at him, poor orphan. He should be selling matches, not overthrowing a country.”

Bee-Bee frowned, but she did as told. Without her coat, she looked like a scarecrow with all the stuffing out of it. Now Varian was the owner of a fine leather coat.

“But I don’t want to wear girl’s clothes!” Varian objected.

“Goodness, chit,” Bee-Bee answered, “I got it from the manliest lion tamer in Madrid.”

Varian brushed his hands over the sleeves, doubtful. “Really? How’d you get it from him?”

“He wasn’t a very good tamer.”

Jodi wrapped his arm around Bee-Bee’s waist. “Now, whad’ya think? Don’t he look a killer?”

“Here.” Bee-Bee pulled out a piece of chalk from her pocket, and drew savage fangs on Varian’s bandanna before tying it around his neck again. “Now you look a highwayman.”

Just what Dad always wanted.

Varian squashed that thought down faster than he could run to the mirror to have a look. Yow, he looked fierce! He waggled his eyebrows at his reflection. “If looks could kill, am I right? My outlaw name will be Varian the Kid.”

Bee-Bee snapped her fingers. “Say, I recognize that name. I think I been reading about you.”

Varian was stunned. “Me?”

“Sure.” Moving the way the wind blows a dandelion, Bee-Bee sauntered to a pile of red books sitting on a chair, next to a half empty bookcase. “I read during my spare time. You know they’d been keeping a book on you?”

“What?”

“Yup. I put it right here.” She threw a slim red volume at Varian, who caught it, mystified.

His jaw played cozy with his sternum when he opened the book and found notes upon notes about him. Sweat collected in the places between his fingers. “Uh … thanks.”

“Now get out of here before your buddies come looking for you.”

Varian ran off in a tizzy, hardly knowing what he felt.

The red book called his name.

“Varian, read me. Read me right away! Don’t you want to know what they wrote about you?”

“Yes,” Varian said, hugging the book to his chest. Why was he so excited by this? Why did it also make him want to vomit? Was he mistaking nervousness for excitement, or excitement for nervousness?

Who cares?

While running back to the castle, he caught sight of Mary the sous chef in the vegetable garden. He hesitated, not sure if he’d rather get to reading the book or showing off his new clothes. In the end, the clothes won out.

But he had to play it cool. So he stood at the edge of the garden, watching her pick cucumbers, before saying, “You should turn the compost heap soon, if you haven’t already.”

“Oh, not today, chico.” Mary sighed and rubbed the dirt off her forehead. When she looked at him, she was all gaping mouth. “My my. Look who looks tough.”

“Just dressing the way I like.”

Black hair tumbled around her shoulders as she shook her head. Varian thought she’d think it was funny, but instead she seemed disappointed. “It’s no surprise you changed your clothes.”

Varian frowned. She was always making cracks like that. That because of his name, he was fated to a life of inconsistency and disloyalty. Boy, did he wish they could take a trip to Old Corona, just the two of them, so he could prove he was the most loyal of all.

“Chico.” Mary dropped her voice lower, her face looking funny, like just before a sneeze. “Come here a second. I want to talk to you.”

“Oh my, a vegetable garden!” said King Frederic, coming around the hedge nearby. He carried a little basket.

Varian scuffed his foot in the dirt, kicking away a few pebbles. If he never had to see the Royals again, he would be delirious with happiness. It was pretty easy with the Queen, since she didn’t venture around too much, spending all her time in the bedroom at the top of the tallest tower, carrying a deep but vague sadness that had Varian wondering how much she remembered. But Frederic? Pfft. That guy was everywhere, saying he wanted to reacquaint himself with everything he’d forgotten. A sort of treasure hunt.

“I didn’t know this was here.” Frederic fingered a tomato leaf.

Mary curtsied. “Good day to you, Your Majesty. Did you enjoy breakfast?”

“Most pleasant. I’ve never had such delicious croissants before.” Frederic scratched his head. “Indeed, I don’t think I’ve ever had croissants before!”

Mary patted him on the arm gently, and they compared the contents of their respective baskets—hers was just vegetables, of course, but his was all sorts of junk. Needle and thread, a lady’s glove, a hand fan, and so on. It was so so boring, and Varian slipped away, the book pecking at his brain.

But almost the very moment he stepped into the castle, a voice spat at him from the shadows.

“Boy, you screwed up! Andrew’s hotter than hot at you for running off like that.” Maisie’s scowl melted once he saw how Varian was dressed. He exploded in laughter. “Look at you, fashionista! A twelve-year-old wearing daddy’s clothes.”

“I’m fifteen!” Varian spat.

That made Maisie laugh harder. “Aren’t you so grown up? I’ve seen more facial hair on toddler butts!”

“That doesn’t even make sense!” Varian pulled a nearby suit of armor off a stand just to give Maisie a fright. Boy, did it! While Maisie was still screaming like he’d met the boogie-man, Varian hoofed it, jumping over the armor, and making for his bedroom.

The bedroom was a tacky nightmare, orange and green and plush, and he ran around the perimeter a few times, feeling like tornado. Because of what Maisie had said. And know what, even what Jodi had said too. He wasn’t a kid! He wasn’t a baby!

There was a bit of charred wood in the cold fireplace, which Varian scrapped across his chin a few times. When he checked himself out in the mirror—well! That was quite handsome.

“Devil-may-care, if I say so myself.” What a roguish goatee he had drawn! How Flynn Rider-ly (the real fictional Flynn Rider, not the fake).

Then laying on the bed, Varian read the book Bee-Bee had given him. It wasn’t funny at all, but super creepy. Were the guards super-creeps to all the prisoners like this?

Varian flipped to a certain page and found out something: his original sentence had been execution, and he owed his life to King Frederic. He could fly.

It turned out, the person who had painted the threat on the wall was Mary! Unbelievable.

“BeTter wATch youRself littlE ALchemist.”

Those words would forever be tattooed into Varian’s psyche, and it was Mary who had done it?

“It makes sense, if you think about it,” Andrew said. “Who could expect a chef to have correct grammar? Especially one that speaks so many languages.”

“I don’t think it works like that.” Varian frowned, crushing his frustration. After Mary had been spent packing, he had come to the lab specifically to forget about her for a while, not have Andrew chase him down to continue on about it.

“You see why I didn’t want you around her. Why else would she have been trying to get so friendly with you?”

A burdensome hate-seed bloomed, making Varian’s throat tight. How could he have trusted her?

Andrew picked up one of the glass orbs laying in a crate. “I want to carry some of these with me. The others, too. Make us some, will you?”

“You said they were a child’s plaything.”

“Did I say that? I was wrong, friend. Make some with more pizazz while you’re at it. This humane stuff isn’t keeping anyone out.”

Varian tossed Andrew a few orbs that were “humane”, whether he liked it or not. “I want to go to Old Corona.”

Busy arranging the orbs on his person, Andrew was unusually silent. Like the bottom of the inky sea. When he answered, his voice was tight, “You see how dangerous it is, right now.”

“We’ll go in the night. And take some mercenaries with us. Andrew, we made an agreement.”

Andrew filled his pockets with a few more orbs, exactly like a child in a candy store. “Thanks, buddy,” he said, on his way out.

“Thanks, buddy,” Varian mouthed, pressing his fists into his thighs. A puff from his overheated mouth blew out the burner burning, and Varian trudged back to his bedroom. Laying on the bed, he drew raccoons in the margins of the red Varian-prisoner book, until he remembered Ruddiger was another friend he had lost. Then he put his face into his pillow and bawled his eyes out. Before she had left, Mary said his name meant he was growing. Varian wanted to grow, but he was a sapling squashed under a fallen redwood. He was trapped.

Even Varian was getting tired of distillations, fermentations, condensations, and all the other -tions. With Mary gone, he had to do a bunch of chores again, keeping him occupied like he couldn’t believe. It even took longer than usual since he couldn’t bear to use the dumb-waiter: the memory of Mary giving him rides up it was a bitter one. But being busy wasn’t why the days dripped by like melting icicles in a blizzard.

Was it possible to die from homesickness?

Sometimes, he stood in the vegetable garden, simply because it was so like home. The smell of ripening vegetables made him think of the cucumbers that grew in gnarled vines around their slatted garden gate at home. The sight of chubby vermilion tomatoes made him taste Dad’s yearly gazpacho. He hated gazpacho, but he would kill to taste it again.

“What do I do?” he would moan, rubbing tears from his eyes. This garden was the only place it felt safe enough to just be. No one bothered him here.

But one day, when he turned around, Frederic stood at the end of the garden row, mouth opened as if to ask a question, and then clamping it shut.

Varian’s face heated. Had Freddie seen him cry? Great.

Well, there was nothing like pretense. It’s what made everyone feel comfortable.

“Hello, Your Majesty,” Varian muttered.

“Hello, Varian.” An awkward moment passed. Frederic passed his ever constant basket from one hand to the next, and then asked, “I was wondering. Are there chickens on the premises?”

“Chickens?”

“Yes. I thought, maybe. Eggs for the kitchen, right?”

Varian raised his boot to scratch at the back of the opposite leg. “Yeah. Except we’re vegan. But yeah, there’s chickens. I have to feed them.”

“Really?” Frederic’s eyes brightened. “Do you think I could see them?”

“The coop’s near the stables.”

“Oh. Near my army’s barracks.”

“Uh, yeah, sure.”

The basket swung as Frederic looked at something in it. “I thought I could pick some eggs, later.”

Whoa, so was an amnesiac Frederic as dangerous as when he was sane? Seemed like it, with all this talk of chickens.

“Well,” Varian answered, “it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

Frederic took it as the cleverest pun known to man. “Ha-ha, hee-hee. Very funny.” He raised his eyebrows at the wooden bench tucked up against a massive rose hedge. “I want to show you something amazing I discovered.”

They both sat on the bench, Varian wondering if Frederic was going to take his revenge by shoving him into the thorn bushes. Instead, Frederic rolled his rump until he was comfortable, and then peeled back a corner of a silk kerchief he had in the basket. Underneath, there were three tiny, speckled sparrow eggs.

“I found a nest that got blown out of a chestnut tree. Do you think they will hatch if I keep them warm?”

Varian’s nose scrunched. “Maybe. It might be hard. I tried to do it once, but even with my dad’s help, nothing happened.”

“Well, even if they don’t hatch, I can look at them. I love eggs, don’t you? All the different colors and shapes—no. No, they’re all shaped the same, aren’t they? The different sizes, I mean.”

Varian stared, astonished. Was this the tyrant that ordered the Guard to hound Varian in his own home, the king that had shown an ounce of mercy, or this silly, happy, vapid man that gathered oak leaves and thimbles as if they were precious jewels? And if he regained his memories, would he go back to being the miserable tyrant?

Gently, Frederic again covered the eggs. “I hope they hatch though.”

“When mine didn’t, my dad said we should make the world’s tiniest omelet.”

Frederic laughed. “He sounds like a funny man.”

“Yeah, some—” To his horror, Varian’s vision shimmered. He turned his face away, not turning it back until the world cleared. He cleared his throat, too. “Dad is funny. When he’s not being so serious. He and his friend call each other names and play tricks. And Dad sleepwalks! He’d probably walk off a cliff without me there to steer him back to bed.”

“Sleepwalks?”

“Like, walking around, even though he’s still sleeping. He’s go plow in the middle of the night, or try to cook. Nothing’s funnier than watching him stir potatoes in a cold skillet. I guess it’s dangerous. Sometimes, he’ll even swing the poker around like a sword.”

“Like an old-fashioned knight?”

“Exactly.”

Poor old Fred. He looked emptily at the bluebirds in the thorn bushes, or smiled at the black-butted bees, as if he wasn’t the king of a dispossessed kingdom. All he knew was what was within these walls, and in his world, he and Varian were friends.

He patted Varian on the shoulder. “Your father must be missing you a good deal. He must have a lot of faith and pride in you to let you work here by yourself.”

The breeze blew a rose petal against Varian’s knuckles, making him shiver. “But he doesn’t tell me things.” Oops. Varian hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but now it was done, it felt better. It felt lighter. He couldn’t say things like this to Andrew. Andrew twisted everything, and would have used it as an opportunity to make it about every one else.

Scooting back, further into the thorn bushes (if he could only disappear into them), Varian explained. “He doesn’t talk to me about where he comes from. Or what he did before. He said I’m not ready.”

Frederic brushed his hand through his beard. “That is unfortunate. Why do you think that is?”

Varian shook his head.

“Hmm.” Frederic’s eyebrows fell like heavy stacks of fog as he pondered it. “I think … I think it must be to protect you. A good father would do anything to protect his child.”

“Even sacrifice a kingdom?”

With a look of surprise, Frederic pulled back. That happy-dippy gleam in his eyes dulled. They wavered, back and forth, focused on something just beyond his sight. In half a whisper, he answered, “Yes. I suppose so. Yes.”

Varian scowled. “You would say that.”

The sound of boots in the grass shushed from behind the hedge, and Andrew emerged through the pathway into the garden, with his peaceful brow and soft smirk, always hiding the edge of a knife. A clear, heavy, buttermilk sourness poisoned Varian’s stomach.

“Ah, here you both are. It’s almost time for our meeting.” Sitting in between them, Andrew spread his knees out, until Varian had to scrunch his own to keep from bumping into Andrew’s. “What are we talking about?”

“His father,” Frederic said, before Varian could overspeak him.

“Hmm?”

“He sounds like a good man.”

Andrew nodded. “Indisputably.” His eyes shot at Varian from their corners. “A very good, good man.”

Varian frowned at his shoelaces. They earned his frowns for eternity—or at least, until Andrew stood up.

“Like I said, it’s almost time for the meeting. I hope you can make it, friend.”

Andrew led Frederic into the castle, leaving Varian shivering in the rose bushes. His legs felt like melting aspic, but he stood up until they solidified again, clenching his jaw.

“I’ll bring the cookies,” he spat.

Varian was late. He would claim it was because he had “misplaced” the cookies, and he had to find them because every one just loved them. L-O-V-E-D them! They were vegan, and yet were delicious with a pleasing and crispy texture. (The secret ingredient was eggs.) Well, Varian couldn’t let down the group by not bringing his cookies extraordinaire. So beg pardon, Andrew!

(In truth, Varian rearranged his sock drawer until he figured he had sent a message.)

The banquet hall was much too large for their uses, but Andrew insisted on using it as their base of operations, because he wanted to be “reminded of what tyrannical extravagances we are fighting against.” Varian knew he just liked the gold gilding and the way everything seemed like it had been dipped in cream.

“It’s about time you showed up,” Clementine said when Varian walked in. She stood at a little table, cutting lemon slices while Kai made a pot of tea.

“Sorry, sorry. Looks like I missed the first round, huh?” Varian threw his bag of cookies on the table. Kai squealed and spread them out on a lilac patterned china plate.

Clementine’s mouth twitched in the corner, but she kept her lips zipped. She’d learned some time ago not to tick Varian off—not when he had enlightened her that for all her ideals of equal treatment for animals, it didn’t mean a whole lot when she wore leather shoes. She took the bowl of lemon slices to the big round banquet table that everyone sat at, sans Arianna (the Queen never had to come—just got to live in the bedroom in the top spire like a sad ghoul).

Once Varian sat in the empty seat next to Andrew’s, Maisie grinned sharp-toothed from the other side of the table. “Sassafras, did you hear about the excitement this morning?”

Varian sniffed the tea in the cup sitting before him. Kai made his own tea, and it wouldn’t have been surprising to find out some day that he plucked the herbs from the horse stables. “No, what excitement?”

“You were still in bed. Somebody tried to break in again. Your little traps scared them off.”

What a depressing thought. Being whisked away by whoever had tried to break in must be better than this.

“I say, Andrew,” Frederic said, “you must speak to my army about this. Security is lacking.”

“I will, Your Majesty. But now that they’re moving out tomorrow, it’s up to us to increase security ourselves.”

Varian’s jaw dropped. This was the first he’d heard of it. Jodi, Bee-Bee, and the other knuckle-draggers leaving? Tomorrow? Andrew must have ran out of money.

Frederic was stunned, too. “Moving out? Why?”

“To face a bigger threat to the kingdom.”

“What threat is that?”

“Rapunzel, of course.”

The room hung in anticipation as Andrew said the forbidden name. Frederic scratched his beard, murmuring, “Rapunzel. Rapunzel. You know, I don’t think I know what that is.”

A hot waterfall gushed from the top of Varian’s head down to his toes, something rushing inside, as if every one of his blood vessels had exploded painlessly. Something had gone wrong with his body. Slowly, he raised to his feet.

The Saporians shook with silent laughter, their faces becoming plump tomatoes in the garden. Fighting to keep a straight face, Andrew tugged Varian on the sleeve. “Sit down, buddy. We’re not done yet.”

“I want to see my father,” Varian murmured.

All the laughter stopped. Bingo, Varian had killed it. But weirdly, Andrew’s smile only grew. Like the flicker of a newly lit candle. His gaze was intensely green. “You know that’s out of the question.:

Frederic slipped a teaspoon into his basket. “Surely, a vacation couldn’t hurt.”

“Your Majesty.” Wriggling, Clementine hopped off her chair. “You don’t look well.”

“I don’t?”

“No. You should lie down.”

“Besides,” Andrew said, his gaze not wavering from Varian’s, “we’re just talking little things now. Little things concerning us servants. We’d hate to bore you.”

Frederic rose and allowed Clementine to take his elbow. “I do feel a headache coming on. Ever since we started talking about threats to the kingdom. I think it’s upsetting me.” He stopped at the doors just before leaving. “I remember I found something interesting.”

“And what’s that?” Andrew clenched his teeth.

“There was this painting hanging crookedly, and when I went to fix it, I found a little door behind it. There’s some sort of tunnel with a rope and platform.”

“A dumb waiter?” Juniper asked.

“Is that what it’s called? Anyway, I don’t think it’s a good place for keeping paint cans. It’s leaking red paint everywhere.”

Andrew and Varian stared at each other, long after Frederic left.

“So that’s where toots hid it,” Maisie snarled, dunking his cookie until tea spilled over his cup. “What a snake she was.”

“That’s what we get for being compassionate,” Clementine agreed.

“And hungry,” Kai said, shoveling cookies down his gullet.

Calmly, Varian rubbed his mouth. That was what he felt. Like a kayaker taking a rest in an eddy.

Calmly, he asked, “Which one of you painted it?”

No one looked in his direction. Except for Maisie. He was always the hold out.

“You’re going to accuse us, whelp?”

“It was one of you—”

“We didn’t even know the dumb waiter existed.”

“I did. And Mary knew I knew, too. She was trying to tell me the truth.” Varian pushed his chair back, knees shaking. Was it out of fright or anger? Who knew. Only his heart beat enough to fly.

Sit down.

“Sit down, Varian. I told you to sit down,” Andrew hissed. He reached for Varian’s arm.

Varian jumped back, while simultaneously sliding his hand out for his tea cup. Why did he want it? (Oh suns, help!) But once he snatched it up, feeling warm and wet in his hand, his body told him what to do. Pulling his arm back, he aimed it for Andrew’s face.

An enormous hand caught his wrist before he threw. He wrenched it, but what hope had he against Kai? Kai’s monster hands, each finger the size of Varian’s wrist, were insurmountable.

“Let go of me!” Varian screeched.

It was embarrassing. No matter how he pulled or kicked or scratched, it meant nothing to Kai. Kai turned him about like a helpless doll. Plopped him back into the chair, and then tilted the chair back until Varian instinctively grabbed the seat, feeling his stomach pull through his back, towards the alluring kiss of gravity. Wildly, Varian thought about rolling out off the side of the chair, but the innate fear of hurting himself kept him clinging to the seat.

Then Andrew leaned over, facing Varian, grabbing the corners of the top chair rail. Now, Varian was pinned, caught halfway in a fall.

“Let me go!”

“Listen. To. Me.” Andrew grabbed Varian’s chin, his fingers cold and slick. The look behind his eyes was where all the calculations and spite lived, but his voice was gentle and reasonable. Like he was speaking to a toddler. “It was me. It was for your own good.”

“Baloney!”

“We’re your friends.”

“You’re not my friends!” The nails holding the chair together bit into Varian’s fingers as he gripped them. “Mary was my friend—”

“Mary would have fed you to the guards. They would have torn you up, little boy.”

“No!”

“Look what you did to their kingdom. To their king. You barely escaped execution before. Do you think they’ll be so lenient a second time?”

His skin was crawling off Varian’s viscera. He howled, “How do you know that?”

Andrew’s lips tightened across his teeth, before slithering in a smile. “I’m the one that told Jodi to give you the book.”

The world was dipped in blood. Varian’s hands flew towards Andrew, but then desperately out as the chair gave way and gravity roared. The red-red world flew as he fell. Then, in a dizzying jerk, the room tilted upright as hands grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him up. The chair clattered as it hit the floor behind Varian’s legs.

“Oops,” Kai sing-songed.

Andrew crushed Varian against him, grasping him by the elbows. “See, kiddo, I won’t let you fall.”

Adrenaline poured into Varian. He almost vomited, and almost believed Andrew. It was an attractive lie. What else was he supposed to do?

“I want to go to Old Corona,” Varian panted. “I want to go home!”

“This isn’t loyal to New Saporia.”

“I don’t care about New Saporia!”

White-faced, Andrew set a firm stroke with his thumbs against the inside of Varian’s elbows. “You want to go so bad? Fine. Go then. No one will stop you. But don’t come crawling back.”

“I won’t!” Varian cried, shivering to bits.

“Maybe, you make it there alive. Maybe, you get him out. Maybe, he’ll still be alive. But don’t you dare come crawling back after what happens next.”

A hundred-thousand images of what happens next scrolled through Varian’s mind. He shut his eyes, tried not to see. Bravely, he insisted, “Nothing happens next.”

“Everything happens next, Varian. Next is when your father finds out what you did to him. Next is when your father finds out how long he was trapped. My own father wants nothing to do with me, and I haven’t done anything close to what you’ve done to yours.”

Varian shook his head. He would not—!

“Maybe even your father forgives you for what you did to him. But what’s next? What happens next? He finds out what you did to everyone else.”

Andrew was holding too tight. Pain zipped up and down Varian’s arms, they tingling and numbing all the same. He trembled and wished he could cover his ears. It was important to cover his ears. But Andrew held too tight.

Then Andrew pressed his mouth against Varian’s ear and said, “Everyone tells him what you did. Do you think after finding out what you’ve done, that your father will still even want you anymore?”

The thing Varian had been trying to protect—warm and tender, struggling for life on this dry, barren rock—broke. A shriek filled his throat, gushing out from a deep vein inside. It overflowed his throat, poured into his mouth, bloodied the inside of his lips as it blew out. Another shriek followed. And another. Out of the abundance, impossible to contain. Varian wailed and wailed.

“Don’t break the kid,” Kai said, stepping back to pour himself another cup of tea. “I thought you said we needed him.”

It was no surprise to Varian.

Incrementally, fingers crept up the backs of Varian’s arms, to his shoulders. Slick and bruising. Snakeskin green filled his vision.

“Oh, sweetie,” Andrew murmured. “I’m sorry. But you wouldn’t listen.”

Of course Andrew, now. Of course, the Saporians now, to watch in cold fascination while Andrew destroyed him. Varian had entangled himself with them, and there was no getting away. No one else would want him. As long as Corona remembered, they would not want him. As long as they could tell Dad, Dad would not want him.

“You’ll always have a place with us.”

Varian pressed his face against Andrew’s robust chest. He hated Andrew and Andrew hated him. They had enabled each other to do things they despised. Yet, he pressed close, and Andrew held him, and told him what to say. And Varian said what he was told to say, and promised to do what he was told to do.

In that moment of choosing Andrew for his immediacy, Varian betrayed his own father.

The hotel room was dark, it was silent, and Dad was waiting for an answer. Varian shivered against him on the bed, while Dad tried for answers Varian could not give. All because of a stupid prison cart on their day of fun visiting Corona.

Why were you with him? Dad had asked about Varian joining Andrew. How could he answer?

Dad’s arm was warm and realer than real on Varian’s back. It was supposed to be a comfort, right? But it was a pressure too. In a laundry list of a hundred betrayals, how could Varian tell Dad about his worst? Corona’s failures to Dad were nothing compared to his own.

Dad wouldn’t … Dad wouldn’t …

The day Janice mentioned a list of universities, that had been the pattern in Varian’s head. Only today could he finish the thought: Dad wouldn’t send him away.

But maybe, Dad would.

“You want to know why I was with Andrew?” Varian repeated Dad’s question only to give himself time to think.

Well, Dad, here’s the answer.

“He said he’d hurt me.”

Chapter Text

Varian told him a lie.

He said he’d hurt me.

That was the lie Varian told.

It was impossible to believe. Quirin hadn’t heard that right. They were sitting privately in their room at the inn, next to each other on Varian’s bed, and the street hubbub of people completing their day did not overwhelm—and yet, Quirin had not heard Varian correctly. Varian hadn’t really said that, right?

He said he’d hurt me.

“He threatened you?” Quirin breathed. His hand tightened on Varian’s shoulder. “You mean in prison, he threatened you into joining him?”

Varian stared back without blinking, gaze clear and unhesitating. He nodded.

Just for an excuse to think for a second, Quirin bent to fool with his socks. He didn’t believe Varian, not for a second.

Why? This was the story he had expected to hear, the story pre-believed. He had halfway wanted the prison record to have been cooked up to hide the truth—just an elaboration to hide the Guard’s negligence. Lies, lies, lies—to come from the Guard: yes. But from Varian, he had expected avoidance, sidestepping, changing the subject. Ambiguity and answers that answered nothing. But not truth from the Captain, and from Varian a lie so blatantly and poorly told it was almost an attack on his intelligence.

“He really threatened you?” Quirin’s mind spun.

Once more, Varian nodded, his stare too direct and too sure. And a hardly cloaked pleading to be believed, instead of the irritation of not being believed.

“Did you tell the guards?” Quirin asked.

Ah, the idiotic question of an impulse. If Andrew had threatened, he would have also threatened Varian into not telling the guards, the pattern of all who breathe threats and conspiracies.

“Well, I mean—” Varian stuttered. “No. I mean …”

Panicked realization bordered his eyes. He looked away before looking back. It was the expression of a man falling into a brier patch, and after plucking out one burr, realizes with horror there are fifty more. And after plucking the fifty more, finds one hundred more. The expression of a person on the edge of being found out.

“You—you see …”

Quirin patted Varian on the back, and Varian fell silent, gazing at his navel. Then he laughed, and said, “Oops. I buttoned my shirt all crooked. Have I been like that all day?”

It was nearing bedtime anyway. While Varian dressed for bed, Quirin stayed seated, trying to make sense of this mystery. His head hurt. The prison, the Guard, the prison notes. The notes had been clear—first, Varian was hostile towards Andrew, and then suddenly, he was not. He was … comforted. Both behaviors did not suggest threats. But what could it have been then? Hostile one week. Comforted the next. One week this, the next that. What—

Just as sudden as the shift in prison notes, the giant unknown fell, so long the mystery. The secret of the two-week gap. One note this, and the next, dated two weeks later, that. The date—the event that fell between those notes. A special, personal day that Quirin found so strange to have slept through. It may have been odd to have slept through his own birthday, but for Varian, it must have been a tragedy.

Varian finished getting into his pajamas, and sat down again, saying with a song of self-directed humor, “This time, I made double-sure my buttons—”

The overstuffed purse holding Quirin’s affection burst wide open, and he grabbed at Varian. That clutching, paternal instinct to protect his son from the world ripped an agony through his arms.

“It’s okay,” Quirin whispered.

Varian stiffened. “Dad …”

“It’s okay.” Quirin held Varian’s fragile eggshell skull in his palm. His natural inclination was to catch Varian in the lie, but he would leave it for now. Maybe, Varian needed his lie. Maybe he needed time to grow into the truth. “I’m sorry, son.”

They went to bed. Quirin blew the candle out on the nightstand, and looked across the room, where Varian was a dark shadow in his bed, with a cathedral of moonbeam illuminating the small of his back. The boy wasn’t going to sleep easy; his hunched shoulders and stiffly curled legs told that story. How often had he slept in prison like that, consumed with guilt?

The prison notes used the word “comfort,” and Andrew oozed comfort. How easily had he projected a snug, gentle, perhaps even fatherly presence, dripping words with cinnamon and honey and everything a lonely boy would wish for? Quirin wasn’t the jealous sort, hadn’t even been with Ulla. But he clenched his teeth now: had Andrew hugged Varian? Had those greedy forearms encircled his son with a hidden dagger, and had Varian, in his desperation, held back? The man had seen the void of Quirin’s absence and had tried to fill it. He had done it, not to help Varian, but to use him.

Tomorrow, Andrew was being transported. The guards had made sure to tell Quirin about it.

Pressing his hands into his knot of a belly, Quirin breathed out the winding inside. “Tomorrow, I’ll talk to the hotel and extend our stay,” he said.

Varian mumbled back, voice muffled by his pillow, “Why?”

Quirin’s thumbs orbited each other. “We deserve a long vacation. We didn’t properly see the exhibition. Or at least, I didn’t.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Or don’t you think I can have fun?”

“Hmm. Only sometimes.”

Varian yelped when Quirin’s pillow landed against his back. They laughed, but their laughs rang hollow.

The next day, the Exhibition was the Lantern Festival all over again. They ate, they feasted, they gorged. They ran the town, they ran the boulevards, they ran the stalls until the vendors frowned at them for causing trouble—up until Quirin produced his money pouch. By the end of the day, he was dead broke. And Varian was dead tired. It was with great satisfaction Quirin watched the boy fall asleep right after dinner, snoring his head off in a way that promised a good solid sleep that would last all night. Mission accomplished.

As for Quirin, he couldn’t sleep. He lay awake, terrified that if he fell asleep, he wouldn’t wake up until it was too late.

But his body came through for him: he had drifted off after all, but awoke just before dawn, just as it should have been. Stars shone heavily, subtracting in the brighten-making gunmetal-gray sky. Silently, Quirin dressed.

Am I really doing this? he asked himself just before he left the room. One last look at Varian, bundled under his blankets, gave him the answer: yes.

The air outside was sharp-scented with the briny, pungent sea. The roads were empty and the city peaceful as sleeping sparrow chicks, with only a few lights burning in otherwise dark houses. The only smoke rising was from bakery chimney stacks. When it was the in-between time—no longer night but not quite day—the world understood it was a time for silence, hushed with early morning. Night animals had gone to bed, while morning birds still slept on.

He ran his fingers along the cool stucco of the post-and-beam houses he passed as he made his way. Three-quarters of the way to the docks, an interruption to silence. Horse-hoof clatter echoed off cobblestone and brick as a carriage approached from behind. A prison transport wagon navigated the haze, appearing first a dark cloud that emerged, suddenly sharp detailed and real, the lamps hanging off the cab like twin moons. The wagon carried vapor: the occupants in the cage wheezed and puffed cold, humid breath as living tobacco pipes. Lamplight shone eerily off the faces of the two guards in the driver’s box, and the third hanging off the back. Stepping to the side, but glancing up as they passed, Quirin caught Commander Larson’s eye in the driver’s seat. Larson looked on, as though without recognition.

For a moment, Quirin wavered. Had he misunderstood?

No. He pressed his hand into a corner of a house, digging his fingers into rough beamed timber until pain zipped up his arm. No. He had not misunderstood.

He followed the wagon to the docks, to the lapping of water, to a great ship moored there, purple in the sea fog. Its mast had separated the skyline yesterday, when he had ignored that this might be the very vessel that would take Andrew away to the barge in the Lost Sea. The wagon was parked just before the loading dock that jutted out to the ship. A veritable maze of shipping crates of all sizes lined the pier, one end to the next, especially in the branches that connected to further docks, swarm upon swarm of a dizzying, lengthy array. Side-stepping one of the many sizable puddles that littered the dock, Quirin crept between several stacks of crates off the side and waited. Between a gap, he had a view of the prison cart.

Lieutenant Bern fussed at the cage door, barking at the prisoners inside, before opening it at some signal Quirin was not aware of. The prisoners came out, one by one. Their shoulders hunched, their heads hung, their sighs were deep. Bern attached their shackles together by means of a chain passed from one prisoner to the next, forming a chain gang. One by one, the prisoners came out. One by one. Attached to the same leading chain, one right after the other. But none were Andrew. Quirin held his breath as the cage emptied.

Was he even there? Quirin both hoped and feared the guards had lied. Maybe this was just a twisted joke by men with crueler hearts than Quirin could imagine. Or maybe, something had happened to Andrew to prevent him from coming. Did he get sick? Had he escaped again? Maybe Divine Intervention had stepped in and applied a well-timed heart attack.

Andrew came out last.

“A fine morning to you, Lieutenant,” he said to Bern, rolling his shoulders. His smarmy voice oozed into the cool dawn. “Are you joining us on our outing?”

Bern laughed sarcastically. “Too bad, guess I’ll be missing out. You get Gregory’s handsome mug instead.”

Quirin’s heart raced.

Taking him by the elbow, Bern jerked Andrew last in the chain gang. Chains jangled as he messed with the lead and Andrew’s shackles, then stepped to the front of the line to speak to the guard, Gregory. The ship’s captain and Larson came down the gangplank from the ship, and they four had a conversation, before Larson waved his arm and shouted, “I hope you got your sea-legs, boys. Move ‘em out, Greg.”

Gregory took the lead. Slowly, the prisoners shuffled forward, moving as it came their turn. They were in no rush, waiting until the line stretched their cuffs out before them, and then they must either step forward or be pulled onto their faces. The prisoner directly in front of Andrew stepped forward. Andrew seemed to hang to the earth with his toes. But the leading chain, instead of pulling taut against his shackles, slipped and fell to the dock, attached to nothing. The prisoner in front of Andrew looked over his shoulder and stared with mouth agape, but in honor amongst thieves, remained silent.

It took Andrew some time to understand what had happened. First, his head tilted down, paused, then came back up. His shoulders quivered in a muffled laugh. Then holding the chain between his shackles between his fists, so it wouldn’t clank, he slid backwards on cat’s-paw toes. The guards, with their backs turned, seemed none the wiser.

Quietly, Andrew continued backing slowly—he had nerves of steel, Quirin had to admit—until he reached the the beginning of the crates, and looked left and right at the walkways that extended, certainly to slip into the crates. His mistake was in choosing to go right—his nose caught Quirin’s fist. It gave under Quirin’s knuckle, a sharp little snap. Choking, Andrew plummeted. Quirin caught him before he hit the deck, grabbing from behind and wrapping a forearm around his neck. He pressed a hand over Andrew’s mouth. Copper-scented wet warmed Quirin’s hand.

Pressing his mouth against Andrew’s ear, hardly above a whisper, Quirin spat, “Either you scream for the guards and they take you anyway, or you take your chances with me and, maybe, I let you go. Which will it be, Saporian?”

Andrew grabbed at the arm around his neck, but it seemed he’d prefer to take his chances with Quirin. He let himself be dragged further into the clatter of crates, down narrow gaps and passages, until Quirin found a spot that seemed secretive enough. It was time anyway—there were sounds from the dock, the guards raising the hue and cry at their “discovery” Andrew was gone.

Quirin pressed Andrew’s face against a stack of crates that went above their heads, and removed his hand from Andrew’s mouth.

Andrew snarled, pressing his head back against Quirin’s palm, “You from Jodi? Blasted mercenaries. I paid you.”

Quirin had no idea what he was doing, with no fore planning whatsoever. But quickly, he would take the direction Andrew had given him. “Not enough. You can pay the rest with talk.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“You keep your teeth.”

Andrew sighed. “This is exactly what’s wrong with you mercenaries. No sense of subtlety at all. Where’s the nuance?”

“You get the nuance of my knuckles if you don’t start talking.” Quirin crammed Andrew’s face against the crate.

“All right, all right, fine. What do you want to know?”

Now here was where having no plan was really coming to bite Quirin. He cast about for words, at a loss. “The—the kid.”

Andrew swelled. “What about him?”

“He didn’t go to prison with you and the others.” Quirin licked his lips. Now what? “H—how’d you get him to join you?”

“Is this what this is?” Andrew shook with laughter. “You want to recruit him, that’s it?”

“Maybe. Answer the question. What’d you threaten him with?”

“Nothing.”

Quirin applied a little more pressure. “Lies.”

Andrew enunciated his words carefully. “I didn’t threaten him.”

Pivoting on his heels, Quirin wrenched them both away from the crates, whirled Andrew around, and let his fist fly. Andrew’s cheek took the brunt this time. Once again, Andrew went down, trying to catch himself against the deck but his shackles making it impossible. It made more noise than what Quirin wanted—the Guard searched the pier and cried out for Andrew in voices that were starting to sound panicked.

Before Andrew could get his feet under him, Quirin sat on Andrew’s back and pressed his face into the deck. “Tell me what you did.”

“Blast it!” Andrew huffed, straining against Quirin’s weight. The puddle nearby rippled with his gasping breath coasting over it. “I just poured sugar on him.”

“What?”

“Kind words.”

“Kind words? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“That’s what I said. Say nice things. Give the kid a couple of cuddles. Give him validation. If you mercenaries actually thought for once, you could understand.”

Quirin breathed. He didn’t know what to make of it. It seemed Andrew’s and the Guard’s stories lined up. Varian’s did not.

“But,” Andrew continued, “he’s a treacherous sneak. He’ll turn on you the moment he thinks there’s someone else to pet him. Be smarter than me. When you have a chance to toss him from an airship, let him go splat.”

The sky was softening with the approaching sun, purple clouds like whales with pink bellies, all at peace—but all Quirin saw was red. His thundering, gnawing, miserable heart whispered to his anguishing hands: Will you take what is not yours?

Yes.

Quirin let his weight up. Just enough. Just enough to take Andrew by the hair and push him a foot over on the deck, and then press his face down into the puddle. It was ridiculous. A puddle only an inch deep, no more than an inconvenience. But he pressed Andrew’s face into it, and Andrew sputtered and coughed and scrabbled. Why should Quirin care? This man was a monster. He had feasted on Varian, on Varian’s vulnerability. Let him feel a fraction of the fear Varian must have felt when he had tried to … something with the airship. Varian.

Andrew heaved and gasped. Rocked his body.

Quirin crammed his full weight into that soggy head.

Bubbles popped around Andrew’s lips.

Quirin pressed harder—

Varian. Varian.

Over Andrew’s struggling head, Quirin saw a vision. Varian, alone again. No more father, yet again. For years and years, this time. Friends now, yes. But father, gone again. And this time, by his father’s own foolishness. What had Varian even fought for, if Quirin was going to throw it away?

The air of dawn crackled as it dove into Quirin’s lungs. He loosened his hold. Andrew picked his head up, gasping, growling, gagging and snapsnapsnap.

Quirin threw his face next to Andrew’s ear and said, “Whatever happens to you, do not ever come to Corona again. I’ll be here.”

He stood up. The guards were nearby, shouting, “Andrew! Andrew!”

“Here!” Quirin yelled. He pressed his foot into Andrew’s back, and Andrew lay quietly, perhaps only too happy to let the guards rescue him. “I’ve got him.”

Bern and Larson appeared in a flash, wending their way through the crates, darting eyes, looking at Andrew with question. Relieved when Andrew moaned, and raged, “Get him off me!”

Quirin spun away, facing the sea, pressing the back of his hand against his mouth. The inside of his stomach was trying to meet his teeth. He had really wished—

“He tried to kill me!” Andrew spat.

“Well, well,” Bern replied, his voice strangling under lifting Andrew to his feet. “Didn’t get very far this time, did you?”

“Listen. He tried—”

“I hope you learned your lesson. Now, here’s Greg to take you where you belong.”

When had Greg appeared? Not that it mattered. All what mattered was Quirin’s realizing horror.

“Come on, you maniac,” Greg chirped, along with the jangle of chains. “Let’s get you to ship’s surgeon.”

Sounding defeated, Andrew gave up his story, since it wasn’t to be listened to. He said a different story. “I think he broke my nose.”

“It should have been your neck!”

Greg took Andrew away, while Larson and Bern remained. Once the footfalls of prisoner and guard were gone, Larson smacked his palm against a crate. “Just what do you think you’re about?”

Quirin laughed humorlessly, grimacing his teeth. “What do you think you’re about? Did you think I was going to play patty-cake with him?”

“We trusted you had more control than that.”

“You hoped I had more control than that. Next time, don’t use me for your absolution.”

Larson and Bern both choked. Gone were those ridiculous self-righteous expressions, pretending an outrage to hide their guilt. Now, what frightened, white, rabbit-stare eyes met him.

“I know what both of you did,” Quirin went on. He pointed at Bern. “You lost your temper, and you paid for it. And you, Commander, used my son’s loneliness against him. You’re no better than Andrew. You both have a funny way of saying sorry, you know that?”

Larson, with more to lose, stiffened and remained silent and regal in his golden helmet.

But Bern broke his peace. “In the prison break, he kept me alive.”

Had Varian done that? Of course he had.

“Now what?” Larson muttered through whited lips.

What a strange day it already was, and with the dawn barely come. It felt like a dream. Quirin was somehow in charge of this situation. With a word breathed in the right ears, he could destroy them all. He, as the aggrieved father, would escape with less punishment than they.

He waved his hand. “I don’t think we have anything more to do with each other.”

They didn’t seem comforted by that, as the true weight of what they had done came over them. They clung awkwardly for a minute, gaping their mouths as if to say something but saying nothing, looking hard at each other as if waiting for the other to know what to do. But no one knew. Finally, Larson tilted his helmet at Bern, and they left silently.

As they slunk back towards the ship, Quirin inspected the blood shot across his knuckles. What was he doing? He could be furious at the guards for failing to live up to their standards, but he was no different. This was the second time this year he had bloodied a man’s face defending Varian. And this time, it wasn’t even defense, but revenge. This was how low he could go? Apparently, in the right circumstances, he would throw away every moral he had.

In the end, if Quirin hadn’t lost control, Andrew would be for a pine box, not a ship.

He dipped his hand into the puddle of sea water, and salt in his broke-open knuckles was his punishment. How was he going to explain this? Especially after he had made that crack weeks ago to Varian about bruised knuckles after a fight? He’d blame it on sleepwalking.

For the first time ever, this sleepwalking habit was useful.

Bern and Larson came down off the ship, their footsteps echoing off the gangplank, leaving Greg the Guard to sail away with the prisoners. With a click of reins across backs of horses, and a lingering look from Larson towards the crates, they drove the prison cart out of the dock and towards the city streets.

Let them squirm, Quirin thought.

In the silence of the docks, he slipped away from the crates to get an uninterrupted view of the ship. The ship … this ship that would carry Andrew away, a man who fed on the lonely and the weary with polished teeth. Now, Andrew was on a ship of men that would feed back. This ship: filled with the shouts of the crew as they pulled up the gangplank and unfurled the catching and rippling sails, which stretched and filled with wind. This ship shifted forward, a silkworm spinning its cocoon. This ship sailed away, and with it, the monsters it carried inside.

Varian in prison. A disfavored subject, what Quirin hadn’t allowed himself to reflect on. It was better to leave that time unknown, sprinkled halfway myth and halfway history, like reading about the wars of the past. But he thought about it this time.

Imagine Varian in prison. Surrounded by a stinking darkness that pressed in on all sides, a weight and fury pulling him down with none to help. Instead, the few hands that were there tried to push him beneath that landslide. But in the worst place in the world, with no one to help (not even a Lilac Lace-Eyes to encourage him) Varian had fought back. He had fought back and pulled himself out. All by himself.

Quirin let out a yearning, aching breath. He was disgusted with himself. But he was so proud of his son.

Chapter Text

He had gone too far.

There was no other way to consider it. Quirin had gone way, way too far.

To make himself feel better, he called it a “one-sided fist-fight.” The man with whom he had fought had had no fists to put up. He couldn’t use cute niceties to outrun how insidious it had been. Quirin had partaken in conspiracies and viciously attacked a defenseless man. Out of nothing more than rage and a desire to visit his revenge.

Remember how angry Varian had gotten back then, when there had been a simple knock to an old man’s mouth? The boy had been trying to say something, but Quirin had been too stupid to understand. But now, he understood. The crossing line was much thinner than he had realized.

But … he got by with it.

Quirin wasn’t about to call Varian a sucker, but … he so got by with it. The next morning in the hotel room, with wide-open eyes like stars in a moonlit fairy pool, Varian ate Quirin’s story right up. Quirin had gone for an early-morning, dream-filled jog-a-thon, and tripped over a stoop, ramming his hand into a crate for the trouble? Sure!

“That was some crate!” Varian said, looking at the bruises on Quirin’s knuckles. “What was in it? Brass tacks?”

“Maybe, whalebone. It was sitting outside a place called Victoria’s Corsets.”

That changed the subject quick enough to suit Quirin just fine, and Varian’s reddening face even finer.

Still, Quirin trying to brush off his horror was rather like brushing crumbs from a velvet dress—practically impossible. While they packed to leave for Old Corona, Quirin said, “If you ever want to get out of here, just say the word.”

Varian, checking under their beds for his missing socks, asked the dust bunnies, “What do you mean? We’re getting out of here once I find my socks, aren’t we?”

“I don’t mean get out of Corona Island.” Quirin gulped, took a second, and said, “I mean out of Corona, period.”

At first, Quirin thought Varian hadn’t heard the question. The boy stretched his arm under the bed, yelled, “Got ‘em!”, and rolled to his rump. After shaking the dust from his wayward socks, he stretched them over his feet, and asked, “You mean like a real vacation? Run off to parts unknown? Who’ll take care of the animals that long?”

“We’ll have to sell the chickens, of course, along with everything else, but Prometheus and Nuthatch will come, too.”

Only now, did the truth of what Quirin was asking make sense to Varian. His face took on a grayish hue, his mouth becoming plastered in a long, stretched out, glue-string line. When he answered, it was entirely in one airless breath. “You mean, leave leave?”

“Yes, son.”

“I’m not hearing you right.”

“Your hearing is just fine.”

Varian stared. “You’re kidding.”

“I’m not.”

Quirin focused on tying his shoelaces to escape that incredulous stare, not precisely comfortable. The laces felt unusually thick between his fingers, rough as he wrapped them around his thumb and vaguely remembering some rhyme from his childhood on how to tie a shoe … something something hop though the bunny hole, pull and see!

“You’re crazy, Dad,” Varian rasped. “Why would you want to leave?”

“I want you to be happy, son.”

“You’re crazy, you’re crazy!” Varian scrubbed his face with his fingers. “You can’t just leave everything behind. The manor and the lands and … and everything.”

Quirin pulled the sheets up on the bed. He couldn’t argue Varian’s point. It wouldn’t be easy. But he had lost a country before and survived it. And this time, he wouldn’t be just running away from something, but running towards.

He sat on the bed and looked at his son expectedly. Varian looked back as if he had suggested they take a trip to the moon. “Well?” Quirin asked. “But I’m not moving to Vardaros, though. I heard that place is nuts.”

A moan and a groan from Varian (he’d be right at home amongst a pod of whales). He floundered and squirmed on the bed until he seemed to realize Quirin was serious, and Quirin was leaving the decision to him. Then he became quieter and stiller in stages, until he frowned in thought, screwed his eyes shut, and carefully spoke. “N—no.” He flashed his eyes with uncertainty at Quirin, but Quirin kept his face neutral, which emboldened Varian to continue. “I don’t think I’d like to leave. I’d be afraid of people finding out. At least, here, everyone already knows, and, I think, we’re moving on.”

He looked again with glossy, shimmering, uncertain eyes, part-way grateful, part-way nervous, part-way disbelieving.

Quirin picked up his luggage. “Let’s go home then.”

So they would continue living as they were. Now that he knew just how close to the brink he was playing, Quirin would have to learn to forget about King Frederic, just as King Frederic had forgotten about everything.

Resolved, Quirin spent the next two weeks forgetting about the man at the top, the one who had made everything happen, the King. When they rode away from Corona, he didn’t once look towards the castle. When they got home, he kept his eyes adverted towards his crops, day by day, and even pulled the shutters on his bedroom window that pointed towards Corona Island. He didn’t keep abreast of the news, in case Frederic might be mentioned, and even when Princess Rapunzel visited, he didn’t do the polite thing and ask how her father was doing. Quirin lived on the edge of a kingless frontier.

He wasn’t able to decide if living of the edge of a princessless frontier would be preferable or not. Rapunzel’s visits were frequent. Ostensibly, she came to ask how Varian’s work on the scroll was going, but that was a question that could be easily asked and answered by letter (which, she sent plenty of those, too). No, visits to Old Corona were less fact-finding missions and more fun-finding. She and Varian happily mucked about, and even once took a day-trip to a place in the mountains called the Demanitus Chamber, which Varian said would provide him inspiration enough to translate a million scrolls in no time flat. (Which, he did not.)

“You were right,” Quirin told Varian on the back stoop one day, when Rapunzel raced out their back door to mount a rescue for a pair of teary-eyed Trixes. Beatrix’s kitten had gotten stuck up their plum tree, and Rapunzel went right into action, hardly waiting for a ladder. The girls stood underneath, with their aprons spread, to catch their mewing gray tabby in case of a slip.

“I’m always right,” Varian replied, watching the rescue. “What am I right about?”

“Staying.”

Varian was silent, but a wriggling energy came off him, which Quirin understood to be pleasure. Well, living with a gregarious princess wasn’t so bad after all.

“But,”—Quirin sighed with wonder—“she sure does get around a lot for a ruling monarch.”

“Now that the King and Queen basically got their memories back, it’s freed her up.” At sight of Rapunzel hanging catty-corner of a tree branch, Varian ran to help.

Quirin pet Ruddiger at his feet, who clenched his paws as Varian cradled the kitten. “I see.”

Summer sped along with its promised furnace temperatures, although it was graced with mountain breezes that shattered the sea lavender. Rapunzel said all that purple blowing through the skies was magical, but Quirin couldn’t care about magic when the sun was baking his brain into bread. He wasn’t alone.

Porter said he was going to order a new tradition of siesta taking. “The Spanish have got the right ideas!” he claimed, while his cravats wilted away.

“If the rains don’t come soon, I will shake a stick at the gods in a funny sort of dance,” Quirin vowed.

Varian dehydrated in his lab until he declared, “It’s like Vulcan is boiling caramel in here!” He moved his less messy activities into the parlor, sitting at the desk underneath an open window, groaning at every puff of breeze that rustled his papers and sent him on a merry chase about the room to catch them. And yet, he refused to move from that window.

His Wonder-Clean Supreme became popular. Knocks on the door from some interested buyer were frequent, not just coming from Rapunzel, and Varian’s piggy-bank reproduced into an entire drove of jingling, jangling oinkers. This family of pigs Varian lined up hidden in the cabinet, in which case, a member was always trying to leap out whenever Quirin opened the door.

Finally, after waylaying a piggy’s latest attempt to see if it could, indeed, fly (the little oinkers hadn’t caught on that the expression was not a challenge), Quirin had had enough.

“Point forty-five percent interest,” he told Varian, walking into the parlor.

As typical, Varian was fighting the wind for a sheet of paper making an escape. “Wha-at?”

“I’m talking compound interest. It’s not a bad rate.”

Varian fell into his desk chair, before picking up a quill to hover over his retrieved notes. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the bank.”

Snap!

The quill fell to the desk in two pieces as Varian stared at Quirin. “Wha—oh! Aw, nuts, I …”

In confusion, he brushed aside the pieces and picked up a spare feather to make another pen. Muttering under his breath, he angled his knife at the quill, but it slipped and slipped. Just when Quirin was going to demand to let him do it, Varian accomplished the necessary cuts, his freckles seeming to shoot off his face in frustration. Then he dipped his quill into the inkwell and stuck it straightway onto his paper, and then stared out the window, allowing an ink splotch to grow all over his notes.

“Do you feel all right?” Quirin asked. His boy was on the verge of heat stroke.

“Who me? Yeah. Yeah, just … what did you say?”

Quirin walked over to pull the curtains further back from the window, allowing more air. “It’s time to put your money in a bank account. The pigs have got to go.”

“Oh. Oh, that!” Varian laughed, scowled at his ruined notes, then laughed again. “Whew—I mean, it’s not really necessary, is it?”

“I’m not a hog farmer.”

“But they’re so cute!”

“Yes, yes, Mister Chester makes a fine porcelain piggy bank but—”

A knock on the door delayed their conversation. Varian jumped up to answer, snickering as he went out, “It’s probably a contribution to my piggies’ bellies!”

Quirin waited in the parlor, jerking up when Varian opened the door and cried, “Castor!”

—But no. Quirin would let Varian handle it. He had confidence in his boy. He had loads of confidence. (But not so much he didn’t bend an ear in blatant eavesdropping.)

Castor spoke in a low mumble. “My mom sent me to get cleaning stuff.”

“Oh!” Varian chirped. “The … uh—the Supreme or the Ultra?”

“I don’t know. She said the ladies at the inn …”

“Must be the Supreme then.” Varian kept his vials of product at a little console table near the front door. A vial chinked as Varian slid it out of the wooden rack.

“Here,” Caster muttered.

After a second of silence, Varian replied, “You can just have it.”

The whole house filled with the jangle of coins falling to the floor.

“You take it!” Castor hissed, voice rushing back. “We don’t need your charity!”

Huffing, Varian grumbled through even more huffs, then ran out the house, shouting, “Wait!”

Quirin was no sneak-artist, but Adira would have been proud of him today. Like a greased pig, he shot from the parlor to the entry in a silent scurry, and tucked himself behind the front door to watch the scene taking place fifteen feet down the gravel pathway. Varian caught Castor by the elbow, thrusting out the coins in his other hand.

“It’s not charity!” Varian howled. “I give everyone a vial the first time. It’s called a free trial.”

Red-faced, Castor jerked his elbow away. “We don’t need anything from you for free.”

Varian bowed his head. “Fine, don’t take it free then. But Castor … I’m sorry, okay. I had no idea what they were doing. They never told me what they did.”

“Am I supposed to believe that?”

They didn’t get further in their conversation (nuts—Quirin’s curiosity was going wild). Franklin stood at the end of the lane, wiping sweat off his brow, and shouted, “Oy, Castor! What’s going on?”

Quirin stepped out of the house. For the first time, he noticed a stream of men passing along the road, headed from town. Castor threw his hands out, gesturing he had no idea what Franklin was talking about. Scowling, Franklin pointed at the windmill.

“Uh oh.” Castor set off towards the windmill, just like the others.

It was a long, studied stare before a trickle of dread crept up the backs of Quirin’s legs. It was a good wind today, making the trees sway and clap their leaves. But the sails of the windmill, pointed into that strong wind that made the trees sigh and pitch about, moved not.

As he stepped next to Varian, Varian shot him the same sort of frightened, searching look Castor had show before taking off. Even the very air felt uneasy.

“You don’t suppose they’re just doing maintenance?” Varian asked.

“In the middle of rye harvest?”

Quirin waited for Varian to feed his piggy bank with Castor’s fodder, and then they set off, following the men that beaded along the path like a string of cheap paste pearls to the windmill tower. They pressed themselves through the doors inside, where the millstones were still and silent, and the sails creaked, and the men groaned like too many bread rolls stuffed into the oven.

Standing on a platform, Ward faced the group, glowering and crossing and uncrossing his arms. Porter stood nearby, in a show of leadership, but looking at the flour trails on the floor as though he wished a wind would whisk away the entire building. Quirin knew exactly what he was feeling, because … well, those were the frequent feelings of a burgomaster.

“I don’t know when it will be fixed!” Ward snapped at one of the men.

“But soon!” came the sharp reply.

“As soon as I can!”

The situation called for exclamations. And exclamations there were! Poor Ward answered it all in injured tones, probably missing his old profession, when he could have arrested them all with the power of the State backing him. There were localized shouting of it being rye season (“I know that!” Ward howled); that vendors were relying on their flour (“You think I don’t know!”); and that this was a disaster (“Nobody died, cool it!”). Breathing a great inward gust, Porter’s torso straightened in an attitude that meant he was about to exert himself. But then someone shouted the rational question, “What is it that needs fixin’?”

“It’s the wallower that broke. I have to send away for the part.” Ward mopped his brow wearily. “It needs a blacksmith. Could take weeks.”

So much for grumbling. Now it was straight up outrage, groans rising in a chorus that would have made the demons topsy-turvy. This meant they would have to pay to send their grain to another mill! The watermill couldn’t grind all their rye. The vendors would hue and outcry, the citizens frustrate at the raise in costs—maybe even the King would be upset! Why, their customers might turn to the competition. To that no-good town (you know the one I’m talking about) that shelled out substandard product without an ounce of professional pride. Did the mill really have to break during rye season?

“We have a blacksmith!” Victor shouted.

Ward guffawed. “Gleason of the broken hand?”

“I’m not talking about Gleason. I’m talking about his apprentice.”

“I wouldn’t trust Reuben to fix a broken spoon,” snarled Ward. “No offense.”

Reuben’s father very much took offense, laying his hand on his boy’s shoulder. “He can do it.”

Reuben, thirteen years old, looked hither and thither with round, darting eyes, shaking his head. So, he’d rather be whisked away with the wind, too.

Victor stepped forward and stuck his finger in Ward’s belly. “You haven’t been taking care of it. You’ve been slacking on your cows, and slacking here. We depend on this mill!”

Face pinching like a desiccated plum, Ward made no retort.

“That’s enough, that’s enough.” Porter raised his hat at the crowd in a soothing gesture. “It’s no use getting upset.”

The crowd wasn’t impressed. Grumbling mumbling rose up, and a spit-spat from an apoplectic farmer: “Porter, what do you even know?” The burgomaster beat his hat against his thigh helplessly.

“I can fix it.”

This last voice wasn’t loud—in fact, it was somewhat quiet—yet, it was confident. Everyone looked at where it came from, to the ladder that lead to the floors above, which hid the upper parts of the windmill (in other words, the parts that mattered). Varian hung off the ladder, his face at first going green at all the attention, but then smirking as his old hubris moved in, as it always did.

“I mean,” he smoothed, “it’ll only be temporary of course, but it’ll work for now. We just need a motor to drive the shaft that controls the millstones.”

Ward’s face was red. “What are you—”

“Plus, I have some pull with Xavier in Corona. I betcha he can rush your order. As a favor to me.”

Ward shut his mouth. His hands grasped for the ether. Weakly, he asked, “It’s not going to explode, is it?”

Varian grinned. “I promise. It won’t.”

“I don’t promise it won’t catch fire though,” he told Quirin a few minutes later.

They stood outside, only a few feet from the door, while the men streamed out to disperse back to their homes and farms, to tell the wife and kids this latest crisis would destroy them all. Hoping their continuous grumbling deafened them to Varian’s joke, Quirin pulled Varian away. Dropping his voice, Quirin muttered, “Don’t let Ward hear you say that.”

“It’s just a joke.”

“It better be. If the mill goes up in flames—”

“My idea is purely mechanical. No chemicals at all. It won’t—”

“It would be a huge disaster.”

“I know.” Flint struck in the backs of Varian’s eyes—and then, very much in front of them. “I told you, I was just joking.”

“You need to be careful.”

“I know! I know how bad I can mess up, okay?”

His pounding heart stuttered in Quirin’s chest as he realized. Red volcanoed through Varian’s face, and now he looked away with a clamped, trembling mouth.

Feeling tender, Quirin ran his hand through his hair. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Are you afraid to trust me?”

The answer was easy: of course Quirin trusted his son. Yet, Quirin hesitated, the words taking their sweet time to bounce off his tongue. Too late. This short hesitation was long enough. Even if he persisted and said it now, Varian would not believe him.

“It’s not easy for me,” Quirin replied, miserable.

With thickly bunched eyebrows, Varian turned his face towards the fields. But he looked back quickly, without the anger and hurt Quirin expected, but an energized ambition making bright and savage his eyes. “I’ll have to show you then.”

Quirin dared hope: he was forgiven?

“Stay here while I get my stuff,” Varian said, before turning towards home.

Dismissed.

Quirin couldn’t blame Varian for running away. Cheap: that was how he felt. Somehow cheap. By the sun, he had screwed up. Why couldn’t he have kept his mouth shut? But when Varian had made that joke, it had unearthed a black seed Quirin had thought dead. Even now, the hair stood up along his forearms.

The paranoid man had better clear his head. Quirin turned towards the grounds around the mill, walking past the small house attached, out to the white picket fence that kept Ward’s milk cows paddocked. What pitiful, dumb creatures they were. Flopping their tails futilely against flies, lowing mournfully like so many beached whales floundering on a rock. How simple their lives must be! Maybe, Quirin was no better than them, nothing more than an oversized bull clumsily stomping on the calves underneath.

Maybe, he should try it. Being a cow.

“Moo,” he said, under his breath. No. The cows did not answer back, but flickered their ears in scorn.

Furthermore rejected, Quirin turned towards the garden Darwin kept at the back of the house. It was a secluded garden, with beech hedges standing eight feet tall and full of bees and moths. Perfect. It would be his hiding spot until Varian returned.

But when he started to enter the archway leading inside, he spotted Darwin lying on a bench within. So that’s where the man had been. Strange. He should have been in the thick of things, since the watermill was his.

Another change of course. Plans demolished—such was life. Quirin roved around the circumference of the garden until he found a soft spot of grass to sit on, and a soft bit of hedge to lean against. Beech leaves were surprisingly springy! Maybe—now this was a thought! When he was old, he would become a hermit.

“There must be a lonely mount somewhere in need of one,” he whispered, brushing an ant off his ankle. Yes, he’d lived there, visited only by the birds and his exasperated son. He’d pretend the birds spoke to him. The life of a coot was becoming more attractive by the second!

“Dad.”

Quirin jerked, before realizing he wasn’t the “Dad” being called. It was Ward being called, by Darwin in the garden.

“Wake up, Dad. Come get some lunch.”

Darwin made a sound like wind blustering through mountain passes. “I’ll get in my nightshirt.”

Ward clicked his tongue. “It’s only lunchtime. I wish you wouldn’t sleep all day. Keeps you up half the night.”

“I was resting from looking for Gus.”

“Gus, again?”

“He’s lost.”

“He died three years ago. You buried him yourself. Don’t you remember me telling you that?”

Their voices faded under shhshhshh of their feet shuffling through grass as they made way towards the house.

“I heard him barking,” Darwin murmured.

“It was probably a fox.”

A door squeaked, and they were gone.

Oh dear heavens.

Quirin slammed the back of his head into the hedge and—okay, that hedge wasn’t as springy as he thought. Guilt? Was that what this feeling was? It seemed so much worse. How long had Darwin been like this? Porter had called him old and feeble, and no one would argue that, but this? This degenerated state? This brokenness of mind? A man so confused he didn’t know the time of day or that his own dog had died?

“Moon help me,” Quirin moaned. Had Darwin been like this when Quirin had treated him to a knuckle sandwich? No wonder Ward had reacted like that. Surely, he had looked past the fault his father played and only saw Quirin as a brute attacking a sick, helpless man.

“Please, moon,” Quirin prayed, “fall on me.”

The moon was a cold mistress and stayed put.

He walked to the front of the mill, where Varian was leading Prometheus up the lane. Ruddiger rode inside a cart Prometheus was towing, polishing off an apple. The cart bounced a delicate tinkling that was almost familiar.

“I’ll help you get the stuff inside,” Quirin said. He reached into the cart and froze as his finger brushed over the tinkling thing. His knees felt full of water. The tinkling … it was from the golden cylinder. The same thing as what he had found in the field and tossed into the river ages ago. One of Varian’s automaton engines.

“What’s this?” he choked.

“Found it in the river when I was moving the fishing wheel around.” Varian knocked its outer casing with a knuckle. “Good thing it’s made of copper or else it would have rusted. It’s my motor.”

Quirin jumped out of his skin when Ward spoke from behind.

“That’s little thing strong enough to run my mills?” Ward leaned over the cart, a study in skepticism.

Doubt from Quirin annoyed Varian, but Ward’s doubt rolled right off the boy’s back. “It’ll be perfect,” Varian replied with sharp eyes. “And if it’s not, I’ll come up with something else.”

Ward was slack-jawed. Once he hinged his mouth again, he answered gruffly, “Come in. Be careful on the ladders.”

What would Ward do if he knew what this motor was? As it was, it seemed not made of metal, but some solid, acidic poison when Quirin hefted it into his arms. Silliness, in itself—it was only copper, after all. It gave him the creeps, but he would face it. If Varian could look beyond what it had been used for and see what good it could be, then so would Quirin. Besides, he could hardly run it down to the river now and toss it in. That would put Varian out.

Once they got all the apparatus and tools up to the right floor, the windmill’s innards staring at them and its bones confusing, Quirin asked, “Are you going to need help?”

Varian stared. “You want to help? I’ve got Ruddiger.”

“But maybe, you need more hands, not paws.”

The sun of Corona never beamed so bright. “Yeah!” Varian yelped. “Sure. Just … put it there and … I gotta run down to get the—” Trembling, he went flying down the ladder, leaving a wake of flour streaking behind.

“I told you to be careful!” Ward shouted. He rounded on Quirin. “Your kid’s gonna break his neck!”

No matter Ward’s prophecy, Varian did not break his neck. Upon his return, he and Quirin spent the afternoon attaching the motor to the mill shaft, the beam that reached from the ceiling to the spur wheel, which drove the millstones. With Ruddiger supervising, the work required ingenuity, soldering, and rope tied around Varian’s midsection at one point. Quirin was a lummox the whole enterprise, just mechanical enough to know pegs went into holes and not vice versa, but they muddled through. By dinnertime, Varian was shoving the crank into his motor and shouting, “Turn!”

Water-logged, the motor took a moment to spew out the river, before starting up, spinning round and striking the tines against the plate. That eerie tune from Quirin’s nightmares began. Before he could think back to that terrible day of sound and shrieking and his immobility, the mill shaft began to spin. There was a touch of protest from the shaft—but if Varian’s motor had powered automatons, it wasn’t going to let a piece of pine put up a fight. After a clunk and a smooth grind, the millstones began to roll.

Varian threw his hands around Quirin’s waist. “See! I told you nothing bad would happen. It’ll be okay, Dad!”

Quirin was stunned.

His stunning was not to be remarked upon; Varian dove down the ladder, Ruddiger attached to the back of his neck like a cape. After a minute, a flurry of stepstepstepstepstep in stereo proceeded Varian and Ward rushing in.

“You did it!” Ward watched the millstones with eyes wider and rounder than (well) millstones.

“Flour’s coming down the chute.” Varian’s prideful nose quivered when Ward grasped his hand.

“Thank you, my boy. Thank you!”

The celebratory handshake jerked Varian. “Aw, it’s nothing. Happy to help.”

“I’ll mill your grain for free!”

“You will?” Quirin screamed.

Ward dropped Varian’s hand and scowled. “Of course not. But I’ll give you a fifteen percent discount. For one harvest.” Hands on fists, he watched his beloved millstones whirr-whirr-whirr. But it wasn’t the only thing making noise. He scowled even harder. “What the blazes it that music?”

“It’s the motor,” Varian explained. “It’s better than chugging, don’cha think?”

“That creep? It’ll give me nightmares.”

Varian’s face fell. “I always kinda—”

“I like it!” said Darwin. He stood in the doorway with the dreamiest expression, before shuffling in with a little dance. “Our poor old wallower broke clean in half. But a musical windmill is a gift!”

There was no boundary in Varian’s sky. He wasn’t just over the moon, but the planets and the stars aligned too. It took Quirin half the night to get him to calm down.

“You know, Dad, I don’t think Ward is so bad after all,” Varian said on the manor stairs, before they each went to their own beds for the night.

With his bedroom door locked behind him, Quirin pulled out Varian’s pardon from the trunk and took a long look at it. The smell of fresh parchment was fading, and it was ever more rumpled, but it felt soft and pleasant, and even more pleasant to read. For the first time, he could look at it and truly say, “Varian did these things.” And for the first time, he did not flinch.

After rolling the pardon up and putting it into the trunk again, Quirin sat in a chair at a window and looked out towards the sea, where the stars scattered across a dark island miles away, flamebursts where the castle stood. Varian really had done those things. Treason, rebellion, kidnapping, assault. It didn’t hurt to acknowledge it anymore. Varian was a boy who had threatened king and country and kidnapped a queen. But he was also a boy who fought to free his father, and what was more, fought to free his kingdom. Varian was not just the bad things he had done or the good, but a swirling mishmash of both, undiminished. He had a story to tell.

Ward had a story to tell, too. Darwin had a story to tell. So did the guards, and yes, even Frederic. Hadn’t Frederic given this manor as a reward for Quirin’s help on the road years ago? What had destitute, homeless, weary Quirin done with it? He had grown a family under its roof and ate fatly from a bountiful land. If he remembered that, he could face Frederic wisely. And walk away, intact.

Chapter Text

Varian loved a road trip. This was a problem. How the blazes was Quirin to run off to Corona without having Varian tag along?

The answer was, of course, chores. This was the benefit of being the bossy dad—make the kid do chores to get him out of the way. Bossily, Quirin drew up a list all the worst stuff that needed to be done but never got done. Wash the windows. Clean the gutters. Dust the baseboards. Separate the chaff from the wheat. Bricks without straw. That sort of thing.

Oh yeah, it was all coming together.

He rolled up the list and bothered Varian in his lab. “Tomorrow, I have to go to Corona to talk to a grocer. But I need you to stay—”

“Could you pick me up something while you’re there?” Varian replied, pulling his goggles off his face. A vial of purple smoke puffed up under his chin.

“Ahem-hem. Sure.” Quirin tucked the chore list into his pocket, never to be spoken of again. It seemed, even Varian was getting tired of Corona.

The next morning, after eating a breakfast designed to keep him satisfied on the road, Quirin set off for his trip to Corona. He stopped at Ward’s house first.

Ward could have made it easier, but he also could have made it harder. When he answered the door, he glowered for a minute or two with swelling lips that oozed like snails in a salt shower. Then, he said, “Oh, all right, come on in.”

“I’m sorry it’s so early. I wanted to catch you before the day got started.”

“No big deal. Dad thinks he’s having afternoon tea in Brussels anyway.”

With a short, sharp laugh, Ward disappeared to leave Quirin to stand uncomfortably in the entryway, staring through a doorway into the nearby parlor. It had been five years since the last time he had been within Ward’s house, and he was shocked. A bachelor’s house even then, of course, but the military order Ward had kept it was utterly abandoned. A cloud of dust covered the back of the sofa, thick enough to smell even from a room away. Discarded boots laid about a floor muddy with footprints and streaked with flour. The linens wiggled askew, clods of cat fur congregated underneath the furniture, and flies had beaten their brains out on the windowpanes. This disorder was because of Darwin, no doubt. Or rather, because of his illness.

“Look, I’m headed out to milk cows.” Ward came back in, carrying a pair of milk pails. “I don’t have time for a gab session. My fool nephew says he can’t make it today. I’m already behind.”

“You know what I’m here for.”

“It’s not to sick the constable on me, is it?”

“That’s your move,” Quirin replied, dryly.

Ward grinned toothily and passed a pail to Quirin, before taking him through the house and out the back door towards the barn and happy, lowing cows. Ward specifically told Quirin to work with “Lolly” the brown-eyed moo-er, and Quirin wondered if it was because she kicked. But she did not, and was meek as Quirin milked her, whisking the flies off his ear with a flick of her tail. Ward sat at his own cow, and for longer than Quirin would have liked, the only sound was the smack of milk squeezed into empty milk pails.

Once Ward’s dark eye glittered at him from behind bovine hindquarters, Quirin cleared his throat. “I shouldn’t have been so hotheaded, Ward. I shouldn’t have punched your father.”

Ward’s head vanished behind his cow again. Gruffly, he muttered, “Well, I’ve wished I could give the old man a smack in the kisser myself, from time to time. It’s just different when it’s someone else living the dream, you know.”

Quirin was expected to laugh, but it wasn’t in him. “I didn’t know about your father.”

“Hmph. In all fairness, it wasn’t so bad until this year. It wasn’t bad, until it was.” After a few minutes of silence, Ward huffed and clicked his tongue, before speaking. “Okay. I shouldn’t have provoked you that night at the Greasy Spittoon. I didn’t consider what you getting arrested would have affected your kid.”

“I would have posted bail soon enough. Varian would have been fine.”

“A son needs his father.”

It was a better recognition of Varian than anyone had given before.

“I’m gonna,”—Ward’s glittering eyes appeared from behind the cow again—“I’m gonna miss our feud though. It’s been more fire out of you than I’ve seen before. You never did convince me of the Farmer John act.”

“I haven’t always been a farmer.”

“I knew it.” Ward grinned. “Hey, you didn’t get the old manor house for fixing some rich bloke’s wagon wheel, did you?”

“No.”

“I knew my instincts didn’t let me down.”

Quirin’s milk pail was full, and Ward took him back through the house to send him off. Quirin stood on the threshold and said, “There must be something that can be done for your father. Your sister is helping, isn’t she? And Castor.”

Ward wiggled his fingers dismissively. “They’ve got their own troubles.”

“Then hire a … well, talk to Porter. It’s his job to help.”

Ward scowled. “That fancy-pants dunce cap? I don’t think so!” He slammed the door in Quirin’s face.

Turning around, Quirin set his gaze down the long, long road, towards the sea. He hadn’t killed Ward. Progress.

Only by keeping Nuthatch from stopping randomly on the road to take the odd nap, Quirin reached Corona Island by late morning. The Royal Petition was going strong. The line of petitioners threading out the castle gates was shorter than what Quirin had seen in the past, but only just, and he wasn’t sure if this increased his odds. In the long run, it was better it was a shorter wait than usual: as he stood crammed between a stooped man who smelled of manure and a young woman who coughed fit enough for the plague, he imagined a hundred different arguments with Frederic. By the time he got to the throne room, he had already imagined a dozen fistfights, and who knows what else if the wait was much longer.

His and Frederic’s eyes met the moment he crossed the threshold. Frederic seemed to freeze, for the shortest moment, before looking away. Beside him, Queen Arianna kept her eyes cast down at her lap, mouth firm and unyielding, set beautifully on her face, such as on a porcelain doll. Between that and Frederic’s inability to look back, this spelled at least some hope for Quirin. He hoped.

The greasy, manure-smelling character in front of Quirin moved on (after making a blindingly stupid request, a complete catastrophe), and Quirin was next in line. He stepped forward and made a perfunctory bow before the throne. “Your Majesties.”

“Ah, Quirin, my old friend,” Frederic replied, with a tone of tight familiarity. The ring on his finger went round and bounced sunlight as he twisted it. “I trust everything is well in Old Corona.”

“I am not here on the business of Old Corona.”

Frederic and Arianna exchanged a glance. “How can I help you?”

“A private audience with His Majesty.”

Betimes, after a hurricane that sweeps the ocean floor, strange sea monsters are cast on the shores, which ooze into misshapen, gray blobs. Frederic was doing a fair impression of one just now. Fascinating! Nearby, the sharp-nosed Royal Adviser sputtered at Quirin’s audacity (apparently), but Arianna brushed her skirt primly and murmured to her husband.

Frederic re-discovered he was a man, not a blob, and leaned forward. “So be it. When I am finished with today’s petitions, I will meet with you.”

The adviser stuck his mouth in Frederic’s ear. “But Your Majesty—”

“Clear my schedule, Nigel. Just do it.”

Nigel straightened, then flung an elegant arm towards a side door. “Follow the guard. He will take you to a private chamber where you will wait until your petition to the King may be fulfilled.”

With his head feeling strangely aloft, Quirin followed the guard as directed.

The private waiting chamber turned out to be a purple monstrosity, wretchedly garish. Maybe, this was an experiment to make him go mad before the King appeared? At any rate, it was an otherwise typical parlor, except the linens and furnishings were all a patriotic amethyst hue, even down to the carpet. A maid came in after a few minutes and asked if he would like refreshments.

“No, I’m fine,” he answered. It was impossible to eat in such a room.

The maid came back with a tea service anyway. He ignored it while she set up, and instead looked out the window at the view, where there lay a courtyard below with a pond full of mallards and swans that were like bushels of ripened wheat sheaves on the water. Once she’d gone, he sat at the table and flipped through an atlas, skimming through the world, glancing at kingdoms as if they were advertisements in a catalog. There was a map with a little spot that used to be home, long ago. How was Kind Edmund doing? How were any of them doing?

When the door knob gave a jiggle, Quirin jumped up, just in time for Frederic to come in. Gold flashed from behind Frederic’s enormous shoulders. Did Frederic trust Quirin so little?

No, the man was making an honest effort. He shut the door behind him firmly, and whatever guard was there had to stay on the other side. Probably with an ear pressed against the door, but still. Frederic would see Quirin alone. Quirin had to remain calm.

“How much do you remember?” he barked, pressing the top of his fist into the atlas. “I hope it’s everything, otherwise this conversation is going to be real awkward for you.”

Not starting off on the right foot, was he?

Frederic swelled regally, then tramped across the room, grumbling, “At least let me take a seat first.” He poured himself a cup of tea, taking great care to pour in milk and sugar precisely. He motioned at Quirin to take a chair, then sighed with grim acceptance when Quirin remained standing. “Prison was the best I could do.”

With a huff of disgust, Quirin turned his back, only turning around again once he felt in control of himself. “Yes. Thank you for not letting them draw and quarter my son.”

“Your tone lacks conviction.”

Quirin stared with disbelief. “Let me assure you, Your Majesty, I am grateful. But what sort of people sentence a boy to death?”

Frederic pursed his lips. “I admit, that had been unexpected. I guess, the tradition—”

“Oh, tradition, was it? Or did they do it to give you a chance to look merciful?”

“Oh, come now!”

“Which would be the better story? They really wanting him dead, doing it out of mindless adherence to tradition, or giving you a chance to look good?”

Pink-cheeked, Frederic replied, “I suppose you would have had him escape accountability altogether?”

“It’s just funny that the only person who was held accountable was a fourteen-year-old boy.”

“What?” While raising the teacup to his lips, Frederic jostled the cup in the sharpness of his hand. It was his first moment of losing his regal bearing since he had entered. “What do you mean?”

Quirin rapped the tabletop with each word: “You. Pushed. Him.”

“You are blaming me?” Frederic sputtered.

“You sent your dogs to terrorize him. He hadn’t done anything wrong—”

“He attacked Rapunzel—”

“What rot!”

“I do not lie!” Frederic’s composure was abandoned. He leapt to his feet, surprising Quirin, who hadn’t thought feelings were already this warm. But Frederic was very warm, his lips flecking spittle-like words. “I will not take the blame for what your son did!”

“You bullied him because he is a child and you are a king, and he was out from my protection. You used your power because you thought he had none. You made him your enemy.”

“He struck at us!”

“You struck him first. So he struck back.”

“Hard, Quirin. Too hard!” Frederic started for the door. Even his mustache was a frazzle. “He almost killed people!”

“You punched a frightened child. Frederic!” Quirin yelled, when Frederic put his hand on the doorknob. Surely, any moment the guard would come bursting in. “You look me in the eye and tell me you were justified.”

Frederic whirled to face Quirin, but froze, remaining silent.

Quirin seized on that. “Show me there’s something of a man in you.”

The door opened, jerking the knob out of Frederic’s hand. Him standing there stopped any rush of the guard, who stopped dead in the doorway, and retreated in confused obedience at Frederic’s snappy, “Leave us be!” After the door was shut, Frederic asked, “What do you want from me?”

“Sit down and listen. I didn’t come here just to tell you off.”

To his credit, Frederic sat at the table again, although his hands shook. “Very few people can speak like this to me.”

“Indulge me. I’m here to speak to you as a father to father.” In Frederic’s manner of appearing calm, Quirin sat and made himself a cup of tea. It would be better to have a tea table negotiation rather than the open warfare he was playing at. He even swallowed down a shortbread cookie, and gave his compliments to the chef. He asked, “Why didn’t you arrest Varian when he stole the Sun Drop? You had every opportunity.”

Sarcastically, Frederic answered, “Out of memory towards my old friend.”

“You didn’t arrest him because it would mean arresting the Princess for her part. Or at least, facing the embarrassment of admitting your own daughter committed treason. It was for that same reason he was never charged for the theft either, once you had him.”

Quirin waited for Frederic to deny it, but the man only sat in hot silence, chewing his tongue, before he plopped his spoon into his tea, stirring until the steam rose in vortexing ribbons. Sounding as though his tongue was too big for his mouth, Frederic answered, “She is naïve. She’s innocent of the world.”

“And my son wasn’t?”

“They said he killed you. That he admitted it himself.”

“He did no such thing. And even if he had, why wasn’t he arrested for that? Where was the investigation? It would have been a greater kindness than what was done to him.”

Frederic scoffed. “You can’t expect me to believe you would have preferred that.”

Wanting to toss his tea in Frederic’s face (Quirin was quite practiced at doing that sort of thing), Quirin bent his smile into a knife edge. “An investigation would have discovered it was just an accident, and then he could have been taken care of properly, instead of being treated like a criminal and hounded for something that didn’t belong to you.”

“And if the investigation determined it had been on purpose?”

“It’s a sad state of the country if even its king doubts the ability for justice to be done.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?”

A moment of silence passed before Frederic answered. “She knew him.”

“Who? The Princess?”

“Yes.”

“Ah.” Clarity punctuated the air around Quirin until he was focusing on what things had before been shrouded darkly. “You didn’t want her finding out what happened. So … what? Why would that matter?”

“I wanted her as far from the black rocks as I could keep her.” Frederic looked miserable to admit it, but at least, he was. “You said … what your scroll said …”

“And what I told you about finding black rocks at the memorial. You were afraid they were tied to Rapunzel.”

Gazing vacantly at the cookies in his hand, Frederic remained stoic. Quirin could feel for him. Everything the man had done had been wrong, his zeal overextended until it reached monstrous, but his motive was clear.

Quirin cleared his throat. “I’ve never not known the whereabouts of my own child.”

Frederic’s hand spasmed against his knee.

“I can only imagine what it must have done, and what it must continue to do. I understand your desire to protect her, of course.” Quirin leaned forward. “But my son did not deserve what you did.”

“I was told that, when he came to the castle that day, he attacked her.”

“Is this what she says?”

Stiffening, Frederic replied tightly, “Rapunzel can be rather too inclined to downplay threats. He forced his way into the castle, rushed past the guards, and went after her.”

“I’m sorry he didn’t follow proper protocol.” Quirin stopped himself; sarcasm would get him nowhere. He tried again. “Varian was a child coming to the one place in the world he thought would help him. I didn’t know this country is so vulnerable that it would deem the desperate actions of a frightened boy as an attack on the Crown.”

“He shouldn’t have touched her. He shouldn’t have insisted.”

“And he shouldn’t have been ran out into a killer snowstorm. He shouldn’t have been forgotten about.”

“The kingdom was in crisis. We were in danger. Arianna and I almost died. Should Rapunzel have sacrificed an entire kingdom for the sake of one boy?” Looking suddenly alarmed as the words spilled out his lips, Frederic’s eyes, mouth, and brow went loose. Did he think he had gone too far?

Quirin took it with equanimity, dropping another lump of sugar into his tea. “I will not fault her for not helping in the immediate moment. She couldn’t have done anything then anyway. But you sacrificed the kingdom for her. For one lone princess.” Quirin added another lump of sugar, although the tea must be sweet enough. “We chose to ignore a threat to the kingdom. That is where this whole trouble started.”

The roomful silence was broken by a dull thumping coming from outside the window. Frederic stood to open the window, where below Queen Arianna stood in the courtyard, practicing archery with a certain degree of skill. Frederic watched her for a time, rubbing his fingers together.

“I was scared,” he murmured. “What it would mean for Rapunzel.”

“I was scared, too,” Quirin answered, leaning into his knees. “It destroyed my home. But what did you hound my child for? Just to keep the scroll from her? It wasn’t good enough to make cruel accusations and tell him to stay out of Corona, but then you—”

“He should have cooperated. He should have given it when it was asked.”

“It wasn’t yours to take. By everything holy and sacred, where was the compassion? I thought Corona was remaking itself into a kinder nation. Thieves and criminals are to be forgiven because of demonstrating a moment of humanity, but a child is to be harassed for a mistake? Is justice only to be found in how nice someone has been to the Princess?”

Frederic clasped his hands behind his back and trod from one corner of the room to the next, the picture of regal bearing. By the lunar phases, if he tried to make some claim that it was his birthright as king to have behaved thus, Quirin would not be held accountable for his actions.

“We assumed,” Frederic said, “you had been killed, and it justified our view he was violent. But I really did think it easier for everyone—including him—to let him slip away, if he would only cooperate and stay away from Rapunzel.”

“And you discovered he’s much smarter and younger than you guessed. He would not abandon me so easily.”

“Yes.” Fists trembled against Frederic’s side. “You want an apology.”

“I’m not the one that needs it.”

Blood flooded into Frederic’s cheeks.

Quirin kept his mouth grim. “What’s more, I want his record expunged.”

Frederic sputtered. “That’s outrageous!”

“There’s no record of your crimes against him. He’s atoned for his mistakes. Why don’t you atone for yours?”

“And I, apologize to him? He should be the one—”

“Be a man, Frederic. Are you too small to humble yourself? A man already in the dirt can’t make himself lower.”

Frederic jerked around to brood out the window. He stubbornly mused, “Arianna has started having nightmares again.”

Quirin stood. “I’m sorry for that. She didn’t deserve what happened to her. Varian feels that.”

A moment of silence passed. Then two. Then three.

“Goodbye.” Quirin started for the door.

When he reached it, Frederic said, “I know this spells the end of our friendship.”

“Oh, Frederic.” Quirin’s hands fell against his legs in a helpless gesture. “We were never really friends in the first place. At most, we were co-conspirators.”

He let himself out.

Quirin did not hold out hopes. He had perhaps gone too far, stomping where he should have stepped delicate. Besides, Frederic was too stubborn and used to getting his own way. But Quirin had wanted to take the man to task, and if nothing else, he had done it. And, it appeared he had walked away intact.

For a day or two, he was on high alert for any hint of retribution. Thank goodness, Frederic didn’t have the patience to play the long game, so as the days passed, Quirin relaxed. It was time to move on, letting go of the things he could not control and focus on the present.

Four days after his trip to Corona, Ambrose delivered a package for him, and a letter for Varian.

“From the Princess again,” he laughed when handing them over, pointing at the royal seal on package and letter both. “You are popular with her, aren’t you?”

Quirin knew they were not from Rapunzel.

He took the package privately up to his room, where he opened it and found Varian’s official criminal record within. There was even the trial record, the same book he had read at the Court Recorder’s, the cover smashed where he had thrown it against the wall. He threw both into the fire.

His feet were made of lead, although where was this heaviness from? Who knew. Quirin went downstairs to resume breakfast, passing the letter to Varian.

“Auugh!” Varian cried upon sighting the royal seal. He opened it quickly, murmuring, “Oh Rapunzel, I know you want to run off again …” He stared at the letter, then read it with white lips. Even the eggs on his plate seemed to shiver with his emotion. When he finished reading, he held the letter towards Quirin, fingers trembling.

Quirin read:

“ Dear Varian,

It is time I took a page from my daughter’s book and reach out to you. My hope is that we can, at least, learn to be comfortable with one another. I acknowledge the harm I did to you in the past. My actions were not befitting a king, who is to selflessly use his power to help his people. I lost sight of that. I hope you may someday forgive me for the part I have played in the past. I am happy to call you a citizen of Corona.

Regards,

HRM Frederic of Corona ”

Quirin handed the letter back, and that oppressive, sticky choking from the past year lifted away. The letter was horrible, written as though by a scarecrow, so stiffly, but Quirin was satisfied. It was sufficient.

Varian was more than satisfied. He was glowing. His fingers were fireflies. His eyes were gemstones. He whispered, “Do you think … they’ll accept a letter back?”

A soft ember glowed in Quirin’s dark. “I do.”

Varian pressed the letter against his chest and burst into tears. This was probably the first time, since Quirin had come out of the amber, that he wept tears of healing.

Chapter Text

Miracles really did exist! Varian wasn’t thinking about common, every day sort of miracles. Like the miracle of the sun rise or whatever. No, he was thinking about Miracles. The sort that get put in religious literature. The sort that form countries. The sort read to little kids in their beds. Capital-M MIRACLES, now that’s what he was talking about.

King Frederic apologized! For reals! The letter wasn’t exactly a gush-fest, but then again, Varian would have suspected it as a forgery if it had been. The stiff-upper-lip-ness meant he could believe it, so much so, he slept with it under his pillow. Like he was hoping for an exchange from the Trauma Fairy. Trauma for a letter. Or something.

Wasn’t it hard to believe that two years ago, Varian would have sooner stuffed his pillow over Frederic’s face than cozy up to reconciliation? Life had changed in ways he couldn’t understand, in reversals of fortune both morbid and outstanding. For example, the village didn’t seem to just tolerate him anymore, but actually seemed to like him! His friendship with Rapunzel and Eugene was better than he ever could have imagined. Dad was at peace, and the farm was in good shape. Varian had no right to be this happy. It was as if he had snuck into Monty’s shop and robbed him of things precious, delicious, and joyful. Dad said life was livable because of Varian’s efforts, through his own refusal to give up. It still felt stolen, but maybe, Dad was right.

What was Varian thinking? Of course, Dad was right! Dad was always right.

But after an entire week, Varian still had yet to answer Frederic’s letter. He meant to, especially since he thought (well, Dad thought) that Frederic would accept it. Mind. Blown. But he just couldn’t seem to find the right words (or rather, write words, yuk-yuk). Every time Varian sat down to compose a letter, his mind went blank-o. One just didn’t jot down a quick note to Royalty, after all. No, his letter had to swell with grace and majesty, with big old boasting words of eloquence. That was just how it was.

Meanwhile, the new wallower for the windmill had come, and Varian went to Ward’s to get his automaton motor back. Along the way, he muttered potential openings for his letter to Frederic.

“ ‘Dear Your Royal Majesty’ is the most obvious choice. Certainly not, ‘Howzit, Freddy?’” Varian chuckled. “Or maybe, ‘Salutations.’ Or even, ‘Felicitations.’ Yeah, that sounds good and … erm, stuffy.”

Ward had left the motor on the front porch, but he came out from the windmill when Varian walked up the path. Darwin followed Ward, dressed in slippers and nightcap, sipping something brown out of a brandy glass even though it was only two in the afternoon. (Drinking out of a brandy glass should only be done after dark—or at least, that’s what Porter always said.)

“Take the blasted thing!” Ward sniffed, waving his hand as Varian cradled the motor in his arms. “It’s saved us, but driven me mad. All that racket!”

“I like it!” Darwin crooned.

“You do, Mister Darwin?” Varian asked, pleasure filling him like air in a balloon.

“The most beautiful music …”

“That’s what I—”

“In the creepiest way.”

Varian deflated like a balloon with a porcupine in it. “Oh.”

Darwin smiled blissfully and wished Varian a good night. Varian went back towards home, pondering forgetfulness. For some reason, Darwin had a pretty bad case of it, like he was living in the past and was easily confused by the present. People said it was an illness (“The old man’s off his rocker!” Ward said), so did that mean there could be a cure? Maybe, the truth serum … Varian had tried it once with the King and Queen, since amnesia seemed like a form of a lie. It hadn’t worked with them, but if he tried it on Darwin, it might do something. He’d keep trying until he got it right. Dad said his best qualities were his fortitude and perseverance, after all.

Varian forgot that he got into the most trouble when he wandered about in this broody, aimless way. He remembered right quick when he came around the river bend, and there in a little stream pool (on the river like a mole on a witch’s nose) … were Castor, Harold, and Richard. Ugh. But they were knee deep in the pool, their pants legs rolled up to their knees. If they started something, surely he could outrun them.

“There’s one, there’s one!” Harry cried.

Knees twitching, Richard dove into the river like a high-diving buffalo.

Mesmerized, Varian stopped in his tracks, his nose itching in confusion. “What in the world …?”

Richard went in hard, but managed to resurface, victoriously holding up a squirming frog. The frog had the most annoyed look on its … face.

Oh dear. The poor frog must be bound for Franz’s dinner plate. Franz had opened a fancy café at the other side of town square to bring culture to their “irrelevant, backwoods village.” Franz said it outright like that, in a speech on opening day, which made even Porter look put-out. But for all Franz’s snootiness, his restaurant was popular because he put frog’s legs on the menu. Everyone dared everyone else to eat them, to many shrieks and outrageous claims of “It tastes just like chicken.” Franz was disgusted at the villagers disgust (“I should have known it was above the plebes!” quoth he), but he was still all businessman. He paid boys to supply his demand. So Castor and friends had moved on from mushroom-hunting, huh?

Whatever their reasons for diving into the river, it meant they were distracted. Varian could sneak away, climb up the hill a ways to avoid … wait. The motor began to slip, so Varian tightened his grip and his stance. No. He wasn’t going to avoid them. If he could look the King in the face after all that had happened, he could look these boys in the face. Into their stupid, stupid faces. (Besides, he had a couple glue bombs on him, in case things got touchy. Just saying.)

Varian set a brisk pace forward, skirting alongside the river as before. They looked up as he came close, and he—? Haha, what did he do? Why, he said, “Hello,” and continued right on. If he had been wearing a hat, he would have tipped it!

They watched him leave unmolested.

Oops, spoke too soon.

“Varian!” Castor shouted, accompanied by the splish-splash of river and plop plop of feet racing along the bank.

And Varian had left Ruddiger napping in a flower bed at home. Looks like Ruddy was going to miss out on the fun.

Varian put the motor in the grass and turned to face them. But actually, it was only Castor after all. The other two still waded in the river, throwing frogs at each other like they were six years old.

“That your windmill thing?” Castor asked, when he got close. His hands he kept loose, not at all making fist shapes. But when he bent to peer over at the motor, it became obvious just how broad his back was for sixteen-years-old. (No wonder those punches from earlier hurt!) But then again, when he glanced up at Varian, his smoke-filled eyes were all a-swirl, as if someone had blown on them like a candle.

Not sure what to think, Varian kept mute. Was he not gonna get smacked around this time? It would be awkward if he was, since he supplied Castor’s mom with formulas for getting whiter whites and sparkling dishes. What a weird place they were in their relationship.

In the color of week-old fermenting strawberries, Castor ran his fingertips over the motor barrel, plucking the golden tines. He wasn’t going to throw it at Varian, was he? Castor muttered, “Thanks for helping my Uncle Ward like that.”

“Oh.” Varian gazed at the river, where Harold and Richard terrorized the resident amphibians. Was this real? Well, he’d hardly dream about them fishing for frogs, right?

“I kinda did it for everyone,” he answered.

“And … um, my mom had gotten caught in the red rocks, so …”

“Oh. Oh!” Varian realized with dizzying bewilderment that Castor was trying to apologize. He sure was rotten at it, clumsy and prideful, but Varian decided to be gracious. “So you’re saying … you’re not going to jump me anymore?”

“No,” Castor answered, miserably. “You really didn’t know about them robbing the bank, did you?”

“No, I didn’t know. I didn’t care about money. I just wanted my dad back.”

They both turned their faces to rub the backs of their necks.

Varian leaned over to plunk the motor back into his elbows, and when he came back up, his brain went on a merry-go-round trip inside his skull. The sudden change in blood-pressure was making him dizzy. Or was it because of something else? He smiled shyly at Castor. “I’m a little disappointed you don’t want to fight anymore. I wanted to get a chance to blow your socks off.”

Castor looked dumbfounded, before he laughed. Genuinely. “You mean literally?”

“I have a glitter bomb with your name on it.”

“You wish.”

Down at the river, Harry shouted at Richard, “Right there!” This time, when Richard dove for a frog, he missed and landed face-first in the mud. Harry roared with laughter, until Richard wrestled him in.

“You know,” Varian said, “you could always come work for my dad. He’s been talking about hiring farmhands again.”

Turning green, Castor laughed again, less genuinely this time. “That’d be great, but whenever he sees us, he looks like he wants to take us out behind the woodshed. This isn’t a plot for him to get his revenge, is it?”

“Nah. I’ll call him off.”

Varian could fly. Strap a feather in each hand and watch him soar, soar away. Wheeee! He and Castor would never be friends, but at least they didn’t have to be enemies. Knowing that was enough to accept the apology.

He felt so brave. After saying bye to Castor, he ran back home, ignoring the burn in his lungs for running so hard, and the burn in his arms for holding the motor so long—because his heart burned even more! He was even too excited to answer Dad’s question of, “What’s the rush?” as Varian ran past him and into the house. After throwing his motor any ole where in the lab, Varian snatched up the letter to Frederic he’d been working on, and ran back for town. He’d mail it before he lost his guts, although it was hardly fit to read, lacking eloquence and dignity whatsoever. But it suddenly didn’t matter anymore.

Dear Your Majesty,

Thank you for your letter and your apology. Surely, you know I am sorry, too. I wish things had been different, but I’m glad everything worked out, and I think we could be friends. I liked our talks in the garden, especially with Chef Mary.

Your subject,

Varian

The little bell above the post office door took a beating as Varian burst in. How it clanged and jingle-jangled! Even more when he jumped to flick it with his fingers. He seemed to float down rather than land, before he ran over to wait for Ambrose at the counter that was always weirdly sticky. The air was kinda being a jerk, being too thing. He gasped, but caught air enough by the time Ambrose appeared from the room in the back.

“Please!” Varian cried, pushing the letter forward, and a Coronan mark for its postage.

“You missed today’s carriage. It’ll be on tomorrow’s,” Ambrose promised. “Don’t go just yet. A letter came in for you.”

Varian exchanged letters with glad heart, but it didn’t last long. When he stepped outside and looked to see who this new letter was addressed to, his glad heart was suddenly, alarmingly kaput, as if he’d dropped it down the stairs. Had that been jubilation he was feeling before? Impossible. Or maybe, this wasn’t dread that he was feeling now. Eerie, unsettled dread? No. It wasn’t possible to feel such disparate emotions so close together.

The letter was for him, from the University of Ingvarr.

Mass confusion was supposed to be spread amongst the masses, right? Not happening in him all at once, and just in him alone. It must be confusion he was feeling. Dread made no sense. Confused why the University of Ingvarr should write him a letter? Of course. But not make him full of dread.

Varian ducked around the corner and leaned against the side of the post office. He disturbed Cleo, Susanna’s calico, who ran out of a nearby elder bush with a sassy brrrrt. Varian opened the letter.

“Congratulations. It is with great pleasure to inform you that you have been accepted for admission to the Alchemy program at—”

It should not have been the sort of letter to break Varian’s glass-slipper heart, but it did. So cruelly, it left him breathless.

“I should have known better,” he murmured to a glossy ladybug crawling up the building trim. Too many good things had been happening. He felt like he hadn’t deserved them, and he should have trusted that feeling.

The ladybug spread her elytra, unfurled her diaphanous wings, and took to the air. As Varian watched her go, he realized there was no need to panic.

“It’s just a silly mistake! Ambrose gave me a letter meant for someone else. It happens all the time, as you know, Ms. Post Office Beetle.”

He checked the letterhead again, and it was most definitely addressed to him.

The world around him was too large. He stood on the edge of a huge canyon, so grand it was dizzying, the space above and below and there and there and here was too much—too big, too airy, too full of possibilities and unknowns. His breath pattered feebly against his lips, and a familiar fuzz darkened the edges of his vision. Varian hadn’t had a fainting spell since the blizzard, when he had forced himself through it so exhaustively, he had exhausted himself out of ever having them again.

Varian pushed the whole world down. He swallowed it all, making it a bit smaller. He needed something concrete and real. He needed … he needed his pardon.

His toes itched, and he sprang for home. Darting around the little kids streaming out from Janice’s gate, springing over a puddle by the well, ramming out past the suburbs and towards the farmlands—he barely noticed doing any of it, only thinking of a thousand possibilities to explain. There was a logic to it, after all. Think of all the hilarious jokes he and Dad would tell about the random college acceptance letter he’d gotten. “Who knew there was a Varian of plain island Corona out there, who also liked alchemy? What are the chances I got his letter? Small world!”

It was not a small world. It was an immense world. Vast and empty, above and below, going to squash him.

He just needed to see the pardon again. That’s all. Just the pardon.

As he ran over the bridge, the last obstacle to home, he tripped over that word “pardon” that was always before him. He sprawled against the stones. When he picked himself up, he stuffed the letter in his pocket to brush away the gravel in his palms. His right thumb was bleeding. It didn’t even sting.

Varian rubbed his thumb against his hip, and ran forward on aching knees. The manor house swam before him; its doorknob was slippery. The stairs swayed under his feet as he ran up them; Dad’s bedroom door shrieked as he plowed through it. Dad kept the pardon with the other important papers in his desk. Varian tore through them, cutting his fingers on the sharp edges of document after document, flinging away any paper that wasn’t his. But, when he got to the end of the stack, there was no pardon. Where was it?

Frustrated and hot, Varian rubbed his head. He searched the papers—now all over the floor—but still turned up nothing. “Where is it?” he howled. “Where did he move it?”

Of course. Dad’s trunk.

The dusty trunk sat against the wall, on the other side of the bed. Dad had given up trying to hide it, since there was no point anymore. Not that it mattered. What did it matter if Varian knew what things were in it? Dad was never going to talk about it anyway. Dad never talked. He never talked about himself, he never talked about Mom, he never talked about the graveyard, and obviously, he never talked about Varian. Not even to Varian’s own face.

Varian threw himself on his knees and lifted the trunk’s lid. There! His pardon had to be there, in that stack of papers. Just as at the desk, he flipped through the stack until—found it! Here was the pardon. It felt the same and smelled the same. Even though it had been through the runner, folded and carried in his pocket hither and thither, even stuffed under his pillow at night. It was still the same. It still said, “ … pardon and remit the convictions for the crimes …”

The world was no longer vast enough to swallow him. Satisfied, he tucked the pardon into his pocket, and dropped the rest of the papers. When he bent to pick them up, a certain set of words written on an envelope caught his eye: “University of Ingvarr.”

Oops. The letter must have fallen out of his pocket. Except … he pressed his hand against his pocket, and the letter was still there. Then this Ingvarr letter in the trunk was a different one …

It was addressed to Dad.

As he searched through the stack, he found more letters to Dad. From other universities. The University of Galcrest. Koto University. The Institute of Science at Pittsford and the University of Pittsford. Seven in all. At the bottom of the stack, there was a list of these same schools, written in a hand he knew well, from years of receiving corrected schoolwork. This was the list of schools Janice said she had given Dad.

A frozen piece of hail pinged Varian through his ribcage. When Dad had earlier asked if Varian wanted to move … He opened Dad’s letter from Ingvarr, and read:

“Dear Sir,

Thank you for your inquiry regarding our admissions process. I have enclosed an Admission Request Form and Questionnaire, as well as a Tuition and Fee Schedule. If you wish to proceed with admissions, please complete the forms and return to the below address for consideration. A letter informing you of the University’s decision will follow …”

Varian’s ears screamed for being full of wind and sight and smell. Maybe … maybe it was the smell of his own beating heart, the sight of his own ragged gasps—

Another sound—an outer sound—broke through the void.

“Varian?” Dad stood in the doorway.

Varian, crouching in a swell of inquiry responses from universities, felt his stomach inflate—inflate against his ribs, his chest, even below until his hips ached. When it burst, it blasted Varian, within and without, with rage.

Chapter Text

To see and say something was wrong wasn’t such an easy thing. But there it was. When Quirin had first observed Varian running back from the windmill, carrying the musical motor with the same heft Quirin plowed the pumpkin field—well, it seemed only but a child’s fancy. It was the lightness in the boy’s feet—Hermes feet, wings on sandals.

“What’s the rush?” Quirin shouted, because he was amused.

A minute or two later, Varian blew out of the house like a kite and soared towards town (the winged sandals, remember). His inky head skipped as he rose and fell with the hills, shrinking into a spot of ink on the fields and furrows, until he went round the bend and behind the black alder trees and was gone.

“Varian being Varian,” Quirin murmured dismissively, stretching his aching back (oof).

When Varian returned, he was still yet running, but with none of the joy of before. His feet were desperately rapid, his legs stretching and squeezing and landing weighty. Bom-bom-bom-bom-bom. The very Devil seemed to be nipping his heels, or maybe the hound Cerberus. Something was wrong.

“If Ward said something to him …” Quirin pounded his fist into his palm, unhitched Nuthatch from the plow, and led her to paddock. Her rump twitched, then came to a dead stop once he opened the gate. “Asleep already!” he howled, applying his shoulder to her tail end. “Never seen such a crazy horse …” He slipped in the dirt.

When he got to the front porch, he had to step over Ruddiger taking a nap in a bed of asters. Maybe … well! Maybe, it was just something in the air. A sleepy haze that he was immune to, but no one else as. That same air must have got into Varian and he came rushing home to … take a nap.

Quirin stood in the entry, throwing his gloves onto the console table. “Varian?” he called. “Varian?”

There was no answer.

Naturally, he looked in the lab, but its shelves were dark, lit not by bubbling and brewing of a thousand alchemical reactions. Next, he checked the kitchen and the back garden, but those places were abandoned as well. When he began ascending the stairs for the bedrooms, a trickle (or was it a flood?) of nagging concern wetted the back of his neck. Hadn’t he seen the disaster trio (Castor, Richard, and Harold) wander past the farm an hour or so ago? Quirin tried to remember if the constable was in town, because that was where he was going next if those hooligans accosted Varian again.

Halfway up the stairs, a shuffling noise waylaid him from going on to Varian’s room, and instead to his own bedroom door, halfway open. Quirin stepped in. “Varian?”

So Quirin had heard heart and stomach were supposed to be set in their own certain places, not prone to shifting with every sneeze or hiccup or bad bit of supper. Quirin had seen the anatomy books. Yet, his vested organs got scrambled upon this sight: Varian crouching next to his (his!) trunk, with letters laying scattered all around. Letters that Quirin recognized. Letters that he had specifically hidden away for the right time. Was that frustration, worry, and confusion getting into a three-way fistfight in his noggin? Curses.

Oho! Besides, his first temptation was to handle this invasion of privacy … immediately. But Varian’s disappointment had to come first.

“Varian,” Quirin sighed.

Varian brought his face up, countering the vicious angles his knees made into the floor. His face went through all the colors of the spectrum, before settling on red. “You have something you want to tell me?” he spat.

Quirin’s jaw met the floor, before he brought it back up with his palm to rub his mouth. What was this? This wasn’t disappointment or even shame at having been caught.

“Answer me!” Varian snapped.

Quirin’s toes gripped his socks. Desperately, he told himself, Answer the question, not the tone—blast it!

“Just what do you think you’re doing?” he barked.

Varian brought his face up stiffly, nearly proudly, his cheeks blooming red poppy triumphant. “It’s not like I haven’t been through it before.”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t go through your stuff.”

“Maybe if I had stuff as interesting as you—oh! Oh, wait!” Varian picked up a handle of the letters and hurled them. “Maybe I do! But how’d they end up in here?”

Quirin sucked in a gram of air, and let out a kilo. Very. Slowly.

Reset. He had to reset this. Answer the question, not the tone. He sank into a chair next to the bed, then patted the mattress. “Let’s talk.”

Varian stood but didn’t move from where the letters lay like fallen oak leaves at his feet. All but for one, which he kept crumpled in his fist. “You don’t even talk to me about it first!”

“What have I done?”

“You … you …”

“I wrote some schools to get information.”

“Not just that!”

“Yes, that.” With wonder Quirin gazed at this cold, acidic simmer that was Varian. Disappointment was one thing—the one thing Quirin could have handled—but there was no disappointment here, only rage.

Varian huffed and vibrated, little tigers in his eyes.

“Will you come here? I want to talk to you,” Quirin said. “I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”

“Oh, how nice! After I already told you—”

“I can’t send you right now.”

“Liar!” Color drained from Varian’s face. The accusation hung between them, until Varian, after a moment of face-contorting struggle, did the last thing Quirin expected: Varian doubled-down. “You are lying to me.”

“I am not.”

“You are!”

“I am not lying to you.”

“Then why do I have an acceptance letter from Ingvarr?”

What?

Quirin looked at the letter crumpled in Varian’s hand, but it was far too crushed for him to read from this distance. What was the boy …?

The answer struck at Quirin. Swiping his brow with his forearm, he kept a straight face. Varian would not take kindly to being laughed at. “Son, you’ve misunderstood.”

“I have not!”

“Let me see the letter.”

With a closed, taunting expression, Varian clasped it to his chest. “It’s addressed to me. It’s mine.” At Quirin’s insistence by holding his hand out, Varian complied, in his own way. He read the letter out loud. “‘Dear Varian, Congratulations. It is with great pleasure to inform you that you have been accepted for admission to the Alchemy program at the University of Ingvarr—’

“—Well, Dad, at least you got me enrolled in the right program!”

In his sarcastic climax, Varian spasmed, and he dropped the letter. Quirin swooped in fast and snatched it up. Varian’s fingers clamped down and ripped it away, but not before Quirin saw the fatal words: “Congratulations” and “University of Ingvarr.” Quirin collapsed into the chair.

“A crazy mistake,” he muttered, faintly.

“That so?”

“It is a mistake.”

“What are you saying? They couldn’t really want me? What am I, a charity case?”

Quirin grimaced, because that would have been closer to the truth than what was comfortable. “I never asked them to admit you.”

“Right, right, sure. After all your talking about leaving Corona.”

“I can’t afford it.”

“Oh? Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho, really?” In a mocking wiggle, Varian pranced about the room. “That’s pretty weird. Asking for something when you don’t have the money.”

“It’s complicated.”

“You told me a long time again you had the money, so ha!”

Quirin snapped, “That was before the Saporians drained the bank.”

Ay, what a mistake! The room couldn’t have chilled any quicker than if the walls had been removed. His chest shrinking, Varian huddled, jerking his shoulders around his ear. He scrambled a sheet of parchment out of his pocket and slammed it over his heart. Quirin’s mouth dried when he recognized it as the pardon. It seemed ten sizes too big for the boy.

Varian spoke first. “I didn’t know,” he gasped. “They kept it secret. I didn’t know they did that. Not until just a little while ago.” A diamond seeded under his eye, which he swept away, leaving a damp trail.

“I know you didn’t. Come here.”

This time, Quirin was obeyed, but only partially. Varian sat, but kept himself out of his father’s reach, bending his knees into an impenetrable cliffside. What a lonely boy he looked. A solitary reed buffeted by a cantankerous river.

“Kai was always complaining about money to pay the mercenaries.” Varian looked at Quirin timidly. “When did you find out?”

Quirin could barely think about that day, much less say anything about it. How to speak of a day when Varian had just wanted to go on a treasure hunt, found mummies instead, and then came home to a madman? Impossible.

Dropping his eyes to his boots, Varian lined them up, heel against toe, ever so precisely. “So you weren’t only angry about the … the not-a-bomb thing.”

“I don’t care about money. I wasn’t angry that day, not really. I was terrified.”

“Of what?”

Quirin swallowed. “Because of what they could have done to you. Of what they almost did.”

Varian frowned. “What do you mean?”

Once again, all Quirin had was a condemning silence, even though it had been his right to go look.

Laughing mirthlessly, Varian stood. “Another secret, huh?”

“When we went to Corona, I went to the court and read the trial record.” At the simple confusion on Varian’s peaked face, Quirin leaned into his elbows and explained. “When there is a trial, a court reporter puts everything that happened in a record. All the testimonies, and evidence, and everything that was said.”

“Oh.” Varian lifted the pardon to his nose. “I didn’t go to the trial.”

“I know.”

“Noble said I shouldn’t go because I couldn’t take Ruddiger, and every time they took Ruddiger away, I threw a fit.” Slowly, Varian folded the pardon and slipped it back into his pocket. “Why did you go see the record?”

“I needed to know.”

“You mean, what I told you wasn’t enough. The pardon wasn’t enough.”

“I needed details. There were rumors and accusations I couldn’t answer.”

“Why didn’t you just ask me?”

Quirin pressed his knuckles against his teeth. Because he had allowed his courage to fail. Because he couldn’t take the pain anymore. “You got so upset when we talked about it,” he answered, lamely.

“So?”

“You got physically ill.”

“So it’s better to go sneaking around?” White spots appeared around the edges of Varian’s mouth. Their moment of tragic peace was galloping away, and the room pressed down.

Quirin pressed his elbows into his knees to combat it, baying the panic. “As your father, I’m entitled to know—”

“Oh, you know, you know! You’re the one with all the secrets! I even tried to talk to you about it, and you shut me down!”

“Oh—Varian, I know.”

“I’m sick of it! I’m sick of pretending!” Varian spun around, dropped to his knees, and then his fists into the trunk. “I’ve seen it! You think you get to know everything about me, but I don’t have to know anything about you? Well, I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it all, so there!”

“What are you doing?”

“Guess what, Dad? I know you have a sword!” Straining, Varian flung out the wretched length wrapped in cloth, landing it in a clunk against his knee. Half-mad, wild-eyed, he reached in for more.

“Be careful!” Quirin snapped, standing.

“And you got a helmet! And you got … whatever these things are called.”

“They’re greaves—I told you to be careful!”

Varian lifted out the gauntlets, wrapped together, and dropped them. They shook like a bag of dropped pennies. “You sneak and sneak, but I can’t even know—”

“I’m not beholden to tell you everything about my life!” Quirin dropped beside the trunk to place his things back in. Handle Varian first—but to be called a liar! And now have his personal things abused. “That’s enough—enough!”

“You’re a liar and a sneak!”

“Do not call me a liar. I have not lied to you.”

“Liar!”

Patience spent, Quirin’s jaw popped, “You’re the one who’s lied!”

Varian pulled back and bounced to his feet, the white no longer confined to the boundaries of his lips but enveloping his entire face. “I have not lied to you! Who told you I lied?”

“Nobody told me.”

“Was it Porter? Ward? The trial record thing?”

“It was Andrew.”

“What?” Varian shrieked.

“You looked me in the face and lied about him.”

Varian stumbled back, mouth gaping. “N—no, I didn’t!”

“You couldn’t even keep your story straight. One minute he’s the friendliest guy in the world who just wants to save the whales, and the next he’s threatening his allies? It doesn’t make sense.”

Sputtering, Varian cast a long look around the room, like so much a lost sheep bleating into the wind, wolves at his back. Head swiveling, he ossified his expression into a showy rage, a trapeze act, a fake that wouldn’t fool a young child. “It is so! I hated him! He was so mean. He was so mean in prison! I hate him ‘cause he was so mean.”

Quirin lifted the gauntlets, and they seemed to slip in his hands, as if some part had broken. “Oh, Varian, there are trial records and then there are prison records. You think about that.”

He gently lay the gauntlets, and then the greaves. It wasn’t until he was sliding the sword in that he realized the odd silence of the room. By now, Varian should have more than responded.

Quirin jerked his head around, and there was his son, trembling like a sheet on a clothesline. Quirin jumped up. “Varian? Varian, son …”

For the first time since the argument started—this argument that they fought so savagely and foolishly—for the first time, Varian allowed Quirin to touch him. Quirin pressed him against his chest, a little pant against his father’s bicep.

Varian wheezed. “I know Andrew … You’re mad about that.”

“What are you afraid to tell me?”

“That’s why you’re sending me away.”

“I’m not sending you away.” Quirin slipped his arm around Varian’s shoulders to lead him towards the bed. Were they to always be talking past each other?

Varian stepped away. Just a step. Just a step, but it was enough. Quirin dropped his arm, and wondered as Varian’s head swept from one side to the next in a slow glacial sweep. As if he was searching for something. Hollowly, he asked, “When you went to Corona last week, was it to see the King?”

A sunbeam striking Quirin blind would have been a kindness, compared to his every mistake suddenly dazzle and shimmer. 

“I thought …” Varian looked at Quirin a thousand yards away. “I thought he decided on his own.”

“I don’t have the power to make him humble himself. We only just talked.”

Varian turned his face towards the wall, the back of his neck like the marble façade on an ancient landmark. When Quirin put his hand on Varian’s shoulder, Varian swung around, shouting, “Don’t touch me!”

His hand flashed up, and the admissions letter from Ingvarr flew in Quirin’s face. Varian raced out, jumping over Ruddiger who had come to the door at some uncertain point. Ruddiger turned tail to chase Varian up the stairs, where there was the slamming of a door and the turn of a key.

Quirin threw his hands to his head.

Time sped on, beyond Quirin’s reckoning. He had no idea how long he stood in his room, surrounded by the scattered offshoots of his former life, and the letters, letters, letters of his present. Slowly, his brain began thinking again, chugging towards that final goal he wouldn’t reach until he drew last breath. What did he think? This is a ridiculous argument. A silly misunderstanding. Fess up, apologize. All will be normal again. But it was so much more profound than that.

A demon played billiards with the backs of his eyeballs.

The admissions letter from Ingvarr lay at his feet. With it, he would make Varian see reason.

Except, what was there to reason? A greater confusion strangled Quirin as he found out it was an acceptance letter for Varian to join their alchemy program. Thanks to Varian’s “glowing academic record and inspiring inventions,” Varian had a—what? A scholarship.

He understood. His clamping teeth barely missed his lucky tongue. Varian’s baffling, iridescent rage was nothing—nothing! There was only one way the school would have heard about Varian’s academic record, and it sure wasn’t from him.

“Janice,” he growled, looking at the clock counting on the wall. It was nearly four, almost an hour past when Janice should have let loose her charges for the day. Even if she kept some roguish boy or girl after school, they would be gone by now, their lines of punishment finished.

Varian was to stew. Quirin would treat him like a pot roast. After he had cooled, they could talk and reason. Besides, Quirin had his own steam to blow off first. He set for town.

His calves prickled by the time Janice's and Porter’s house appeared before him, his pace set so quick and hard he had pounded the blood out of his toes. Bah, who needed toes when he felt this angry? He carefully inspected the house before entering the garden, but there were no children laughing or shrieking, no Yes-Ms.Teacher. Excellent.

Janice answered his knock.

“Are you alone?” Quirin asked.

“What a question!” She held the door open, all elegance and collection, even with chalk scattered like pollen on her chin. Yes, even with that, as graceful as ever, as if she hadn’t been playing games with his child. “Don’t let Ambrose hear you. He would love to spread a rumor like that.”

Quirin brushed past her into the house. “I’m in no mood for your jokes.”

She took him into the parlor, and turned towards him slowly, gazing with mouse-spirited eyes. “Goodness. What’s the problem?”

“This.” He whipped the Ingvarr letter at her.

She took it and—oh, such beautiful eyes she had as they promenaded over the letter, so incongruent. Now, Quirin understood why they never settled on one color in particular, one day this, one day that, sometimes green, sometimes brown, sometimes something else entirely. She was proud of her work! Her face was lit like a church stained-glass window.

“This is wonderful, Quirin!”

“I have you to thank for it?”

“Oh, well. I sang his praises. Even drew replicas of his latest invention.”

“Thank you for meddling.”

That celebratory-banner pink on her nose gloomed as she gave him back the letter.

“You had no right to do this!” He pounded the letter against his leg. “How dare you do this without consulting me first?”

“I saw you were giving up too soon.”

“Where else did you sing your praises? Are we to be getting acceptance or denial letters from every school in the Seven Kingdoms?”

“Why, only just Ingvarr.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s my favorite, that's all.”

That was all, huh? Looking in a mirror, she swiped the chalk from her chin, her lips pressing out purple like a fig. But in the reflection, Quirin saw a shield in her eyes, even as her words were so flippant.

He measured his words carefully, then blew them in a blast. "You have undermined my authority and violated Varian’s right to make the choice for himself.”

“Oh for goodness—!” Janice lowered herself into a chair at the nearby cluttered desk, and pulled a lopsided pile of schoolwork across her lap. As she shifted through it, she asked, light as whipped cream, “Isn’t he happy?”

“He couldn’t be less so.”

“Why ever not?”

How could Quirin illustrate for her the mind-numbing, incomprehensible scene that had taken place? “Maybe it’s not being given a choice. Maybe it’s the weeks of travel. Maybe the lack—”

“It’s only twenty-three days by ship. Imagine if it were Koto.”

“Oh, only twenty-three days, is that all? For all I know, he’ll be seasick the whole …” Spectral hands grabbed Quirin by the throat in a sudden comprehension that rushed in icebox agony. He looked at her, amazed. She was a new creation.

The village teacher studiously graded schoolwork, unaware (or pretending to be) of his analysis of her.

“Janice.”

Keeping her head bent, she dipped a quill into an inkwell.

“What are you doing?” Quirin breathed. “Did you specifically choose that school because it was so far?”

At first, she pretended not to have heard him, her mouth thinning into a blade of grass. But boldness was Janice’s defining trait, and she couldn’t help but to bring up her face, and with unblinking honesty, admit, “I intended for him to go far, far away.”

“You haven’t forgiven him.”

“Nor have I, you.”

“Me?” Quirin’s ear sang. It was a strange song, a masochistic relief to hear what he long knew was in people’s hearts. And what was in his own. Even if it killed him to hear it from her.

Janice pushed the schoolwork to the side and leaned back. “What have I done? I got him into a good school you don’t have to pay for. Dear me, isn’t it terrible?”

“It’s your motive.”

“My motive of helping?”

“Of trying to get rid of him.”

“Oh, that. I’m trying to rid him of you. Don’t misunderstand me. I love him. I love everything about him. I love everything attached to him.” She ran her hands through her hair, frowning when her fingers tangled in the bun at the nape of her neck. “I haven’t been thinking much of you as a father.”

Quirin swallowed. “I’m aware of my flaws as a parent.”

“I don’t think you are.”

Vacillating between speech and silence … well, what was Quirin to do other than rub his fingers over his bow-stretched mouth and wish to defend himself? But how could he when he himself had asked a thousand times why had Varian thrown aside the morals Quirin had taught him? It didn’t make sense, only that Varian had been driven by external and powerful cruelties, and a father who had failed him in some vague, non-defined way. How had Quirin failed his son? He could blame everything, but that was the same as blaming nothing. Even blaming Ulla occupied his heart, like a poisonous mold that persistently grew behind the wall panels of a tired old cottage. Quirin could not be a mother, no matter how hard he had tried being affectionate because that was what he remembered most of his own.

Quirin stood before Janice, flopping like a fish in Varian’s wheel.

Janice took pity and spelled it out in scientific precision. “You didn’t pay him the attention he needed. You didn’t give him the encouragement he needed.”

“I tried my best.”

“He’s desperate for your approval. When it seemed he was to never get it, look at what he did.”

Quirin had thought the same, among a myriad of his other supposed faults, but he had only thought of it academically.

Janice took her hair out of bun, gathering the pins in her lap. “You didn’t support him in his interests.”

At that, Quirin’s ire snarled again. “All I’ve done is support him! Do you have any idea how expensive—”

“Money!”

“Yes, money! I made sure he had the things he wanted, and it wasn’t cheap. I didn’t pull him out of school to work the family business, like happens to so many of your other students. I never forbid him from pursuing alchemy, no matter how many accidents or how people howled for him to stop. Do not say I never supported him.”

“But did you show an interest?”

Quirin threw his hands out. “Excuse me for not being an alchemist!”

Her eyes flashed. “You’re afraid of it because it took Ulla away.”

“It did not take Ulla away. I gave him freedom—”

“If ignoring is freedom, than I suppose so. Quirin, you didn’t have to understand, only show an interest. You didn’t even go to the science expo he took part in, did you?”

Quirin held his breath, his fury about the get away from him. The worst thing about the science expo was that Varian had never told him he was participating, and never asked Quirin to go.

With hair pins in her teeth, Janice rewound her hair. “I see how you’re looking at me. If I were a man, you’d sucker punch me.”

“I might,” he replied, strangled.

“I’m not saying these things to hurt you. I say them because you’re my friend.”

In the expected end, her pins dropped from her mouth. Not knowing why he did it, perhaps only because they were friends, or seeing her struggle as ridiculous, or because he had performed the same function for Ulla, Quirin picked up the pins and held them in outstretched palm. Janice took them one by one, her fingernails scratching his palm, to press them into her caramel hair.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she murmured. “The damage is done. He’s practically a pariah.”

“The Princess herself is his friend. The people come to him for help.”

“Yes, yes, as long as he is useful, they will get along. But do you think they have forgotten so easily?” Her knuckles staggered as she pushed pins. “What future does he have here? He will always be watched and remembered for what he did. Have you considered if he wants to marry? He can bat those big, blue eyes of his all day long, and some girl will fall for it, but what to do if the girl’s parents forbid the match?” Janice finished her hair in the messiest style he’d ever seen it, a slipshod bun hanging halfway down her neck. “At least, if he’s somewhere where they don’t know, he’ll have a chance. I know you want to keep him, but don’t be selfish.”

Quirin clenched his eyes and said the most honest thing he knew about her. “This isn’t about Corona. This is because you’re still angry. Janice, if I told you what went on between him and the Kingdom, you wouldn’t be so unforgiving. He was pushed into a corner.”

“He could drown Fred in a soup tureen, for all I care. I care that a ship’s mast fell through my brother’s roof. I care that Varian was in prison for a year. I care that Porter has been haunted by the image of you in that … thing. You should have seen his face when he came back from seeing it. He thinks of it still.” Her mouth trembled. “It haunts me, too.”

Pungent sweat dotted the back of Quirin’s arms at mention of the amber, as it always did. As it probably always would. He groaned. “I don’t know why you should let it bother you so much.”

“Do you really not know?” She shot to her feet, her darkening eyes reflecting both blue and green, like an underground pool Quirin had seen in a cave once. “Can you honestly be so stupid?”

Quirin turned towards the window, to look at the light streaking in, green as it filtered through lilac leaves. The sun headed break-neck for day’s end. He should go. He should go before things went too far, if they hadn’t already.

But he couldn’t help himself.

He faced Janice and said, “You’ve always had a hard time letting things go. He’s a child, Janice. He’s my child. You’d understand if you had one—” He tried to bite back the words before he finished them (so stupid, with the headstones in the garden). But it was too late.

Her face was a well shattered plate of ceramic, jagged edges showing the white heart. Sun and moon, now that they had both got their licks in, he—

A blinking white flurry—Quirin caught her hand before it connected against his face. In shock, they stared at each other, both unsure of their next move, his panting and her panting in unison. Her wrist was narrow as a robin’s leg in his palm.

“Quirin!” Suddenly, Porter was there, wrenching Janice’s hand out of Quirin’s. With a fire and fury in his eyes Quirin had never before seen, he grabbed Quirin by the collar.

“Stop it!” Janice shrieked. “Don’t!”

Instinctively, Quirin grabbed Porter’s wrists to keep from being throttled, his sight overturning as Porter shook—

“Porter, stop it!” Janice’s pale hands pulled on Porter’s cuffs. “He was only defending himself.”

“What?” Porter swung wild eyes at her.

“He’ll cream you, you powder puff!”

It took much longer for Porter to calm then it took for him to rouse. Slowly, his hands loosened from Quirin’s shirt as he stared between Janice and Quirin, and then he stepped back and kneeled to pick up his hat that had flown off his head in his blind rage. When he spoke, his voice shook. “Just what is going on here? Janice, you silly idiot, what are you doing?”

Back stretching, Janice turned it before dropping into a chair, keeping her face towards the wall.

“Quirin?” Porter asked, tightly.

Quirin stared the impenetrable, feminine back. “I’m sorry, Janice. You know I didn’t mean it like that. I’m stupid. It wasn’t said maliciously.”

She corkscrewed her hand, wafting a fan in her face until her loose hairs billowed.

Quirin held out the admissions letter from Ingvarr and asked Porter, “Did you know about this?”

Porter’s frigid gray eyes loosened with interest at the letter, before they tightened as he seemed to realize this was the cause of the trouble. He flickered his gaze away.

“You have meddled in the affairs of my family,” Quirin said, pocketing the letter.

“You said I should have done more.” With cheeks like tightly closed roses, Porter threw his hands out in a showman-like display. “So, I’ve done more. The actions of a lazy milksop.”

A noxious gas filled the back of Quirin’s throat, the announcement of coming vomit. Maybe he deserved this. But Varian did not. “You had no right.”

“We were only trying to help.”

“You cannot send him away like a math problem to be erased.”

“That’s not—”

“You don’t know what you’ve done.”

Porter kept his eyes to the floor. “Was I supposed to ignore the barn?”

How could Quirin answer that? It was the most shameful day of his life, to have lost his mind on Varian. But it was a betrayal that they couldn’t understand how shamed he was.

No more words were exchanged before he left. No goodbyes or well-wishes. Quirin simply turned his back and let himself out. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever turn his face towards them again.

Dinner was a lonely affair, with the house silent and oppressive. Varian refused to budge from his room, even refusing to acknowledge Quirin’s knocks to come to dinner. After washing the dishes and sitting for a few hours reading (rather, attempting to read, with the words like catching butterflies for all Quirin’s powers of concentration), Quirin took himself to bed. There was no use waiting any longer. Let Varian have his night of feeling sorry for himself. Quirin would explain it in the morning.

The substance of life was upended again, but Quirin awoke the next morning feeling better. He was getting good at handling life being topsy-turvy, anyway. He whistled when he made breakfast. He whistled when Varian refused to make an appearance, not even making a peep when Quirin knocked on his door. No matter. Varian would eventually come out for food.

Whistling, Quirin went to work the farm, resolved to force the issue if Varian wasn’t out by lunch.

Lunch was late. It was all because when Quirin went to feed the animals, he found out Prometheus was missing.

“How’d he escape?” Quirin asked Nuthatch, who lifted sleepy-eyed lashes and kept her horsey secrets.

For the next few hours, Quirin was forced to stomp over hill and dale, asking everyone in sight if they had seen his worn donkey. After no luck, he came home to a real sight: Prometheus standing at the gate, turning his huge ears towards Quirin as if to say, “Hee-haw, where have you been?”

Now that Prometheus was wrangled, Quirin went in, into a somber, muted house. Varian was awfully stubborn. Moodily, Quirin made lunch, burned it, gave it enough first aid to still be edible, and went upstairs. His knock on Varian’s door was rougher than intended.

“It’s time to come out now,” he barked. “You’ve sulked enough.”

Varian’s door was impenetrable.

“I want to talk to you.”

Still no answer. Quirin was done with this game.

“I’m coming in.” He tried the knob, halfway expecting it to be locked. Behold, it opened! There was no screech of outrage when Quirin went in. And no wonder. The room was empty.

Puzzled, Quirin put his hands on his hips and listened. The house: impeccably silent.

“The river,” Quirin muttered. “He must be at the river. With his fishing wheel.”

He turned to walk out, but a ray of sunlight streaming through the shutters caught his eye, as it landed on a white square laying on Varian’s pillow. Eerie déjà vu flourished in front of Quirin’s face, although this was a scene he had never seen before. (For one, Varian’s bed was made.) As if approaching an executioner’s axe, Quirin picked up the paper. It was a note from Varian.

“Dad, I’m going to the Demanitus Chamber for a few weeks. I’ll be back in time for the trip to Ingvarr. Just leave me alone.”

Varian had run away.

Chapter Text

In silence, the world turned.

Quirin’s life became marked by silence. The stars shifted in silence, the crops grew and stretched in silence. In silence, Quirin shifted and turned and grew. In silence, Quirin was stunned until he was stupefied.

He worked cold—freezing. Then warm—too warm. Numbed, his world was exploded with cotton. Soft white cotton, billowy and puffed, and him in constant danger in case a match should light.

The silence ended after a week, when Quirin said, “Why, Varian’s acting like a brat!”

Effulgent anger burnt out the dull paralysis of the first week. Where Quirin had hardly thought in the first week, in the second, he was resentful enough to believe he didn’t care. Fine, let Varian go away! He was nearly of age, after all. Quirin wouldn’t keep him from spreading his wings.

Besides, it was nice for Quirin to only be responsible for himself. He was a bachelor again! Pie for breakfast? Yes, please! Dirty dishes left ‘til the morning? Why, don’t mind at all! Dirty boots left at the front door? Take that, Varian!

“He’s an absolute pig, anyway!” Quirin told the chickens while he tossed them cold spaghetti one morning. “He was always calling me messy—but why would I let a child boss me around? Why’d he judge me anyway, when he’s the one who blows the roof off the house? Pfft. Just ‘cause he does most the cleaning?”

Correction: Varian did most the cleaning. Now that he was gone, it was up to Quirin. And he wasn’t very good at it. The roof stayed attached to the rafters, but no one could get a kitchen basin sparkling clean like Varian. Quirin’s best efforts left spots.

By the end of the second week, Quirin almost cried over those spots.

Despair smothered his anger in the third week. Quirin was shattered. Varian hadn’t even sent home a letter. How could it have come to this? He had only meant to help his son. Somehow, his attempts caught fire and turned to ash.

Maybe, he should send a letter to the University of Ingvarr, writing that Varian would not attend this semester.

“Are you mad?” Quirin grumbled, putting the seed bag over his head and pretending to tighten the handles around his throat. “You want to completely destroy everything?”

He wrote a letter to Varian instead, imagining Rapunzel would forward it if she would be so kind.

He licked the quill a long time, before he put it to paper.

“Varian,

You’ve missed out on a lot of news in Old Corona! There have been lots of changes.

The cabbage came in. The harvest will be a good one—if I can keep Ward’s cows out of it. They escaped out of pasture the other day and spread out all along the valley, even wading along the river bend. They ate almost everything in sight, and even got into the hay shed and feasted on Nuthatch’s carrots. Prometheus tried to stand up against them, but a donkey is no match against hungry cows.

Freya’s Corona Adventure has ended. She went back to her country—married! Her parents showed up as threatened, but they had the arranged fiancé in tow. I guess he’s improved, because Freya said his beard was nice, full, and bushy like a beehive. She slaughtered her chickens for the wedding feast. Her house is empty now. I wonder who will come claim it.

Send me a letter back, son.”

Quirin folded it up. “I’m not going to send it, of course. Kid doesn’t want to be bothered? All right. Don’t be bothered. I’m not going to crawl—”

He leapt to his feet when there came a knock on the front door. Maybe it was Ambrose, and—

It wasn’t Ambrose at the door.

It was King Edmund.

King Edmund was as mad as they got. Maybe, not as mad as Hector, but then again, it was entirely possible Quirin’s memory of Hector had gotten a little murky. Certainly, in this current day and age, Kind Edmund was the insanest guy Quirin knew.

He should have expected it. If leaving the man alone in the Dark Kingdom had seemed like a death sentence, a diagnosis of completely-lost-his-mind should have been only too obvious.

Or maybe it was Quirin who had gone insane. At any rate, somebody was insane. It was the only explanation for King Edmund to be sitting in his dining room, saying, “Tasty apples.”

Quirin was going to say, “Thanks, grew them myself,” but what he actually said was, “K-K-King Edmund?” Certainly, his legs had turned into moonbeams and shot him into the heavens.

Edmund looked up from his meal of fried apples and sausage. “Are you still saying that? I thought you got past the shock.”

It had been the only thing Quirin had been capable of when he opened the door, and saw Edmund standing there.

“K-K-King Edmund?” he had mewled.

“Sir Quirin!” Edmund had screamed, dropping his bag and punching Quirin’s shoulder. “Still solid, I see. Hey, I bet you thought you’d never see me again, but you can’t get rid of me that easy. Have you got anything to eat?”

That was how Quirin came to host King Edmund, a man he hadn’t seen in twenty-some years, at a moment’s notice. He hadn’t gone shopping, so a quick meal of fried apples, sausage, sauerkraut, and biscuits was the best he could do.

Edmund lapped it up, his assessment of such a meager meal very generous. “It’s not too bad at all. Have I ever had your cooking before?”

Sitting over his own plate, Quirin jerked until the sausage on his fork went rolling. “Just in the field, Your Majesty.”

“That’s not cooking. That’s burning over a campfire. Or am I talking about my own attempts?” Edmund laughed.

Throwing back his glass, Quirin slugged apple cider, hoping it’d loosen him up a little. Which was rather ambitious, considering it was non-alcoholic. But what was wrong with him? He should be affectionate. He should be pleased. Not … not whatever this was.

Maybe he’d awaken in a moment, roving some mountaintop in his pajamas. Oh, sun, please.

“He doesn’t seem comfortable,” Edmund muttered. He observed as if Quirin had lit himself on fire and called himself the Pumpkin King.

“It’s just so sudden,” Quirin replied. “And unexpected.”

“Now that the Moonstone has been stolen, I’ve been seeing the world. Decided to look up old friends. After visiting Horace, of course.”

Horace? Quirin drew a blank, and applied butter to a biscuit, wondering. Oh, wait. Horace? That Horace? The little prince?

Edmund was talking about That Horace. He told an amazing story of training the ravens of the Dark Castle to scour the world for evidence of his son’s whereabouts, especially when the pigeons stopped coming from Horace’s nurse. Poor Horace grew up in a Coronan orphanage, never knowing who he really was, and even took on a new name. It didn’t exactly put him on the straight and narrow.

“I’d hate to say it,” Edmund sighed, “but without his old man to keep him in line, the boy took to a life of pretty crime of grand larceny and high treason. But in the end, he did me proud. Saved a princess, and has installed himself at the castle here. I couldn’t have wished for better!”

“Saved a princess …” The slow build of realization was rather like a league of ants had begun constructing a massive anthill on Quirin’s head. “You mean … he’s the one dating Princess Rapunzel? The wastre—I mean, boyfriend?”

“It was fated he hook up with a princess. No one can outrun their blue blood.”

After playing with the table cloth on his knee, Quirin jumped up, crying, “You’ve ate the last biscuit. I’ll get more.” Once in the kitchen, he shoved an entire biscuit in his mouth to stifle the screams. The wastre—boyfriend was Horace? Incredible.

After stomping his feet, he grabbed another bottle of apple cider and took himself back to the dining room.

Edmund popped the cork with his thumb and poured them both a glass. “Just think, if things had gone differently, Horace would be ordering you about!”

Quirin smiled weakly. “If things keep going the way they look, he just might still.”

Edmund waggled eyebrows and tossed knowing smirks.

“He never said anything to me about coming from the Dark Kingdom,” Quirin mused. Although, hadn’t there been a time when Eugene/Horace brought up the subject? Yeah, Quirin smacked him down then. It had seemed like stupid small talk that Quirin didn’t want to small talk about.

Edmund grunted and squinted, his forehead depressingly making more lines than what it once had before. “He’s not too pleased about it. It’s a lot to take in, I suppose. He’s only now warming up to me.”

“Really?”

“He didn’t want anything to do with me. So I had to chase him here and force the issue. Del-i-cately.”

“Delicately?”

“Not really. But we’re getting along.”

Ambitiously, Quirin drank more cider.

Pushing back his plate (and none too soon, since he had eaten every sausage in the house), Edmund leaned back from the table. “They tell me I’ve lost my mind from too much isolation, so I’ve been stretching my legs. I ran into Adira a few months back, when she was storming the castle. Do you know, she abandoned her oath?”

“Is that so?” Quirin shivered.

“She told me you were dead.”

“Oh! I didn’t realize she’s been around …”

“But when I got here, they said you weren’t. Dead, that is.”