Chapter Text
Eventually, Ted manages to coax Henry to nap. He takes him upstairs, tucks him in her bed. While he’s gone, Rebecca cleans up, makes more tea, settles by the fire. She knows what’s coming—the conversation they need to have, away from innocent ears. She just doesn't know what he’ll tell her, what he’ll admit. If he’ll say what he’s found, or keep it close to his chest.
She doesn’t know if she’ll help him or not.
Destroying Rupert is, of course, still enticing, but she knows she’ll already have to leave her home, to resettle somewhere far away. She’ll have to start over again—a new village, new townsfolk to frighten, new quiet to become accustomed to.
It feels like too much already, and she’s tired. She’s been tired for years.
She sips her tea, listens as Ted pads back down the stairs, Henry’s backpack over one shoulder. He sets it on the floor beside him as he joins her in front of the fire, in the second chair no one ever sits in. He looks… right, there, for reasons she can’t explain.
“He put up a good fight, but he’s finally out,” Ted offers, though she doesn’t ask.
Outside, the late morning is dull and grey, rain coming harder now, the wind whistling past her house.
Ted holds his hands out near the fire to warm them, and she takes a moment to look at him, study him—his profile, the line of his arm where his sleeves are rolled up to the elbow, his mustache. It’s not quite as ridiculous as she first found it.
When he catches her looking, she refuses to blush, merely wings an eyebrow. “Where did you get the shirt?”
He looks down at himself. “Oh. A horse.”
“A horse?”
“Yeah. While you were—” She narrows her eyes. “—takin’ a rest,” he says with a smirk, “this horse showed up in your yard with my bag. Darndest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Black stallion, bit tetchy, wouldn’t hand it over until you fed him?”
“How’d you know?”
She sighs. “Shithead.”
“Sorry?”
She waves a hand. “That’s my horse. Shithead.”
“You call your horse Shithead?”
“He’s named after an old friend.”
Ted blinks at her a moment. “If that’s a joke, I love it. And if not,” he says, his voice turning serious, “I cannot wait to unpack that with you.”
Rebecca opens her mouth, but all that comes out is a slightly confused, “Okay.”
He’s a strange man, though she doesn’t know why she expected anything less.
Ted sits back in the chair, eyes on the fire. His expression slips, becomes a bit more grave, and Rebecca lets the silence settle for a while, lets him think. She’s content enough in the quiet, but evidently he isn’t, because it isn’t long before he asks,
“You ever learn somethin’ about somebody, changes the way you look at ‘em?”
Rebecca pauses, then nods, and Ted sighs, running a hand through his hair.
“I’ve always known the king isn’t—I was a farmer, y’know, I paid those taxes. I know how… important money is to him, if you don’t mind my sayin’ so.”
Rebecca shrugs. “You’ll find no love for the king here.”
Ted nods, gaze drifting back to the fire. “Yeah. I mean, I never had any interactions with the guy—I was just a messenger. Just, tryin’ to keep my head down, y’know? Make some kinda life for me and Henry, after his mom—”
He cuts himself off, and Rebecca hates the way her heart clenches, just a bit. She doesn’t offer an apology, or condolence, but it must show on her face because when he looks at her, he shakes his head quickly.
“No, no, she’s fine. Sorry. Just, uh—sheerin’ sheep and growin’ tomatoes wasn’t the life she wanted.” He smiles tightly, and Rebecca blinks in surprise.
“She left you?”
He shrugs. “It took a while, but—she wanted to go, explore the world. She didn’t wanna leave Henry, but we decided it’d be better for him to stay with me, least ‘til he’s old enough to go off on his own. She keeps in touch, sometimes. Sends him little drawings of the stuff she’s seen, where she’s been. She seems happier.”
Rebecca nods slowly, takes a sip of her tea to help the dryness in her mouth. How anyone could leave a child, she’s never understood. Will probably never understand, and her heart pinches at the thought of the little boy upstairs, growing up without a mother; at herself, her life absent of so much joy.
But Ted doesn’t seem angry. Doesn’t seem overly broken up about it, either, which prompts her to ask,
“How long ago?”
“‘Bout five years now. Henry was three when she left, so, he doesn’t remember much of her, which might be for the best.” He sighs. “But I couldn’t manage the farm on my own after a while, so we packed up. A friend told me I could get a job at the market, but that fell through, so…”
“Errand boy,” she echos, and he nods.
“Yeah.”
He doesn’t add anything else, but Rebecca watches as he leans forward, elbows on his knees, fingers tangled together.
“What did you find?” she asks, and Ted looks at her, almost assessing.
“You gonna help us?”
“Depends entirely upon what you found.”
Ted’s lips quirk, and he nods, but he’s quiet a long time, staring into the flames, before he speaks.
“‘Bout two years ago, I overheard some of the Red Guard talkin’ about a quest the king sent ‘em on. Lookin’ for some kind of talisman. I didn’t think much of it, y’know, ‘cause he’s always lookin’ for more money, more land.” He pauses, twisting absently at his finger. “A few months after that, I kept hearin’ stories about people goin’ missing—somebody’s aunt, a cousin, a grandmother. People up and leave all the time, so I didn’t—” He shakes his head, guilt etched in the lines of his face. “Puttin’ food on the table, tryin’ to get up enough money for a tutor for Henry, that’s all I was worried about.”
She doesn’t know why she feels the need to comfort him, keeps her lips pressed tight together to keep it from spilling out, lets him continue without interruption,
“Then one night I was comin’ home late, and I saw a couple of the Red Guard. They had this girl with ‘em, maybe about twelve, and she just—she looked so scared, y’know? Most political prisoners, they’re taken to the cells beneath the castle, but I couldn’t imagine what a little girl coulda done—you steal a loaf of bread, you spend a night in the public jail, you don’t go to the king. But that’s where they took her.” He pauses, takes a deep breath. “Two weeks later, her face was on a missing persons poster with all the others, and I just… couldn’t shake it. I started keepin’ track, payin’ attention.”
He leans over, reaches into Henry’s bag, pulls out a thick, black book and hands it to her.
Rebecca frowns, but sets her tea aside and takes it, flips it open. There are scribbled drawings, little notes and dates, glued in portraits of the missing people, all of them women. Old women, young women, a little girl with pigtails who couldn’t be more than four years old.
Her chest tightens, and she looks at Ted, looking at her.
“Nice thing about bein’ an errand boy, you’re pretty invisible to most people. So any letters I got that went to the castle, I started readin’ ‘em.” He pauses. “Well, first I had to teach myself how to read. They don’t exactly cover that while you’re butcherin’ chickens.”
“You—you taught yourself to read?”
She’s almost impressed.
“Taught myself how to reseal the envelopes, too,” he says, and Rebecca swallows.
“Interfering with royal mail is punishable by death.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Though I don’t know why—from what I could gather, most of it was just people writin’ letters back home, complaining about the weather or the pay. Though sometimes I’d get some private stuff that was—” He makes a face, and Rebecca smirks.
“Promiscuous?”
“Downright bawdy,” he says, giving a little shudder. “Some of ‘em had drawings. People sure are creative.”
She almost laughs, but her eyes settle on the book again, the little girl’s charcoal face staring up at her.
“Eventually a note came through, anonymous, for the king’s eyes only. It didn’t say much, just that a piece of the talisman had been located, and payment could be sent to a place in the East Country. I wrote down where.”
He points at the book, and Rebecca flips through it until she finds it, a hastily scrawled address for an inn, no name given.
On the next page, and several pages after, are drawings of various talismen. Some she recognizes, others she doesn’t, from a variety of cultures around the world.
“I started lookin’ around, tryin’ to figure out what he was lookin’ for, but none of it made sense. I mean, maybe that’s ‘cause I got about a first year readin’ level, but what would a rich, powerful king want with a broken dohickey?”
She glares at him for the phrasing, but inside, her stomach starts to churn. She’s heard the stories, of course, but that’s all they were—stories. Witches’ equivalent of bedtime tales to keep children from skirting their chores, to keep them in line. Still, as she flips through the pages and pages or different amulets, gemstones, coins, she feels her heart start to skitter.
“Anyway,” Ted goes on, “guess I wasn’t as good at resealin’ stuff as I thought, ‘cause a couple hours later they ransacked my house. Henry was helpin’ out down at the pub, thank god, and a friend of mine tipped me off.” He sobers, looks down at his hands. “We barely got out.”
“And the Red Guard followed,” she says quietly.
He nods. “You know the rest,” he says, leaning back in the chair. “I just—I don’t get it. They went through my house like they were lookin’ for somethin’, like they thought I had somethin’.”
Rebecca’s fingers pause over a hastily sketched Egyptian coin.
“If the letter was sealed with magic, the king would know it had been tampered with, regardless of your skills.”
Ted frowns. “But there was nothin’ in it. It was just a letter.”
“Rupert doesn’t know that.”
Ted exhales slowly. “He thinks I took his dohickey?”
Rebecca glares again, but it’s short-lived as she considers what he’s said. “It’s possible. If the talismen was sent with the letter—”
“Then someone else got to it first.”
“And you’ll take the fall.”
Ted huffs, rubbing his chest absently. “Kinda already did.”
Rebecca shakes her head. “They’ll be back.”
“Why? Don’t they think I’m dead?”
“He’ll want proof. The king is methodical that way. Never a misstep, never a mistake. They’ll be back for your body, and for Henry.”
His neck snaps up. “Henry? He didn’t do anything.”
“They won’t care.” Off his look, she huffs. “How do you think he’s stayed in power for so long? No loose ends.”
Ted winces, looks toward the stairs, eyes bright in the glow of the fire.
“He’s in danger because of me.”
Rebecca purses her lips. He doesn’t need her agreement, and nothing she can say will comfort him.
He turns back to her with a wry laugh. “Don’t suppose you know any good hidin’ spells?”
Rebecca doesn’t answer, and Ted sighs, rubbing the back of his neck.
“Worth a shot.”
She knows, and she knows he knows, that he and Henry are fucked.
He’s not a fighter, not a thief—he can’t spend the rest of his life hiding in shadows. Rupert is too powerful. Those that support him will protect him, do anything to gain his favor; and those who don’t fear him far too much.
The neighboring kingdoms won’t protect him—they’re as terrified of Rupert as his own people. But maybe—
“There’s a port not far from here—three days on horseback, if you hurry. I know a man who could take you abroad.”
“Abroad? To where?”
She shrugs. “Wherever he’s going. He’s a bit…rough around the edges. But the only thing he hates more than being landlocked is the king. He’ll probably help you, in exchange for something.”
“I haven’t got much.”
“Leave that to me,” she says, and rises, means to return her teacup to the kitchen, to give herself a moment to think. But she forgets about the notebook, hears it fall to the floor.
Reaching down, she retrieves it, glances down at the open page, and freezes.
It’s a sketch, a poor rendering of a medallion, ancient words etched around its edges, a black stone in its center. She would recognize it anywhere from the stories her father told, late at night, a book open in his lap.
You’ll fill her head with nonsense, her mother used to scold, but she loved his stories, loved the way he’d tuck her in, the sound of his voice lulling her to sleep.
She never loved this story, though.
It frightened her, always, so terribly her mother insisted he stop telling it—it gave her nightmares.
“Rebecca?”
Ted’s voice is soft, worried.
She swallows.
“Where did you find this?”
He looks down to where she’s pointing.
“It was in a book in the king’s library. Perk of the job, I guess—go in there with enough armor and confidence and no one bats an eye.”
“What book?” she demands, and looks a bit chagrined.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t in English.”
“Shit,” she whispers, and before Ted can ask, she takes off, up the stairs, down the short hallway. With a wave of her hand, she removes the cloaking spell on the door at the end of the hall, hears Ted following after as she wrenches it open and climbs the stairs.
She’s already rifling through a large trunk when Ted appears behind her.
“This house only has two stories,” he says. “I saw it from the outside when I was gettin’ your flower.”
“Illusion spell,” she mutters, distracted, finding all sorts of odds and ends, but no books.
She waves a hand to put everything back, slamming the trunk shut as she moves on to the next.
“Wow,” Ted remarks, “You got a lotta stuff up here.”
Too much stuff, she thinks, and too little time.
With a frustrated wave, she opens all the trunks, their contents flying out—books and letters and manuscripts, old clothes, weapons, things she hasn’t seen or thought of in decades. They hover around for a moment, her eyes scanning frantically until she hears Ted’s,
“Is that a pink teddy bear?”
She glares, sends a small cloak flying into his face.
Ted grunts—“Right, got it, shutting up.”—and she ignores him as he wriggles out of the cloth.
It’s only a moment later he’s right over her shoulder.
“What’re you lookin’ for?”
“A book,” she snaps, and Ted looks around. Half the objects in the air are books.
“You got a lot of those.”
He’s right, of course, but she doesn’t agree—she sends everything else, teddy included, back into their trunks with a thud. Summoning the books, she lines them all up at eye level and higher, in neat rows going up to the ceiling. She mutters to herself as she scans their titles, flicking away the row when she’s finished, bringing the next closer.
They’re in various languages, some old, some modern, but the one she’s looking for is in French, her father’s native tongue. When she mutters this, Ted shrugs.
“Oh, I don’t speak French.”
“No shit.”
He shrugs, unfazed. “What color is it?” he asks, and she huffs.
“Black.”
All the books are black.
“Right.”
“It has a sword in the spine.”
“Sword,” he repeats, “Got it,” and then, barely a moment later, “That one?”
He points at a thick, battered volume way at the top, and she’s about to correct him when she sees the dusty, barely-visible gold sword below the title.
Ted shrugs at her surprise. “I’ve got good eyes.”
She huffs, but brings it down swiftly into her hands, turning the pages until she finds what she’s looking for—a footnote at the bottom, one of many throughout the text, barely three lines long.
She reads it, and her stomach clenches.
“Rebecca?”
“It was a story,” she says, her voice quiet. “It was just a story.”
“What was?”
For a moment, she hesitates. Telling him—she could put him in danger. She could put others in danger, if he isn’t who he says he is. Isn’t actually kind. She’s been decieved before, but when she looks up he’s so close, his breath ghosting over her shoulder as he leans in to look at the book. He seems to sense her gaze, turns to her with his wide eyes and there’s nothing there—no hint of ego or anger or self-righteousness. When she thinks back, she knows, Rupert always had that—always, behind the feigned compassioned, looked… unhappy. Cruel. His eyes flat and emotionless, always, even when he was smiling. She didn’t see it, didn’t want to see it, then, but Ted…
Ted’s eyes are warm, and deep, and there’s something in them, something she can’t name. Doesn’t recognize anymore.
She doesn’t know if she should trust him, but she does; and knowledge is power, so she takes a deep breath.
“No one knows how magic came to be,” she starts haltingly, eyes scanning the old, familiar words. “Some say it’s part of the earth itself, and we stole it, harnessed it for ourselves. Others say it came to us as a shooting star. That it crashed outside a small village, and all the women who touched the fallen rock suddenly had magic, and that magic grew, and was passed down by blood.”
She turns the page, shows him a large drawing of a shooting star, barreling towards the earth.
“Word spread, of course, and more and more women wanted magic. Some for good, some for evil. But people without it—men without it,” she corrects herself, “were—afraid. It wasn’t long before the village was raided, the people killed, the stone destroyed. They say only a piece of it survived, but that it lost all its magic.”
She glances over at Ted, watching her raptly.
“That stone was put in a talisman for safekeeping,” she continues, “hidden away by a witching family for generations. Thousands of years.”
She hears the echo of her father’s words in her voice.
“After a time, witches and men lived peacefully again. Intermarried, had children. Sometimes the magic would skip a generation, or twelve—some say it has a mind of its own. But then…”
She remembers her father, telling her of the Second War. How brutal, and bloody, the new king adamant no woman should have magic. Tells Ted the same.
“He tried to wipe us out. Unsuccessfully, at first—until he found the talisman. The witch he killed, she was holding it when she died, and her magic went back into the stone. The king discovered when he wore it, he could also do magic—the first man to ever do so. Very little, at first. But it was enough.”
Ted nods, his voice low. “He killed a lot of witches, didn’t he?”
“Almost all of us. Every time he killed a witch, her magic went into the stone, and it made him stronger. He decimated the land, took over countries, murdered—millions of people.” She purses her lips, breathes in sharply through her nose to keep her voice steady. “Eventually, a small coven was able to storm the castle. They were able to retrieve the talisman and kill the king, but by then—”
She doesn’t need to say it outloud.
“They decided to break the talisman, and split up, hiding each of the three sections in different corners of the world. Over time, it just… became legend. And then myth, and then nothing more than a bedtime story for young witches. I never thought—” She shakes her head. “I never thought it could be true.”
“Is it?”
She looks at him, can’t quite keep her hands from shaking. “That talisman you drew, it’s exactly what’s described here.” She points at the footnote. “If this is what the king is after, if it’s what he’s found—”
Ted’s eyes widen. “Then all those women…”
“Are as good as dead.”
She slams the book shut.
“There were little kids,” Ted says, almost a protest. “You don’t really think—”
“I think I’d rather not find out,” she says curtly, and turns on her heel, brings the book with her as she descends the stairs, barely waiting for Ted to follow before she seals it back up.
“We have to help them,” Ted says, following her back down into the living room. “If the king is kidnappin’ innocent women and kids to murder so he can have magic, we gotta stop him.”
Rebecca lets out a nearly hysterical laugh, her heart thundering in her chest. “Help them how? You can barely read!”
Ted huffs. “I can do other things.”
“Like what?”
“I dunno—talk? I’m good at talkin’, convincin’ people—we’re gonna need all the help we can get.”
She snorts. “You are going to get on a boat with your son,” she says, summoning a case, letting it fly open on the table as she directs her most important vials into the soft cushioning. “And I am going to get the hell out of here. There is no we.”
“We can’t just leave ‘em,” he insists, following her around as she sends various objects into a satchel, ducking when a book flies particularly close to his head. “They’re your people. Aren’t y’all like, a coven or—”
“My coven died long ago,” she snaps. “I don’t owe anyone anything.”
“It’s not about owe,” he says softly, but insistently. “It’s about doin’ the right thing. We may be the only people who know what he’s plannin’—if we turn a blind eye—”
“So what’s your plan, then?” she says, whirling to face him. “You can’t just show up and sweet talk the king into sudden mercy. You’re not a soldier. You have no fighting skills, no education, and no fucking idea what you’re up against.”
“You just told me what we’re up against.”
She bristles at his continued use of we.
“And yet, you seem to have no actual understanding of what’s about to happen.”
She pushes past him, snatches a blanket from her chair and rolls it up tight, needs something to do with her hands, some way to calm the thundering of her heart, her jagged thoughts.
Ted stands in the center of the room, his eyes burning into her profile, and if she were paying attention, she’d see the realization, slowly dawning.
“Rupert.”
Rebecca grits her teeth. “What about him?”
He shakes his head. “You called him Rupert earlier. When we were talkin’. You didn’t call him ‘the king.’”
She freezes, fingers gripping the soft wool. “So? That’s his name, isn’t it?”
“King Mannion, sure. But I’ve never heard anyone call him that. No one that didn’t know him personally, anyway.”
Rebecca swallows, glares down at her hands and wills them to stop shaking but they don’t. Her heart is slamming against her chest and her breathing feels labored and forced, and she stares hard at a spot on the floor, trying to focus. Trying to push the voice out of her head.
“You know him, don’t you?” Ted says quietly, interrupting her spiral, taking a few steps closer. “That’s why you’re so afraid.”
She glares at him. “I’m afraid because I’m not stupid.”
Ted doesn’t react to the insult, just keeps looking at her so, so gently. “What did he do to you?”
Rebecca stills.
She can still feel it—the biting iron around her wrists. The cold cell. Still wakes some nights, his voice in her head, whispered promises and betrayals. Still feels his touch, his leather gloves ghosting over her shoulder—
Still hears screaming.
She doesn’t know what shows on her face, but when she meets his gaze, Ted looks stricken.
“Rebecca—”
She jerks her head. “No,” she snarls, throwing the blanket onto the chair as she stalks toward him. “No, you don’t get to tell me what to do—I saved your life. I saved Henry’s. And now, because of you, I have to leave the only place I’ve ever felt at home, felt safe. I have to start over, again, because of you, so don’t you dare try to pity me into your fucking suicide mission—”
“Okay.”
“—or tell me how I should feel about the murder of my own people—”
“You’re right.”
“—or look at me like I’m some kind of—” She freezes, his words registering. “What?”
“You’re right,” he says softly, barely a hair’s breadth away from her. “You’re absolutely right. We—Henry and I—we brought a lotta trouble to your door, and instead of throwin’ us to the wolves, you gave us food and shelter and damn near brought me back from the dead. And don’t think I don’t know what that cost you, ‘cause you pretty much collapsed in my arms.”
Rebecca works her jaw, torn between stunned silence and the urge to correct him again.
But Ted just smiles at her, like he knows. “You’ve done enough, Rebecca,” he murmurs, with an honesty that makes her eyes burn. “And I’m mighty grateful for it.”
She blinks rapidly and eyes him warily. “That’s it? No cajoling? No grand speeches of persuasion?”
He stuffs his hands in his pockets. “That’s it,” he promises, and Rebecca deflates slightly, cannot, for the life of her, figure out why she’s just the slightest bit disappointed.
“Well. Good,” she says.
Ted looks at her almost fondly. “Good,” he repeats.
She doesn’t know why they’re standing so close. If she moved, even a little, they’d be chest to chest. His eyes are warm, tinged with sadness, but so, so kind she can hardly bear it. His smile fades away, replaced by something else, something she can’t name, and his breath ghosts over her cheek.
“Rebecca.”
She takes a step back, and whatever was building breaks.
“You should get some rest,” she says, when she catches her breath. “After nightfall, we’ll leave for the port. You can decide on the way what to do, but regardless, you’ll need supplies, and Roy can help.”
He nods, blinks rapidly before his expression eases.
“You’ll take us there?”
“It’s on my way,” she lies, but if Ted realizes, he doesn’t call her on it.
“I appreciate that,” he murmurs, his low voice making her shiver.
Get a fucking grip.
“You can take the bed with Henry. I have a few things to finish up.”
He takes it as the dismissal she intended. “You’ll be okay down here?”
“I’ll be fine.”
He nods. “Alright. I’ll see you in a couple hours, then.”
He sounds so sure, it almost breaks her heart. Rebecca nods stiffly, and he smiles again before disappearing up the stairs.
She stands motionless for a long while, staring vacantly at the place where he stood.