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~~ 1 ~~
Nicholas Benedict woke up to a face full of oatmeal.
Slowly, groggily, he pushed himself upright. A napkin was pressed into his hand before Nicholas could even think to grope for his own.
“Thanks,” he muttered.
Next to him, John made an indeterminate noise of acknowledgement and returned to his own oatmeal.
He swiped the napkin across his mouth and scrubbed at his eyes. Then he squinted at the sunlight dappling the wood of the breakfast table. It hadn’t shifted in the slightest. Usually he could use such clues—the patterns of sunlight, the drip of a candle—to gauge how long his most recent episode had lasted. But maybe—just maybe—well, John had been nothing if not pleasant to him …
Keeping his eyes fixed on the bowl in front of him, Nicholas cleared his throat and took the leap. “How long was I out?”
Silence.
Nicholas held out for only a few seconds before glancing over at John. The older boy was working on a mouthful of oatmeal. He chewed and swallowed before he answered Nicholas.
“Not long. Couple minutes.”
Couple minutes.
A couple minutes had been enough for the other children to notice. Snickers and tittering rippled through the room. Nicholas didn’t have to look to know it emanated from the Spiders.
Nicholas took a deep breath, raised his head to say something chirpy—the attention of the room was already pinned on him; why not make himself a spectacle on his terms?—when John gently knocked the back of his head down towards his bowl. Nicholas glanced over at him. He wore a tiny disapproving frown.
“Eat your oatmeal before it gets cold,” he muttered. Then, dipping his spoon into his own bowl once again, he added, “I hear Mr. Collum brought in the finest Parisian chefs to prepare it this morning. You wouldn’t want to miss out.”
Nicholas managed perhaps ten seconds of high-pitched dolphin snickering before his head slumped forward again.
This time, John was quick to catch him before he faceplanted into his oatmeal.
~~ 2 ~~
The smoke curling from the huffing train only stood out because it was denser than the mist clouding the sky behind it.
“You’ll write me, won’t you?” Nicholas Benedict asked.
Every day, Violet Hopefield signed, and he knew that she meant it.
He shifted the pack from one shoulder to another. It had taken Violet’s family a little longer to save up for her art school tuition than they’d expected—the settlement from the drill had certainly helped a great deal, but there had been lodgings and supplies and travel costs as well. And, oh, were there a great deal of required supplies. Violet was carrying her own satchel as well, stuffed to the brim with brushes and paint in a myriad of colors.
The train whistle blew, signaling its impending departure. Three minutes.
Violet nimbly hopped aboard. Through the smoke lingering on the platform Nicholas glimpsed her heave her satchel into the overhead compartment on the train. He let his own pack fall from his shoulder, passed it to Violet when she appeared in the doorway. She lofted the pack up too, then hopped back onto the platform for one last goodbye.
Train smoke, Nicholas chanted to himself. Train smoke, an opaque cloak—
Violet’s arms were warm and firm around his shoulders. Nicholas tucked his head on her chest before he went limp.
He woke to the sound of the train whistle squealing.
“How long?”
About three minutes, Violet signed, a smile and a shine in her eyes.
“About three min— Violet, the train was scheduled to depart in three—”
The train whistle squealed again.
Violet pressed a kiss to the top of his head, patted his cheek, then turned and leapt onto the carriage just as the wheels began to churn.
Nicholas waved from the platform.
(He tried not to dwell on the fact that he’d spent their last precious few minutes together asleep.)
~~ 3 ~~
He woke to sunlight, a sea breeze, and a fierce ache on the back of his head.
This was not uncommon for a Navy sailor with narcolepsy—though, Nicholas supposed that to be a Navy sailor with narcolepsy was uncommon even in itself.
Without opening his eyes, he made a questioning little hum. No need to ask the full question.
He was met with silence.
He popped one eye open and glanced sideways, squinting against the sun.
Even in the warm golden light, Phil’s face was stark white.
“You could have,” he gasped, then put a hand to his chest. “I wasn’t paying attention—you could have fallen—”
Far, far below the westernmost wall at St. George’s castle, the grass rolled to the bustling streets of Lisbon, and to the still more bustling harbor beyond.
“Just my luck I didn’t fall forward, then,” Nicholas said lightly. His knuckles grazed the fast-rising knot on the back of his head. “How long was I out?” he asked, hoping to prompt their usual routine.
“Felt like ages,” Phil said, still gasping. “I kept playing it in my mind—you, plummeting limp to the ground below …” He gathered himself enough to check his watch. Then he frowned, a little sheepish. “Oh. Thirty seconds.”
“Good. I didn’t keep you waiting too long,” Nicholas hummed, pushing his weight onto his forearms and heaving himself into a sitting position. “Although what a view to wait with!”
Phil’s hand shot out to press onto Nicholas’s chest, pushing him back a little, farther away from the edge. “Is that what set you off?”
“The view?” Nicholas nodded, a little smile playing on his lips. He reached for words—for obscure adjectives, tucked deep in the dictionary, hidden on the highest shelf of the library. All of them failed him. “It’s beautiful.”
“Aye,” Phil agreed. “Aye, it is.”
But never once did he take his eyes from Nicholas until they were safely back on the ground.
~~ 4 ~~
“I eat more than other children,” the girl told him, once she’d primly settled atop a stool in the dining room. “Sometimes I require a snack every fifteen minutes or so.”
“Noted,” said Mr. Benedict, and opened the pantry.
He returned to the table with a bowl of gleaming red apples and set it down in front of the girl.
“That’s it?”
Mr. Benedict glanced up. The girl met his gaze with a challenge in her eyes—the look she’d had when she marched up to his desk in the Monk Building during this morning’s test, straightening her crisp yellow overalls as she went, and demanded he refer to her only as Number Two.
(He’d nodded and obliged right away. And Mr. Benedict knew that he’d passed her test, just as she had passed all of his.)
“No, I was planning on preparing a more substantial meal, if you’d be amenable,” Mr. Benedict replied. “The apples were just to hold you over until—”
“I wasn’t referring to the apples,” Number Two cut in. “That’s all you have to say about my eating habits?”
Oh dear. Nicholas had long known that there were some things that could simply never be taught from a book. Being responsible for the well-being of a child, apparently, was one of them.
“ … Do you have any allergies?” he ventured quizzically.
Number Two stared at him for a long moment. “You really do believe me,” she said, as if she could scarcely believe it herself.
“About your dietary needs?”
“Don’t you think I’m making it up to get more food than I need?”
Mr. Benedict blinked. “Number Two, you will always have as much food as you want here, regardless of how much you actually need. I trust you aren’t the type to gorge on sweets for every single meal.” Here he frowned, not wanting to ask the question but knowing he needed the answer. “Do adults usually not believe you?”
Number Two shrugged. It was a little too stiff to be casual, as if she had never really shrugged before but had witnessed enough people do it to make a passable first attempt. “They did. After a few days.”
“After a few—”
“I got passed around a lot,” she continued, fiddling with the straps of her overalls. “From orphanage to orphanage.”
The luggage he used to carry each time he was moved was brown. He wondered if her bags were yellow, or if they were a dull standard color too, secondhand.
“Funds were usually tight,” Number Two said. “Orphanage directors don’t want to hear that they have more mouths to feed, especially not that certain mouths require more food.” She shrugged again. It looked a bit more natural this time. “They usually figured out I wasn’t lying pretty quickly, right about when I started getting dizzy—”
Mr. Benedict’s vision swam before his eyes. Perhaps it was contagious.
“Oh, dear,” he said, weakly, pulling out a stool. “Oh, child, I think I might—help yourself to an apple while I’m—”
He was out like a light before he could manage another word.
When he next opened his eyes, the dark wood of the tabletop greeted him, as it had many times before. Mr. Benedict groaned and pushed himself upright, ran a hand through his hair, and reached for the pocket watch in his waistcoat—
“Twenty-two seconds.”
He blinked.
“You were out for twenty-two seconds,” Number Two repeated, in a tone entirely too brusque for a child of her age.
“So I was,” he sighed. It had been several years since he’d had someone by his side to announce the time. Another change he’d need to re-adjust to, if Number Two agreed to stay in his home.
He resettled his spectacles and tilted his head at the girl. “You didn’t take an apple?”
She produced an apple core from her fist. So thoroughly had the fruit’s flesh been bitten off that it looked as though ants had picked it clean.
“You said I was out for twenty-two seconds?”
Number Two gave a tight nod.
“Hm,” said Mr. Benedict. Then he waved a hand at the bowl. “Take another apple.”
~~ 5 ~~
“No, you won’t be able to contact Miss Perumal again.”
With this pronouncement, Reynie’s hopeful expression slipped off of his face and plopped onto the carpet of Mr. Benedict’s study.
That settled uneasy on his shoulders. He’d always been one for nurturing hope even when it seemed most foolish, for blowing on the spark in cupped hands and feeding kindling into the feeble fire.
They’d needed hope over the last few years. They’d need a great deal more of it in the coming days.
And so he tried to pass this flame to Reynie.
Every mission needed an end. Every knight needed a home to return to. He had no doubt that Reynie—like all of the children—was capable of extraordinary things—if only there was a promise giving him strength.
You’ll see her again without a doubt, is what he wanted to tell the child.
“I am sorry, Reynie,” Mr. Benedict said, and hated how his voice quavered.
Reynie stared steadfast at a spot high on the wall, unseeing. He breathed once, hard, and swiped at his eyes.
There was no other way, insisted a very Number Two-sounding voice in his head. You’ve exhausted every other option. You need to rely on children. There is no other way.
Lean backwards, insisted that same voice as he plummeted, limp, into his chair.
When Mr. Benedict awoke, he perceived at once that Reynie was on the verge of making a tactful retreat from his study. He laid a hand on the boy’s arm to stop him.
“Forgive me,” he sighed. “Please stay just a moment longer. I wanted to ask you something. I wasn’t asleep long, was I? I trust I haven’t kept you up?”
Reynie lifted his chin in a very grown-up like manner. He resisted an urge to tousle the boy’s hair.
“No, sir, only a minute or two.”
“Ah, good.”
He resettled his spectacles.
Then Mr. Benedict turned his mind to another gift, another flame he wished to pass to Reynie—one of riddles, of self-doubted decisions, and of chess.
~~ 6 ~~
By the time he awoke, Constance had already found the candy jar. He’d have to ask Rhonda to find a new hiding spot.
He rubbed his temples, the ghost of a smile still stretching across his lips. Goodness, the girl’s tongue could peel paint off the walls.
Good thing she was here, then, in Mr. Benedict’s home. The walls needed repainting.
“Mind that you save room for lunch, my dear,” he chastised. She pulled the lollipop out of her mouth and stuck her bright red tongue out at him. “I hope I wasn’t asleep long?”
Constance squinted over his shoulder for a few heartbeats. Then, “Seventy-five minutes?”
Mr. Benedict blinked. The sunlight dappling the dining room table scarcely seemed to have moved an inch.
Constance frowned over his shoulder at the dining room clock, eyes narrowed in concentration. Mr. Benedict didn’t need to be a child psychic to know what she was thinking: Which hand was the minute hand, again?
Her frown darkened into a scowl.
“Never mind,” Mr. Benedict said quickly. He reached across the table and swiped a butterscotch candy from the jar clutched in Constance’s pudgy fists. “Never mind, my dear. I wasn’t out long enough for you to eat the entire contents of the candy jar, and that’s all that matters.”
Constance rolled her eyes at him and clumsily ripped open a peppermint.
~~ +1 ~~
The imaginary chess board lay stretched between the two brothers. Although like his twin he had no trouble remembering the position of the many moving pieces, Nicholas still preferred to use a real, physical chess board. It made the game more present, less idle, somehow. But Ledroptha deemed it foolish and inefficient. And he was here for Ledroptha, not for himself.
His twin snored away in the metal chair behind the bars separating them.
The argument had been one of the worst yet. He had half a mind to apologize, once Ledroptha awoke … but nothing he had said aloud had been untrue. Perhaps he could have put it a bit kinder. But then, perhaps Ledroptha would not listen to a word he had said, if it had been kind.
Ledroptha snorted, sputtered. Shot bolt upright.
His expression closed off after a few precious moments of eye contact.
An ugly sneer curled on his lip. He checked one wrist, blinked, checked the other, before frowning at himself. His watch had been confiscated when he’d been taken into custody—deemed too dangerous, despite the fact that it wasn’t a cleverly disguised weapon.
Grumbling, he twisted and turned to look behind himself at the alarm clock glowing at his bedside—
“Five minutes,” Nicholas said, like an offering.
Ledroptha turned back to him. He looked more lost than Nicholas had ever seen him. “What?”
“Five minutes. You were asleep for five minutes.”
Ledroptha snarled at him.
Nicholas chose to ignore that. Waving a hand at the imaginary chess board between them, he asked, “Shall we?”
Ledroptha’s snarl deepened. Evidently he wasn’t in the mood to simply let the argument blow over.
Nicholas sighed and rose from his chair. “I’ll be back in a week or so.”
“You’re wasting your time, Benedict,” Ledroptha hissed. “You’re wasting everyone’s time.”
And yet you agree to see me when I visit, Nicholas mused.
He held up a small container he’d settled under his chair. “I brought you some banana bread. Would you like me to pass it through the bars now, or leave it with the guard?”
“I don’t want it,” he snapped. “I won’t eat it.”
“I know, Ledroptha,” Nicholas said softly. "I know."
He’d leave it anyway.