linda had not ant to be awake.
She had every intention of sleeping. She’d even gone through the motions — changed out of her dress, let her hair down, lay in the bed that still slled faintly of unfamiliar wood and cold stone. But sowhere between closing her eyes and actual sleep, her body had simply... declined to follow through.
It had been happening more frequently over the past week. Not insomnia, exactly. It was less like lying awake and more like her mind had decided it no longer needed the dark interval. She would close her eyes and instead of drifting she would simply... wait. Aware. Her senses filtering through the fortress walls as if the stone were gauze.
She could hear the lake. Specifically, she could hear each individual ripple where the wind touched it, and beneath that the slow, almost geological movent of water against the fortress foundations. She could hear Thar’s breathing two floors below, steady as a blacksmith’s bellows. She could hear the pink spiders in the dungeon beneath, their psychic chatter a low ambient hum like distant music in another room.
She could hear Jack’s footsteps on the bridge. Even before the gate opened she knew his gait — asured, unhurried, the slight asymtry from favouring the cane side.
linda sat up, pushed the blanket aside, and went to the window.
The courtyard below was empty except for two guards she didn’t recognise yet, both doing their level best to look alert in the cold. Jack crossed beneath her without looking up. He had that quality, sotis, of moving through spaces as though the space had been arranged for him personally.
She watched him disappear through the main hall entrance and listened to the sound of his boots on the stone stairs. Third floor. The study. She’d known before he turned the handle.
linda sat back down on the bed’s edge and looked at her hands.
The rings were there — gold and silver, lifted from Leon’s very enthusiastic collection — catching the candlelight in small precise gleams. But it wasn’t the rings she was looking at. It was the skin beneath them. The slight luminescence that hadn’t been there a month ago. The faint blue-white quality to her veins when the light was low, like sothing cold and clear was running through her instead of blood.
She pressed two fingers to the side of her own neck, the way Jack sotis did before he fed. She could feel her own pulse. Slow. Slower than it used to be. Steady as the lake.
’I wonder,’ she thought, ’if this is what he felt when he first arrived. Everything slightly too vivid. The world coming in at the wrong volu.’
She stood, retrieved her cloak from the chair, and decided she might as well do sothing useful.
* * *
The study had been Jack’s idea and Thar’s construction project. It occupied the tower’s third floor and was accessible by a narrow stair that Thar himself barely fit through sideways. The half-orc had spent two days reinforcing the floor joists before Jack would allow any of Leon’s confiscated furniture inside. Now it held a desk, three bookshelves of varying quality, and a disturbing quantity of stone slabs covered in Jack’s handwriting — or rather, in Automatic Writing’s handwriting, which was technically Jack’s but with an uncanny tidiness that suggested the spell had opinions about presentation.
He was at the desk when linda arrived, one hand resting on the surface while the Automatic Writing quill worked steadily in the air beside him. He didn’t look up.
"You should be sleeping."
"You should be sleeping," she replied, pulling the second chair to the desk’s corner and sitting in it with the practiced ease of soone who had stopped asking permission weeks ago. "How did it go?"
Jack’s hand moved and the quill paused, hovering. He had a habit of thinking through his fingers — when his hand stilled, his mind was working.
"Six birds. Courier access. Intelligence from the other side of the mountains." He tapped the desk once. "In exchange for providing House Ravenhall with condemned criminals for their ritual, and keeping knowledge of said ritual to myself."
linda processed this. "What ritual?"
Jack explained the Aurel binding in the sa tone he used to explain most things — as though the information had always existed and he was simply returning it to circulation. linda listened without interrupting. By the ti he finished she had her elbows on the desk and her chin in her hands, which he occasionally found endearing and occasionally found irritating. Tonight seed to be the forr.
"So we’re running a prison system now," she said, "so that a Veranthos baron can feed criminals to his ancient bird-people."
"When you phrase it that way it sounds bad."
"How would you phrase it?"
"We’re leveraging Blackthorn’s justice system to create a surplus of high-value diplomatic assets while simultaneously securing our only communication line to the central continent." He picked up his pen and tapped it against the desk. "The criminals are a byproduct."
linda considered this. "What happens to the criminals after the ritual?"
A pause. "Kieran wasn’t specific."
"Maybe be specific next ti."
Jack looked at her sidelong. She t his red eyes without flinching. This too was different from a month ago — not that she’d been afraid of him, precisely, but there had been a calibration period between fear and comfort, and sowhere in the last few weeks she had stopped calibrating and simply... arrived.
"Noted," he said, and wrote sothing down.
She watched the quill resu its work. It was cataloguing, she thought — the details of the compact, compressed into whatever organisational system Jack’s mind ran on. She had looked at the stone slabs once. They were arranged by type of threat, ti horizon, and sothing he called "defeat potential," which she had understood imdiately and found vaguely horrifying.
"Tell sothing," she said.
"Specifically?"
"The birds. Six of them. What are you going to use them for, really? Not the courier line answer. The real answer."
The quill stopped. Jack set the pen down.
He was quiet for long enough that the fire settled and the lake sounded closer. Then he said, "There’s a city called Icrilis. It floats. Archmages from across the central continent convene there once a year to share research and eat food that costs more than Blackthorn’s entire annual output." He looked at the window, at the dark rectangle of night beyond it. "I need to be at the next one."
linda sat up slightly. "The floating city. I read about it once, at the university library. They said the lift chanism was—"
"Six interlocking arrays of space-affinity mana anchored to ley line intersections, yes."
"I was going to say ’impressive.’"
"It’s that too." He turned from the window. "The Mage Tower can get an invitation. Master Gray will push for it if I give him sothing worth publishing under his na. The birds an I can correspond with contacts in Icrilis before I arrive, so I don’t walk in blind."
"What contacts? You don’t have any."
"I will by sumr."
She studied him. The firelight made the angles of his face severe in a way that daylight softened. He looked, in this mont, more like the original Damien Nightshade must have looked — the vampire prince who had grown up in the dark eating history and calling it dinner. Less like the person she’d been watching slowly, grudgingly develop preferences for comfortable chairs and dry wit.
She didn’t say this. Instead she said, "You’re planning to leave."
"Eventually."
"And Blackthorn?"
"Will function without . That’s the point of building infrastructure." He looked at her steadily. "And Zero. And the marquess’s army camped outside. And Leon, such as he is."
"And ?"
The question sat on the table between them without embarrassnt. She had earned that much — the right to ask things plainly.
Jack said, "You’ll co with ." As though it were the most obvious conclusion in the world. As though the alternative hadn’t occurred to him as a possibility worth considering.
linda looked back at her rings.
"Your water magic," Jack said, returning to the slabs. "How is it?"
The shift was deliberate. She recognised it — he moved away from personal territory the way he moved through a room, efficiently and without announcent. She let him.
"Better," she said. "I held a column of water for nearly an hour this morning before it destabilised. And I’ve been practising temperature control." She hesitated. "Thar says if I can maintain sub-zero temperatures across a sustained body of water, the ice affinity will start to manifest naturally."
Jack’s quill paused again. "Thar said that."
"Apparently orcs have a tradition of elental progression theory. Sothing about mountain winters."
"Hm." He made a note. "Don’t let him take credit when it works."
She smiled despite herself. "I’ll try."
They sat in companionable silence for a while — Jack writing, the quill writing, the fire breathing its slow breath. It was, linda thought, a strange kind of normal. The sort that grew in unlikely places, like weeds through flagstone. She hadn’t expected it. She’d expected fear, calculation, survival arithtic. Not this.
Not whatever this was.
* * *
In the dungeon below the fortress, the pink spiders were having a eting.
This was not unusual. They had etings with so regularity, conducted entirely through the low-frequency psychic hum that served as their native language. What was unusual was the agenda.
Julius, whose iron sword was propped against the cavern wall with ceremonial care, was making his case. The hum he produced had a specific cadence that, rendered into approximate human terms, conveyed sothing like: ’The black plant has agreed to a resource-sharing arrangent. We provide small bones from dungeon kills. It provides anchor points for web installation in the upper galleries. This is advantageous for colony expansion.’
The spider in the top hat conveyed sothing like: ’What does the plant get from bones?’
Julius conveyed sothing like: ’It likes the calcium. Also I think it’s just lonely.’
A long pause in the psychic hum. Then the spider with the blue bowtie conveyed sothing like: ’Does Papa know about this?’
Julius considered. Then he conveyed sothing like: ’Papa will find out eventually. That is different from Papa knowing.’
The eting continued.
Several floors above them, the candle in the study tower burned until dawn. The quill never stopped moving.
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