April 1070

You know, the first two days of April, part of me hoped that Lucille could somehow manage to reel Robert in and I could chalk the whole go-to-vampire-France talk up to being an April Fools' joke. But opening my front door on the third day to find Lucille standing there along with Tim and a serious expression put paid to that.

"Bad news?" I asked.

"Very," she said.

"Of course. Well, seeing as you're here in person…" I stepped back and waved for them to enter.

"Not going to welcome us in?" Tim asked.

"As a general rule I'm rather picky about who I verbally invite past a threshold," I said. "So?"

They folded. Once we were all sat around my dining table, I asked, "Just to make sure, you're here about the trip to Mortain, right?"

"Yes. Why, is there any other impending catastrophe I should be aware of?" Lucille asked.

"No. Just a little surprised you didn't talk him around," I said.

"How could I, when you've practically barred me from using my Hunger?" she asked archly.

I blinked, her response throwing me off. I mean, yeah, I'd basically told her to stop feeding off and controlling people, and she seemed to do that, but I just hadn't really expected her to do it completely, go cold turkey.

It surprised me. And it rather changed the tone of my offer.

"I… uhm, okay," I said intelligently. Looking for a change of topics, I glanced at Tim. "What are you aiming for, if your father shows up? Both of you?"

The siblings both grew still, and by the heightening tension it was obvious this was something of a sore point.

"Whatever my sister decides, I'm with her," Tim said. The words and phrasing sounded rehearsed, but the tone sounded earnest, genuine.

I looked over at Lucille.

"I want him dead," she said. "I will accept any arrangement that keeps him and his influence far away from me."

I nodded and crossed my arms. "Okay. Well, here's what I can offer. If your father shows up, I'll meet with him. And then I'll tell him that you're under my protection and to fuck off, politely. But unless he seriously pisses me off, or genuinely threatens my life, I'm not killing him."

Lucille did not seem happy about that, at all. She had the kind of expression that you'd shoot someone who told you to "be reasonable" over something completely unreasonable, like pineapple on pizza. I'd probably shot Sanya and Michael the same look when standing over a gloating Cassius. It felt weird being on the receiving end of one of those glares.

Finally, she forced out a quick, "Fine."

I flipped my palms towards her before settling them back into the crooks of my arms. "Okay. How do you think your father is going to show up?"

"Grandly. He always seemed to enjoy attention," Lucille said, venom seeping into her tone.

"Do you think he'll be there when we arrive? In Mortain, or Maine?" I asked.

"Mortain, no," she said, starting to shake her head only to pause. "Or… unlikely. I suppose he could have agents here, watching us, but unless Robert tells everyone right away… no, there likely isn't enough time for him to hear and arrive. Maine seems more likely. Why do you ask?"

"I'm trying to figure out how much time I have to prepare," I said. And how long I would have to wait; for example, if I wanted to brew a set of escape potions, I'd need to do that a few days before the meeting at best, ideally a day before. And if I didn't know when that was going to happen, that was a problem.

Also, I needed to work out some way of veiling or otherwise concealing or protecting Elfleda, just as a backup. The blending potion was a good start, but it definitely wasn't a one-size-fits-all solution.

"Besides that, Timothy," I was getting better at adding the other bits on to Tim, even as I Anglicized the pronunciation, "I need a practice partner."

"For what?" he asked guardedly.

"Swordfighting," I said, pointing to where my Warden sword sat sheathed. "I've used that sword exactly one time in the past year and that wasn't even a real fight. If I'm potentially going to be fighting a vampire, or multiple, I want practice. And I also need someone I could use magic against."

"You could pick any of the guards to do that. They spin the wildest tales about you," Tim said.

"None of them are vampires. And there's a pretty big gulf between thinking and joking that I'm a wizard and actually facing me down," I said.

Tim sighed, hummed under his breath for a few moments, then sighed again. "Very well. The opportunity to hit you does appeal to me, I must admit."

"Haha," I said dryly. "Meet up four hours after noon by the north gate, then go find somewhere relatively private to practice, by the edge of the woods?"

"That works," he said. "Starting today?"

I turned around and looked out the windows that opened into the main room, trying to judge the time. I'd canceled lessons for today since I didn't know when the Renouths would arrive, and I'd eaten lunch, which meant that it was sometime after noon. Beyond that, I didn't know.

I shrugged and turned back to Tim. "Why not?"

It took the better part of an hour to sort things out, mostly on Tim's end – grabbing blunted swords and armor and all that – though there was also a moderately lengthy period of walking and searching. Nothing really interesting happened in that time so I'll just say we crested the edge of the woods, found a small grove set into the tree line like the gap in a C, and skip to the interesting bit:

"Have you ever actually fought before?" Tim asked skeptically. "With a weapon, I mean."

"Yeah. With my staff, mostly," I said. And guns, but, well, the closest I could get to that was a crossbow, and those took two hands. I guess I could try a hand crossbow, but I don't think anyone really made those, so getting one would probably be expensive and difficult. Not to mention rather pointless and you know what let me just move past this tangent. "Why do you ask?"

Tim pursed his lips. "To put it simply, you look like an idiot."

I looked down at what I was holding: staff in my right hand, sword in my left. It was a practice sword rather than my Warden sword, so it was a bit heavier and a bit smaller. "What do you mean?"

Tim sighed and said, "Why don't I demonstrate." Then he took his sword in his left hand, put his right behind his back, and came at me swinging.

I lost. I uh, don't really feel the need to go into any more detail than that.

"What is your coat even made of?" Tim asked once he was done demonstrating.

"Leather," I said. "It's just enchanted. What, did you think I wear this every day just because it looks cool?"

"Cool?" he asked, confused.

"Fashionable, I guess."

Tim gave me a skeptical look. "You have a very… interesting sense of fashion. Though I suppose it works for you."

"What do you mean by that?" I asked.

"Your paramour. But she's neither here nor there," Tim said. "Your weapons. I've never fought someone with a staff before but I can imagine the uses of wielding one with a two-handed grip, particularly if it is durable enough to not chip or break when blocking steel. And your sword is strong and seems well-suited for you. But together…" He shook his head. "You're using a sword in what I assume is your unpracticed off-hand, and you're wielding a staff almost as large as you are with one hand. Your form is awkward and awful and the only reason it isn't completely useless is because you have reach."

"That's why we're here practicing," I said, a little peeved.

"Practice is the work of months and years of dedication and effort. What do you actually hope to accomplish in two weeks?" he asked.

"Get some idea of how to fight someone like you while mixing in magic," I said.

"As I just saw, you didn't get the opportunity."

"Yeah, yeah, just wait a minute," I said, setting the practice sword down on the ground and looking at my staff.

Okay, so maybe I'd overestimated the viability of the Gandalf setup. I mean it could probably work but Gandalf was a… probably fictional demigod and I wasn't. And if I didn't have a magic sword on hand – technically two – I wouldn't be bothering with swords and would just stick to my staff. But I had swords that could be useful in different situations, and I needed my staff as a focus. So how to make this work?

"What is your sword even made of, anyway?" Tim asked. "It looks to be a very polished steel."

"Silver, actually," I replied.

"Silver," Tim said flatly. "And it broke my sword."

"It's magic. Duh."

He sighed. "Of course it is." He stepped back a little and started twirling his sword, simultaneously showing off and passing the time. "Why do you wish to use it? Especially with your left hand? Why not just stick with the staff?"

I didn't want to bring up Amoracchius, which was most of the reason I'd suggested this kind of practice to begin with. Instead, I said, "It's got abilities I find useful I can't replicate myself. The rest is personal. As to why the left hand, I need to hold my staff in my right hand."

"And why is that?"

"Because of the way magic is circulated," I said. "It comes in through the left and comes out through the right. If I switched my staff around that would make it useless. So it needs to stay in my right hand."

"And whatever your sword does is so important you simply must cripple yourself like this, despite the fact you did not bring it against the demon-bear?" Tim asked.

"Yes."

Tim rolled his eyes and let out a long-suffering sigh.

My main problem, as Tim had so eloquently pointed out to me, was that my arrangement was awkward. Well, there was also the inexperience, but there wasn't an easy way to solve that problem. Somehow, I needed to make it practical to wield a staff I couldn't really use defensively while using a sword I'd rarely really practiced with in my left hand.

I looked down from my staff to where my shield bracelet hung, just inside the sleeve of my duster.

Some people, I'm sure, may have questioned the efficacy of putting my shield bracelet on my left hand. Magic comes in through the left hand and comes out through the right, so surely that means the shield bracelet shouldn't work, right?

Well, no. It's true that magic mostly comes out through the right hand, but there's the key word: mostly. Wizards can do plenty of magic with their voice, for example, and I'd seen Morgan just use his foot, and some kinds of magic didn't technically require any physical medium at all. Hell, I'd even seen Luccio melt about thirty zombies with a needle of fire cast from her left hand; if that wasn't proof enough nothing would be. Magic isn't like a revolver, where you have to load bullets into the cylinder and fire them out of the barrel. It's more... fluid. But not necessarily efficient.

In a way, the left hand/right hand dynamic was a bit like a focus. It was real, it provided tangible benefits, made things easier, but if you had the will and conception and power, you could sidestep it. But I wasn't that experienced yet, and I didn't have the months to years it would take to get over that stumbling block.

But, while it might've been more effective initially to put the shield bracelet on the left hand, I hadn't for two very important reasons: because there is a strong association between using your left hand for defense, to hold a shield, which compensated for the initial inefficiency, and more importantly, to keep my right hand free. But if I was going to make this awkward style that even Luccio and Morgan generally didn't bother with work, I needed to make some compromises.

Now, if I held my sword in my left hand, I could either use the sword, or project a shield; not both. Which obviously was a bad thing, because as Tim had shown me, I really needed my shield to survive more than two seconds against a serious opponent with this setup.

So, I took my shield bracelet off my left hand, and put it on my right. I knew it would make it weaker for the first stretch, as I stepped away from the "shield on the left" belief, but I guess I had two to four weeks to figure out how to address that.

Tim arched an eyebrow at the switch, and it climbed higher when I bent down, picked up the practice sword again, and assumed a stance like a Roman soldier – holding my sword like I was going to thrust, and my staff like it was a shield.

"You look, somehow, even more of an idiot like that," Tim said.

"Just come at me," I said.

Our second exchange lasted as long as our first, but only because Tim backed up after his sword slid off my blue shield.

"That does change things," he allowed. "Though how long can you maintain that?"

"About… two to three hours just on its own," I said, doing some quick mental math. "Maybe five, ten, fifteen minutes if you hit me repeatedly, depending on how hard."

My shield, now that I thought about it, was probably really, obscenely good by current day standards. Most wizards and practitioners today probably only had to defend themselves against the ornery lower Fae, minor supernatural creatures, people with swords and spears, wild animals, and so on. And since those just didn't take that much energy to block, there probably wasn't much of an impetus to constantly improve a shield.

But I'd cut my teeth on loup-garou, vampires, Fallen, various magical heavyweights, and the almighty machine gun. I'd had to push and push the limits of what I could withstand with a shield just to stay alive.

Blocking the comparatively slow swings of a sword that came at me maybe twice a second at best was trivial compared to that.

Tim hummed thoughtfully, looking over my shield. "Then I suppose there are two questions. Can you avoid getting outflanked, and can you actually manage to land a hit."

I brought the practice sword back up. "Let's see."

We went back and forth for about ten minutes. It became clear very early on that Tim was just too fast for me to properly hit him, which boded poorly against any vampire that actually started drawing on their Hunger. My size gave me an advantage in pursuing Tim and keeping the pressure on, but an extra foot of height and the additional stride it gave me would mean little when a vampire decided it wanted to try being Usain Bolt for a bit. So I started mixing in small amounts of kinetomancy and aeromancy, pushing and pulling and nudging Tim off balance. And then I stopped.

Sure, it was nice to confirm that I could do the Jedi trick of moving people around, but against the kind of enemies I actually might use sword-and-staff against, small bits of magic weren't going to do much. I needed to get to the point where I could actually hit someone with my sword, because if I could get someone with my magic I'd already won against most opponents.

After that first set of proper sparring, we broke apart, and I took out a waterskin and chugged. Tim, the bastard, didn't even look fazed.

"What's your opinion on your father?" I asked. "Actually. You seemed to be holding something back when I talked with your sister."

"Lucille is… far more bitter about what we are. And understandably so," he said.

"And you're not."

"Not particularly," he said.

I almost asked him about the first woman he had to have killed. Almost. But then I thought of Thomas, and how there was basically no point blaming Thomas, Tim, or Lucille for their first kills. No one told them they were going to be a praying mantis the first time around.

"So you just don't care?" I asked instead.

"I do not particularly like my father, but I don't hate him the way Lucille does. Nor do I have any issue with what I am," he said. "Though, I must say I am not particularly interested in getting involved with whatever schemes he may be working on."

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because it all just seems so pointless and risky," Tim said. "He's Constable of France, good for him. He's the third one, and both prior Constables only held their post for a few years. He must worry about his position within both the mortal courts and the White Court, maneuver and plot and scheme, be wary and deceitful and manipulative. And what does he get out of all that effort? More power, which he uses to accumulate more power?" He shook his head. "No, I've come to rather enjoy the life of a wandering sword. I get wine, women, and wealth in exchange for using my blade, which I am very good at. I don't face foes that realize the difficulty of killing me, I don't have to worry about getting scarred or maimed or crippled, there's little risk in anything I do. Why would I give that up?"

"That simple, huh?"

"Why make it more complicated?" he asked with a shrug.

"What about your sister, then?"

"She's my sister," Tim said simply. "I should look after her in place of my father, no?"

There wasn't anything to say in response to that, so we got back to sparring.

Tim's responses were interesting, assuming they were true. He was still being a vampire, still being a predator. But for the standards of the time, he wasn't being that bad, assuming he wasn't leaving a string of corpses or thralls wherever he went.

During our second break, I asked, "You know, I've been wondering for a while now: how did you end up doing the tax rounds? Seems like a bit of a boring job."

"Are you talking about how we met?" Tim asked.

"Yeah."

"Well, you're right, it is a boring job. A necessary one, but boring. I was never interested in it and it was easy to avoid being saddled with that task. But that time… that time I volunteered."

"Why?" I asked. "Did you have a change of heart?"

"Not before, no," Tim said. "After… perhaps. No, it was because I was rejected."

I furrowed my brow. "What?"

"Your paramour, Elfleda," Tim elaborated. "She and Lucille have been having their little courtly spats and intrigues for a while now, and since that was one of the only things my sister seemed to take actual interest in, I never really pursued Elfleda. No point in cutting the game short, you know. But she was there, and the years went by, and I worked my way through the rest of the ladies, so I got curious. And got rejected, soundly. Which was new, I admit. Oh, I've gotten demure responses and polite initial denials, but never a complete lack of interest. Which just made me more curious. And so we went a few times until a very public and somewhat humiliating rejection. I considered… a few options, and finally decided to distance myself for a little while and see who else was out there, around Berkhamsted."

"Which led you to flirt with Hilda and Eva," I said.

"I can't help it if women show interest in me, wizard."

"No, but you don't have to flaunt and reciprocate in front of everyone either, including father and son."

"Are you still upset about that? Nothing happened."

"Yeah, partly because of me," I said. "Who knows what Eadric would've done if I wasn't around to consult."

"He would've humiliated himself, that's what would've happened," Tim said.

"Maybe. Still would've been very messy."

"Perhaps," Tim allowed. "Though I'll note that you seem to have told almost everyone in your little circle about who and what I am and nothing has happened, so you may be over-exaggerating."

I frowned. "What?"

"Please, I'm not blind. Hilda went from eyeing me favorably to looking at me fearfully, Eadric, well, he scowled harder, and Eva can't seem to sort out what she wants to feel about me. Elfleda is much better at hiding it, enough that I can't really be sure, but it seems rather reasonable that if you told Eva then you would have told Elfleda. Really, the only one in your group who doesn't seem to know is Cuthbert."

"Does Lucille know?" I asked in a serious tone.

"No. Or at least, I haven't told her. She might've taken things poorly initially, and since then it just hasn't seemed important. You haven't told the earl, after all, or if you have he hasn't believed you. So far the secret's been preserved, which is what I really care about, and at this point the secret coming out would be almost equally as damaging to all of us. So why worry her about it?"

I looked at Tim, eyes slightly narrowed, and drummed my fingers against my staff. "I think," I said after a minute, "that you should tell her."

Tim's eyebrows shot all the way up to his forehead like a surprised deer. "I'm sorry?"

"If you're as observant as you say you are, you can't have missed the trust issues she has with you," I said. "And if she learns you've been keeping secrets from her, and not the minor, personal kind either, I really don't think she would take it well."

"And how do you know that?" Tim asked, a slight edge to his voice.

"Because I saw her soul," I said bluntly. "The core of her being. She's cold and bitter because she feels she's been betrayed by everyone. You want to contribute to that?"

"…no."

"Then tell her," I said. "And if you're worried about her reaction, well, to paraphrase what you said, we're all in the same boat." I frowned slightly. "Maybe even literally so."

Author's Note: Harry's got a lot of intense, personal experience when it comes to people springing unpleasant secrets on him.