QUEEN OF RUIN
Longueville had woken up that morning feeling like absolute dogshit.
Her head pounded away, blood rushing in her ears, as a bone deep, painful chill dug into her shins. She was drenched in sweat. Her breaths came out rapid and shallow as if she had just come from running about the grounds... Nightmare? She wondered. She gingerly sat up, cradling her head in both hands. Overnight, someone had stuffed cotton in her mouth, sat on her chest, and chopped off her right leg - with some effort, she wiggled her toes. Both sets. Good, leg still there. After the momentary panic faded, she frowned. She had no idea why she had thought her leg was gone.
Because a spirit took a bite out of it last night, she remembered.
Perhaps it had been a nightmare.
She swung her legs out from underneath the covers. The wound was there, just as she remembered. It was still blackened, the skin directly around it was pale and mottled while her thigh in general looked reddened as if she spent too long in the sun.
And it smelled!
That was probably a bad sign.
Someone knocked on her door. She hesitated a moment. Her room was small and out of the way as befitting the station she told them she had, not one that saw room service or anything privileged. It had a basic dresser, table with chairs and that was all. She took her meals in the kitchen, and never gave anyone reason to seek her out. She glanced about the room all the same, making sure everything was in place. The last thing she needed was for anyone to find anything incriminating anywhere.
Nothing.
She then wrapped her bed sheet around her as a makeshift robe with a hood. She wasn't exactly ashamed of her sleep wear, but if it was Osmund... She shuffled to the door.
"Yes?" She rasped as she opened it. The girl on the other side, young and vaguely pretty like all of them were, blanched.
"Are you alright?"
"Do I look alright?" Longueville answered snappishly and the girl shook her head. She thought about just forcing herself through it, but she honestly did not have the patience to deal with any bullshit today. "The Headmaster is going to have to do his own work today. Please let him know." She thought about mentioning the fucking mouse, but decided against it. The girl nodded then half-turned, hesitating. "What now?"
Timidly, the girl volunteered, "Should I send for Professor Durand?"
Not until she thought up a good lie about how she got the wound on her leg, and why she didn't go to him immediately with it. She could ask him to treat the symptoms, forget the cause. That was about all she could do, ask. The man wasn't stupid. He'd figure it out.
"If it gets any worse, I'll go to him myself," Longueville waved off even as a horrid thought came to her. What if it couldn't be healed? She assumed it could have been, magically if not conventionally, but what if she was wrong?
She hurriedly closed the door. What if she was wrong?
She should have asked, damn it!
She should have asked about a lot of things. Did it need flesh for her request, could pain or blood have worked instead. Did allowing it to take flesh mean it could do more than it could with just blood? Could she have asked a more powerful spirit to do the same task for a lower price? Why hadn't she asked?
Her head thumped on the door, still recalling that moment when the Queen had stepped aside and her mind went blank.
She had panicked.
She bit her lip and went back to the bed. Her leg still felt like dead weight, but just as promised, there was still no pain. She thought she might have preferred the pain. She was ashamed to admit it, but after getting back to her room she had been high on the glow of finally succeeding. She forgot about it. Then she dismissed it. And now it was biting her in the ass.
She laid on her back and stared up at the ceiling. It was made of the same grey stone and wooden rafters as other ceilings in the Academy. She counted the blocks.
Right, think of a good lie.
Think of a good lie.
Think of a good…
Think.
She drifted off to sleep.
She jerked awake to the sound of someone pounding at the door and was instantly aware of all the ways she felt even worse than before. How long had she been asleep? Damn. She struggled to sit up, wrapped up in her bed sheets as the door opened a crack and Renia de Rutenia stuck her head in.
"Do you mind?" The woman asked softly. Her red eyes swept the room, and then her, cooly analyzing. "If I may, you do not seem well at all." She ducked out of sight for a moment, her voice murmuring something before she reappeared carrying a tray laden with food. "You missed breakfast and lunch," she said as she closed the door behind her with a foot. "I took it upon myself to see that you ate something."
Longueville did not feel very hungry, but she knew letting herself starve wasn't going to help anybody, least of all herself.
"Thank you," she ventured, watching the woman cut a slice of bread to go with what smelled like chicken soup. She carefully stood, and shuffled over to the table in the center of the small room. It was a wooden slab with four legs, more or less. A rather tattered light blue fabric masquerading as tablecloth sat on it. Nothing like the polished dark wood with inlaid silver covered with silken white lace the Queen had in her room. The woman didn't seem to notice the difference. She expected a turned up nose at the stains. She expected hesitation at lowering herself to parceling out food for someone lower than her on the ladder, but defying expectations was something the Queen of Rutenia was good at.
Longueville ran a finger over the coarse material and suppressed the smirk. If her father could see her now, he would have had a screaming conniption fit. She didn't even know why the thought was funny. She stopped thinking anything of her father a long time ago.
"Chicken?" She murmured. She dunked her bread into the broth and took a bite, chewing thoughtfully. It was so very inoffensively chicken, but there was a hint of sweetness to it and a savory fullness she did not expect from common fare. Did she order this personally? Was the woman doting on her? "It's good."
"It should be," the Queen muttered. Longueville smothered a smile as she studied the foreign woman.
Renia de Rutenia looked the same as she always did, dark hair tamed into ringlets and wearing a dress of a strange fashion just close enough to normal to seem off-putting. The patterns were too neat, the seams and hems too even and the material too fine. It didn't look real. The gold of her - Arcanum, she called it - glimmered in the weak sunlight filtering through the fabric over Longueville's windows. She had helped herself to a cup of tea, taking small sips. In spite of the late night they both had, she didn't look tired. She didn't look like anything. There was no hint of the cosmetics some women used to hide defects. She was just perfect like a doll, as if the little wears and tears of living failed to touch her.
"We're not friends," Longueville eventually pointed out.
"But we are somewhat friendly," the Queen said in response, a little smile tugging at her lips. "Are we not?"
She supposed that was true. "Teacher?"
"Student," the woman acknowledged. "Would you like to hear how you did?"
Longueville felt the wry smile take over her face. She shifted, and nodded down towards her leg. "I feel like I fucked up."
"Yes," the woman said without fanfare. "But likely not where you thought you did." She set her cup down. "Your leg, may I?" Longueville sucked in a breath, and carefully peeled the layers off. Exposed to the open air, the wound was still ugly. Renia de Rutenia inspected it. "Yes, I was afraid of that." And before Longueville could react, she leaned forward and pressed her thumb into it. She was struck with a sudden boiling agony, sweeping like fire from her leg. She nearly fell out of her chair jerking away from the pressing digit. Just as quickly as it had appeared, the pain faded.
The woman's eyes gleamed with a strange satisfaction. "No blood, and a weak cantrip to prevent you from feeling that pain. What went through your mind, when you made that condition?"
Longueville couldn't breathe for a few moments. That familiar heat boiled in her gut. Alright. She was going to assume that was necessary.
"Blood and pain are also prices," she gritted out. The pain was gone, but her head throbbed in the aftermath. The bread sat heavily in her stomach, making her feel ill. "Three for the price of one didn't seem…"
"Fair?" Renia de Rutenia finished for her. Her eyes rolled up towards the ceiling. "Fair…" she repeated in a softer voice. "I will be blunt. The prices we pay for their services will never be fair. The best we can hope for is manageable." She took a lingering sip of her tea. "Blood, you can get away with refusing blood. Even they know we don't function well when they take too much. But pain?" Her eyes closed. "Pain. Pain is part of the process." She opened her eyes. "Did I not tell you that?"
She had.
"So...what?" Longueville asked, exasperated. "I'm supposed to just let them have it?"
"Yes." The Queen's lips pursed. "It is how they judge sincerity near as I can tell, that you feel it." Her head tilted to the side, her red eyes flicked back and forth. "What...would you think about someone that offered a deal and the trinkets they put up for collateral were expensive for you, but a pittance for them?"
"I have a hole in my leg," Longueville hissed.
"We grow flesh back." Renia de Rutenia countered. "We replenish blood. We cannot 'un-feel' pain. If you did not feel as you do now, if you woke up this morning no worse than you were yesterday, saw that physician of the Academy and was healed of the wound, what did you really pay?"
Longueville's mind rebelled against that kind of logic. The skin, the fat, the muscle was gone. There was a cost there. What did it matter, if it hurt or not?
You over promised, she remembered Renia de Rutenia lecturing in Osmund's office to a pink haired girl. And spirits do not value things such as we do. Items precious to them are as their life. Promises made are as their blood. Alliances bargained for make you kin. Betrayal makes you a kinslayer. To break your word, even such as described, you would have torn their heart out and thrown it away. It matters not how or why.
Because the point wasn't the cost, she realized. It was the bargain.
"Is that it then?" She wondered out loud. "The payments. We have to suffer for them."
"Or have another suffer for us." The Queen confirmed. "They are thinking, feeling beings and they are malicious." The woman smiled a small, sad smile. "Don't forget that."
"Let it hurt?"
"There are worse prices to pay," the woman said with shadowed eyes. "Let it hurt."
How much have you suffered, Longueville wondered idly. Then she realized that was perhaps the wrong question. How much more will you suffer? Did it matter?
There was only power, and what she would do for it.
Longueville nibbled on the hard, sharp cheese that came with her meal. It tasted like iron. "Is it worth it?"
"What do you wish power for?" Renia de Rutenia asked solemnly. "Who do you wish it for?"
Tiffania.
It brought to mind her sister's fragile smile.
Yes, she supposed it just might be worth it. She sighed and looked to the side, towards her windows. The ugly pale yellow drapes did a poor job of holding back the sun's rays. Without them, the view wasn't anything special either, just the dirt road winding through the Academy's north entrance. Her stomach was still roiling uneasily and her head felt empty. Looking at those drapes did nothing to ground her.
She felt like she was on the edge of a cliff, a step from falling.
"You caught me off guard, you know," Longueville said eventually, searching for something to grab on to. "Stepping to the side like you did."
"That was intentional, yes," the woman admitted. "The clever ones can...piggyback onto our souls, peek into our reality and extend their influence." She made a vague, waving gesture. "They will move things. Make noises. Appear before you wearing a face."
"Just to be annoying?"
The woman lifted a finger from her cup and twirled it in a circle. "More or less. Some rather enjoy getting to torment us for free."
Lovely.
"If they could always catch you off guard, unsettle you? Making the deal is better for them."
"Could I have asked for another? Spirit, I mean."
The Queen blinked, then frowned. "Of course, you could have. I was actually rather curious why you didn't, it would have been the first thing I did."
Longueville groaned, throwing her head back. "Thought it was part of the test," she mumbled. The woman snorted and she held up a finger. "Don't say it. I know." It had been part of the test, just, not the way she thought. "Damn it. How badly did that fuck me?"
She winced as soon as she swore in front of a foreign queen, but the woman didn't even bat an eyelash. Did she swear in front of her before? She felt like she had. She couldn't remember. Without that golden crown on her head, there was something about Renia de Rutenia that tempted one to let their guard down.
She'd made that mistake before.
"The one I had in mind could have probably figured out that counterspell to open the doors, in exchange for a little pain."
Longueville sucked in air through her teeth. Subtlety over brute force, right. As soon as the sun went down today, the old man would check the wards on the Vault and find out he'd been robbed. If she could have pulled it off without anyone being the wiser until someone did inventory?
She shrugged a shoulder and ran fingers through her messy mop of hair.
Well, too late now.
Perhaps she could get away with being too sick to be the thief?
"But the actual wording of your request? That was rather well done," the woman continued with a little pride in her voice. "I do not think I could have done any better."
There was some subtle tension that lifted upon hearing that. Validation, perhaps? Some part of her worried that there was some pitfall, some hidden trap in the Vault that she hadn't thought of, but no one came for her. Just the Queen.
"Your wording is good enough that, well," the woman glanced down at the table, and nudged the bowl of soup closer. Longueville obligingly grabbed at the spoon. "You might consider a fluid contract as opposed to a solid one."
"Verbal versus written?"
"Just so. Set a few ground rules and boundaries." The Queen's lips turned upwards with wry amusement. "I personally like 'don't kill me, even by accident,' but to each their own."
"Not dying would be great," Longueville said and the woman's expression flickered. Her red eyes cast down into her tea cup as if it whispered secrets, brows furrowed as her smile slowly faded.
"It would be," Renia de Rutenia murmured. "Wouldn't it?"
The bite of bread stuck in Longueville's throat as a ball of ice. Swallowing it hurt all the way down.
There was no pity in those red eyes. No sympathy. Last night, the woman had been impeccable. Humour at the right times, sadness at others. She had been so completely and undeniably human that Longueville felt as if she had been set adrift. A mask underneath a mask. Was this what lay at the heart of it? There was nothing but a cool, impersonal acknowledgement in the Queen's eyes that caused Longueville's own denial to wither.
"I'm dying, aren't I?"
"...you are suffering from a severe case of blood poisoning," the woman said clinically and Longueville felt as if her heart would just up and give out right then and there. Blood poisoning. "High fever, rapid breathing, discoloration of the skin, fatigue or sleepiness," Renia de Rutenia listed, ticking them off on her fingers.
Longueville knew what blood poisoning was. It was when a wound went bad, infected by noxious vapors spreading like poison. The only way to deal with it was amputation. She looked down at her leg, and felt the world tilt to the side.
"How long do I have?" She interrupted whatever the Queen had been saying.
The woman paused, then nodded. "I would give you tomorrow, at most."
One more day.
That word 'tomorrow' hung in the air. Longueville once thought that knowing when she was about to die would change something. That she would reminisce on the past, or have a change of heart about everything. Maybe she would find her faith? She sat there at a crude table with a tattered tablecloth in a small, ugly room and felt nothing but a blank gray.
There wouldn't be enough time to go home.
She could send a letter? Her fingers drummed on the side of her bowl of soup. She had no idea what to write, but she could try. She owed that much, she thought. Thinking about how her sister would receive it made her stomach clench, so she stopped thinking about it. There was nothing she could do.
Longueville considered, her drumming fingers stilling.
Almost nothing.
"Tell me," she began slowly. "The mistakes I made with the test." Renia de Rutenia raised a curious eyebrow, leaning forward in her seat. Longueville smiled tightly. "Was one of them trusting you?"
The Queen's answering smile showed teeth.
"And so you've learned the final lesson." She caught the triumphant gleam that flashed in the woman's red eyes. "The real threat is never the demon."
The sun streaming through the faded yellow drapes darkened, as if hidden by a cloud. And yet, the red rubies of the woman's Arcanum shimmered brightly, lit with an inner, pale red light. There was a shadow within each one.
"Demon," Longueville repeated as she sat there in a fascinated fugue. Not spirit, demon. She wished she could say she was surprised. She wished she could say the parts of her that had screamed through the Haunting hadn't expected it. She wished she could say that she didn't look into the woman's blood red eyes and fear what her father was. Blood. Pain. You had to suffer the prices and they appeared as dark smoke and shadow.
No, she wasn't surprised at all.
What else? What else did the foreign queen say that was just to the left of the truth?
Everything?
"Why lie, when the truth serves just as well?" The Queen said as if she had said that out loud. Had she? "Demons are spirits, of a sort. I did wish to see you taught - "
She snarled. "Lies by omission - "
"Are you any less guilty than I, Longueville?" The woman said sharply. She looked away then, worrying at her lip. "I did what I had to."
"But why teach me?"
"If not you, it would be someone else," the woman said. "Another mage who understood what it meant to have power and what it meant to crave it."
"Louise," Longueville tried.
"Craves power, does not understand what it means to have it."
"Your servant girl." Damn it, what was her name? Why was it so hard to remember?
"Not a mage," the woman lilted with an amused slant to her smile.
Longueville cast about for another option.
"Henrietta?" The woman tilted her head back, eyes flicking away and said nothing. Longueville gaped. "Henrietta?"
If not her, then it would have been the next ruler of Tristain sitting in this chair, offered the chance to surrender or die.
She could laugh.
She didn't.
"You should feel honored," Renia de Rutenia said with a laugh in her voice. She grinned, large and wide. "I chose you."
And Longueville looked at her.
The woman looked the same as she always did. Curling dark hair tamed into ringlets fell about her face, contrasting her porcelain skin. There were no wrinkles, crow's feet or laugh lines. No signs of exhaustion, anxiety or stress. It was as if she was a doll. Perfect. The wears and tears of living passed her by, leaving her in that ageless range between twenty five and forever.
The woman smiled easily. They were masks, each flawlessly built to hide something ugly. This smile was no different. It was open, honest and unburdened, like the rest of them, save for one difference.
It didn't reach her eyes.
Something in the back of her mind yelled in alarm.
Longueville tried to think back and replay their conversation in her head, searching for every time the woman smiled. It was hard to remember. It was hard to think. Her head continued to throb over the dull roar of blood rushing in her ears. Start from the beginning. The beginning. The Queen had knocked on the door, waking her -
Waking her?
Longueville swallowed as she glanced about her small room. Everything was just as she remembered it. The table, the drapes, the crude dresser in the corner and the lumpy bed. The view outside the windows would be the same dirt road through the Academy gates. The only indication anything was even wrong was a woman with cold, red eyes.
It was enough.
"Do you ever take your own face?" Longueville said mildly. "Руин."
The demon in the guise of a woman deliberately refilled its teacup, and with a twirl of its finger set the liquid to steaming. It scooped in a teaspoon of sugar and stirred. The dim sun outside darkened further, into a deep, bloody red. The strange light cast strange shadows that twisted. Longueville clenched fists in her lap, and carefully didn't look into them for too long.
"Look at you," the demon mused with the queen's voice. "Half-dead, but can still pay attention."
Longueville smiled thinly. "I am a thief."
It barked out a laugh, red eyes alight with an inner fire. "You remind me of my daughter," it said, wearing its daughter's face. "Irreverent and clever." It took a sip of its tea and savored it, eyes fluttering closed. It hummed. "Monique," it said eventually. "For a clever girl. My subjects will know you by that name, allow them to know your true one at your own risk."
Longueville raised an eyebrow. "Why warn me?"
"And watch you destroy yourself out of ignorance?" It asked with a matching raised eyebrow and a cruel smirk. "Why, that would take no time at all. You think I haven't seen enough of that? Boring."
"The very soul of compassion," Longueville quipped.
"Aren't I just?" Руин laughed. "No, ask your questions, Monique. Receive truthful answers. Walk into this with your eyes wide open."
With her eyes wide open, huh?
Longueville stared down into her bowl. The chicken broth had long since congealed, shredded meat and mushy vegetables crowding the bottom. "Is that why you taught your daughter? To destroy her?"
"Concerned?" It asked, sounding honestly curious.
"Maybe," she said truthfully. However it answered, it would give her some insight to its plans for her. Something she could use.
She didn't want to die.
There was only one way this could end.
"The very soul of compassion," it stated dryly.
"I do try." She settled her throbbing head in her hands. "Well?"
Its red eyes gained a far off look within them, as if it was seeing something or someone else.
"I was there when she was born," it murmured. "A pitiful, broken thing. Legs fused together, one arm too many and one eye too few. And dead, of course."
Longueville rocked back in her chair. Renia de Rutenia was a doll, perfect. "Stillbirth?"
It hummed an affirmative. "I fixed the body, reshaped the flesh and formed the bones. I anchored her soul. I made her. She's mine." An odd little smile played around its mouth. "I want for her what every father wants for their children. Only the best. I want to see how far she will rise."
Longueville studied the demon. The red light cast sharp shadows on the woman's face, turning perfect into eerie. Renia de Rutenia had been born dead. Her name meant born again, hadn't the woman said? Because she hadn't been born right the first time. The contract scars beneath the gold chain sleeve had begun to bleed, rivulets of red streaming down its right arm. "What happens at the end?" Longueville questioned softly. "When she's risen as far as she can go? When she's reached the top?"
"What else?" The demon said.
Its grin split the woman's face in two.
"She falls."