"Won't you join me?" Lucien asked as Mrs. Beazley carefully placed his breakfast in front of him. In truth the last thing he wanted was company - it had been a terribly long journey from Hong Kong to Ballarat, and Lucien was tired, and more than a little hungover, and his father was dying, and Mrs. Beazley's beautiful little kingfisher kept singing at the most unbearable pitch - but he was trying, very hard, to mind his manners. He had only just arrived, and he didn't know, yet, what sort of woman this Mrs. Beazley was, and he didn't know, yet, whether she would be an asset or an enemy.

"Jean already ate," the little bird trilled from his perch on Mrs. Beazley's shoulder, "but we could stay and chat. Wouldn't you like some tea, Jean? You could have a cup of tea and young Doctor Blake could tell us all about his travels. You would tell us, wouldn't you, young Blake? All the fine places you've seen, and all the wonderful people you've met? Oh, it must be marvelous, to travel so extensively, I'd love to see -"

"Halcyon, please," Mrs. Beazley implored him, looking like nothing so much as a harried mother attempting to corral an unruly child. "Let the doctor eat his breakfast in peace."

The courteous thing to do, Lucien knew, would be to say something like oh, really, he's no bother, to set her mind at ease about the disturbance her little bird was causing, but the truth was that Halcyon, as kind as he seemed, was beginning to grate on Lucien's nerves a little.

"I won't be here long," Lucien told her around a mouthful of eggs, still hot from the stove. "I'd like to see my father, sooner rather than later."

"Oh, that's marvelous!" Halcyon crowed, delighted. "We're going to see old Doctor Blake this morning, too! We could all go together, wouldn't that be lovely?"

It was curious; Lucien was certain he had never seen a daemon whose manner seemed so opposed to his person's. So far Mrs. Beazley had been calm and quiet, making her way through the kitchen with graceful ease, not troubling him in the least and not asking invasive questions, but her daemon was bursting with curiosity and could hardly allow a single minute to pass without speaking. She seemed almost exasperated by him, as if she wanted only for him to be still and quiet, as if she would have changed his very nature, if only she could. But his nature was her nature, by its very definition. Had she been, once, a bright and curious girl, chatty and eager? Had life cowed her or refined her? A question for another time, perhaps. At the moment Lucien had more pressing concerns, chief among them his plans for the day, and hers.

"If it's all the same to you I would prefer to see my father alone," Lucien told her. It was Halcyon who had spoken, but he spoke for Jean, whether she wanted him to or not, and so it was to Jean that Lucien addressed himself now. It had been far too long since he'd seen the old man, and there was far too much bad blood between them, and the last thing he needed was a witness. Particularly a beautiful, shapely witness who had lived beneath his father's roof for god only knew how long. No, there was something deeply unsettling about the thought of standing at his father's sick bed with Mrs. Beazley by his side.

Halcyon looked crestfallen - or as close to that as a bird could manage - but no disappointment or displeasure showed on Mrs. Beazley's face.

"Of course," she said evenly. "I wouldn't want to intrude. He will be glad to see you, Doctor Blake."

There was a note of something that sounded almost like admonishment in her tone, but she turned her back on him before he could question it, crossed the kitchen and set about washing the pan she'd used to make his breakfast.

"You give him far too much credit," Lucien grumbled. "He's always been a miserable old-"

"Lucien," Nemea chided him gently. She had so far been quiet, as she often was; Nemea was observant, much interested in riddles and the ties that bound people together, but usually preferred to let Lucien do the talking.

Mrs. Beazley shot him a dark look but did not add her disapproval to Nemea's; she carried on with her work, and Lucien wolfed down his breakfast as quickly as he could manage. The moment he was through he thanked her for the food and promptly departed, with Nemea walking a step ahead of him, her tail flicking in agitation. In his haste to escape Mrs. Beazley he had sent himself hurtling towards his father, and he could not say whose company he desired less, at present.


Lucien Blake had not set foot in Ballarat Hospital since he was a boy, and he found it much changed from his recollections. Which, he supposed, it would have to be, given the advancements in technology and medicine that had come about over the last forty years. As he marched through the doors people stood to the side and gawked, whispering behind their hands. It was not an unusual phenomenon; everywhere they went, Lucien and Nemea attracted stares and whispers. A daemon her size was remarkable, and people almost universally believed that a lion must denote ferocity and aggression. Lucien knew better than most, however, that things were rarely as they seemed.

Mrs. Beazley's little bird, for example. Flighty and vain, that's what people said about birds, but some birds were clever and some birds mated for life and some birds migrated along the same routes as their ancestors with an admirable sort of consistency and some birds longed to be free and some birds preferred to move in flocks. To assign a single label to all of them was foolishness, whatever the small-minded people of Ballarat might say. It was the same for his lion; yes, a lion could be a fierce creature, but lionesses protected their packs, raised children in large family groups, did not stalk through the world alone and angry. They could be proud and could be wise and could be playful, could be a million different things, and whatever assumptions these people made about Nemea, Lucien knew they would be the wrong ones. These people, they didn't know the first thing about her. They didn't know the first thing about him.

But their awe and their discomfort eased his way somewhat, as no one was interested in holding him up for a chat. He received directions to his father's room quite quickly, and made his way there with dread growing in his heart.

There was no excuse to linger, however, and so he squared his shoulders, drew in a deep breath, and stepped through the doorway and into his father's sickroom.

They had propped Thomas Blake up on a mountain of pillows, but still he seemed to slump, too weak to hold himself upright. In Lucien's recollections his father was always tall and proud and unquestionable, wearing his authority like a suit jacket, elegantly and artfully. Now, though, the old man was grown old indeed, and laid low by his infirmity. He was frail, now; if he tried, Lucien probably could have enveloped the old man's bicep in his fist. The robust mustache Thomas had always sported had been shaved away, and there was nothing to hide the way the muscles on the right side of his face had gone slack. His hands were boney and weak, and his once bright blue eyes seemed cloudy, now, though as Lucien walked further into the room something rather like recognition seemed to stir there. The old man's lips parted, but no sound came out.

For all that he had known his fair share of devastation, to see his own father laid so low left Lucien feeling positively wretched. His stomach twisted uncomfortably, with guilt, with rage, with sorrow. He'd spent the last forty years of his life cursing this man, but what was there left to curse, now, when Thomas could not even speak? What purpose would it serve, to air the grievances he had carried in his heart, when there was nothing Thomas could do to rectify them? And what bloody good was it being a doctor, when Thomas could not even save himself from this indignity?

"Lucien," a soft voice called. It was Artemis, his father's daemon, a shiny black skink who currently lay curled in a ball on his father's stomach. "We had given up hope of ever seeing you again."

It seemed that while Thomas could not speak, she could speak for him. Lucien couldn't decide if that was for the best; he had never been particularly fond of Artemis, who like his father was proud and much concerned with appearances and status.

"I wasn't sure whether I'd come myself," he told her. "It's not as if dad wanted me here."

"You know that's not true." As Thomas Blake's life waned so too it would seem did Artemis's; her voice was ragged, and she seemed to struggle to draw breath, and she did not uncurl herself, though he was certain she would believe her current position most undignified.

"Do I?" Lucien fired back. "All my life, all he ever tried to do was get rid of me."

Always herding young Lucien out of the surgery, never making time for his own son, shipping him off to boarding school a bare few days after his mother died, paying for him to study medicine abroad, far from home, admonishing him for marrying a Chinese girl; all Thomas Blake had ever done, as far as Lucien was concerned, was push him away.

"Your father only wanted what was best for you," Artemis told him.

"But he certainly didn't want my input on the matter, did he?"

If you insist on going through with this folly, Thomas had written to him upon learning of Lucien's plans to marry Mei Lin, don't bother coming home. Of course, Lucien hadn't wanted to come home at all, and he had been blissfully happy, for a time, in Singapore with his wife, and then with their baby girl. And then the war had come, and all his happiness was turned to ruin.

"He was only afraid," she said heavily.

"Afraid that I would embarrass him." More than twenty years had passed since Lucien received that letter, but he felt all the shame and all the grief of it washing over him, then, as fierce as if it had only just happened, and something rather like hate stirred low in his gut.

"No," Artemis correct him sternly. "He was afraid that you would only repeat his mistakes, and suffer the same consequences. He did not want to see you hurt."

Lucien stared at her for a moment, wondering what the bloody hell she was talking about, but it came to him, then. The real reason for his father's distress. Thomas Blake had fallen hard for a beautiful, foreign girl, and brought her back to Ballarat, and she had never been happy there, and he had watched her slowly fade away, lonesome and isolated, until at last she left him, left him far too soon, with a child to raise on his own and an empty bed and a belly full of guilt. Had he really been so worried for his son? He'd had a funny way of showing it.

"He loved you, Lucien."

Lucien just nodded, his throat too tight to speak. Maybe she was right. Maybe the old man had loved him. That love had cut Lucien to the bone, but it had been there, just the same.

"Thank you, Artemis," he finally managed to choke out.

"Sit down, Lucien," she told him. "I'm tired, and so is your father. Let us rest a while, and then we can talk some more."

It was a habit ingrained from his childhood, obeying Artemis's imperious commands, and so Lucien did as he was bid, and settled himself down in the chair by his father's bedside. Nemea stretched herself out at his feet, and he rested his hands on his knees, keeping watching while his father and Artemis slipped into dreams.