expresses intention to make commitment to update every week
proceeds to take 2+ weeks for the next update
nervous laughter
Anyway, now that we've established how flaky I am, let's get on with the chapter.
The beer was too light and tart for her tastes, but at least it wasn't sweet. The nice, wholesome sort of inns Sorey favoured never had any of the heavy stuff Rose really liked. She drank slowly, swishing it around in her mouth, savouring the bitterness. Trying to resist the urge to chug it down and ask for about a dozen refills.
They'd just finished eating supper. A pair of footmen, incredulous that two people had apparently gorged on six plates of food, had cleared the table at least a half hour ago. A crackling fire warmed the room, making Rose sleepy, although that might have just been the booze.
Zaveid sat at the head of the long oak table, telling stories about him and Eizen, Edna's brother. He gestured wildly as he spoke, laughing heartily whenever Edna interjected with digs that exposed his embellishments. Rose didn't pay enough attention to keep track of what they were saying, though. Right about now, she couldn't stand interacting with any of the others.
None of them treated her like they normally did. Literally overnight, they'd gone from bantering with her, regarding her as an equal, to handling her like glass. They were probably just trying to be nice, trying not to hurt her, but their caution only made her feel worse. Each time they cut off suddenly, or randomly asked how she was feeling, or looked at her with softened eyes, it was like a punch in the gut—a jarring reminder of what had happened. Only Zaveid treated her with any sense of normalcy, or at least he had at first.
"Hey, Rosie," he'd called across the table during supper, smiling cockily through a mouthful of goulash. "You're sure quiet tonight."
Everyone else had looked at him in censure, as if pointing out the obvious was a crime. "Am I?" Rose quickly said with a laugh. "Sorry about that. Guess I'm a little tired."
Lailah had promptly changed the subject, and since then, no one had said a word to Rose.
She wished the Sparrowfeathers were in town. They'd have chosen to stay at some rowdy tavern, with cheap ale and bawdy music. She could've used that, right about now—getting hammered with her friends, and for the night, forgetting everything. Flav was a faithful drinking buddy, always up for some fun. They'd flirt with cute serving girls, maybe gamble a bit, and end the night off with some clumsy drunken dancing.
Those were the best nights, the nights when nothing mattered and the only objective was to forget your cares. Even now the temptation of oblivion sang to her, but being the only drunk person around was never really any fun. Just sad.
When she stood, all eyes turned toward her. She felt strangely sheepish as she said, "I'm heading up. 'Night, everyone."
"Rest well," Sorey said.
Edna called, "Don't let the bed bugs bite."
"There are bed bugs here?" Lailah yelped as Rose shut the door behind her. She leaned against the door, sighing. They were good people. But sometimes, she just—needed some alone time.
That was a lie. Before yesterday she couldn't recall ever craving isolation, not even in the darkest days following the disbanding of the Windriders. The desire unnerved her.
She headed upstairs to their room.
Since the seraphim didn't need to sleep, a simple two-bedded room would do for their group. Rose never minded sharing a room—after all, she'd done so for most of her life—but they did occasionally get the stinkeye from an innkeeper. It didn't happen often, though, and she was glad. The less people who thought she and Sorey had a thing, the better, since Sergei Strelka and his Platinum Knights alone were bad enough.
The bed creaked as she sat on it. Drowsy as she was, she couldn't rest yet. Maybe if she drank a little more it would put her to sleep, and she cursed herself for not bringing her mug upstairs with her. She didn't want to have to go down again.
So why not go up?
The second time around the window slid open with a mere squeak. The evening air was nice and cold, but windy, which just gave her bad thoughts. She leaned backwards against the windowsill, scoping out the roof, and was satisfied with what she saw. The edge looked perfectly reachable, provided she stood on the windowsill and jumped. She did so, and pulled herself up.
The wind tugged at her clothing, her hair, and she momentarily wished she'd worn something warmer. She picked a random spot to sit on, somewhere secluded enough that people on the street couldn't easily spot her, but where she could watch them. The dark roof tiles froze her butt at first, but after a while, they warmed comfortably enough.
Even at this hour some people were out, bundled up in coats, illuminated against the street by the lamps. A nearby red-cloaked knight was having some trouble lighting one, as the wind kept blowing his flame out, and he cursed fluently each time it happened. Rose chuckled a little as she imagined what stiff-necked Sergei Strelka's reaction would be to such language—probably an even one better than Sorey's—but another strong gale took all pleasant thoughts from her mind.
She dreaded Dezel's return. No one had mentioned it, at least not in her hearing, but she knew they were all worried. Back in the dining room they'd all kept glancing toward the door, as if thinking he'd enter that way. Some seraphim chose to travel normally, by foot, but most preferred to glide through the ether, letting their physical bodies disintegrate then momentarily reappearing wherever it was they were heading. Dezel was definitely of the latter group, he'd scared her shitless more than once that way. Asshole.
"Don't tell me she took off again," said a sighing voice from below.
Rose crawled over and stuck her head past the edge of the roof. "Hey, Edna, I'm up here!"
Edna leaned back against the windowsill, arms crossed against her chest, looking unimpressed. "Oh. There you are."
"What's up?"
"Sorey wanted me to tell you that we're heading for Aifread's Hunting Grounds tomorrow, to look for Heldalf."
"All right," she said. That wasn't entirely unexpected.
"He also wanted me to tell you that if you don't feel up for travelling so soon, everyone would be fine with it if you took a rest—"
That idiot. "Are you kidding me? Just one day of doing nothing has me antsy as is." Well, that and other things.
Edna smiled. "I told him you'd say something like that, but he wouldn't listen." She paused, looking pensive. "Also ..."
"Yeah?" After Edna didn't answer for a few moments, Rose reached down, as far as she could. "Here, lemme help you up."
Edna stared at her outstretched hand for a moment, then said, "I can do one better." She disappeared then reappeared at Rose's side.
"Damn. Wish I could do that." So many jobs would've gone way more smoothly if she'd had powers like that.
"It's probably a good thing you can't, then." A strange look crossed her face, and she added, "Sorry, that was—"
"Don't apologize for treating me as you normally would," Rose blurted. "I hate it when you guys treat me like I'm some delicate flower. I'm not."
"Oh," she said. "Right. That would drive me crazy, too. I'll stop."
"Good."
Silence. Rose fidgeted with the hem of her shirt, and Edna still looked thoughtful. After a couple more moments, Rose decided to just cut to the chase already.
"Y'know, you're the last person I would've expected to come talk to me, especially when I'm like ... this." It was because of that that Rose didn't dread talking to her. Edna, she thought, could be trusted to not spout worthless platitudes, or to try to talk about feelings. She'd be real with Rose—but not sentimental. Rose had always liked that about her.
"Perhaps so," Edna said. "And for the record, I'm only here of my own volition. No one sent me to say this—I'm only speaking for myself, and no one else."
Well, that was certainly a start. "Go on."
"I'd ... like to apologize."
"For what?"
"I knew, pretty much from the beginning of our acquaintance, that Dezel was using you as a vessel."
Rose swallowed. "I see." She tried to keep her voice chipper as she added, "So, did he tell you, or—?"
"He did, but only because I basically forced him to." Edna tilted her head back, looking at the cloudy night sky. "The first time you and I had armitized, you'd conducted far too much power, so much that it quickly wore you out. You fell unconscious, but instead of getting booted out like I would've with Sorey, I had complete control over your body. That, added with the fact that ever since we'd met he'd been practically glued to your side, and that he'd been a little too interested in the power of the armatus, really solidified it for me. When I presented this all to him in front of everyone else, he had to 'fess up."
"Wait." She felt sick. "Everyone knew? Everyone? And none of you even thought to tell me?"
Edna nodded.
She let out a breath. Okay. Okay, okay, okay. So they'd known. They'd known, and yet, they hadn't told her—not a peep. It was one thing to know that Edna knew, but it was quite another entirely to know that they had all known, yet not one word ... Unbidden, warm tears sprang to her eyes, and she hastily wiped them away.
Edna began, "If you want to be alone, then—"
"No, I'm fine. Really. And besides, there's more I'd like to know." Rose hated the slight quaver in her voice. She sniffled, a little, but that was because of the cold—not because she was crying. "How long have you guys even known him? I asked Lailah, a while back, but she'd been vague about it. I hadn't really thought much of it at the time, since sometimes she's just weird like that, but ..."
"Dunno how long the others have known him, but the first time I saw him ... must have been that time you tried to kill Sorey." Rose smiled wryly at the memory. She was lucky he'd been such a good sport about it. Edna continued, "You collapsed right after we'd fled, and he appeared and whisked you away."
Rose pursed her lips. That had happened a lot, whenever she'd gotten in serious fights. She'd perform perfectly, feeling so irregularly powerful, but after a while, she suddenly wouldn't feel so good anymore. Sometimes she fainted. She used to think that was just her body catching up with all her used up energy, but now ...
"So I guess he was—" she struggled for a moment "—in me when I was conscious, too."
Edna looked down. "I'm sorry for not saying anything earlier."
"Did he say anything to you, that time?"
"I don't think so. The first time he spoke to us was in Marlind, at the inn. Don't you remember?"
"Huh?"
"I guess you wouldn't," Edna said. She rubbed her arms, to warm them. "Dezel, he'd—he'd used your body to come through the window to Sorey's room. Then he'd left your body and had a little chat with us. Asking why we were leaving Marlind, or something like that."
Rose shook her head. "I don't remember that at all. Did I say anything, after he'd ... left me?"
"You just stood there. You had your assassin gear on, so we couldn't tell what your expression was, but ..." She trailed off.
Bile burned the back of Rose's throat. She hadn't considered that before—that other people could have memories of her, memories she had no idea about. Just how many people had met her while she wasn't herself? Even some of her family? She shuddered at the thought.
"I apologize for never telling you about any of this before now," Edna said quietly. "I was a coward, and I've no excuse for it."
"Thank you. I accept your apology." But she said nothing of forgiveness. That ... would be a long way off.
Edna nodded. "Sorry you had to hear it first from Pippi Longstocking, and not one of us."
Rose smiled a little at that.
For a few moments, they watched the street below them. Near the end a man draped his arm around a woman's shoulders. She, at least head and shoulders shorter than him, huddled snugly against his side.
"It's sure cold out here," Edna said. She splayed her arms and legs. "Look, I'm covered in goosebumps. Gross."
"Yeah," Rose said, still watching the lovers. The man leaned in and whispered something in the woman's ear, and she laughed while pushing him away. They proceeded out of sight. "I still wanna stay out here a little longer, though."
"Suit yourself. Just don't freeze your legs off, you'll need them for tomorrow."
She snorted. "I won't."
Edna waited a moment, then dissipated.
Rose wished the clouds would break, so she could see the stars, but wishing never changed anything. A gust hit her like a slap in the face, and she hunkered down in her spot, shivering.
After a while of thinking she decided that yes, in some small way she had noticed when things were amiss, these past five years.
Like when she was sorer waking up than she'd been before she slept, a sharper sort of soreness—not the dull ache from yesterday's exercise, but the kind that came from recent exertion.
When there were little scratches on her arms and legs, bruises she didn't remember getting. Little smears of blood or dirt here and there on her clothing, even though she'd just put on fresh clothes before heading to bed.
Or when eight solid hours of sleep felt more like two.
She remembered once, in one of the Scattered Bones' former hideouts, she'd woken up on the complete opposite side of the room than she'd fallen asleep on. They'd all had a laugh about it, chalking it up to sleepwalking, even though she'd never sleepwalked before in her entire life—nor since. She'd cherished that memory, but now the mere thought of it made her stomach clench.
Rose had attributed all these things, at most, to her characteristic absentmindedness. That these were sort of things that just happened to everybody, nothing out of the ordinary.
But now she knew better.
She stayed on the roof for half the night, until she couldn't decide whether she was more cold or tired. Sorey slept soundly in their room, not even stirring when Rose's boots thunked on the wooden floor. Foolish boy would get himself killed with that kind of unguardedness. Even so, she was grateful he hadn't closed the window, even though he must've been freezing with the drafts blowing in.
As the window squealed shut he shifted in his sleep, mumbling incoherently. Rose's mouth twisted into what must have been a smile. Maybe he was naïve, but he'd be all right.
Exhausted as she was, even in that nice warm bed, it was nearly first light before she finally drifted to sleep.
Heh, sorry about breaking the fourth wall with Edna's Pippi Longstocking line. It was too good of an opportunity to miss.
Also: Flav, who was mentioned briefly early in the chapter, is one of my Sparrowfeathers OCs. They'll will play a bigger role later on in the story ... much later. -_-
