[23] In the School, the Three Guys Met

Mallory slammed the sword down on the upraised shield of the sputtering flinching kid underneath, some greenhorn, hardly able to lift his arm against the onslaught. If she wanted the kid dead he surely would have been, but Mallory was content to strike the shield again and again, wielding her sword like a club, until she stepped back to heave breath and the kid scrambled to the defensive line established by his comrades-in-arms.

Ten of them, identically liveried behind identical shields between which extended identical polearms, formed a moving arc that clattered with heavily armored steps slowly along the wall of the dining chamber. Ensconced behind them stood Duke Meretryce.

"Mallory—listen to reason, Mallory. Your accusations are, I assure you, patently absurd. Mallory? Your Majesty? Are you listening to me?"

Mallory loosed a feral roar to shake the chandelier and brought her sword down double-handed on a chair that promptly shattered to pieces.

"Mallory—Mallory, please! It is utterly preposterous that you would accuse me of this barbaric act. Have I not proven myself through decades of loyal service to you, my queen? Have I not—"

"EEEEEAAAAAGGGHHH!" Mallory swiped the sword over the tabletop, sending plates and glassware hurtling.

"Had the queen not rashly pummeled to death the assassin, perhaps the question of guilt would be proven after interrogation," said Duke Mordac. He stood at the far end of the room, surrounded by his own loyal retinue.

Shannon leaned against the wall, arms folded. Clearly this was going nowhere. It seemed Mallory just wanted to lash out and break things, although Mordac and Meretryce wore nervous enough faces. Maybe that simply meant they were culpable, but from Shannon's point of view, they would have shown less fear were they truly guilty. Meretryce in particular always prepared a grandiloquent speech to wrest control of any situation, but this time it seemed he was truly caught unawares.

Nonetheless, Shannon was not one to rely on dubious, malleable concepts like "facial reactions" or "body language" to assess truth. Anyone attempting to appear innocent would do their best to feign surprise when their crime was exposed. Their preexisting animosity toward the queen meant they couldn't be discounted as suspects.

Ideally, though, the dukes weren't the culprits. Shannon's hands were still shaking and she kept them in her pockets to hide the fact. If the assassin were some unexpected third party, and Shannon guided the investigation to reveal the true culprit, she would not only protect herself from subsequent attacks but indebt both of the court's major political factions to her. While Shannon possessed only a partial outlook on Whitecrosse politics, did not even know the wide variety of interested parties who might want the queen dead, she did have one significant clue:

The assassins didn't want the queen dead. They wanted Shannon Waringcrane dead.

Slow her down, the bloody-nose assassin had said. I'll get the sister. (Paraphrased.) The target had not been the queen, but the heroine.

And they referred to her as "the sister." The sister. The sister! Why did they—

"What in the name of all that is holy in this land is happening?" hissed an asthmatic voice over Mallory's ruckus. Heads, Shannon's included, turned cautiously. In the doorway near Meretryce's contingent crept a rickety, rattling form: the brown-skinned eyepatch-wearing girl. Jay stood behind her. An atypical shaken look in those raccoon-circled eyes.

Blood on his pants.

"Was it yooooou?!" Mallory's sword lifted, pointed melodramatically. "Was it you, Viviendre de Califerne? Making for your vassal nation an opportunity to free itself from the rightful shackles of its suzerain?"

"Please Your Majesty, as if I've a single care in the world for that godforsaken place." Viviendre expressed not the slightest discomposure in face of the queen. "Anyhow, we heard the commotion. You were attacked in your bedchamber, no? The same happened to us. Two assassins. They came for the hero and me—killed my attendant, even. We managed to slay one, but the other fled."

This announcement caused a flurry of voices from the dukes, the dukes' men, the servants flitting around the queen to clean her messes without coming into the arc of her wild swings, and even the queen herself, whose sword arm lowered as her head tilted. To Shannon, however, it came as only a partial surprise. If Shannon was a target, it stood reason Jay was too. Actually, this revelation helped her. It narrowed the attack's potential motive—it wasn't tied to things only Shannon had done, such as her public works project or her tryst with the queen.

"Someone dislikes the idea of the hero and heroine being here," Shannon said.

"It's true?" Mallory looked from Viviendre to Jay. "Tell me now you sod, is what the Saracen said true? You were attacked? Two assassins?"

Jay nodded limply.

"See the aftermath yourself if you'd like," said Viviendre. "It's in my chamber."

"Those who have recently finished a full and filling meal ought not attend!" Between Jay and Viviendre burst the fucking Fool, the codpiece and coxcomb-wearing moron who bounced and bounded with a series of flips into the center of the room, all his bells a-jangle. He seized a leg of leftover fowl, bit into it heartily, and while chewing sang: "Oh-h-h-h-h, God made-a man in his image, so lovely a sight to view! But unseam and see his stuffing, and even the strongest shall—shall—"

His eyes suddenly bulged, he reached to his throat, choked and sputtered, dropped onto the table writhing, and lastly pounded his fist into his gut and spat a glutinous fountain of brown paste into a nearby goblet.

"Shall spew!" He said, tumbling to his feet. In a stage whisper: "Fortunate that trick went off, half the time it comes out the other end, ee-hee-hee!"

Mallory burst out laughing, Viviendre twittered unvoiced glee, Meretryce rolled his eyes, and Mordac bellowed that they ought to have made a eunuch of that bawdy imbecile years ago. Shannon detached herself from the cacophony and tried to think. Who wanted the hero and heroine dead, regardless of whether they had done anything (Shannon) or not (Jay)? The only one who ever expressed obvious dislike of them was Mallory, when she battered them silly. Mallory wasn't the perpetrator, though. Then who? The dukes still stood to profit greatly from the newcomers. Or at least her.

Logistically, any moderately wealthy or influential person in town might be the culprit. But there was another limiting angle. Since Viviendre claimed the attack on Jay happened in her bedchamber—and what the fuck was Jay doing in her bedchamber anyway? Oh God, she didn't want to know—that meant neither sibling was where they usually would be at the time of the attack. Whoever organized the coordinated assassination must necessarily be someone capable of tracking their movements. Or maybe that mattered less than it seemed. Whitecrosse Castle was no bastion of security. Servants and courtiers witnessed the comings and goings of any personage of importance. Then why have the attack happen when both of them were with someone else? Even if Viviendre, who looked crippled, was useless, it left witnesses. In the case of Mallory, it significantly reduced the odds of success. Why not wait until Shannon was alone, with nobody to protect her?

Something didn't add up. Or did it? After all, the assassins attacked when Shannon and Mallory were supposed to be asleep. Shannon only saw them coming because the queen snored so damn loudly. Maybe Mallory had been a target, and only after she woke up did the assassins prioritize the weaker Shannon instead?

She realized her head was cycling, cycling, cycling. Her hands continued to tremble in her pockets, her eyes glanced from face to face, sizing each as a suspect. Even Jay—could Jay have—? As revenge. For when she attempted to strangle him in the cave. Of course. Of course! Why didn't she think of it? He could've faked the attack on himself, gotten his new friend to vouch for him. Of course, of course, of course!

"Let's see Viviendre's chamber," Shannon said.

After some demurring, those present agreed.

Soon they were en route along the winding passages of the castle. Mallory strode with long aggressive steps, Meretryce and Mordac and all their twenty-odd troops in formation maintained a pace about twenty steps behind, and Viviendre was forced to hobble desperately to avoid the dukes' field of jutting polearms at her back. Being an oblivious asshole Jay didn't bother to help her, so Shannon stepped in, seized Viviendre's arm, and assisted her as best she could, an act that received significantly less gratitude than Shannon believed she merited—received, in fact, no more than an icy, one-eyed glare.

As soon as Viviendre's bedchamber entered their field of view, clearly demarcated by the servants bustling around it, Viviendre tore herself from Shannon's grasp and fanned her arm as though giving a guided tour. "Up ahead. On the left. That's where they left Jreige, my attendant. Pierced through the chest, dead instantly I believe."

The servants, on seeing the queen, went silent at once and cleaved to the walls to allow her passage, and the anxiety in their eyes did not alleviate when she instead stopped before them. "I see no body," Mallory said.

"Your—Your Majesty." A servant bowed his head. "We removed the slain Saracen and began the process of washing the corridor of blood."

"What? No. No, no, no!" Shannon swept past and inspected a spot conspicuously void of bodies, living or dead. "You cleaned it? You cleaned the crime scene?"

"Crime scene, Lady Heroine?"

Irredeemable. But Shannon should've known. Why would these primordial yokels have any concept of forensic science or even basic investigative process? These types probably saw a man knifed in the gutter and pinned the blame on whichever village idiot was most easily scapegoated. She pinched the bridge of her nose and expelled a hiss of steam. The back of her eyeballs chafed against her brain, blood vessels boiled and bubbled, but she must control herself, controlling herself was good and possible and she must do it. At least she overcame one barrier to mental clarity during her time with the queen.

"If it's any consolation, Lady Heroine, we've not yet touched the room itself. We—well, perhaps a lady like yourself ought to avert her eyes from such a sight anyway—"

Nonsense. She whipped past and pulled the door open and—and understood exactly what they meant. A hand went to her mouth and she recoiled from the sight.

"What is it? What do you see?" Meretryce shouted from down the hall, straining to look over the heads of his men.

Mallory laughed. "Spectacular! Oh, this is a lovely image. And here I thought you were so feeble, Viviendre, such a sight would cause you to faint dead. You too, Shannon, not even a scream from you? What fortitude!"

Her fury, rendered lukewarm ever since the Fool's jape, dissolved into jovial good cheer, which she expressed first by jostling the very short Viviendre's head and then wrapping an arm around Shannon's shoulder to grip her more salaciously than it looked. "And?" the queen said. "What insights can you glean from this... what did you call it? Crime scene, yes. What insights, O Shannon?"

The mocking tone reveled in Shannon's obvious nausea but Shannon took it as a challenge and straightened herself. Insights. Right. Let us glean some insights.

What remained of the assassin's body was dressed the same as the assassins in the queen's bedchamber. Not to say they wore a uniform, just similar styles of rags: lower class, dirty. Shannon had already searched the other two corpses—or rather, she got Mallory's maidservants to do it—and found nothing of interest on their persons, so she suspected nothing would be found on this one, either. They were either common scallywags or else attempting to appear that way, but the coordinated timing of the attacks suggested a competent mastermind. Maybe the assassins were merely pawns, then, intended to be disposable...

"How did he wind up this way?" Shannon asked. "No sword could—"

"Mine could," said Mallory.

Maybe it could. "But my brother—or this girl—"

"Magic did it." Viviendre tapped the bulb of her staff to her temple, producing an audible bonk noise.

"Aye, aye, that's unimportant anyway," Mallory said with impatience.

Shannon reached out a foot to step over the mess and into the room, decided a step was too risky, and performed a full hop to land safely past the splatter zone. The rest of the room, poorly lit, possessed a few trademark signs of a struggle: mussed bedsheets, toppled furniture. She noticed idly that the bed, while messy, was not messy in a way that suggested someone had used it recently, so maybe her freak asexual brother was still an asexual freak.

"And you said the other assassin escaped? How?"

"Through the window." Viviendre treated the fact as an irrelevant afterthought. Shannon inspected the window, which was shut. As though anticipating her next comment, Viviendre said: "Of course I closed it after to prevent a draft."

Of course. Shannon supposed it was a reasonable story, given the other assassins came in through the window too. How difficult was it to scale the castle walls?

She turned and something caught her eye. "What's this?"

"Hm?" Viviendre remained in the doorway, although Mallory had followed Shannon inside.

"There's blood on the other side of the bed. And—vomit?"

"Oh, yes. That." Viviendre tapped her cane. "Well, we managed a few significant thwacks on the man before we sent him running."

"And the vomit?"

A shrug. "An ordinary reaction to what I did to his companion."

Mallory nodded, her eyes fixated on the gore. "Excellent. Most excellent. We shall hunt the final assassin immediately. If he's bleeding he'll be easy to find. Yes. Yes!"

She exited the room, not minding that she stepped through the entrails of the corpse, with a finality in her bearing that suggested the matter were settled. Shannon didn't think so. Something didn't add up. Bleeding, vomiting, yet the man still managed to clamber down the sheer walls of the castle? She opened the window and poked her face into the chill. The other assassins left a rope behind. Here there was none.

What did it mean, though? How did it get her any closer to determining the culprit? And what would she do if no culprit was found, if Mallory tracked down the fourth assassin and crushed his skull before they could wring a confession out of him, if he existed to give a confession at all? When she put the candle back where she found it she realized her hands were still shaking. When she looked at the room and saw only Viviendre's smiling face in the door and no trace of Mallory she hurried back to the hall, leaping past the organs, to return to the queen's side. In the corridor servants stared, guards stared, the dukes stared, Viviendre stared. Boorish. Uncivilized and boorish, that a world like this could exist, a world where anyone could slit her throat from behind and get away with it so easily.

For the first time, she felt truly trapped here. Trapped, unable to escape. How far could self-mastery take her? How far until she cracked? No—no thoughts like that. She must go farther, so farther she must go. Alternatives were non-negotiable.

Looking at the faces, though, she realized something.

"Where's Jay?"

—

At a weird, limping half-trot caused by indecision about whether to run or maintain an element of inconspicuousness, Jay reached his bedchamber, grabbed his bat and Makepeace's shield, and made an immediate beeline for the academy. Nobody was nearby anyway so he started to run despite the thunderous clap his shoes made against the polished floors, and the awkwardness of carrying the shield made him slow again, so it was all the same: start stop, start stop, start stop.

He possessed only a vague memory of the cavern DeWint used to ferry him to the academy and didn't want to get lost so he went the route he'd learned on his aimless wanderings around the castle grounds, exiting out a small side gate and crossing a neatly-manicured courtyard to the next big building over. The apex of the hill around which all Whitecrosse was built curved slightly and the world curved as well, a palpably bent horizon over the forests and mountains up which crept a halo of light. Dawn already. He'd spent the whole night awake but felt no fatigue, in fact his eyes were like bolts of lightning in their sockets.

Into the academy he navigated, past the few students awake so early, until he reached the door to DeWint's office and pounded it the same moment he flung it open. DeWint shot up from his desk, over which he'd been sleeping, a stunned sputter out his lips and a smear of ink on his forehead, with the pages of the book he'd passed out reading fluttering with a dry crackle.

"Wha—hah—Hero?"

"Olliebollen. Now. Give her to me now."

DeWint blinked again, his eyes bulged comically as he processed his desk and Jay and the general fact of his existence, hands mechanical as they smoothed out the gray tufts of hair that fanned mad scientist-like from his temples. "Olliebollen. Oh yes, oh right. Olliebollen Pandelirium, certainly boy, certainly." He stood, he patted his chest and shoulders. "Queer coincidence actually, you know normally I am not half so scatterbrained as to fall asleep during my studies, but I'd made an arrangement with your sister to give her the faerie. She never arrived. How odd that it's you who comes knocking..."

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The words tumbled out. Finally his knobby fingers found the pocket and between two pinched nails he extracted her, Olliebollen, sleeping herself or maybe in a comatose sort of sulk. "Now! I do hope, young man, you'll remember the reliability by which I kept your little secret safe and sound. No other in Whitecrosse would have done the same, mind you—"

Jay snatched the fairy and deposited her into his own pocket; she started thrashing and sputtering. DeWint tried to say something else, but Jay didn't listen, he was already out the door and down the corridor.

"Who, what, oh it's you." Olliebollen peered up from the breast pocket with her beady insect eyes. "Well—whatever." She sank back and curled into a ball.

He understood his current frenzy of activity could not be sustained, not without sleep or food, but he decided to worry about that later. There'd be farmhouses outside the city, they'd recognize him as the hero and give him a little bread. It'd work. He tromped up the small half-staircase leading back to the ground floor and brushed past a pair of students. It was still early enough he didn't expect to encounter many people on the way out of the city, and with the queen and everyone distracted by Shannon's Sherlock act (come on Shannon you didn't think you knew the first thing about criminal investigations did you?) he'd probably be past the walls before anyone noticed he was missing. The problem was Makepeace. Or what Makepeace told him at least. When they first met at that abandoned inn he'd said something about his mother's knights coming to fetch him, and he'd mentioned something similar when they were captive in Flanz-le-Flore's court, something about escaping, getting away. He mentioned needing Mayfair to take his place. Jay hoped Shannon was enough to take his place. She'd have to be. He was gone, continuing his journey, gone and—

He reached the main hall of the academy and turned for the door and there she stood. Viviendre de Califerne, leaning on her Staff of Solomon. The moment she saw Jay her face perked up bright and warm.

"How," he said, staggered by the waft of her perfume. "How'd you—"

"I read your mind."

He was prepared to take that literally, mainly because the alternative was worse. "I see," he said lamely. Cautiously. He looked her straight in her eye, refusing to glance down to her staff, refusing to let her think anything about what he was thinking.

"What is this Jay? What the fuck?" She spoke with a smile, she spoke with good humor. He realized she was breathing raggedly between words. Even considering the detour to his bedchamber and the long winding route he took to DeWint's office, she would've needed to hurry to reach him. "You cannot honestly tell me you're frightened? Are you not the hero? Did you not fight the dread lizard Devereux at the monastery, and brave the forest of Flanz-le-Flore, and however other many perils? A pair of common thieves has you rattled now?"

Jay considered his words carefully before responding. "My goal is to get into the vault under the castle. I know a way to do it, but I need something first. I have to go west to get it—and then I'll be back."

Every word was true, which meant as a lie it was unparalleled, although he knew that the pause he gave before he said it would've piqued his interest if he'd been Viviendre trying to dissect himself for falsehood. Viviendre demonstrated no change in her demeanor, she only leaned to the side to support herself against the doorway, taking a pause of her own to catch her breath although she must be thinking too.

"You know, I really do have a better read on you than most," she said. "When your sister saw you were missing she went straight to your room. I expected you'd go to DeWint though."

Jay wondered if Makepeace's shield would be able to block whatever the fuck her Staff of Solomon did. If it came to that.

"I knew you'd left something with DeWint. Not exactly what, mind you, but it was clear enough. After all, we first met outside his office, didn't we? I hope you don't mind, but I eavesdropped on your conversation before I made my entrance. I am terribly, reprehensibly nosy like that."

No. It couldn't come to a fight. Makepeace's shield blocked a lot but he had no guarantee it'd help against Viviendre. It was the Flanz-le-Flore problem all over again. With the equivalent of a snap of her fingers—lifting the staff and saying a single word—she won. Except this time, winning meant Jay in two halves instead of turned into a cute critter. A fight needed to be avoided at all costs.

He needed her to continue to think he was fleeing because he was scared of the assassins.

"Don't worry about it." Jay believed himself to be speaking calmly. More calmly at least than her, whose sudden flurries of words were interrupted by flimsy coughs and wheezes.

"Your sister thought you got bored and went to sleep. But I'd seen your face, I knew it wasn't that. You intended to run." She braced her staff against the ground and hobbled forward, to him, and he fought the urge to take a step back, because if Viviendre had from a practical standpoint the same power and speed of implementing that power as Flanz-le-Flore, then Jay could beat her the same way he beat Flanz-le-Flore. Those brittle bones breaking and Viviendre surely much more brittle.

Why was she moving closer anyway? Did she really not know as much as Jay thought she did? Did she actually trust him?

"Really though," she continued, "it was more desperate hope than anything. I knew there was a chance you'd decided on the straightest route out of Whitecrosse, but if that were so, I'd never catch up. I had to pray you'd make a detour to reclaim whatever it was you left with DeWint. So when I saw you here, well—it gladdened me."

Five steps away. Four steps. Was she really going to get in range of him? Was she that stupid?

She stopped. Her eye scrutinized. "Is something wrong, Jay?"

Shit. "No. Nothing." Should he step forward himself? Would she read it as aggressive? He couldn't afford to err. Not once, not for a moment. Or else he might hear that word—Divide—and nothing more.

The same smile remained on Viviendre's face, but with no movement, no adjustment whatsoever, it became wan. Her head shifted to the side and her golden eye glistened.

"You fucking asshole," she said, turning her face the other way, turning it back, scrunching her features, shaking the long black bangs of her hair. "I—no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. I know it's—look. I understand. I'm not ignorant about myself, okay? I'm deformed. I know. I know touching me, kissing me, that sort of thing must have made you sick to your stomach. I understand."

"Huh?"

"I'm such an idiot. I'm sorry. I never should have—I never should have given myself hope. That was a mistake I thought I learned from long ago, yet here I am, making the same exact error the moment someone deigns to spend a few minutes without calling me a degenerate inbred heathen. I should have understood the first time, when we held hands, when you pulled away from me with that look in your eyes—I shouldn't have preyed upon your goodwill. I forced myself onto you, God I really am just a desperate fucking whore aren't I? You don't need to say it. I know you wouldn't anyway, you're not cruel like those dukes, but—"

In the main hall behind Jay a pair of students walked, looking at Viviendre and whispering; Viviendre, a single streak of tears running down her cheek, flung her arm in a rude gesture and screeched: "Fuck off shitbrains! Fuck off, mind your own fucking business you toothy cunts!"

When the pair hurried away, Jay looked back at Viviendre. "You think I'm running away because I'm disgusted by the way you look?"

"You don't need to lie to make me feel better. Just like DeWint. He pretends he wants to fuck me but it's all just to be polite. I know because I—because I—even with him I would have—"

Jay stepped forward. Once. Testing. She did not tense up or react defensively, she only waved a flippant hand as if shooing him away. A tepid gesture, not one designed to actually stop him. Another step and she was within reach. He slowly extended his hands, as though he intended to embrace her. Still no reaction, only amid what were becoming open sobs:

"Please, oh please, I can see you hesitate even now, stop it. Do not bother to patronize me Jay. Just like Makepeace. Just like him too! And he fucked her? He fucked fucking Sansaime?"

Bat tucked under one arm, shield clutched awkwardly in the same, his free hand fell gently on the wrist that carried the staff. A tiny wrist, easy to wrap his fingers around. Like Flanz-le-Flore, bone that would break in an instant against his strength. His fingertips trembled, the memory of that moment etched into them. And Viviendre didn't resist, didn't react like anything was wrong, even stepped forward and pressed her body to his chest as she cried.

She really thought he was leaving because he thought she was ugly. She really thought that. And his plan was to shatter her wrists and run.

Instantly he became aware he could not do it. Not again. Not to Viviendre.

But he couldn't remain here, holding her and her holding him. Viviendre—regardless of what he thought about her, he needed to continue toward his goal. To open the vault, acquire the relics, create a paradise. He needed to go west, find a fairy to feed to Lalum, and use her animus on Queen Mallory. He couldn't lose sight of that and so, with Viviendre secure in his arms where he could stop her if she attempted anything, he said, "That's not why I'm leaving."

"Don't lie. Respect me enough to not fucking lie, Jay. Whatever you find imperative to accomplish in the west, it could wait. A day, two, a week, however long. You didn't get the idea to leave now for no reason."

"Viviendre. I don't mind your appearance. I told you that. It wasn't a lie."

"Then why? Huh? Why? What other reason? You're afraid of a couple sellswords? I can protect you Jay. You saw that. I can protect you even when you cannot protect yourself. Or is that the trouble too? You cannot stand a woman powerful enough to—"

"Viviendre. You hired those assassins."

The sharp stiffness that entered her body told him exactly what he needed to know. He readied himself to pin her arms if they tried to move but when her muscles loosened they flopped weakly.

"That's—that's—" Her watery eye peered up at him. "That's not—How could you think such a thing?"

"The first man was already in your room. You had to have let him in at some point—"

"Any servant with a skeleton key could have done so. Or the key could have been stolen."

"He was alone with you for however long but only attacked when I showed up. So he was waiting for me. How else would he know I'd be there? The only other person who heard you invite me over was Jreige, and he clearly wasn't working with them."

"You have much to learn if you think the walls of Whitecrosse Castle lack ears, Jay. And what about that spider of yours? Lalum? She was watching you closely enough to show up a few seconds after you were in danger. But late enough to only wrap up what we'd already finished—perhaps to silence the man so he might not reveal her as the mastermind—"

"And you hate my sister, too. You think the change she'd bring would kill you. You said that yourself—you said you wouldn't survive it."

"Nonsense. Any number of people would have motive to—"

"You also hated Mayfair. And Mayfair was also trying to change this world, wasn't she? Which is why you sent Sansaime to kill her. Which is why even mentioning the name Sansaime makes you tense up."

"Jay. I can't bear the name of that elf because—because—You know why! These conclusions are absurd."

Jay didn't need to convince her. She already convinced him by how coolly and readily she reverted from her previous sobbing state.

"When I let go of your hand and you thought it was because I was disgusted by you, you told me to come back later. That's when you planned it." This was the only part he wasn't sure of. But he thought it must be right. Her emotional outburst only a few moments ago proved that his rejection of her—or her perceiving him rejecting her—meant enough to her. That her passions could sway her.

Her forehead shook back and forth against his chest. A rattling sigh escaped her; it ended as a fehfehfeh. "Jay. You're a fucking idiot. You know that?"

He readied himself. His hand remained around her wrist. If he felt her twitch, even a twitch, he'd do it. The sight of the split assassin was burned into his mind. Even a twitch would be impetus enough to override his reluctance.

She didn't twitch. She whispered: "If you're clever enough to piece all that together, you ought to be clever enough to realize you weren't the target."

"So you were trying to assassinate yourself? Come on. You got mad at me because you thought I hated you or whatever. Then either you had a change of heart or realized the attempt wouldn't work in the middle of it and used your staff—"

"You're so fucking stupid. Think for five seconds imbecile. Who actually died? Other than the assassins themselves, of course."

Jay tried to think but the only thing he could think of was the split-open body with its guts heaped on the ground. If he focused he could also bring to mind the other one, thrashing on the floor and vomiting. And then—

Oh.

"Jreige."

"Yes! Of course. Jreige! I cannot comprehend what thought process led you to—how could you possibly believe I wanted to kill you? Jreige was my brother's trained monkey. If my brother was gripped by one of his turns as he often is and decided, oh, perhaps my oh-so-enchanting sister is conspiring in secret to depose me, it'd take but one signal and Jreige would slit my throat as I slept. He'd do it without a moment's hesitation. For a year I was willing to live with that danger, but meeting you—the grand hero!—that changed everything."

Jreige had said he'd report Viviendre's relationship with Jay to the king. And Viviendre portrayed said king as a jealous, suspicious, paranoid, teetering on the brink of sanity. Makepeace mentioned the king of California as having lost his mind... It made sense. It made perfect sense.

"You were unarmed and yet the assassin only swung his sword slowly and wildly so you might easily evade it. Or did you believe yourself to be so nimble? No. A simple scheme: A commotion in the room, Jreige goes to check, and when his back is turned the second man runs him through from behind. Even the utter clods I hired for the task could perform it. With the hero involved, with a foreign princess involved, none in Whitecrosse would ever believe the true target was my insignificant footman. Even my brother might not realize it, once word reached him. Either way, I'd have purchased for myself plenty of time. He'll send another man, but that man won't know my habits like Jreige did, if he tries to kill me I'll outwit him. Do you truly not believe me? I would never hurt you, Jay. Never!"

Replaying the moment in his mind, he even remembered the second assassin—just before Viviendre divided him—saying something to the first, something about leaving, something that suggested their job was already done. At the time he'd put no importance on the words, because immediately afterward the man was grotesquely dispatched, but now it made sense, it made so much sense, and yet it didn't change the icy clutch around his insides, not as he looked down at Viviendre who smiled up at him as if they were now devious confederates, sharers of a wicked secret.

Some part of him liked that smile.

"And my sister. And the queen. What about them?"

"I simply wanted to scare your sister. That's why I waited until she was with the queen—Mallory would defend her, the woman is a terror. Now your sister will think twice about pursuing her grand schemes so quickly, and things shall remain as they are, and the balance shall keep, and I'll be able to continue living as I have for as long as this feeble body of mine will last. Besides, it had the added benefit of putting the queen on the scent of the dukes; she'll not consider me a suspect. Don't you see, Jay? I accounted for every detail. I even knew the queen wouldn't be able to resist herself and would beat those assassins to death—she's quite predictable in her tendency toward violence. Tension will remain high for a time, then all will calm, all will forget, and we may continue as we were."

Her explanations came out in a rapid, almost babbling cadence, as though she had held them inside until they burst out of her mouth. By the end of the final paragraph she was wheezing again, and Jay had no idea what to do, how much to even believe her. Maybe she intended to only scare Shannon, or maybe she didn't mind what happened to Shannon either way and told Jay what she thought he wanted to hear.

He decided not to ask about Mayfair.

"You're afraid of change," Jay said, "but I want to change this world too. I want to make a paradise."

Her lips curled in soft, kind condescension. She nuzzled her head against his chest and Jay became aware of another student passing through the main hall watching their public display. "Oh, Jay. You don't truly believe that."

She may as well have used her staff. He felt exposed through the middle, and he shivered, which prompted her to wrap closer to him. Over her head, through the open main doorway of the academy, he stared down the slope of the hill past the walls and farmland into the forests beyond, the sky now a perfectly-separated series of horizontal halves: the upper black and starry, the lower a milky cream color.

Jay had the feeling that if he let her have her way they would stand together like this until they both turned to stone.

He placed his hands on her shoulders and gently broke away from her, forcing himself to emphasize the gentleness of the motion so that she didn't falsely imagine disgust. He'd been honest before; he didn't think she looked that bad. In the games he played, female characters would have eyepatches or scars all the time, and Jay got the impression from his brief forays online that these tactical imperfections only amplified their appeal to the internet degenerates. To him it was all simply neutral, the way Viviendre looked meant the same to him as the way Mallory looked, even if from an objective standpoint he understood one was far more beautiful than the other.

"I still have to go west," he said.

"You don't. You really don't."

"I'll be back. Even if I get what I want, I have to come back if I want to open the vault."

"You don't really want to open that vault. You don't even know what's in it, Jay."

"I also need time alone. To think."

"Why? Are you upset I didn't tell you my plans beforehand? I didn't know whether you could lie convincingly under duress. I assumed you'd be a better witness in my favor if you were ignorant."

"No, it's—" He stopped.

That was her reason for not telling him ahead of time? She thought he couldn't lie convincingly about it?

He blinked. Looked at her. A strange shard of clarity cut into him.

The obvious thing for her to say would've been that she expected him to try to stop her, had he known about her plot. Or that he would expose her to his sister or the queen. That would be the normal way of thinking.

But she did trust him, didn't she. After all, she revealed everything to him now, even though he still had the power to reveal her. She truly believed he would not betray her. She might think he found her ugly, but not that he would betray her. Even as a lie it didn't cross her mind.

And so her actual lie had been even flimsier. It took only one poke to break apart, how obviously her plan was more apt to succeed if he knew and played along, and how the drawback of him "not being a convincing liar" was completely trivial compared to that advantage.

So what was the truth? His mind sought some kind of rational reason before he realized the reason could not be rational, not rational in a way he defined the word at least. After all, it was irrational for her to trust him at all, she'd known him for only a couple of days. Yet here he was too, having been lulled into an almost sleeping state hearing her explanations and reasons, going along with whatever she said, nodding. Rationally, he should've crushed her wrist to prevent her from using the staff—and that was just to start. How could he even entertain the claims of someone who sent assassins after him—in seriousness or part of a plot—and his sister too? He'd wanted to go along. He'd wanted to fall into this sleeping state, to nod, to hold her wrist gently instead of shattering it. The same reason he kept coming back to her, and the same reason she kept coming back to him.

A plot like this, so grandiose and over-the-top, needed a more compelling motive behind it than eliminating an inconvenient underling and scaring someone from building a sewer. Ironically, from a rational viewpoint, the real motive would be far less compelling than those semi-comprehensible ones. But a strain of emotion infected Viviendre and it all stemmed from the same source. The same source that caused her to break out sobbing when she first thought he was leaving her.

She wanted Jay to love her. No—she needed it.

Faking an assassination ploy, having him "save" her from an assailant creeping up behind, only for her to then "save" him after he was in a seemingly inescapable situation. Maybe the other reasons had a part in it, but looking at Viviendre, knowing everything he knew about her, this reason must have been the most important all along. She wanted to force them together. Saving each other's lives—isn't that the cheapest, easiest method? It happened with Lalum after all. He saved her and now she fawned over him, followed him, did anything she could for him.

And Shannon was the one person trying to send Jay home. So Viviendre needed to stop her. Whether she truly intended to kill Shannon or just scare her like she claimed, that was the true motive, not the stupid sewer.

It all made perfect sense. It all turned to bile in his stomach, phlegm in his throat. Strings surging around him and he almost didn't notice, almost let her spin her little story and believe it, almost wanted to believe it.

Flanz-le-Flore—just a little shrewder.

"Hello? Jay? You've gone silent on me once more," Viviendre said.

"I'm leaving."

He let go of her, moved past her. He was two steps out the doors of the academy before she managed to cough a response, before he remembered her staff. But her response was only: "What? What's wrong?"

He kept walking. Fast. Down the courtyard, not looking back. She was a woman of passions. If she thought he wronged her deeply enough, would she use the staff? She wouldn't for less.

"What? What has upset you Jay? Tell me! It's that spider, hm? You love that spider. Of course! If Makepeace would take Sansaime over me, then you'd surely take—"

She couldn't possibly believe what she was saying, she was trying to bait him into responding, and it fucking worked. He wheeled on her, jabbed his finger. "Don't you dare try to manipulate me. Don't you fucking dare. I won't stand for it!"

"Manipulate? Manipulate you—what? What?"

"I won't let anyone control me. I won't let anyone play with my emotions. I make my destiny. I make my decisions. I do!"

He didn't wait to gauge her reaction. He wheeled around and stormed toward the quaint brick wall that marked the end of the courtyard. Until he reached that wall all she needed to do was point her staff, say the word, and end it. If he made her waste time thinking, hesitating, trying to understand, that was time she wasn't deciding to divide him.

She didn't say anything. Was that because she was dumbfounded into silence? Or because she understood exactly what he meant and simply lacked response? One glance back and he'd know, but he didn't look. He didn't want to look. He didn't want to see her. He realized that if he hadn't stormed away when he did, if he'd still been gripping her wrist, he would've destroyed her. Then he passed the wall and left her field of view and continued into the narrow alley leading down and out of Whitecrosse: a westward path.