It was dark when Clarke woke. Shafts of moonlight came through the window, lighting on sleeping forms, constant sleeping breaths playing accompaniment to snores. There was also the smell, a smell of blood and someone's innards. The smells of sickness.
His own sickness had melted away save for an empty stomach growling for some sort of food. He stood, almost knocking over a bucket he couldn't see in the dark, the sloshing inside and its placement indicative of a sick bucket.
“...ruination follows that boy. You've got to make him leave. The fight when he left ten years ago, the secret spying, the day he comes back there's fire and plague. Do whatever you have to but get that curse out of here.”
A hushed conversation drew him to the window, listening from behind the wall. Mr. Bruin's gruff rumble was the first voice.
“I've always taken care of you for the right price, right Wade?”
He was speaking with Twinty. Clarke could hear the charm creeping into his voice, the hypnotic act he put on to reassure.
“I even cleaned up the whole mess here with a few potions that I'm not even charging you for. Isn't that what you always liked about me? That money always kept me in line?”
“I never liked anything about you but you had skills we needed in this town after the wave of refugees. You just make sure you know who's holding the leash here.”
Grass swayed as he walked away and Clarke leaned out the window. Twinty was making a rude hand gesture at the elder Bruin's back.
“What a sucker.”
“You really didn't ask him for any money for the potions?”
“I've been overcharging him for things for years. I'll let it slide. Besides, all the ingredients were yours, I'm not out anything.”
“You're getting soft in your old age.”
“You owe me some copper for boiling the water though.”
“That was Gwen. All you did was pour it down my throat.”
“Nursing fee then. But I'll let it slide if you leave town.”
Crickets fiddled out in the tall grass, the moon high overhead, half full. Clarke sighed. Twinty spoke, quietly. There was a hushed tremble in his voice, some regret of something long past.
“There is a town called Whaler's Wharf. Well, more wealthy kingdom than town. Twenty years ago there was an explosion there that killed pretty much everybody and those that got away didn't live too much longer after. The people at the edges of the city were the ones who lasted.”
“Are you talking about the-”
“Yeah. The Abandoned Kingdom. Used to be a port city with a lot of merchants, a lot of ideas passing through, a lot of people. A lot of elves, a lot of dwarves, lizardfolk, humans, scyllites, ratlings. I worked there in the castle as a spy apprentice so I knew a lot about what was going on. Collaborative research between the elves and the dwarves backed by the monarchy. Weird machines, weird magic. I don't know what your mother did but she was important. This was back before everybody elses business was mine and I was always away but I did know her. Knew her. It's hard to think of her as a person when she never existed for me.”
Clarke looked down at the dirt.
“So you didn't actually remember her.”
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He shook his head.
“No. The night you came to me and I threw you out I made a note of it. I knew you were just some addle brained child. Then I was going through my records that night, tucked away in my portable hole when she came up, like a ghost in my books. She was there in every day of my notes, even if it was that she only came in to sit and scream and cry or teach the little pup who I had just thrown out. So I went back further, going through unchanged records like my memory in paper all stored safely in the other world of wherever those holes open out into.”
Just like with Alouella's story. Wherever those holes open into, it's not affected.
Twinty folded his arms, scowling at nothing in particular.
“It made me mad that I had been made to forget anything, to have my mind tampered with when it was everything to me. It made me angrier when I learned that I owed her a debt for saving my life way back in whatever happened to that abandoned kingdom. I never owed anyone, anything, but here I was telling myself something I didn't want to hear, a usually trustworthy source!”
He sighed, deflating into his robes.
“I read and re-read but I had never paid her back. I thought it was because she wanted to save it, to really get something from me. But I guess I always knew it was because she was just too nice. Or she didn't care. But ratlings don't forget debts. Most of our societies are built on favors and one hand washing the other. It would have driven me mad to owe her any longer. So...I took you in. Ratlings are not good parents, Clarke. You do know why I was named Twinty Sevin, right? Because we're named numerically until we're old enough to take a real name. Because most of us die. So, suffice to say, I didn't want to take you in at all. But I owed her.”
The night quieted again and Clarke took it in, the years of things that had been hidden from him just behind those fading eyes.
“Did you finally get tired of me? Ready to have the both of us out of your mind?”
Twinty flicked a claw across Clarke's temple, enough to hurt.
“Don't think my motives for me, boy. Maybe I...just wasn't finished teaching you. And if you were dead, I couldn't fill the last few cracks in your head with something halfway resembling good alchemy.”
It was the closest Clarke had ever heard him get to saying anything resembling fondness.
“Then why now? What happened to your secrets and ignorance?”
“Because you're not going to give up. You're going to keep going and going and it's going to eat you alive. What changed my mind was all of these people you have around you. The dwarf worried over all of you. Alouella asked about you first thing when she regained consciousness. Wade didn't even threaten to murder you when he found out the cause.”
“He threatened something else though?”
“There was talk of making you wear his sick bucket for doing that to him but that's not so bad as murder. In some ways.”
Clarke looked over his shoulder. He could pick out their shapes in the dark, Gwen sleeping slumped at Alouella's bedside, Wade curled by the wall. Even Wormwood had found a chair.
“My point is, even though I'd given up, you hadn't. And right this moment you have the means and knowledge to try. Whaler's Wharf is far, far to the south. Through lizardfolk country and into a zone filled to the brim with the same mana you encountered in the city. I went back there once and the moss grows at the edges just the same as the samples you brought back. I advise taking a dose every hour, more often inside the castle. Hell, I'd advise not taking Alouella at all. If she can't control her magic she's not going to be any help.”
“I'll try. You know how she is.”
“The lizardfolk down there really don't like elves. I'm serious, ditch her and Wormwood.”
“So what are we searching for? What am I looking for that would help?”
“My master, the Spymaster of the kingdom, he was everything I am now and more, writing everything down and hiding it away. He'd know everyone threatening the people of the kingdom back then. If anyone knew it would be him. You'll need to find his hidden office somewhere down in the dungeon.
“Somewhere?”
“He was THE Spymaster. I'm lucky I managed to find a general location for his office.”
Clarke had grabbed his book, taking quick notes word for word. Everything was before him now. It certainly explained why anyone would have kidnapped his mother and there was an eerie peace that came with it, that there wasn't just some boogieman group stalking the night to kidnap just anyone. And it occurred to him.
“Twinty, you knew this all this time? Where there might be a clue? Even through my years of begging and threats and bribes?”
He crossed arms, grumbling quietly to himself.
“Yeah. It was all there. But god dammit boy, don't make me repeat all the stuff about letting you get yourself killed. It's embarrassing. Now either get back in bed or help me empty the puke buckets. This place stinks.”
He hobbled in through the door and Clarke did as he was asked.
There's a price for everything.
He touched something wet and chunky and his face soured.
I'd rather have given him cash.